Transcripts
1. Introduction and welcome!: My name is [inaudible] , and I've been fascinated by watercolors my entire life. I love the translucent hues, blurs, and blooms it creates. I've been painting with it ever since I was introduced to it in high school. My favorite subjects to paint are pets, horses, plants, and flowers. I've been teaching myself how to bring these subjects to life with watercolor for years. Now I'm applying my teaching experience to help others master this beautiful, delicate, and sometimes difficult medium. I hope that by demonstrating some of the core techniques and my own tips and tricks in these classes, I can help you to improve your watercolor work. If you've enjoyed the course or have any questions, please let me know in the discussion below. Let's get painting.
2. Materials: All right everyone, before we can start with the painting, I'll go over all of the supplies that we'll need to be able to transfer our drawing to our watercolor paper and to be able to complete the painting. Obviously, you don't have to use everything that I do. Just take it as guidance as to how I achieve the effects that I achieve. Have a look if you have similar things at home, if not, maybe can inspire you the next time you go into a art supply store looking for new materials to buy. These are just some of my favorites. So to begin with, I painted the painting on thick, cold-pressed watercolor paper and it's cold pressed. So you can see that it has a little bit of grain to it, texture, which just helps us create the texture of the firm. To be able to transfer the drawing, I also make use of transparent tracing paper and surround paper, or also sometimes called graphite paper. It looks like this and it has a layer of graphite that lets you transfer a sketch or a line drawing like the one that I provide for the course onto a watercolor paper. We'll need that together with our paper. Then we will need two pots of water to clean your brushes and to use to mix with your paints. I also used to some kitchen roll to wipe wet brushes on or to dab excess paint off of the painting with. A cloth or a towel to wipe wet brushes on and to remove any excess water with. I also make use of a water spritzer. Looks like this to wet my palette and obviously we'll need our paints and our brushes and our palette. Before I explain the pens that I use, I also make use of a fine liner, this is just a 0.5 Staedtler fine liner. A pencil, this is a mechanical pencil. It has HB lead in it. So just make sure using HB and I use an artist's eraser. A normal eraser will also work, but I prefer this one. At some point also add white marks using white ink. This is by Winsor & Newton, I really like it, but if you have a different brand that also works well, feel free to use that. I prefer this overusing white gouache or white watercolor. I find that it is easier to use for making hair marks and whiskers. If we have another look at our painting here, and we look up close here, the whiskers and all of these little white marks are made using the white ink.I just find that that works better for me personally. For the paints, my preferred brand tends to be Smink, it's a German brand of really high quality paint, but you use whatever you have. The colors that we'll need are green earth, we'll use this on the eyes. I use quinacridone magenta around the nose. We use ultramarine finest, which is a non-granulating ultramarine blue. It's quite hard to find. But this one's a really nice one. We use Smink of violet, which is the same pigment as Winsor & Newton's violet. We use sepia brown. Whenever I've referred to the dark brown or the sepia tone during the class, I'm referring to sepia brown. We also use gold brown. Most of the body of the cat is painted with this. I also use quinacridone gold hue. I make quadruped better use of [inaudible] , that's what that one looks like. Lastly, I use sap green. This one's by Winsor & Newton. It's a little bit more of a yellowy, warm green rather than a cool tone green. I find that Smink's sap green isn't really a true sap green. So I really much prefer this one. To paint with a paints, I use a ceramic palette, and ceramic is really my favorite. I can make a whole class about this if you would like, because it is quite important. But note that I use my paints by applying them to the top of the well here. Then I spritz them with my water spritzer like this, so that the water pulls in the well and it just dampens my blob of paint there. If I want a really concentrated color, I can just take a clean brush and rub it straight on the paint there to pick up a lot of paint and then apply that to wet paper. Then that way you apply a lot of pigment at once. If I want a more watery tone and I need more of a wash of color, I can go down into the well, pick up a bit of the paint from the side and make a very watery wash on the bottom of my well. Then this way I have a lot of control about how much pigment I'm picking up and using all my painting and that's really important to me. Whether I pick up really strong concentrated pigment from the top there, or whether I have a very runny watery wash that I just apply straight onto my dry paper. So often during the painting process, if I say that, I'm picking up very concentrated color, what I mean is that I have a damp but not very wet brush and I'm rubbing it over those blob of dry paint that came out of the tube here. I'm really picking up color, really picking up pigment with my brush and applying that onto my damp paper. That's what I mean when I say that I'm using concentrated or originally pigmented color. Moving onto the brushes, I use quite a few, but I'll talk you through them just so you'll know why I use the ones that I do and why I like them. The large brush that I have here is a Da Vinci size three mop brush. This guy's really versatile. You can't see it now, but when he's wet he has a really nice fine point, very nice fine tip. You can do a lot of detail work with him, but you can also just do big wet washes with him. He picks up a lot of water and pigment as well. I really like this one. This is the largest brush. Second-largest one is a Caisson size six by Da Vinci. For something that's a little bit of a smaller job, but still requires a nice wash with lots of water. Then I also have the Caisson in a size four just a bit smaller. Then I have a cosmic topspin in the size one, this is a nice round small detail brush. I do a lot of work in this class with this one. Then I have a size two cosmic topspin liner or a rigor brush. You can recognize that it's a liner because it's very long and thin. This is my favorite range of liner brushes. So in future, if I ever need more liner brushes, I think I will pick him up from this range because I have really nice elastic spring to them. Then I also have a very tiny size one, Nova by Da Vinci. It's also a liner brush. As you can see here, I use this guy with white ink for the whiskers and other white marks. Last but not least, I have a super tiny little 5-0 Nova brush. It's super tiny and fine and it lets you make tiny little marks, get into the eyes, the nose, things like that. So that wraps it up for the materials for the class. Aside from that, like I said, you need water and your paper. If you've got all of those things or something similar to any of these things, then we're ready to get started. I'll see you in the first lesson coming up next.
3. Lesson 1: Transferring our line drawing to paper: Before we can start painting our painting, we'll first have to transfer our sketch, our drawing onto our watercolor paper. The way in which I will show you how to do that in this class is by using Saral paper or this transfer paper. It's what you see here, this gray piece of paper. It has a layer of graphite on one side that you can lay between a sketch and your final piece of watercolor paper and if you then trace on top of it by pushing with, for example, a pencil or a pen, it will leave a mark on your watercolor paper. Then in this way, you can transfer any drawing of any kind onto watercolor paper without having to sketch directly onto it. That means that you will be using the line-drawing that you can find on the Skillshare website to trace onto tracing paper. Then you'll have what you see here on tracing paper, and then you can use the Saral paper to transfer that onto your watercolor paper. The line-drawing can be found on Skillshare. You have to access the website directly, you can't download the files via the app, so that's the only important thing. All you have to do is print out the line-drawing, place a piece of tracing paper on top of the line-drawing, and make a trace of this line-drawing yourself. Then you can do what I'm doing here, which is to place the transfer paper between your final piece of watercolor paper and the trace, and then you can push with any kind of pen as you see me do now the trace onto your watercolor paper. Here, all I'm doing is using an old pen, it basically doesn't have any ink anymore. I just use it to push over those lines, which will push the pigment from the Saral paper onto the watercolor paper. The only things to keep in mind here are to really line up your drawing well before you start, so make sure that it's positioned in the center of your piece of watercolor paper and that you're happy with the positioning so that once you get started, you don't move it anymore. I've used a little bit of masking tape at the top here to secure it all in place so that nothing slides around while I'm transferring the drawing. I'm really taking my time here, I'm pushing quite hard just to make sure I get all of these marks onto my paper. Now I just slide my little piece of Saral paper further down and I keep going. You can always go over certain marks twice if you're unsure if you've covered them or not, that doesn't really do any harm. It's easier to go over them twice rather than to forget some portion of the drawing because otherwise, you have to try and line up your tracing paper again in the correct way before you can go back and add any marks that you might have forgotten. I usually tend to go over certain parts twice if I've forgotten whether I've done them or not. I'm checking here to see if it's really worked, so I'm just lifting on one side of my sketch there and you can see that it's left marks for me there where I've drawn, and there I'm just lifting the other side as well. I'm carefully removing the tracing paper, making sure that I'm not going to rip any part of my watercolor paper. I'm just carefully removing the masking tape there. If we have another close look at what we're left with, certain portions of the drawing are clearer than others. I could have pushed even a little harder in some places but overall it's enough to get me going. What I'll do now is take a pencil and go over any portions that are not quite defined enough for me yet such as around the eyes and the nose and the ears, to make sure that those are really clear before we make a start on painting them. I'm taking an HB pencil and the picture and I'm going over any lines that are either don't find quite clear enough or any portions where the line didn't quite make it through. Like I said, I could have done a bit of a better job of pushing on the Saral paper, but if it's not quite clear enough, it's not too bad because you can always just fix it up afterwards. It's a little bit a question of personal preference. Do make sure to use an HB pencil, because using more harder pencils will result in lines that you can't really erase because they make too much of an indentation on the paper I find, and using softer pencils will end up smudging your painting. Later on, when you go to erase some of the lines, they might leave a bit of a gray smudgy cast on your paper. I'm really not a fan of that and I found that HB pencils really work the best here. Something that's really important for this technique of watercolor painting that I'll be showing you here today, is that the features, so the face, ears, nose, mouth, and in general, the facial features need to be very well-defined because certain portions of the body of the cat will be quite loose and creative and fluffy looking and to create that contrast and to really give it some amount of realism, certain portions of the face and the body need to be well-defined. The only way to do that is to be very confident and clear about where you want your lines to be, where you want your edges to be with your watercolor. This is something that I've already covered in my previous two classes as well. For this reason, it's really important that you have the features and the edges that are present in the face really well-defined now with pencil. You can see that I'm really being very confident and clear with these lines around the eyes, the pupils, and the little highlights of the eyes that I'm just drawing in now and the edges of the fur where the fur, for example, overlaps with the ear. I'm making sure that I really take my time and I draw those in carefully now. Here, now you can also see me draw in the dark markings around the eye. I've done the left eye there, now I'm working on the right. In this way, we create a nice amount of contrast around the face and contrast is what draws the eye in on a painting. Wherever you have the most contrast, so the most stark differences between light and dark, between value and no value, that is where the eye of the viewer is drawn to. We want that to be the face, we want the face to have a lot of expression and personality. To do that, we need to make sure that the face has a lot of contrast and detail to it. This is why I'm really taking my time here, making sure that I'm happy with all of the markings across the face and that I'm very confident with where I want the ears, the eyes, the nose, the highlights, and the markings to be. I think about there, I'm happy with the face and the amount of detail I have on the face. If we zoom up now, this is what our drawing looks like for now. Like I said, to access the line drawing and to be able to do this yourself, just make sure to download it from the website, print it out, trace over it with tracing paper, and then transfer it onto your watercolor paper using a Saral paper. If you don't have Saral paper and you want to do it with pencil only, have a look at my previous classes and one of the two, I think the first one, so my black and white cat tutorial. There, I show you how to do it without Saral paper using pencil only. That is an alternative that you can use. This wraps up how to transfer your drawing and in the next lesson, we'll start by painting the features of the face.
4. Lesson 2: Washing in eyes, ears, nose and upper body: All right. We have our sketch on watercolor paper now, and in this video we're going to make a start by painting some of the features of the face. I'm going to be starting with the eyes. I've wet this first left eyeball here and I'm dropping in a green color onto the damp paper. I'm using my small size one round brush the cosmotop spin, and I've dropped on a thin layer of green earth. It's a very muted soft green color, and I'm using that as a base for the color of the eye. Here, I've picked up a little bit of the sap green, so that is this little bit more of a brighter green, and I'm dropping that onto the edges of the eyes. Once I'm happy with that and I'm letting them dry, I'm also going to be wetting the little nose, making sure that it's damp but not sopping wet, and I'm dropping in a little bit of Quinacridone Gold. I'm concentrating it at the top of the nose and along the edges there. I wipe off my brush and I pick up a little bit of the magenta color to drop in a little bit of a pink hue to the nose. I'm just letting those colors mix on the paper because I want a little bit of the gold-yellow tone to show through, and I wanted a little bit of the pink to mingle with it. I've wiped off my brush and I'm just pulling off a bit of color on the two nostrils areas there just to lighten them up it because I've just applied a little bit too much color there. I wipe my brush on the tissue, and I wipe it over the damp paper to pick up a little bit of that excess paint. While I let that dry, I'll make a start on the ear. I've dampen that ear up there as well, it's damp paper, and I'm just taking my larger size six casaneo brush and I'm dropping on that magenta color again. I'm letting the paper move the color around for me. I'm not fussing much with it, I've just dabbed it on here and there. Concentrated mostly on the left edge there where there is the most color, the deepest part of the ear. Now, I've picked up a little bit of purple. There's a shmink of violet, and I'm just dabbing that on, concentrating more on the right side where I see more purple hues in the ear. I'll just repeat that on the left. I've just dampened it, dabbed on some pink and dabbed on some violet. Switching back to my small size one brush, I just drag the color and move further onto the dry paper there where the hairs are. I've picked up a bit more concentrated magenta, and I just pull that in to make those little fur marks that we'll paint in later. In this way, the paint still bleeds across the damp paper, but you have a lot of control around the edges where you've kept the paper dry. I'm doing the same thing here with the violet tone on the right side, so that most of the violet is on the right and most of the magenta is on the left, on that right ear. I'm repeating that on the other side as well, using my smaller brush now for more control and precision, and dropping in a little bit of the gold hue as well because this ear has a little bit of warmth to it if you look at the picture. I think, well, the right ear should look harmonious to the left one, so I've dropped in a little bit of that gold hue on the right ear as well. By this point, our eyes have dried, so I'm picking up more sap green, and I'm deepening the color around the inner side of this eye, where there's a bit more of a shadow and I'm making sure that I paint around the highlights there and around the pupil. Now, I've just got water on my brush and I'm just pulling the paint that I've already applied across the entire eyeball. Then I do the same thing on the other side. This is now dry paper that I'm painting on, and I'm using more of the sap green painting it on the inner side, going around the pupil and around the highlights, making sure that edge is really crisp and clear, and making sure that most of the color stays where I want it to be, which is the darker areas of the eyeballs that you see in the picture. I've not picked up any paint, this is just water, and I'm applying it to those areas that are lightest in the picture because the water will push some of the pigment away. If you remember from my previous class, I like to use watercolor blooms to push a pigment away from the highlights and that's also what I've done with the eyeballs here. While those dry, I'm making a start on the fur, the upper-right area that you see me start on here now, I've dampened it up until the point of the red line there. My paper's very wet and I've picked up sepia. This is a rich dark black and brown color. I'm dabbing it with my mop brush all along the edges there, and I'm letting the wetness of the paper moves the pigment for me. This will allow you to achieve a very fluffy looking fur because the pigment just moves around by the water. I'm dropping in a little bit of my ultramarine blue and a little bit of my transparency yellow to create a brownish gray color and to add more interest to the fur. I'm not such a fan of mixing colors on the palette, I prefer to let them mingle and mix on paper. You can see that I've wet the area just beyond where I applied pigment so that that edge stays soft, and I don't get any unwanted hard edges where I don't want them. Now I've just taken my super tiny little Nova brush and drag out those flicks to make them a little longer and a little freer. Now I'm happy with that for now. So I'm extending the area that I've wet, beyond where the red line is. So here you can see now I'm dragging the water further down, and I go all the way down, before I go in with more pigment again. So there I've got the pigment again, and I'm creating loose stripes because in the picture you can see he has stripes on his legs there. I'm not worrying too much about mixing or moving the pigment, I'm just dabbing it and dropping it where I need it on the paper. With the tip of the brush there, I create little flicks, and those are little flicks of fur, that are coming off the edge of his body. Now I've just switched on to a little bit more of the transparent sienna, and am making sure that I keep that edge around the paw really crisp and clear. I switch on to my smaller brush again, with a bit more pigment and a bit more control. I make sure that those stripes are clear. I flick off little bits of fur around the edge of the body there. If we have a look at the picture, this is this line that I'm making there. So we have many layers of fur, but to simplify it for the picture and to make sure that I have a little bit of a simpler job as a painter, I'm just concentrating on that one line there, where the pale fur overlaps with the shadow from the back. That's why I've painted that red line there. At a later stage in the painting we'll add pale fur to the belly. Then in this way you can break up more complicated paintings into simpler ones, so that you have a chance to create detail and add detail where you wanted without over complicating. Because if you're painting and there too many complicated details to add, it can start to look messy if you're working with watercolor, so this is one of the ways in which I simplify my pictures to paint them. I choose details to paint and I skip others that I find too complicated and too messy. So in this case, it was my decision to make that one line where the pale belly fur meets the dark fur that is in shadow where his front leg is there. I'm basically just going to be repeating this technique on the other side of his front body here too. So you've seen that I've just wet the area, and I've started dropping in transparent sienna, and I'll probably be moving on to more of the sepia color next. So there you see that I added a bit of sepia. I'm wetting the area down there again, and you can see where that edge of my water is. That is where my line will be for my dark paint. Here I've picked up very watery sepia and now I'm going in with more pigment because the area is very wet, allowing me to move my pigment around easily, and creating very soft, whimsical, fluffy looking fur with very little effort required. It's this movement of the water on the paper, that lets me create this very fluffy effect. Now it's important to note that while I'm painting this, I'm always looking at the picture. So when you see me hesitate with my hand in the paint, that's me looking at the picture, thinking where I want the dark to go, where I want the light to go, and what color I should be using. Even though I don't always show you the picture as I'm painting here because I want to preserve screen space, I want to show you what I'm doing, know that I'm always looking at the picture. Here you can see these are the two portions that I've chosen to paint in the dark color, and if you look at the picture again, you can see that they are the first darker whereas on the belly the fur is paler. In this way by first wetting the paper, I can create very soft washes and changes of color, so between the sepia and between the transparent sienna mostly. But then also, a hard edge where I want the edge of the dark fur to be. In this way I can control where I want the edges to go, and I don't have any edges or any hard lines in the middle portions of the dark fur where I don't want them. The best way to achieve this is to keep your paper wet, and to be very clear about where the edge of the wet portion is because your paint will go wherever it is wet and it'll create a harsh line wherever wet meets dry on paper. So now I'm just going around and working on the remainder of the paw just with more transparent sienna and gold brown here. On the paw I use a little bit of gold brown and sepia. I'm concentrating the pigment on the edge of the paw there because I want the edge to be very well defined, and the inner portion of the fur to look more fluffy again. So that's the same concept of concentrating on your edges and making sure that your edges are crisp and clear, and that the inner portions of your shapes are very whimsical and non-defined and soft. So this is where we're at now. This is the first progress picture that you can also download from the website, and this is the first wash of the upper portion of the body and the features of the face. We'll keep going in the next lesson. See you there.
5. Lesson 3: Washing in the fur of the face and belly: Now that we've finished with those first layers at the top there, we're going to be working on this belly area, this middle belly area of the picture that you can see there. To paint that, I'll mostly be working very wet. As I already explained in the previous video or the previous lesson, I should say, it's easy to create these furry marks by working very wet. I've wet all the way down to that red line and I'm making sure that I don't place any pigment too close to the line because I don't want any harsh edges. I want to be able to connect my shape down they're, further down without creating any lines. I basically will extend that wet area later. For now, stay away from the edge that you've created with water and just drop in paint the way I'm doing here now. I'm working mostly with the transparent Sienna, and soon also be dropping in some of the sepia and just creating dabs wherever I see darker paint and the picture. Little shadows, marks, anything like that. I'm just letting the damp paper do most of the heavy lifting for me as it lets the paint bleed across the paper. Here I'm just switching over to some of the sepia and dabbing it on where I think the dark areas are visible on the picture. I'm really staying away from that edge down there, so that I can create a seamless margin to the lower area of the belly. But because I don't want the paper to dry on me while I'm painting. I can't do too much of a big area at once. That's why I have to split it up like this. Here I'm just going and adding more dabs and dashes of the dark sepia and also more of transparent Sienna. I'm just building up the color. That's good to work slowly with this because you want to keep an eye out for how the paper moves the pigment across the page for you. If it moves around too much, you might need to keep adding more until you're happy with the depth of color. Now I'm concentrating more on the edge there. I'm also creating little flicks a fur, because he's got hairy, fuzzy, furry belly there. To create that effect, you can use that brush on a very tip just to create little flicks. If I zoom in here, you can see what I'm doing a little better and just flicking from that wet area onto the dry over the pencil line. Now I'm dropping in some of that sepia, making sure to connect it all the way to the very edge of that little flick mark of the fur. Then this way you can, you can create the illusion of stripes in the fur and also shadows. Just dropping in more of that sepia all over. Once I'm happy with that, I'll be moving further down. Because I kept my pigment away from the edge of my watch it there, I'm able to continue downwards and extend that area downwards without any mark or lines. Layer in the finished painting, you won't be able to tell that we've created this large shape of the belly in two, goes into two stages. Here I'm creating more flips on the edge there, so that the paint can bleed inwards into the damp area. I'm also going in with more sepia. Again, transparency Sienna. Here I'm taking my time with the tip of that mob brush to go in-between those pencil marks, where the lower leg overlaps and comes forwards in front of the belly. I'm really going in between all of those pencil marks, making sure that I respect and save the white of the paper there because I need that for the very pale highlights on the leg. Once I've done that, I can speed this up a bit and just add more color. Because my upper area dried already a little bit, it's creating this funny line. The best way to remove that as to take a clean damp brush, to dab over it. Wipe your brush on some tissue, dampen the brush again, so you've got a clean wet brush again and dab again upwards and wipe on a tissue again and wet the brush again and dab over the line again until we can make it disappear upwards. You can see that I'm really removing everything from my brush. It's damp, but not too damp. I'm really rubbing it on that on that little towel. Now I'm just flicking it downwards to remove any traces of that line and removing the pigment again on my towel and dabbing again. Have that upper area been a little more wet and damped by the time I would've moved down to the lower area of the belly, we wouldn't have faced this problem. But because I'm also filming this whole process that can sometimes take me a little while. Then some of the areas of the painting dry on me before, I can make the next move, before I can paint the next section. Here, I've just taken my little size one brush again and I'm creating more fur marks and making more narrow hair marks around that area where we have the front leg. Well, the lower leg that comes in front of the belly that highlight. I'm painting negatively between those white hairs that you have to imagine are there for now, you see in the picture, to create that shadow behind the leg there. Now I'm going back down here, adding little flicks to create that fur effect. The minute with a damp brush, I will connect it upwards into that painted area that's already damp. Then that way you get a very nice crisp line of fur that connects softly into the wash of color that we've already created. If we take a step back, this is what we're looking like right now, and that line is creeping back, so I've repeated the steps earlier from that line just to soften it again. I have wet this area of the face because I went to Washington, the first layer fur on the face. Very much like with the body and just dropping in gold brown onto damp paper, and am taking time with the edges. I am going around the nose. I'm doing all of those, both fairly watery, gold brown. I'm just taking the paint everywhere where I see any brown in the face of the cat. Remember that we are going to paint over this was several layers. This is really just the base layer. The only thing that you should be sparing are highlights because we always build up the depths of color on top of layers. But you can never go back and remove paint from an area that has dried. You can only really remove paint from areas that are still damp. For example, by wiping them with a clean brush, jabbing them with a tissue, or placing in water blooms that pushed the pigment away, so am going around all of the facial features with the gold brown. Just making sure that I keep any highlights light. For example, around the mouth where the fur is very pale. I'm painting in a soft wash off that golden brown color. Just about all over the face. Just switching onto my smaller brushing and a little bit of watery sepia here to paint in the stripes of the markings around his face. I add darkness wherever I see darker markings on the face. For example, between the eyes and the nose, and the stripes across the forehead. now with more concentrated paint on dry paper, I've added in some of the dark marks around the eyes with sepia. I'm also deepening up those stripes there. It's how little chance to dry, not completely dry. But you can see that the paint is moving around less so than it was when the paper was much wetter. Just adding all the dark marks that I can see. Here also around the ear. I think I'm happy with that first layer of the face for now, and you can also find a progress picture of this on the website to download to guide you as you add these first layers of fur to the face.
6. Lesson 4: Creating soft fur on the upper body: Now, I'm letting the face and the belly dry because at this point I was still continuing to work on the painting. While they dry, I'm going to add in this bar that you see me paint now, and also add a second layer to this upper body area. Much as we've been doing before, I've done in this area and I'm going in with gold brown as a base color. I've taken fairly watery color and I'm just placing it all over the paw sparing out any of the highlights and letting most of the movement of the paint come through the dampness of the paper. Then I'm going in with sepia around the edges, defining those and running them bleed towards the center of the paw, making sure that the darkest areas, so the areas between the paws are really dark with the sepia color. Here, I've switched onto a smaller brush for more control to be able to keep the edges very crisp and clear while it's letting the furry area of the inside of the paw blend on its own. Here, I have gone in with some transparency sienna now, so this is a little bit more of a red tone rather than the golden brown. I'm adding in more color towards the paws and I'm just letting it mingle towards the inside of the paw on its own and concentrating mostly on the edge of the shapes they're. Here, I'm blending the paler areas of the paw there and I'm placing in a watercolor bloom right here and that circle as a highlight, because if you look at the picture, he has a highlight write on that paw there. I've just done that by dropping in a little bit of water. If you can watch that area for a little second, you'll see that it becomes lighter and whilst that's happening, I can drop in more sepia around the darkest points of the paw and the shadow that comes as the paws curves around the body in the back there. Adding in a bit more pigment here and really defining that area between the paws with that deep dark shadow using sepia. That's what that paw is looking like for now. While that dries, I'll add a second layer of paint to this other paw. It's dried fairly pale. This is the funny thing with watercolor, with darker colors, they have a tendency to drive paler than you think they might and paler colors have a tendency to dry darker than you think they might. It could be that you have to build up quite a few layers to get the intensity that you want. Especially for beginners, I would always air on the side of caution rather than apply too much paint at once because you can't really remove the paint once it's dried. I've dampened the entire paw again and now I'm dropping in golden brown wherever I see patches of a richer brown color in the picture. I'm using my small casaneo brush to do this. This is the size four casaneo because it's just a little larger than my size one brush. But it's fairly soft and it doesn't create any harsh edges or lines. Here, I'm just creating a few marks of fur and I'm using sepia to do this. I've picked up very concentrated color from the very top of my palette where the paint is basically dry. I've just past my dump brush over the dry paint a few times to pick up a lot of pigment and going in between the paws, the toes here, to make sure that those areas of shadow are really dark and well-defined. Now I've switched onto the smaller brush to create little flicks of fur to add more texture to the paw there. Whenever you want to add details like this, always go with a smaller brush because it gives you more control and I find that the smaller and the thinner of those little fur marks are, the better they end up looking. Now, I'm just blending in a bit more of the golden brown over that toe there because it was just a little bit too light and value, and again on this paw here as well. If we take a step back and we compare it to the picture, this is where we're at now. We zoom in again and we can keep going. I switched onto my larger casaneo brush to dampen this larger area if the paw and leg here again. This is just water. Now I'm dropping on transparency sienna for a rich reddish-brown to intensify the color of the leg there. I'm using sepia to create little flicks of fur and I'm just letting that bleed into the damp paint that I've already applied there. I've split this up a little bit, I'm just squiggling the sepia over those pencil marks where I have the darker stripes on link. Because as I said earlier, everything dried a little paler than I wanted it to so I really have to work to build up the pigment and the depth of the color here on the leg. By using a small brush for this, the pigment will move less across the paper. Then, for example, if I were to have used my larger caseneo brush, the size for caseneo because the brush is smaller and the pigment doesn't spread as far in this way. Because these stripes are quite tightly packed and close to one another, using a smaller brush allows you to create more of that stripy effect without having to colors mix too much and dispersing and washing away the striped pattern of the cat. Here, I'm just finishing up that area above the leg there and working in more little squiggles to preserve a bit of that stripy effect there. I'm concentrating a lot of pigment or cross the edge where we have those fur marks on the side of the body. Here I am dragging it across that edge where there's a shadow, where the leg is coming forward and I'm finishing off the area with a brown stripe that you can see that blends into the face. Again, because it's a very thin stripe, I'm just using my very small size one brush. If we take a step back, this is where we're at now and we'll keep going in the next lesson.
7. Lesson 5: Washing in the tail and lower leg: In this lesson, we'll complete a bit more work on the eyes and the nose before moving down towards the bottom of the body and layering up on the lower feet and tail. So I'm starting off by just wetting the eyes and adding a couple of dollops of the blue color, the ultramarine finest, to create a bit more dimension in the color of the eye and making sure to avoid any of those small highlights that we kept free. I'm taking my time here looking at the picture and only placing the color where I once select the darker areas of the eye to be. I'm avoiding the highlighted areas of the eyes. I'm switching over to my smaller brush and I'm tracing around the nose with sepia. This is the smallest brush that is listed in my supplies list. It's the tiny little nova round brush. I just use that to paint in the nostrils and the dark line that runs in between the two sides of the nose. Really take your time with this and be careful. Should you make a mistake, you can take a clean brush with water, dab the area, and then pad it with a piece of tissue and then that way you could lift off any of the pigment. You could essentially wait for it to dry or dry it with a hairdryer and start over. Here I switched to most likely larger round brush to paint in some of those markings and that shadow. I'm still doing that with sepia, but this time I've watered it down a bit more. I'm going all the way around the eyeball. I also draw on that little patch of dark on his nose. His nose is mostly pink, but he has a small brown patch at the very bottom of it. So I've just painted that in now. I'm also going back over that mark and just to deepen that up a little bit. Next, I'll fill in those markings under his eye, the ones that we had previously drawn in with pencil and again, I'm doing this using sepia. Then I repeat the same thing on the other eye. Now you might argue that it could be easier to first paint in the remainder of the fur, so the actual color of the face before adding these markings. But I personally find that it's easier for me to complete paintings and to know where I'm going if I really well-define the features of the face, so the eyes, the nose, then the mouth. I personally find it easier to fill in larger areas such as the fur on the face with color once I have a clear idea of the features of the face. So it's a little bit of a question of personal preference here. If you prefer to first paint the fur of the face, you could always watch some of the later lessons in the course, fill out the bulk of the face and then come back and add these details later. This is just how I do it and how I can get the best result. Now, while we let that face dry, I've moved down to the bottom of the tail here. So the base layer was gold brown and I'm now filling it up with sepia for the stripes. I'm doing this with my small size one brush because I really want to create some some squiggly stripes, because his stripes are very jagged and uneven and I wanted to create that texture and effect. So I find that if I squiggle a tiny brush around, it'll give a bit of a jagged and uneven finish, which is what I'm really going for here. I'm also just doing that on the other side of the tail there. There you can see what I mean I'm really squiggling the brush around, really scribbling it to create those shapes and the stripes on his tail. Now I'm adding some flicks of fur to the tip and to make sure that it looks nice and fluffy and textured. At this point, the entire tail area there is still damp so that allows me to work quite freely. Should you ever run into the issue of the area drying or starting to dry, I would urge you to let it dry completely or dry it off with a hair dryer and then re-wet the entire area. If it's halfway dry and you then add more water, it has a tendency to dislodge a lot of the pigment, much like with watercolor blooms and that's more difficult to control. So if you run into the issue where you've wet an area you've been painting and it starts to dry, I would urge you to dry it completely whichever way possible, and then to re-wet the entire area once it's fully dried. Here I'm just adding more texture again with my size one brush working with sienna and sepia. I've now switch onto my very tiny brush just to add more of those few marks and to get smaller marks and smaller hairs. Then I'm going all the way around the tail with this. Now, while the tail dries, we're going to move on to the lower part of the body where we left off with the belly there. So I'm going to be wetting this area here and note that I'm keeping a little bit of an edge of dry paper where the edge of the fur will be because in that way it won't bleed as much. In there you can see I've now grabbed more of the sepia color and I'm drawing in little hair marks on the edge there where the darker fur of the leg meets the paler fur of the body. I'm just creating hair marks and I'm letting the paint blend in towards that wet area that we've dampened. I'm only worrying about the edge there, and I'm following my pencil marks where we demarcated the area in which the two kinds of fur meet. I'm going over that with my very tiny brush just to sharpen those points and to make sure that I get the darkest, most pigmented color into the very tip of that shadow. So, in that way the line will be very high in contrast and it'll look more realistic, because ultimately what we've painted in there is a line of a shadow where fluffy pale fur overlaps darker fur underneath. I'm just moving on to the foot, painting in the foot as we've been painting the rest of the body. Here I'm working again with golden brown painting in the foot and using the sepia color for darker tones and shadows. I'm really focusing on the edge and making sure that that just bleeds upwards. I'm using my mop brush for this because it has a nice point, but it also picks up a fair amount of water and pigment. The reddish area at the front of the foot there, I painted with transparency and just for a little more redness. Here I'm going back with more pigment, just filling out those little shadows between the pale hairs to make sure that those are really nice and deep and to make sure that that's the darkest area of that area of the foot. Filling in more of that sepia color, I'm just darkening it up and adding more color.
8. Lesson 6: Adding depth and colour to the face with a second layer of fur: In this lesson, we'll be adding the second layer of paint to the face, and we'll also be working on the ears. But before we do that, I'm going to let you watch me make some mistakes maybe you can learn out of them. I here attempt to paint in the pupils of the eyes of the cat using paint but because it's such a small area and because the pupils are so narrow, it would be much smarter to do this with a fine liner with a pen. That's actually what I do in one of the later lessons of the class, but I thought I'd let you see how I fix it up again. I'll just go over it with a clean brush and some water. I paddle over it, and then I dabbled with some kitchen roll to lift the pigment off again. If it hasn't had a chance to dry yet, it'll lift right off and it will not really be noticeable that you made the mistake. In a later lesson, we'll cover the pupils and I'll do that with fine liner, but for now we're adding more detail to the face by going around the eye with the deep sepia tone and a very fine little brush. We're deepening that line around the eye where the dark markings are and really concentrating on that corner of the eye. I'm just speeding it up on the other side. I'm doing the exact same thing there. I go all the way around the eye making sure that the darkest point is the very inner rim of the eyeball, and making sure that the corner of the eye is nice and dark. Then I also do the same thing with the nose and the nostrils. Lastly, I go over the mouth as well. Now, to work on the ear here and that upper corner of the face, I first need to wet the area. I dampen it and the water goes up and around about this far. Just to give you an idea of how large of an area we're working with. Once it's all wet, I go in with a gold brown tone, and I take that all the way around the ear. Now, I'm just finishing up the ear there taking the brown all the way down and going in with the sepia to deepen up that inner rim on the very inside corner there. To do this, I'm using my size one ram brush. Here you can see I switched over to a liner brush to create some hair marks that go over and above the ear there. They sit further towards the viewer. They sit more further towards you looking at the picture. I'm just flicking out little marks to create that fluffy appearance. I'm just going all around the ear there, and using sepia to make those little hair marks. At a later point, we'll be using white ink to add even more hair marks but for now, we're focusing on paint. Working with ink requires you to be finished with your painting. I would never advise to use ink and then to follow up with more Watercolor paint after that. Going all the way around the ear and I'm also adding a couple of little marks that indicate those tiny little tufts at the tip of his ear. To help it stand out from the white background, I also make sure to trace around the right edge of the ear there. Now in the picture it's not really clear whether that so dark or not, but to help it stand out against the white background, I do like to add some definition to the very outer edge. Here I've turned my brush around so that it's easier for me to flick little hair marks across the ear. Now I'm happy with that. I'm just making sure that that blends down and to the far there by just dampening that area with water and then dropping in sepia to deepen up. Then I just dry it up with that stripe that goes just about above his eye. Here I'm blending with a little bit more of that gold brown color. Then I've just cleaned off my brush there and wiped it dry so that I'm able to blend that color without adding any more pigment or water to my damp paper. I already had enough pigmented water on the paper there, and then I decided that I needed a little more hair. I go back in with my liner brush, and we'll just drag the wet paint out to make more little marks. Once I'm happy with that, I continue wetting the central part of the face and I make sure to join it up with that area that we had previously dampened. Then I go in with more gold brown. Since his stripes are fairly irregular and squiggly, I made sure to wiggle my brush is I draw them and that way it looks more like fur and less like a block of color. It makes it easier for the pigment to disperse across the damp paper. You could see that I was just blending up an area with a bit of water because it's a highlight on the face. I didn't want to add any more pigment there and I just scrubbed over it a bit with a wet brush until I was happy with the diffusion and the amount of gradation between the color and the lighter area that it was the highlight. There I'm finishing up the stripe down the face. Then I'm going in with more sepia again to deepen it up. Here, I have to split this up a little. I'm just making little marks at the top of his head there to break up that straight line and to add more texture and more of a hairy appearance of fluffy appearance to the top of his head there. Now working on his other ear there. I'm just going in with sepia and filling out that shape, making sure to leave lighter paper behind where I want the little hair marks to be. Painting negatively around the marks that we need to indicate that there is fur and hair there. Do it again as well. Here, I wasn't quite happy with the color of the ear. I'll go back in with more of the magenta color after having dampen that area. With my very thin brush, I'm just tracing around the edge of the ear there to make it stand out from the white background, just like we did on the other ear. I'm doing more of the same on the other side of the face here, wetting the area, and then applying mostly gold brown and a little bit of sepia where needed to fill in the face and to add color to the face. I always work in sections so that they don't dry up on me as I'm going, and I always made sure that I wet a larger area than I intend to pain so that I don't get any harsh edges anywhere where I don't want them. That I'm able to continuously blend and that I only phase hard edges where I intend to put them. I'm just adding some dabs of paint where the whiskers will grow, and I'm adding a bit of brown to the mouth there. I did that with very watery sepia. If we zoom out, we can see where we're at so far. That's it for this lesson in the next one we'll keep going. See you there.
9. Lesson 7: Washing in the lower leg quickly: In this very simple lesson, we're going to be painting in the lower leg that you see me wet here now. We're going to be working wet on wet again, and for now I've just dampened the area, but note that I left a bit of a dry edge at the top there. I'm just coming in with more of the gold brown now, and I'm flicking off more hairs from the edge of the body there, just like we've been doing on the other parts of the body so far. Here on the picture, you can see we're painting that lower right leg there, and note there's very strong highlight on the edge which is why we've had to keep those hairs at the top of that leg white, because obviously we can't paint in white, so we have to spare the area and work around the highlight. But we'll get to that in a bit. For now I'm focusing mostly on the very edge, making sure that I have nice little hair marks and making sure that I built up the color. I'm still working with the gold brown here with my mop brush. You can see I've picked up quite concentrated pigment here. I'm really brushing my wet brush over the dried up paint that's on my palette so that I get very strong color payoff. Now I've switched onto to a little bit of the sepia, and I'm again concentrating on the edge. I'm not worrying too much about the paint blending in the middle because the damp paper will do that for me. I'm also dropping in a bit of blue, and as it mixes with the brownish tone, so we've already applied, you can see that it turned into a very nice gray shade. I'm going back in with more gold brown. To get that striped effect, I'm also layering in more sepia now. I make sure to take the sepia all the way up to the edge because the stripes of his legs, they bend around the leg. To keep it more realistic looking, make sure that you take the paint all the way up until the edge there. Obviously the leg is round so we're trying to create that effect also with a curve of those stripes that you can see in the picture. Here I'm always just looking at my reference picture and applying the paint where I think it's needed. I'm being quite liberal with the pigment because as we've learned so far, the paints will dry paler than what we expect them to do, and we do want quite a bit of color here on the leg. Be generous with the pigment here and let the damp paper do most of the work for you. Focus mostly on the edge, and make sure you have those little hair marks in place to give the cat texture and to create the illusion of a furry body. I'm now moving up to that highlight area there and I'm using very watery paint and I'm just pushing it up all the way into those little hair marks that we left white, making sure not to use too much pigment because we wanted mostly pale. Here I'm switching onto my little size 1 round brush. Those little hair marks at the top of the leg there that we've painted in in pencil, I'm tracing them with a bit of the brown and the sepia because else they won't show up, and we do want them to be visible. The easiest way to do that is to trace them with a neutral color that appears in the body and the fur, and to blend that into the body a little bit to still have that highlight in place, but to define the edge so that the fur marks can be seen. Obviously white fur can't be visible against the white background. You can see that I've been using more of that gold brown, just making sure that those hair marks are visible and that they blend into the highlight, the white area that we're keeping white at the top of the leg there. Here you can see that I'm just blending down the paint from those fur marks into the highlight, and I'm making sure that I'm using a small brush to create that gradient of color from the gold brown into a little of grayish sepia, just very watery sepia then blending into the highlight, so into the white. Once I'm happy with that gradient, I go in with my mop brush to blend it out. Now, at this point, I'm going to finish up on the leg here and we can have a look what it's like once it's dry, and whether we might need to add another layer or not. I'll see you in the next lesson.
10. Lesson 8: Building up detail in the fur with a second layer: While that lower body dries, I'm going back up towards the upper portion of the body, and we'll be adding a few more layers here today. If we take a look at this paw here, I had realized that it has quite a distinct highlight towards the middle of it, so I'm just taking my pencil now to make sure that I map that out so that I can keep that area pale in light. Sometimes it helps to use pencil to guide what you're doing halfway through your layers. If you're in doubt, I would always say to use a pencil to make more marks as long as you can erase them at a later point rather than trying to wing it and to not use pencil marks. I've given myself some pencil marks here for where the highlight is roughly, and now I've just wet the entire paw, and we'll be going in with more brown to increase the warmth and color of the paw there. I'm starting off with sepia to add that very dark shadow that you can see on the edge of the paw there towards the back, and that comes because the paw's curving upwards and forwards, so that back area is really quite in shadow, and I'm just letting the sepia blend across the paper there. It's damp and I've just pushed it across the edge. I'm doing the same thing with the front of the paw there between the toes. I'm taking a very small size 1, cosmo top spin brush to go between the toes and to increase the value there, to add more shadow, and definition to the toes. Now I've picked up some transparency henna, which I'm using to increase the warmth. Like I said, it was little too gray and cool toned, and I'd need more brown tones to match it with the rest of the fur of the body and to be more accurate and representing the picture. You can see that I use my pencil marks there to guide me as to what area to keep free from pigment so that I keep that highlight there. Now I'm just using my slightly larger cast nail brush to blend out those edges around the highlight. Then I decided that that shadow was just not quite present enough. It was not quite dark enough and it didn't come up quite fur enough, so I've added more pigment and I'm just letting that dry for a minute while I move on to the other paw here. I'm wetting the other paw here up until that red line, so the entire area is damp. I'm going in with more of that very strong sepia. This is very concentrated pigment on my brush here, and I'm pushing it across the paw here, along the edge. I'm then letting it blend itself to keep that fluffy, furry appearance. I'm just placing it wherever I see in the picture that I need more depth. I'm also using it to increase the value of those stripes. You can very clearly see here that the paint doesn't travel beyond that red line because that's the point up until which I wet the paper previously. It really does matter where you place your water on your paper, and I would say that that's equally important to how and where you place your pigment, because your pigment will go wherever your water is. Now I've switched onto some transparency henna. Here and there I'm placing more of that brown tone to increase the warmth and color so that it doesn't turn too gray or too desaturated looking. Now I'm blending some fairly watery gold brown to make that gradient towards the highlight on that paw little softer. Now I'm moving on to this area down here, so I'm wetting the entire area again and be mindful of where I'm placing the water here now. I'm keeping a little bit of a free edge to where I want that edge of the fur to be, because I'll be painting that dry. Note that I have a bit of an edge on the left and a bit of an edge on the right there, so if you think about the yellow arrows representing where I want the edge of the fur to be, and the red where the edge of the water is, that gives me a bit of space of dry area where I can then make fur marks. Well, it's still blended towards the inside of that shape where it is wet. I've just applied a little too much water there, which is why I'm dabbing it off with my brush. I'm just wiping my brush on my towel, picking up more water and wiping the brush on the towel again in the neck and extend those stripes downwards. In this way you can work section by section and still make it look as if you painted the entire portion in one go. Here note again that I still have those edges of the water, and I'm just dabbing on the dark paint, the sepia color where I see that I needed looking at the picture. I'm working all the way up to that edge there, so the edge where my water end, and in this way, the gradients between the color stays super soft on the inside of the shape and when I choose to go beyond that edge where the paper is actually dry, I can make very distinct marks that don't extend beyond where I want them to go, and they don't bleed into the wetness of the paper because the paper isn't wet there. There you can see that I'm dragging from the damp area over onto the dry, making those little marks where I want the edge of the fur to be. Here I am now dragging those little hair marks, and the paper there's dry, which means that I can make small little detailed marks and they won't bleed, and they'll stay nice and crisp and they won't get blurry. Here I'm adding lots of little hair marks with my brush using the very tip of the brush, and I'm making sure that it blends into that center area of the shape where it is damp. If we zoom out a bit, this is where we're at. I'm still not quite satisfied with the depth of the lines there around the paws, so I'm going back in with my small brush, I'm really loading it up with the sepia. I'm now painting on this area that is almost completely dry, so I have not re-wet this area at all, and in this way, the paint will not disperse as much, and I can get more of a crisp line where I need it, which is on the very edge where the shadow is the darkest. While that dries, I'm just going to be adding another layer of paint to that right side of the body there, so for now I'm just wetting the area with water. Then we'll be building up some of the color there. In this case, I'm starting off with a lot of the sepia pigment, so I'm really loading up my brush and I'm going over those stripes to make them more visible, and to add more depth of color to them because they blend it out a bit too much in the first layer, which is not a problem because we can always add more pigment where we need it. Now I switch on to my very small little brush there, and I'm just going over those fur marks again to make sure that those are really very dark, and to make sure that they're some of the darkest areas in that shape overall, because in this way they appear crisper and more detailed to the eye. Even though in the picture it might not appear as though that edge is the darkest point of the shape, if you paint it in that way, it will give quite a bit of expression and it will make the painting pop forward a little more off the white background. This is little bit of a stylistic choice that I make, so obviously you don't have to do that. I'm just explaining how I create the effect that I like in my portraits. I'm also doing that on the inside edge, making sure that those fur marks are very much the darkest points of the shape. That the most pigment just concentrated on the edge. I'm running that into those stripes that we created. Now I've switched on to my larger brush to be able to blend a little bit. For now, I'm going to let this area of the cat dry completely before we move on to the next steps. I'll see you in the next lesson.
11. Lesson 9: How to use layering to build up shadow and detail in the lail: In this lesson, we'll be doing more work on the lower body down here. So far I've wet the foot that you can see there. Much like we've been doing already so far, I'm just going in with the gold-brown, focusing on the edges of the foot and making sure that I have the most pigment where I want the value to be the darkest, which is in-between the little toes and around the edge of the foot where there is a bit of a shadow. This is very much the same technique that we've been using all this time. To get this pigmented color payoff, I take the tip of my mop brush, it's just damp, and I wipe it across the dry paint that's on my palette. In this way you get a lot of pigment, and you can use the very tip of the mop brush to be very precise. Once I'm happy with that first layer of the foot, now I want it to dry. I'm just going to dampen this area here, and I've left a tiny bit of an edge between the foot and the area that I dampen so that there will not be any bleeding between the areas and we can just patch it up later. Here you can see that I've been keeping a little bit of an edge there. I'm just going in with more gold-brown and sepia because this area is really dark, if you look at the picture. I want there to be a decent amount of pigment and depth to the color there. There you can now see that edge that I've left so that the two areas won't bleed into each other. We'll patch that up at a later point in time. Now, I've wiped off my brush. I've wiped it off on my towel so that I can just blend the pigment across without picking up more pigment. With this flicking motion, I'll just make sure that the directionality of the color and the kind of flow in which the color moves around on the damp paper is roughly in the direction that I want it to go, which is outwards and upwards. Here I've wept the brush on my towel again and I'm just patching it a bit to blend the colors further. With my small size 1 brush, I'm just going back in with more sepia to deepen up the very center there. I'm dragging it again in that direction, upwards and upwards. While that dries, I'm going to move on to the tail. The interesting thing with the tail here is note the circle I drew in red, it has a very strong highlight at the top there where the first layer of the fur stands outwards and forwards, and that catches the light quite a lot in the picture. To do that, I'm going to be sparing that area and keeping it mostly pigment free. For now we're just going to be adding a base layer of color, keeping in mind that that left side of the tail is going to be much darker than the upper right side of the tail. In a later lesson, we'll be adding more layers to the tail to build up that color and that depth, and to add that detail of the highlight. For now we're just bending it in with sepia gold-brown and a little bit of transparency in there, making sure that most of the darkness is concentrated at the lower edge of the tail, so doing what we've been doing all this time already, where we concentrate on the edge, we add little flicks of hair for texture, and we let the damp paper do most of the blending for us, and in that way, creating a nice base for us to work in subsequent layers. You can see that I'm mapping out where the darker portion of the tail will start. If you look at the picture, you can see what I'm doing there. I'm making sure that there's a decent amount of blending happening. I'm using my small brush here so that I get in those low fur marks, so that it all looks as seamless as I can make it. I'm adding a little bit more of the gold-brown, and I'm using my small brush because I don't want to add too much pigment and I want to make sure that I'm able to keep that highlight pale. Then I realized I needed a little bit more depth and darkness on that lower edge there, so I've gone in with a little bit of the ultramarine blue and a little more of the sienna just to deepen it up and to add more shadow, because ultimately the tail is round and we're trying to create the illusion of a round, fluffy, bushy tail. To wrap it up here, I'm deepening up that area where that tail is under his foot because that's mostly just in shadow and I really want that to be deepen dark. In this way, by layering up the sienna, we can build up quite a bit of depth there, quite a bit of value to create that shadow. While that dries, I'll be adding another layer to the tip of the tail. I've just wet the area, and overall it was much too cool toned and not brown enough, so I'm really focusing on layering in some stripes of the gold brown to increase the warmth of that tail area to make it more harmonious with the remainder of the fur of the body. I'm using my small brush here, my size 1 cosmic topspin just to create more shadow under the foot there to make sure that that edge is really nice and crisp, and that those fur marks on the edge of the tail are really well-defined and crisp. I'm going all the way around the tail again. Since we've dampened it, the sepia will blend into the body of the tail, and we don't have to worry about that too much, we can just focus on the edge and keeping that crisp and making sure that we have enough texture there. At this point, we've made it all the way around the tail, and I'm just going in with more of that sepia to build up the depth of the dark stripes. By using a small brush and by wiggling it up and down, you get more of that textured furry appearance on the tail. Do do that with a small brush so that you get more small marks, because that helps you create the illusion of fur. There you can see what big of difference that's made for the stripes and the brown color of the tail. We have much more warmth in it now and deeper darker stripes and a very well-defined edge with fur marks, which makes the tail look more expressive and makes it pop forwards more towards the eye of the viewer. For now, I'm going to let this area dry and we'll move on to a new step in the next lessons. I'll see you there.
12. Lesson 10: Using shadow to paint in the lower leg: Okay everyone, we've already come a really long way. Our cat is really starting to take shape and we just have a couple more steps left to go. First off, I'm going over the body of the cat and I'm erasing any pencil marks that I might still be able to see because it's a lot easier to erase them now than it would be at a later stage once we've added more layers of paint. I would recommend for you to go and erase all over the cat any pencil marks that you can still see all over the body and around the face. Because it will be much easier to remove them now, than it will be at a later stage. I'm using an artist's eraser to do this because I find that it's just a little better at getting the job done than regular erasers. Although, if you're really careful, irregular eraser should also work. In this lesson, we're going to be working on the central part of the cat, the belly and we're going to be adding more pigment. So I've wet this inner area that I've demarcated with those red lines there and I'm going to be adding more pigment to help to lift that left leg off and forward from the belly, so to create shadow that lifts the leg visually and to increase the amount of color and interest in the center of the painting, in the belly of the cat, which we want to have very loose, very fluffy and fun to look at. I'm just starting off with some sepia here to build up some of the depth. I'm just dabbing and painting it wherever I see dark colors and dark flex on the belly of the cat. This entire area is wet and I'm working with fairly pigmented color here with my mop brush, using the very tip of the brush to apply the paint. Now, I've switched on to my liner brush here and I'm going to be creating more of those flicks and also just making sure that once again the edges are the darkest points of the shape. So I'm really pushing very pigmented color into the very tips of those flicks of fur and letting those bleed and blend into the center of the shape. You can see me take my time here with my liner brush, carefully going around those marks that we've already made and letting that blend into the center where there is damp paper. I will do the same on the other side here to lift that other leg forward as well. I'm filling in those areas that are in shadow, that are being cast in shadow from the fluffy pale fur that is catching the light from that leg that's coming forward and off to the body of the cat. So in a way we're painting negatively here, we're painting around the furry hairs that are sticking out from that knee portion of the leg there. We're making a nice deep shadow around it and letting that shadow fade and blend into the damp paper that we've dampened just a minute ago. A liner brush is really my very favorite tool for the job here. It holds a fair amount of water and pigment for you, but it has a very long skinny tip that lets you make long fur marks and long thin lines. If you find liner brush is very difficult to work with or you prefer working with a very small round brush, then go ahead and do that. You should use whichever tool makes the job easiest for you. I personally find that these CosmoTop-Spin liner brushes are really the best ones out there or well, they are my favorites from all the liner brushes that I've tried. But I do know that some people prefer to work with shorter round brushes. So if that is your preference, just go ahead and do that as long as you're able to paint the shadow between the fur here. In this way, I just keep going until I make it to the end there. For this for example, you don't really need to look at the picture. Obviously, I used a reference picture to see where shadow is present. But we're obviously non recreating every single hair or every single piece of fur on the picture. So here use your judgment and make sure that the deepest points are the ones that are furthest in on the little marks. The furthest under the pale fur that is peeking through and peeking over the remainder of the body so that you create the shadow effect. As we've already done on the left side of the body, I'm also going to be making sure that the deepest points of the side of the body is the edge there. So I'm pushing pigment along those flicks that we created to make the belly appear furry and fluffy and letting that blend in towards the center of the body. Going in with a little more of that transparency and a color to increase the warmth of color and to add more brown into the equation here. If we zoom out, you can see what that looks like. We didn't actually wet this upper area of the belly yet, because it would've been too large of an area for me to paint in one go. It would have dried on me before we had to finished. So I'm now extending my waterline upwards and I'm going to be repeating that technique that we used on the lower belly here on the upper belly as well. Again, we're dabbing on the dark color sienna, wherever we see darkness in the picture and wherever we think that dark splotches or stripes are visible in the picture which we would want to recreate on the painting. I'm just using my mop brush again and dabbing on the color on the damp paper wherever I see fit. I'm blending up towards those hair marks that we painted in the previous lesson to make the belly nice, seamless and flowy with no hard edges anywhere aside from on the edges of the body of the cat. Using a bit more of the gold and brown color add some watery sienna. Now, you can see that I'm being fairly carefree with the paint here and because we've made the area so damp, most of the blending is really done for you by the water that's on your paper. That's one of the core aspects to this technique of watercolor painting, choosing where to focus and where to add detail and where to really control your paint and where to let go and where to let the water do most of the work for you. In this way you get a very organic looking gradient of color and then that way you can create a very fluffy looking fur without having to expend too much effort. If we zoom out, this is where we're at. We can see that we've added a lot of color and depth to the belly. While that has a chance to dry, I'm going to be adding another layer of paint to the tail. In the previous lesson, we had discussed how the tail would require several layers because it has this highlight of fur sticking out and forward off of the tail if you think three-dimensionally. I'm going to be adding another layer to try to capture that a little better now, as the tail has had a chance to complete the dry. So now I'm just wetting the entire area with water, clean water and I'm adding in more paint in this case golden brown because if you look at the tail down there, you can see there's quite a bit of brown. I just want to increase the pigment and I'm adding flicks of fur there. What I'm going to be doing is I'm going to let those flicks dry and then use those as a guide for that shadow area that is on the very left side of the tail underneath the layer that's sticking forwards and outwards. For now I'm just pushing that gold brown all the way up until the edge to keep it seamless. I'm also adding a bit more sienna there on the edge where the paint is not quite dark enough yet. Again, having this strong, deep, bold edge will really make the painting pop off the white background. I'm dropping in a little bit of ultramarine blue and smink of violet here to add a bit more dimension to the color and to break up the brown a little bit. That just keeps it more interesting and we've used these colors on other portions of the body as well to add depth and color and in this way we can keep the picture quite harmonious and ultimately create a well-rounded looking painting by having the color appear on multiple portions of the body. We've also used it on certain portions of the leg and by including it here on the tail again, we can add more depth and make it look more interesting and create more interesting colors for the viewer in the end. Here I'm going back in with that liner brush, the CosmoTop-Spin liner and I'm just dragging out those marks, I'm making more thin hair marks because I just wasn't quite happy with that edge and I want the tail to look really furry and fluffy with lots of little hairs sticking off the edge. The best way I've found to do that is to use a liner brush and to pull the brush towards you. So depending on how your painting is positioned on your table, you might have to get up and walk around your table so that you're able to drag towards you. I find that makes for the most realistic hair marks. So I'm just going around the entire tail adding more of these thin wispy hair marks. To finish it off here, I'm just making sure that that edge there is really nice and dark. So at this point, we're going to have to let the tail dry again before I can work further on it by adding another layer.
13. Lesson 11: Adding interest and shadow to the lower leg and paw: We're almost finished everyone. In this lesson, we're going to be working on this lower right paw here. I'm just wetting it again. Once again, the paint is dried much lighter than we want it to. I'm going back in with more of that sepia color to deepen up the areas between the separate paws of the cat. Here, I'm going around the edge again, just making sure that the darkest area still has the edge of the border. Here, I'm adding a little bit of a shadow around that bottom claw that just peaks out just to give it a bit of dimension there. I picked up more sepia at this time, much more concentrated, and I'm really focusing it on the darkest areas of the paw, and in this way it'll create a nice shadow between the toes. I'm flicking my brush here to create more of those fur marks, and I'm having a look at the picture to make sure that I'm painting in accordance with what I see in the picture. Now, that I'm happy with the shading of the paw, I'm picking up more sepia on my size 1 round brush, and I'm going to be adding just a few more details with very concentrated paint almost like I were to be drawing them on with a pen. I'm just tracing around that edge there, and that will help me to pull the paw forwards, and have it pop off the body that is further behind in the picture. I'm trying to help lift the paw forwards, and to give it more dimension so that it's clear, that it's closer to the viewer than the remainder of the body is. I'm tracing around it there, and making sure that it has a nice, clean, well-defined edge there. Because this entire area of the cat is pretty soft, and whimsical, and fluffy. We do need a bit of definition here and there to help ground everything, and to give it some amount of realism, and to also give it detail and depths. That's what I'm doing here by using very concentrated paint almost as if I were to be drawing with a pen. I'm adding a shadow there towards the back toe there, and I'm doing that for each of the toes. Now, I've picked up some of the ultramarine blue, and I'm going to blend out of that shadow. I'm just using my small size 1 round brush for this. Now, I've left this in real-time because I want you to be able to see how much I'm taking my time with this, and how much I'm hesitating because as I'm doing this, I'm always looking at the reference picture, and triple checking whether I really see what I am seeing, and I'm thinking about where I still need to add depth or shadow or value, and where I need to preserve highlights. Keep looking at your reference picture, and work slowly. Here, I'm also just going to be sharpening up that edge there. I'm just dampening it first before I pick up that sienna, and I make sure that that edge is the darkest point. I'm just going over that again with more of that sienna color to keep that edge really dark, and well-defined, and sharp. I'm just making my entire way across. Here, I switched onto the liner brush because I find the liner brush just a little easier for that, and then I also switch between the size 1 round brush and the liner brush. You can see that I've wet that upper area again so that I can keep going. That's what that's looking like from the other perspective. Then I'm also going to be doing that up there. If you remember, we use brown to define those hairs there because if we were to keep them white, you wouldn't be able to see them against the white background. But unfortunately, it just dried a little paler than I would like it to be. I'm going to go back, and just deepen those tips of those hairs again with my liner brush with a little bit of the sepia color. There you can see that I'm just pushing it up all the way until the edge making sure that the darkest points the very tip of that piece of hair. I'm really taking my time with this. I'm going slowly with my liner brush, not going over the edge at all. I'm really just painting over what I've already painted. Here, I'm adding a little bit more of that gold-brown. I'm making sure that that blends into the highlight. That wraps it up for this lesson. I'll see you in the next one.
14. Lesson 12: Adding colour, depth and interest to the face: Everyone, we're going to be adding a few more finishing touches to the face before we move on to the white ink in the later classes. We've paid a lot of attention to the body in the couple of lessons previous to this one. Now I want to direct our attention back to the face. If you remember previously we had the struggle that we weren't able to draw in the pupils with paint. Here I'm now going in with the fine liner of 0.5 to finally enter. I'm going to be going around the eyes and also drawing in the pupils. Only do this if you're certain that you do not need to do a lot more with watercolor in that area. Because certain fine liner have a tendency to bleed if they come in contact with water. This one doesn't so much this one is by Stetler. But in general, I would argue that there should be one of the last layers of that particular portion of the painting. Here I'm just drawing in the two pupils, and I'm also going to be going around the mouth and the nose to define the face even further. Going all the way around the nose and also making sure that the nostril is really dark and well-defined. Make sure you take your time doing this because fine liner really can't be removed. You have to be very confident with what you're doing. I have now switched onto a bit of sepia on a small brush. I'm just darkening that area under the mouth. I'm dabbing the area to create little flex. This creates some texture and I find that it's a bit more of an accurate representation of the photograph. I've applied a bit too much water and pigment there, so I'm just taking a piece of kitchen roll to dap off some of the excess. Then I can go back and put more paint. I'm also going around there to darken up the shadow that's cast by the leg onto the face and then filling in those little shapes that we missed earlier. Going around the ear. This is where we're at now. I'm going to be paying a little more attention to the ears because I'm still not quite happy with the color. I'm just wetting the area and with my liner brush, I'm taking ultramarine finest along that line of the ear to darken it. Because we've wet it, the color will disperse itself and bleed into the inner area of the ear gradually. That's exactly what we want so that the most pigment is at the edge of the ear there. I'm also wetting the other side. Just with water and then going in with ultramarine finest. Now I've switched onto a bit of the sepia just to darken up that area of the ear even more. Then also repeat the same thing on the other ear. I've wet the area and I take ultramarine finest all around the edge and I use sepia to darken up the edge even more. Then you can see the difference there again. To increase the texture on the ear and to add more of a fluffy appearance to those sides of the ears, I'm going in with the liner brush and more of the sepia color to add more hair marks. I've given the inner ear a chance to dry at this point. I dropped it off real quick with a hair dryer so that there's no chance of bleeding because we don't want these small hair marks to bleed into the inner part of the ear. Then I'm also going around and doing that on the other ear. I'm just adding little furry earmarks to that side of the ear there. I've actually gotten up and moved around my tables so that I'm able to drag the liner brush towards me as I make these marks. This is much easier than pushing a liner brush away from you. If you struggle with liner and brushes or you're just struggling to make these hairlike marks in general, I would encourage you to move around your table and always drag them towards you. I find that this is far easier than pushing or flicking away from myself. I'm also just lining that outer rim of the ear. Not necessarily because I see that in the picture, but because I wanted to stand out nicely against the white background so that the painting really pops and I'm going back round and doing a little more of that on the other ear as well. I just keep going until I'm satisfied. While the ears get a chance to dry. I'm adding another layer of shadow to the eyes. These are completely drying them, only taking it around the inner and outer edge of the eyeball to give it more of a rounded shape. I'm using very watery sepia to do this. I'm doing all of this with the cosmic topspin liner brush. But if you find a small round brush easy to use, go ahead and do that. Just use whatever you find most comfortable. Here I'm just using a bit of water to blend that space in the eye and I'm drawing it off because I added just a little bit too much water there. I'm just damping here with a tiny little piece of kitchen roll. I noticed that the pink of the nose was getting a little bit lost and it was looking more brown than pink. I layered on a little bit more of the magenta. Now I'm just taking it clean damp brush to spread it around and to pick up a little bit of that pigment because I had applied just a tiny bit too much. Just a thin layer of pink over the nose. That concludes the face for now. We're not done yet, but for now I want to let it dry and this also brings us to our next progress picture, which you can download on the website. Just make sure you're on the website and not only using the app. See you in the next lesson.
15. Lesson 13: Defining edges with layers and shadows: Welcome back everyone. We're almost finished. We're just working on a couple of finishing touches before we can move on to working with white ink. In this class, I'm going to be focusing a lot on edges and improving the contrast in the edges that we've created so far. To start us off, I'm working on this foot here, so am just wetting the entire area and I'm going to be going in with the deep concentrated sepia tone to create a bit more dimension and shadow there because we essentially didn't finish this foot yet. That'll be the first thing we're busy with here today. I'm just taking that sepia all across that lower area of the foot and I'm just letting that bleed upwards. It's a very dark area, feel free to be liberal with your pigment. Just make sure to respect the separate toes there at the front and to always keep blending. I do that with my mouth brush. To increase the contrast here, I'm taking even more of that sepia up into those shadow areas between the hairs, making sure that those are really nice and dark and crisp, so that they pop even more. I'm doing that with my liner brush but you can use whichever brush you like the most for this. I'm a big fan of the liner brush because it holds a fair amount of water and pigment and has a very nice thin, flexible tip. Am just tracing over that top edge of the foot. Not because I necessarily see that in the picture but because I wanted it to stand out up against the white background. The next step is to finish up that tail there, the shadow. Remember how we made those hair marks as a guide for ourselves last time, now I'm painting around them and painting in that shadow that I've circled there. I'm making sure that I just know where I'm going and then placing in the shadow. Am just going all around it. Up until this point, we've just really left that area too pale. After taking a step back from the painting and looking at it again, I just realized that it needs to be much darker than it was so far. Am just layering up the sepia here. Am just making sure that its darkest towards the area where the foot is on top of the tail. I'm using a liner brush just to thin out and stretched out those pointy shadows there that come between the hairs. In a way here, we are painting negatively again because we're going around the hairs that are to the very forefront of the tail there. If you think back to that funny highlight that was catching a lot of light because the hair was sticking out towards us, towards the viewer, that's what we're essentially painting around. We call that painting negatively when we paint around something to help give something shape. Now I've just picked up even more pigment and I'm just sharpening up those very fine points in the shadows and making sure there's enough of them to give the tail enough detail and to show that their hairs there. I'm going to be adding in the other shadow now that runs roughly through the middle of the tail there. I'm just doing that with my mouth brush and some sepia, so that's that middle part of the tail. I'm flicking in little hair marks to indicate the edge of that shadow. To give it a little more dimension, I'll also I be going in with a little bit of the purple color, just to echo some of the colors we've been using throughout the rest of the cat to create nice union and uniformity and to keep it more interesting to look at. Here I'm still working with sepia, making some marks with the tip of my brush. I'm pulling those out to make more fine little hair marks on the edge of that shadow there. Now while that dries, I want to improve the contrast of that edge there on the upper body. I'm just wetting the area as per usual and I'm going in with my liner brush and sepia. As we've been doing all this time, I'm just painting over the edge that we've already created and letting the paint bleed towards the inner portion of that shape that we've wet. Then keep going all the way down the side of the body there. I'm not creating any new marks. I'm just going over the very edge of what I've already painted to give it even more contrast there. By keeping the area wet, the inner portion of that shape always remains well blended. There are no harsh edges on the inside of the shapes, only where I choose to place them on the edge of the fur. To keep it more interesting and to add more color, I'm also going in with the transparency enough. I'm just encouraging it to blend a little bit here manually but it might also mean that your paper's a little too dry, if it's not blending as you wanted to. In this case, I could have also wet the area again. I'm also using a little bit of purple to echo some of the purple reviews in the rest of the body of the cat. It makes for a nice, interesting, more dynamic shadow. To intensify some of the stripes that he has on his leg there, I'm just wetting the entire area again and I'll be going in with quite heavily pigmented sepia just to deepen up the very inner portion of those stripes, the very center of each stripe. I'm using the very tip of that brush. If you find that a little too difficult, just use a smaller brush. For example, the size one round cosmic top spin brush that we've been using would also work for this. I'm using the very tip of this mouth brush. As you can see, I'm dabbing it to create more of a jagged edge. If we're using a small brush, you could also use that wiggle techniques that I've shown you on some of the other portions of the body, that would also work well here. I'm just doing more of the same. I just keep going until I'm satisfied. Here I've added a bit more of the sienna color, a bit more redness and warmth and then I just let that dry. Ready for the next lesson.
16. Lesson 14: Increasing depth, colour and shadow on the belly: All right, in this lesson we'll continue what we've been doing in the previous one, but focusing mostly on the belly of the cat and this will be the final lesson before we move on to making marks with white ink. Things such as the whiskers. These are really some of the finishing touches to the painting. If during the course of this process here you still find pencil marks, make sure to erase them because we don't want any pencil marks remaining at the end of the painting process. Here I've just wet the belly and our goal here is to increase the color and interest of the belly a little more. Because as per usual, it's dried lighter than what we want it to be. I wanted to add one more layer to it to give it more color, more warmth, more dimension and to make it more interesting and more filled with texture. Here I'm using the very tip of my mock brush just to add more of that sepia color, to add more patches and spots to darken the ones that we already have. I'm going in between those hairs and making sure that the shadows, they're a really dark and deep. I'm increasing the color of the existing spots. I'm looking at the reference picture as I'm doing this, but I'm also being a little more flexible at this point and trying to increase some of the contrast that we have, but are not that's present on the picture. To increase the interest of the belly and to make it look nice and to get it to a point where I'm happy with it. I might be adding a bit more of the brown because I find that overall the bellies and moved to cool toned. Even though you might not be able to see it in the picture. Here in there I do deviate from the picture if I think that it will add a lot to the painting. You can see here that I've gone in with the gold brown and I'm adding just a couple of patches of gold brown to increase the warmth and to make the belly a little more yellow there. To give it more of a balanced color because I wasn't so much of a fan of that very great, cool toned look on the belly. I'm just blending it out and thinking about where I want to add my next splash of color. Here, I've moved onto a bit of transparency and so really quite warm and reddish. I'm adding more patches, especially towards the inside of the belly area. Here I've cleaned off and dried off my brush just so that I'm able to blend that top edge there seemlessly. I've now switched onto my size one brush because I want to work on that edge just a little more. I think it needs a little more contrast so that I can really pop. I'm using transparency under here so that very reddish brown. If we zoom out a bit, you can see how much interest we've added to the belly with this final layer. That's going to be working on the top here. Under that paw, we just need a bit more of a shadow. It looks a little bit unfinished there because the paws much closer to the viewer than the body and yet the body is paler than the paw. To even that out and to make that look a little bit more realistic, I'm adding a bit of a shadow. I'm doing that with ultramarine blue. As I blend that over the round and you'll be able to see that it makes it a bit more of a gray tone. Browns mix with blues will always result in gray tones. To switch to a smaller brush, I'm able to push that in between those hair marks a little more easily. They're just adding a little bit more of the sepia to deepen it and then I'm moving up to this upper area here, which overall is a little bit too pale in comparison to the rest of the body. Which is why I'm going to be adding one more layer of the sepia brown to deepen it up overall. I'm starting here on the edge. I'm just painting it all over and this can happen quite a few times where you start out, not entirely knowing how deep or how much value you need to add, how deep you need to go. Then in the end, when you see it in relation to the rest of the painting, you'll notice that certain areas simply need more value. That's also what happened here. I'm really laying on a fairly pigmented layer of the sepia brown. I'm keeping some of that texture of the stripes. You'll see that I'm not covering up everything, so to speak. I'm respecting the stripes that are there. I'm just deepening up everything by a couple of notches. In this way, we overall increase the value of that area and we push it further backwards where it belongs because it's in shadow. Then that way it'll look a little bit more realistic and a little bit more true to the picture. I'm just doing that all the way down. I'm always making sure that the edge of that for is dark and crisp. It should always remain the most dark point over shape. In this way you can create edges that really pop and maintain this style of portraiture that I like personally. Once I'm finished with blending map, we're done. This is where we're at now we're ready to go ahead and use white ink to add the remaining details on the painting. At this point, please make sure that you let the painting dry completely and that you take an eraser to it and erase any remaining pencil lines that you might still have, because once we've added the white ink, you'll no longer be able to do that.
17. Lesson 15: Preparing for and using white ink to add fur marks: All right, so I've had a bit of a break from the painting. I had a day's break and I let it dry. I realized that there still just a couple of things that I wasn't quite happy with. So before we move on to the white ink, I'll just walk you through my final corrections here first. My first step was to deepen up that area of his crotch because I just thought it was a bit too pale. The other thing that I wasn't quite happy with yet was the shading of the face. So here I'm just wetting that area one last time. I'll be dropping in a bit more pigment to add shadow to his left and right side of his cheek to make the face look more rounded. I'm just coming in with sepia. I also do that on the other side. I'm just using the very top of that mop brush to push the pigment along the edge of his face. I drop in a bit of that transparent sienna on both sides. You can already see now that the face has a bit more shape, thanks to the shadow that we've just added. That just gives it a bit more of a rounded effect because this face is actually quite narrow, but because of the angle of the picture, it looks wide. So by adding this shadow and trying to capture the fact that both sides of the face are in shadow, it creates the illusion that the face is more narrow and instead cast in more shadow. That's ultimately what we wanted. But sometimes you need to take a step back from the painting and let it mull over in your brain and take a break from it before you can see these final adjustments as was the case for me here now as well. At this point, I'm moving onto the white ink. This is my favorite kind. This is by Winsor & Newton. You must absolutely use it on dry paper. So you have to let your painting dry. As I've said a couple of times before, make sure you erase any remaining pencil lines before you go and use this. My favorite way to apply it is with a very thin liner brush. This is a size one liner brush. In this way we are going to be adding small white hairs wherever we see fit as a finishing touch to the painting. Then this way will also be painting the whiskers. So I'm starting down here on the leg and I'm just creating little flicks of hairs to reinforce the idea that there's pale hairs on top of the shadow and to create more of an appearance of fluffy fur. These little white hairs, they're catching the light of the sun in the picture. In this way, we can try and capture that a little better than if we were to leave this step out. You could also do this with white gouache or white watercolor. But I do find that the ink gives better coverage and it's easier to use. So if you are able to source it, I do recommend making the investment rather than trying to do this with white watercolor or white gouache paint. Here you can see I'm just dragging the brush, the liner brush towards me. So I've gotten up and I've walked around my table to the other side so that I'm able to drag towards me because this is much easier than trying to draw hairs or hair-like marks pushing away from yourself. I keep looking at the picture, making sure that I go in the direction in which the hair is actually facing in the picture. So here I'm adding marks all the way down the lake. I also do that on the other side. There you can see a little bit of what I'm doing. Here, you could see I was struggling a little bit, so I moved up and around my table to be able to drag them towards me. This is really much easier. I'm also going to be doing that down here, where this pale fur overlaps with the shadow and the darker fur of the leg. I'm just taking my time doing this. I just keep going until I'm happy with the result. I will say that sometimes with this effect less is more. So don't go overboard with it. Also adding a few of these to the tail. So it's not necessarily that we're painting white fur, it's more that we are painting hairs that are catching the light. They shimmer and shine as though they're white. This just helps to create more texture in the painting. I'm also doing it in the tail. I'm using it to highlight that little claw that's just peeking out from the paw and add a little bit of fur to the paw. Then to that fur up here to give it more texture again. I've walked all the way around my table so that I'm able to drag my brush towards me. If at any point you find that the ink isn't quite covering, let it dry and add another layer. I sometimes do this twice, where I go around the entire painting and one layer and I let it dry and then I take a step back and have a look where I might need to layer up a little more. But again, less is more so don't overdo it. Whenever you have the feeling that you're not sure where to add anymore, stop because otherwise you end up adding so much it starts to look a little silly, and then you regret adding it. It's quite difficult to remove. You can't really remove it the way that you can remove watercolor paint, so do be careful. In the same way, I just go around both of the edges of fur so on the right side here and also on the left, adding little marks until I'm happy with them. In the next lesson, the final lesson, we'll be adding whiskers and white marks to the face and then we'll be finished. I realize it's been a really long process and I'm happy you've made it all the way through until the end. We're almost done. Don't give up now and just a couple of moments you'll have finished your painting.
18. Lesson 16: Adding whiskers, facial marks and other finishing touches: In this very last lesson, yes, we're almost finished, we'll be adding the final touches to the face of the cat. Here I've just very lightly dampened the area where the whiskers are growing because I need to deepen that point just a little bit. Before we can add in whiskers with white ink, I'm just dabbing on a little bit of sepia to darken up the area of the root of the whisker and I'm doing that on both sides. I'm using my very tiny Nova brush for this because it just gets into all those nooks and crannies and it doesn't apply too much paint. I'm just dabbing that on to create those spots. Here I've picked up white ink on my liner brush again, and I'm going to start on the fur marks towards the left of the face there while those roots of the whiskers can dry. I'm just dragging them towards me and creating little hairs that will overlap with the ears. I'm also painting in a couple of those really long white hairs that he has growing just over his ear. Dabbing on a bit of white ink for those tiny little white fluffy hairs around his mouth and nose. The area down here is dried by now, and I'm also just painting on that little mustache that he has, that little bit of white fur under his mouth, and adding the highlight to the inner room of the ear there. Just a couple more fur marks to the ear and a couple of long white hairs, and then I'm drawing in those whiskers that he has above his eye that hang over his ear, and the other one as well. If you're not feeling very confident painting these in, just use a very light touch of pencil first to figure out where you need to go and the direction of the hair. I'm also doing that on the other side and you can see that I have my pencil marks still there so that I can follow my pencil mark with my white ink so that I'm not nervous about drawing in the long hair, and so that I know exactly where I need to go with my ink. There I'm doing the other one as well, and the last one. I'm just adding those ear hairs as well, and more of those very little marks on the top of his ear. I'm just adding a few to the side of his face, and I saw that the first one on the other side, draw it a little transparent. I'm just going over it again here adding another layer. Now I'm moving on to the whiskers and I still have my pencil marks there guiding me so that I am very confident knowing where I need to go with my ink for the whiskers. I do recommend using a little bit of guidance from your pencil for drawing those in and using one long swooping motion to paint it on with your liner brush. Make sure that you have plenty of ink on your brush, but that it's not forming a drop at the end of the brush. Because if you do that, you'll get a very big glob of paint right at the root of the hair and that's not what we want. His whiskers are actually doing a very funny thing here because he's pushing them the opposite direction with his paw. He's pushing them and letting them go the opposite direction in which they're growing, so they have a bit of like a funny look to them in this picture. I'm just making sure that I know where I'm going with my ink, and then I'm taking one foul swoop and going the entire length of the hair that I'm drawing in one go. Again, use a pencil to guide you. I'm just adding in one more above the eye and a bit of texture on the paw there. A bit of texture on the forehead, and if we zoom out a little you can have a look how far we're at now. Now, because we're working with the white background, some of the whiskers aren't really visible. To get around that issue, my technique involves using a bit of dark paint to follow up on the whiskers as well with. That makes them stand out both against dark and pale backgrounds. With sepia I'm just going along some of the whiskers that we've already painted in with white ink. I'm just tracing them on the underside as if they had a shadow, so I'm just tracing almost every whisker that I've drawn in white ink. I'm just going around and I'm making sure that I really cover the areas that hang over his body onto the white background so that you can really see the whisker. If I zoom in a little, you can see a little better what I'm doing there. I'm using that same small, skinny size one liner brush for this. I'm just dabbing on a little more sepia where I want just a little bit more darkness and contrast in the face. Then if we zoom out, we can have a look at the final painting. That's the final painting, we are done. Thank you for making it all the way until the very end of this class, I hope you've enjoyed it and I hope that you've been able to learn something. I would really love to see your projects so do please post pictures and write a little bit about your experience with the class in the projects on Skillshare. I really look forward to seeing what you've come up with. If you run into any trouble or you get stuck with anything, let me know in the comments to the class and I'll do my best to help you out and get back to you as soon as possible. See you there.
Maura Leusder, Watercolour artist and lover of color
