Relaxing Watercolour Projects for Beginners: Simple Skies & Silhouettes

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Sharon and I specialize in watercolor, illustration, and modern calligraphy. This watercolor class is all about simple skies and silhouettes. I chose this topic after I'd seen how popular my earlier watercolor for relaxation class had been and realized that so many of us just want to have simple projects that can be completed in a fairly short amount of time that will help us switch off from the daily stresses of life without any pressure and with an end result that you can be proud of. In this class, I start by taking you through all of the supplies that you would need, including the option of using the templates I've provided for you. We then start our practice sessions by first looking at skies and background, and here we practice a lot of basic watercolor techniques from flat washes and graduated washes to fun variegated washes and soft clouds. We then move on to looking at silhouettes, practicing values, and brush control with lots of tips for building up your colors and making effective yet simple compositions. After we've practiced all of these different techniques and elements, we'll move on to the projects. In this section, I take you through 15 different projects step-by-step in real-time, putting into practice the techniques that we've gone through. I made so many examples for this class because they are so much fun and quick to paint, experimenting with different details, different colors and different combinations. So I found it quite hard to choose just 15 projects to be honest, but I chose some of my favorite for you to paint with me. You can work your way through all of these projects in order, perhaps one a day for 15 days. But also you can just pick and choose which projects inspire you as well. Of course by the end of the class, you will have the knowledge and hopefully the inspiration so that you can go away and make as many more of these as you want to, whenever you want to. This class is for you, if you're a beginner to watercolor and want to practice or improve on some basic techniques, you want inspiration for many projects that you can complete whenever you have 20 minutes of such paint, or you just want simple projects that will help you to relax. This class is a really fun way to explore your paints as well, practicing fundamental watercolor techniques, and also seeing what colors and combinations work well together. I'll be using a limited palette throughout and showing you how I mix each of the colors. As with the relaxation class, we paint all of these projects as bookmarks and pyrethroids. I really enjoy doing it this way because it keeps them fairly small and compact, but also it means you have some lovely finished pieces that you can give as gifts at the end or use around your home. Hopefully you're feeling inspired and excited about this class, so grab your supplies and let's get started. 2. Supplies: Let's talk about supplies. Firstly, I've included some templates for the projects for you in the resource section if you wish to use these to draw out your paintings first. I've also included a template for one of the practice sessions as well for the values class. You can access these via the website, they're not currently available through the app. These include blank templates for the bookmarks, and for the polaroids, and also outlines of some of the projects. I haven't included templates for all of the projects, like the ones with the finer details like the weeds and the branches, because they're much easier just to paint freehand. The subjects are generally pretty simple and you can easily paint these yourself without using these guides, but they are there for you if you want to just concentrate on the painting and not worry about getting the shapes or the compositions right for any of the projects. If you wish, you can download these PDFs, print and either trace them or cut them out and draw around them. You'll need watercolor paper. I'll be using a block of Saunders Waterford cold pressed watercolor paper. By a block, I mean the old pages are glued together around the edge. I would definitely recommend cold pressed for this class and at least 300 GSM or 140 pounds thickness because we are going to be using a fair amount of water for our washes and anything less than that will probably buckle with water. I'll be showing you how to draw on cuter or all of the project templates with your paper. You will need seven bookmarks and eight Polaroids for the projects if you plan to do them all. To draw on your templates, you'll need a pencil and probably an eraser. I would always recommend using a pencil that is quite like HB or H. Whatever you use, make sure it's not too heavy because you can't always erase your lines once they've been covered in watercolor. This one's a kneadable eraser, which I would recommend because it would do less damage to the page than a normal eraser. You can just use it to pick up the pencil from the page. You'll also need a ruler for drawing out your templates with. You need some watercolor brushes, and I'll be using a few different size round brushes in this class. I'll be using a size 10, which is my larger brush for the background washes because we want to cover a fair amount of area. I'll be using a small size 0 and a size 4, for some of the details. These round brushes have nice fine tips and full bodies which can hold a decent amount of water and paint. They are great for both fine lines or edges and for recovering more areas of paper. For the reeds in project 9 I'll to be using a liner brush, which is great for consistent thin strokes. It's great for things like reeds and long grass and it's definitely worth investing in if you like to paint delicately. But if you don't have one of these, you can just use one of your smaller brushes. That's absolutely fine. My brushes are Princeton brushes, which I love and would highly recommend. You need some water color paints. I'll be using Winsor & Newton professional tubes. You do not need professional paints. Spy would recommend investing in a good quality palette. Even if it's just a few small paints, higher-quality paints like these professional paints have much more pigment in them so you get more vibrant colors. They also mix better and will last you much longer. You can mix most of the colors you need just by using your three primary colors. The three primary colors are the Windsor & Newton professional range; Windsor Blue, Red Shade, Winsor Lemon, and Permanent rose. Those are the three colors that I'll be using in this class and showing you how to mix up the different colors for our projects. I'll also be using Payne's Gray and Indigo in the class. Both of these are opaque or semi-opaque colors. They are really nice, deep dark colors, which give a great contrasts with some of the silhouettes. Then niceties in black because they have cooler tone then they're not done like black can be. For future projects, I'll just be using the Indigo for the whole project, which is a lovely deep blue. Indigo is a must-have for me on my palette. I love it for its deep color. But for any of these projects, you can use whatever colors you like or colors that you have. I've chosen these colors for the class using a limited palette to show you what you can achieve just using these three primary colors, so that you can start experimenting with mixing your three primaries and explore all colors that you can make. But if you'd like to make it simpler and concentrate on the techniques, then you can of course, just choose a premix color in your palette for the projects. You can use any colors that you like. Don't restrict yourself by thinking that you need to use a blue for the sky or whatever color I'm using. You could try pink or purple or an orange or green. These projects are about having fun and relaxing. Remember, don't put limits on yourself, just enjoy it and go with the colors that you like. You'll need a pallet to mix your paints on. For paintings like this, when we're painting large areas with washes, we want more water in our mixes. So I like to use pallets like these which have these wells in. This just allows you to mix up a bigger quantity of paint to cover a larger area. You'll need some water, ideally two pots of water, one to keep clean for your initial wet washes, and one for you to watch the paint off of your brush with. You'll also need a paper towel or a cloth to take off any of the excess water or paint from your brush. We've got a few extra supplies that we need for the class. You'll need some masking tape. I'll be using this artist's masking tape. It's 12 millimeters wide. I'll be using this to mark out the borders for each of the projects. You can also use washi tape, but make sure whatever you're using won't damage the paper when you take it off. You'll also need something to cut out your templates with either scissors or a craft knife, metal ruler, and a cutting mat if you have them. I'll also be using a black fine liner a pen. This isn't essential, but it's useful for some finer details like the wires or the boat mast or even tiny birds in the sky. This is a Pigma Micron size 1, and these are waterproof. If you do use a black fine liner just make sure it's waterproof as well. Again, this isn't essential, but I'll be using a heat tool to dry some of my layers with. I don't normally do this, but in some of the projects there are a few layers that we want to dry quite quickly. You can either use a heat tool, just make sure you don't get it too close to the paper or leave it on there for too long. You can also use a hair dryer or you can of course, just wait and take a break for a few minutes while you wait for the paper to dry before you move on to the next layer. At the beginning of each project, I will give you an overview of what supplies we'll be using for that project to help you get prepared. Now that we know what supplies we need, let's get started with our practice session. 3. Practice Skies Part 1: Intro & Tips: In this first practice session and for the next few videos, we're going to practice painting some backgrounds that we can use with our projects. These can all act as simple skies, but they are also really, really useful techniques to know for all of your watercolor paintings. Plus it can be super relaxing to paint and a great way to help you explore your palette and mixing different colors. First, I just want to quickly talk you through all of the different backgrounds that we are going to look at. This first one is a flat wash. This is where we have an even layer of color throughout the whole piece. Then we'll look at a graduated wash, which is where we start with quite a deep color and then we gradually dilute it so that it fades out. The aim with this is to get a nice and smooth transition. This is a great wash to use for a simple sky because the sky gets lighter towards the horizon. Always make sure that the dark part of the sky is at the top of your landscape. Next we'll look at a variegated wash. So whereas this graduated wash was using one color, a variegated wash will use two colors or more, transitioning smoothly from one to the other. Then we'll look at more patchy variegated wash. This one is great for moody skies, but it's also just really fun to do because whereas with ones we've looked at so far, we want a smooth finish. With this one you can relax a bit more and let the paint and water do their own thing, so it can be a bit more unpredictable. You'll see we have some oranges here, some light oranges and then, some yellow retains here and going back to the oranges. There are a surprising number of ways that you can paint something as simple as these graduated washes and the variegated washes. If you look at different artists, they will have their own preferred method. In this class, we're going to practice these in a couple of ways; wet on dry painting or dry paper, and wet on wet painting onto wet paper. The reason I'm going to show you more than one way to do this is to encourage you to experiment and to think about what methods you prefer so you can grow as an artist, knowing that you have multiple ways that you can do things because they all have their benefits or advantages. There's never one way to paint something in watercolor. Every artist has their own preferences and strengths and uses different methods and techniques accordingly. Experimenting and exploring the capabilities of what watercolor can do is what is going to help you find your own preferred method and your own style. The next one we'll look at is this drifting wash, which is again very much loose and relaxed. We wet the paper at the paint and let it do its thing without interfering. Finally, we'll look at paintings in simple soft clouds, wet on wet. Before we start with these washes, I want to share some tips with you first that will be helpful to bear in mind through out the next few practice videos. Firstly, make sure you're using the right size brush for whatever size you want to cover. I'll be using a size 10 round brush. But if I was going to be painting a bigger area, perhaps half the page or more, I'd use something bigger like a 14 or a 16 or more. Use whatever you're comfortable with, but bear in mind that if your brush is too small for the area you're trying to cover, you're likely to end up with the streaks throughout your paint. Secondly, make sure you mix enough paint before you start. If you need to stop and mix more, your paint on the page is likely to dry, which will make your finished piece again, look streaky or patchy. For this type of work, it's great to have these palettes that have a bit more of a well so you can make a good mix with plenty of water. You can also get palettes like this and I use this as well. Its just got a nice dipping so you can make quite a lot of paint in there. I tend to use my flat paint more for delicate work when I don't need as much water, but these are much better for these larger washes. Thirdly, we want to be working quite quickly. With most of these washes, you need to keep adding paint, lots of paint that is already on the paper is still wet. Otherwise, again, you'll end up with streaks if you go too slow. You can see here because this second curve of paint I put down was wetter than the first, its pushed some of that paint back. You can see this streakiness here. It's not a nice smooth wash anymore. The next tip is to use gravity as your friend. You can tilt the paper to encourage the flow of paint in a particular direction. This is especially useful for larger areas when you want the paint to blend smoothly, or if you want to have a looser, more organic effect. You can change the angle depending on how fast you want the paint to flow in that direction, or just tip it the other way. Alternating the angle is quite good when you have two colors on that and then, when you want to slow it down, you can lay it flat. Bear in mind if the paper's still wet, the paint will still keep spreading slowly until the paint has dried. The next tip is to remove any excess water and paint from your page. The reason for this is so that you can get a nice smooth wash. Excess water on your page will make it harder to control your paint and can lead to backwashes. Unfortunately, if you're not paying attention to the amount of water you have on your page, you may not notice this until the paint has dried and it's ruined your piece. If you're using the wet on wet technique and laying down a coat of water first, try to avoid having a puddle on your page. You want to aim for an even coverage of water. To check you can hold your paper at an angle and you should be able to see just a glossy sheen over your page. If there is excess water, you can tip the page up and the water will flow down to the bottom edge. You can then either use a dry brush and gently pick it up, or you can use a paper towel to gently absorb it. This may also happen when you're working with masking tape and the paint can sometimes gather at the edge. If you leave that, that can back run and then once it's dry, it will create those horrible lines again. Again, you just need to gently pick this up with either your brush or your paper towel. Next, try to avoid disturbing drawing paint. This is something that you will surely regret. If you go back and try to fix something that is drying and your brush is wetter than the pain on the paper, it's going to dilute that spot that you touched with your brush and push the paint that's on the paper away. Once this dries, it's going to lead this horrible dark edge around the light area. Really try to resist doing that. If you want to fix something, you may try covering the whole area with a second coat and I'll show you this later. Next, have a pot of clean water handy. This is especially useful for when you are diluting paint on the page, like with the graduated wash or when you're laying down a first coat of water for the wet on wet technique. Having two pots, one for your clean water and one for your dirty water is really helpful. If you're not getting the effects you want, think about the supplies that you're using. Paper is really important with watercolor. I talk about this all the time. Good quality watercolor paper will always give you a much better results than cheaper watercolor paper. Good quality paints contain more pigment so that you can get the richer, deeper colors. If you're using cheaper watercolor paints, they don't contain as much pigment so you may struggle to get that contrast you want between the light and the dark. You really notice this in the graduated wash. This is why I try to use a limited palette in my classes so that I can show you that you can invest in just a few good quality paints and mix your own variety of colors. Remember, you do not need to spend a fortune on a big palette. That's quite a lot of tips there for you to start with and I really heard they've been helpful. I'll share some more as I go along that are specific to the type of wash that we are doing. Let's start with the flat wash. 4. Practice Skies Part 2: Flat Wash: In this video, we are going to practice painting a nice even consistent flat wash. Make sure you have your paint mixed up beforehand. We want to have plenty of water in this mix because we do not want to add any more as we go along, because that would just dilute it. We are going to keep the paper flat and just do a small square to start with. I'm just going to lay this down, go back and pick up some more paint, and then overlapping that edge, I'm just going to paint some more. You can see there are a few pours of paint here, so you can just spread them out, make it a bit bigger. Or you can tip the page like I showed you before. If any excess runs to the edge like here, we can just clean and dry our brush and pick it up. That way we know that we will not have those back washes. As you can see, that's nice even consistency, level of water is the same across the whole piece, so we can be confident that that is going to dry nice and even. This time we're going to paint a flat wash on a bigger area. We are going to do it the long ways in a bookmark shape. We will pick up our paint again, just make sure you have got enough mixed. This time we are going to tip our page slightly, and we are going to start by painting perhaps an inch of paint at the top. Then you tip this, and you see the excess is running down to the edge. Picking out some more paint, and just above this bead of paint, and paint in another stroke and pull the paint down. We're just going back to the paint on our palate and continuing down. When we get to the edge, we can just pick up the excess paint. I'm just going to clean and dry my brush slightly and then go back and pick that up just gently. I don't want to leave any marks. That's our flat wash. In the next video, we will look at painting graduated washes. 5. Practice Skies Part 3: Graduated Washes: In this video, we're going to paint some graduated washes, which is where we will use one color to paint a wash that goes from dark to light. This technique is great for skies because the sky tends to be lighter towards the horizon, as I mentioned earlier. There are a number of ways you can do a graduated wash. I'm going to show you a couple of ways. The first way I'm going to show you is similar to how we painted this flat wash by tilting the paper. It's going to be wet-on-dry paper. We want to make sure we've got plenty of paint mixed up beforehand. We want the paint at the top of the wash to be really quite concentrated so that there's enough contrast as we dilute the paint as it goes down towards the bottom. I made sure there's plenty of water in there as well. Set your page and add about an inch of paint at the top of your page. Again, you should have this bead that's forming. Instead of going back to our paint, this time we're going to go to our water, just going to wash off my brush. You still want a fairly good amount of water in your brush. Just above this bead, I'm going to pull the paint down. Tilting the paper is going to help make that transition nice and smooth as the paint runs down. Again I'm going back to my water and just above that bead, I'm just going to paint a couple of horizontal strikes and pull that down. You can see it's starting to get lighter. You want to make sure that still there's bead of water because that's going to help make it nice and smooth. At this point I'm going to go to my clear water because we want this paint to get paler as we go down. Just making sure I'm washing any excess paint off in my brush. This is just clean water I want to add. You can see it's getting really nice and pale now. If you have any excess water at the bottom, its got a tiny bit there, I don't really need to pick that up, you can just pick it up with your brush or a paper towel. It feels like it's a nice smooth transition, if you don't need to tilt it anymore, you can just lay it flat and leave it to dry as it is. That's the first example of a graduated wash painting, wet-on-dry paper and using gravity to help us, tilting the paper and using that bead of water, pulling it down, diluting it as we go. The second way, I want to show you to paint graduated wash is wet-on-wet. Again to lay some clean water down on the page first in a similar size rectangle. Make sure it's nice and even, and then I'm just going to tip it up and pick up that excess at the bottom. Now picking up my paint, I'm going to start at the top. I'm just going to wash off my brush. I'm washing off the paint, and taking off a lot of the water as well, just on the side of the jar. If you want to tilt you can. Once that starts flowing, I'm just going to go above here and then start pulling it down. I can see there's quite a lot of water now, so I'm just using my paper towel to take off the excess. If it's running too fast, just lower your paper down and then just use horizontal strikes to pull this down. I'm going to go back up here it's still wet so I can still go into it and pull some more down. Whilst it's still wet, if you want to, you can add some more at the top to make it a bit more darker. I'm just dragging this down. I'm going to wash some of that paint off and then drag it down more. Once it looks nice and smooth, you can lay it down for it to dry. There you have two different ways of doing a graduated wash, wet-on-dry dry, and wet-on-wet. Experiment with both and see what your preferred method is. Next, we'll look at painting a variegated wash. 6. Practice Skies Part 4: Variegated Washes: In this video, we're going to look at painting variegated washes. Again, there are quite a few ways that you can do this. Variegated washes are when you have more than one color, and they blend together. This work really well for sunsets when you have a dark color by the top and perhaps a brighter color towards the horizon. One of the things you need to think about when you're doing variegated washes and mixing two colors together, are that they are colors that are close to each other on the color wheel. If you have complimentary colors, then mixing them can get a little muddy. I'm going to start with using a yellow and an orangey-red, which obviously sit next to each other on the color wheel and will blend together really nicely. One of the quickest ways to do a variegated wash is wet-on-wet. I'll start by preparing our colors, and I'm ready to go. Using your clean water we're just going to lay some water down on the page. Then just check if there's any excess and pick it up with either your brush or your paper towel. Now, we can add one of our colors at the top, going down to about halfway. Then we can pick up a second color, and then add it to the bottom. I'm not going to be blending this in much, we're just going to leave it and then let them blend into each other naturally. I can see that there's a bit of excess water still on this page, so I'm just tipping it and picking that up. This is one way to do a variegated wash where it's really simple, and we don't interfere too much. We just let it blend together nice and softly, but you can see it's not really smooth from one color to the other. Let's do it again. This time we're going to put a bit more effort into it to make it a more smooth transition. Let's layer our water down in about the same shape. I'm again taking off that excess water at the bottom. Again, starting with the yellow, I'm working with nice horizontal strokes to get this nice and smooth. I'm working my way down to about three-quarters of the way. Now. I'm going to go and pick up my orange. From about a halfway I'm just going to add in, and then bring it down to the bottom. I'm adding more orange at the bottom bringing that up, and then I'm just going up. I'm going to clean my brush. Now, I want to start mixing that paint in. I'm just going up over the yellow, bringing the orange up. I'm working back down. I'm going to add a bit more of my orange in to make it darker at this end. I don't want to go too far because I don't want to make that too orange. I'm going to go back, pick up my yellow. I'm starting at the top, and bring this down. This is mixing nicely on the page. Then we can wait for that to dry. This time we're going to paint it wet-on-dry. Instead of mixing the colors on the page like this, we're going to mix them on our palate. So just make sure you've got enough color prepared beforehand. I'm just adding a bit of more water to this. With this wet-on-dry, we want to tilt our page up. We're going to start with yellow, add about an inch at the top and add enough. So the excess runs to the edge again. I'm going to add a little bit of this orange into this yellow we mixed, and then pull this down. I can add some more. I'm just going to go straight to that orange, all the way to the bottom. If you've got some excess, you can just pick it up. I'd recommend practicing these smooth variegated washes with the different colors that you have from your plate remembering the color wheel. Here are a few examples of some different washes. I will say, the oranges and yellows work really well together because they're so close to each other on the color wheel. You can use different blues or blues and purples, and you can even use complimentary colors like yellow and purple. You just have to be very careful not to mix them too much because that's when they tend to muddy colors. Practice your smooth variegated washes. In the next video, we're going to look at the more Moody- blended Skies, which is another version of the variegated wash. 7. Practice Skies Part 5 Variegated Washes cont.: Now we're going to look at the variegated washes which have multiple colors in, but don't have that smooth transition from one to the other. These are great for moody skies. I really love the effect of these, but they're also just really fun to just play around with, if you just want to do some swatches, like I have here. I really love these colors. We'll be using these colors for one of the projects later on and I'll show you how to mix up these different pinks and purples. Again, I'll show you how to do this wet on dry, and wet on wet. I'll be using my yellow and orange again. We'll start with wet on dry. This is quite like the case technique that we practiced in the relaxation class and now am picking up my orange, and I'm just going to lay this next to it. Now what you can do is just dilute your brush and then add some water for some pale areas. You can see I'm not blending in, I'm just adding the paint next to it, so it overlaps slightly. I'm going to pick up some more yellow now and then get back to my orange. Then again, dilute the paint in my brush and just add water. It's just really fun to see the different effects, because you can do this all over the page and you're guaranteed that you're not going to get two pieces that look the same. You can leave it like that or if you want to, you can go back in more and clean your brush. You can pick up some of the paint. I don't want to do too much to it so I can see it's already drying, or you can add a bit more in. I'm looking to do anymore to this one because it's drying, but you can just see there's nice soft blends all over. Let's try this wet on wet now. I'm laying down some clear water, tilting it to take off the excess. Now I'm just going to add my coloring. I'm using horizontal strokes nicely. You can tilt if you like, to encourage the paint to fly and merge together. While it's still wet you can add some more. We can see there's a bit of excess paint at the bottom, so I'm just going to pick it up. Now I can lay that flat and let that dry. There we have a couple of examples of how you can do this more moody sky with the variegated wash. This is on dry paper and this is on wet paper. Again, try that out with lots of different colors in your palettes. Some will work together better than others. Here's a page I did just to have different swatches. You've got a couple of different blues in here this is a read and a pink. Again, orange and yellow, but this time with a little bit of pink in, green and yellow, green and blue. It's quite fun to just do these swatches like this and then add little details over the top. Next we're going to have a look at the drifting wash and then move on to paintings and soft clouds. 8. Practice Skies Part 6: Drifting Wash: Next we're going to practice painting a drifting wash. For this, we're going to be tilting the paper to use the gravity to do the work for us. This is going to be a much more relaxed effect, will have less control over it. We're going to start by putting some clean water onto our page again. Then as always, taking off the excess. I'm going to use the same two colors I did before. Starting with my yellow, I'm just going to add this at the top, and I'm just going to tilt the page to bring it down. I don't want it to cover the whole bottom area, so then I'll just lay it flat once it's done enough. I can still see there some extra water, so I'm just taking it off with my paper towel. While it's still wet, I'm going to go back, pick up my orange and then add this into the top, and again tilt that so this can blend into the yellow. Remember, you can just change the angle of the paper. Then once you're happy with how it looks, you can just lay your paper down flat and let it start to dry. Some of these don't look like much on their own, but once you put the detail in front of them, with the mid ground and the foreground, they can be really effective. I think it's the beauty of these effects which watercolor is so grateful, combined with the contrast of the crisp details that really make effective yet simple paintings. 9. Practice Skies Part 7: Soft Clouds: The final sky we're going to practice is paintings of clouds. Again, this is going to be on wet paper, I'm going to switch back to my blue. Again, we want to lay down some water first. Then we'll take off the excess. With these clouds, I like to give a few more seconds for the water to dry so that the edges of the clouds are soft, but there's still a little bit of definition in there. You can try this with varying levels of wetness if you really want some soft clouds and just go straight in and you can get some really nice wispy effects. But if you were a little more definition, just wait a little bit longer, so the water has dried a little. I think that should be okay, so I got my blue. I'll start from the top left and just paint in the top. I want a nice big cloud here, so I'm just painting these curves in and around this way as well. You can see that it's not spreading to much, the page isn't that wet, so this is going to be really nice and soft. I'm just going to leave a few more smaller clouds around here. Now, what we can do, clean and dry your brush and then you can pick up some of these areas as well around the cloud. It just gives a nice wispy effect. You can also go back in, especially underneath to give it a little bit of depth, more definition under some of the clouds. Make sure it's still wet that you want this to blend in. I'm just going to soften some of these off as well. Don't overwork it. But you can make this much softer, especially if you use a more diluted blue. Let's try this again. I'm not going to let the page dry as much as I did last time. This is going to be a bit more diluted and I'm just going to go in. With these strokes I'm not trying to make this too defined. Just trying to leave some of the white patches of the paper so it'll look like clouds and then we can leave it like that. Pick up some of this excess water at the edges. But having it really nice and soft. They have a couple of examples of these nice soft clouds, so keep practicing those if you want to. Now we've come to the end of our practice session for skies. We're going to start looking at the silhouettes next. 10. Practice Silhouettes Part 1: Intro & Tips: Now that we've completed our practice session for the skies and the backgrounds, we're going to move on to the silhouettes. In the next few videos, we'll be looking at some tips and techniques for painting these layers and details. Let's start with some tips. Firstly, always build up your colors from light to dark. What colors are generally transparent, which is what makes him unique and so appealing to look at? When you're painting, you always need to start with the lightest colors and build up. Unlike acrylic, you can't go back and add a paler watercolor on top of a dark one, so you need to make sure that you're planning your painting and leaving any light areas alone. With these landscapes, it's worth keeping this layering in mind so that you don't make the sky too dark in your first layers. We'll practice building up these values in the next video. For fine and crisp details, wait until the first layer is completely dry. If the first layer of paint is still wet, the next layer will just bleed into it and you'll lose the definition that you want for those fine details. This can be a lovely organic effect if we want something a bit more blurry or misty in the background, but it doesn't work for these fine details. So either channel your inner patience or use a hairdryer or a heat tool to dry the paint quicker before adding the next layer. Next, use less water for fine details and more control. If you're painting something very fine, like a thin line or a stem perhaps, you want a lot of control over the paint, and having less water in your brush will give you this control and this definition. If your brush is saturated with water and paint, this will probably make your lines inconsistent. You should be able to see any excess water in your brushes. The tip may not look as pointy because it's so saturated with water. But it's a good habit to have anyway to take out the excess water from your brush, and you can do this by either gently brushing it on the side of your glass, or the side of your palate, or you can use a paper towel and dab it gently to take out the excess. The brush would then return to its nice fine point. This is going to make your brush strokes finer, more delicate, and more consistent. Next, let's look at colors. Choose opaque or semi-opaque colors for the most contrast. For really dark details like birds or reeds, we want to use deep opaque colors to give the most impact. You can use something like indigo, which is this lovely, deep, dark, opaque, blue. Payne's gray is another great option with these cool undertones and I'll be using that a lot in this class. You can use a premix black like ivory black, but this content look more dull than an alternative, like the ones above which have those cool tones. You can also use a waterproof fineliner for some of these details. I'd like to use Pigma Micron pens, and this is a size one. These will again give you that contrast, and they're great for adding in really fine details like tiny birds in a distance or wires or boat masts. Next tip, keep it simple. You don't need to over think these projects or go overboard with details. There is beauty in simplicity. The great thing about the silhouettes is that we do not need to worry about using lots of different colors or details within the objects, we can just focus on the shapes or the outlines, the composition of the piece, and creating an illusion of depth within our landscape. What makes these projects so effective is the simplicity and the contrast of these bold, dark, opaque details against the backgrounds. Next, choose a focal point to draw the eye to. This is a great rule for any painting. Think about what the key point of interest is in your painting. Where do you want to direct the viewers' attention to? Having one key focal point in a painting naturally will make it more pleasing to the eye. If there's too much going on with the same prominence, it can become a bit more confusing to the eye. Next, the rule of thirds makes an image more dynamic. The rule of thirds is a great thing to remember when you're composing a painting, particularly landscapes. The basic principle of this rule is that if you divide your piece into three and then place your focal point along these lines or junctions, your piece will end up being more interesting and pleasing to the eye. In this example with the boat, the focal point, which is the boat, is on that lower third line with the horizon slightly above it. This just makes it a much more interesting piece and if the boat was in the middle of the painting. Now bear in mind, this doesn't always work 100 percent of the time, so do use your own judgment, but it's certainly a useful idea to keep in mind when planning composition. Finally, we're going to be working on creating the illusion of distance with size, value, and detail. Firstly, size. Things in the distance are obviously smaller than things closer. You can see with this hot air balloon, just by making this one's smaller, it instantly appears farther away. Next is value. Things that are closer are darker or have more contrast and color, and things that are farther away are paler. Again, with this balloon, this bigger balloon is bolder and darker, and this balloon that's farther away is paler. The last one is detail. Things that are closer will have more detail and definition than things that are farther away. Again, with these balloons, you'll see in the one that's closer, you can see more shape at the top of the balloon as it curves around, and you can see the rope attaching the basket. Whereas the one which is farther away is much less detailed and is pretty much just made up of a couple of simple shapes. Hopefully, these tips have been helpful for you. There's quite a lot to think about there, but we will continue to focus on all of these things as we go through the class. In the next video, we're going to start practicing some values using different amounts of water to paint lighter and darker tones. So get your paints ready. 11. Practice Silhouettes Part 2: Values: In this video, we're going to be practicing values. Now, values are the range of tones from light to dark, and you can change these with watercolor by adding or reducing the water and pigment in your mix. If you have more pigment and less water, the color will be darker. If you have less pigment and more water, the color will be lighter. Knowing how to use values is one of the most important things to learn with watercolor, as it can have such a big transformational effect on your work, helping to give it depth and dimensionality. As we just discussed in the tips video, value helps to give the illusion of distance within a landscape. Here are a few examples. You can see that the things further away are lighter, such as the smaller hot air balloons, the mountains in the distance, and the mountains on the horizon. The things that are more prominent and more focal in the piece like this hot air balloon that's closer, this mountain is closer, these mountains, and this boat are much darker and much bolder. With these mountains, they gradually get darker as they come closer. In the lighter areas and the distance, we would want more water to dilute the paint, and in the dark areas that are closer, we would want less water. When I say more water, I don't mean we want a puddle of water on our page, I mean that we want there to be more water in the mix with our paint, just so that the paint is lighter. We can then take any excess water out on our brush to avoid having a puddle on our page. This is one of the most common things that people struggle with with watercolor. Let's just take some time to practice manipulating these values. If you're adding paint to your pallet, perhaps from a tube like I am, you want to keep this away from where you're going to be mixing the paint. When a palette like this, these wells are slanted, so I add the paint to the top, so I can pull it down. We'll call this the source of the paint, and this is where we're going to make our mix. I'm going to pick up some water with my brush, and pull a little of that paint away from the source. This way we can always come back and add more if we want to get a more concentrated mix. If we want to get the darkest color, we can just go straight to that source of the paint. We're going to start by going from light to dark, and then we'll go the other way. I'm going to add a bit more water into this mix here, so it's nice and light. You want to start with a really, really light color. That's looking really quite diluted now, which is good. I've got lots of water on my brush, so I'm just going to pressure on the side to take out the excess. I'll add that to the page. You can see that's really nice and light. Now we want to go a bit darker. I'm just going to take a bit more of this paint in to this mix. I'm moving slightly higher up away from that pool of water there. This should be slightly darker, and again, I'm going to add a little bit more of the pigment in. That's looking quite dark, so I'm just going to wash some of the excess off of my brush, and I can dilute this on the page and spread it out. I'm just going to paint over the top with water and spread it out. I'm just picking up a little bit of that paint. We've got a nice graduation now from the really light to a medium. I'm going to pick up some more. We're getting darker now, and we can probably fit two more in here. This is indigo that I'm using, and this is an opaque color. With the most concentrated mix, is going to be completely opaque. Which means that there'll be a solid block of color. Now I'm just going straight to the source. I'm making sure there's not much water in there, it's going to be a solid opaque color. Now we can go back the other way. Again, starting with my paint, with very little water, I'm going to dilute my brush, I'm just going to dip it in slightly and then brush on the side. This should have taken out a little bit of that paint, and again, just getting back to my water, dipping in my brush to take off a bit of the paint, brushing on the side to take out the excess water, and then painting again. We can do this all the way down to when it gets really pale. Taking off some more water, a bit of excess in there, so I'm just using my brush to lift it up. Then giving it a bit of a more of a wash in the water to get that paint out, because we want this one to be really quite pale. Then we've gone down to this really nice pale wash. For an extra exercise, if you want to do some more, we're going to layer these values up. In your resources section, you'll find a template for this exercise, which you can trace over, or you can draw this out yourself. If you're going to use a template, you can either trace it out or you can cut these boxes out and draw around them. If you're drawing this out yourself, then there are five boxes, there is one centimeter between each of them. This exercise is going to allow us to practice both values, layering, and also identifying when the paint is dry enough to paint over it so that we can get those nice crisp edges around each box. So once you're ready, with this, we are going to be starting with the lightest mix first on the whole square and building it up, so in the middle, is going to be the darkest it can be. I'm going to be using my size 6 brush and my indigo again. First, we want to mix up a really pale mix with lots of water. I'm just moving it to the second well, so I can make sure there's plenty of water in there and it's nice and pale. Because we've got quite a large area to go cover, I'm not going to worry about taking off the excess from my brush. I'm just going to add it to the page and then I can spread out. I'm just making sure that the tip is going to the edge to make sure that's nice and fine. This is a nice exercise to not only practice values and layering, but to also practice painting neat edges and having plenty of brush control. When you get to the edges, just slow down, change the angle of the brush to help get the smooth edges, change the angle of the paper, whatever helps you. That's the first layer done. Now we just need to wait for that to dry or use your hair dryer or your heat tool to dry it. While that's drying, we can prepare our second mix. We're going to be going a step darker on this one. We've got five graduations to go, so we started off with a really light one, which is about this one. For the next one, we probably want to go between these two. I'm going to add some of my paint to their second well and just make sure there's plenty of water in there again. For this one, we're going to be painting out to this second box. Again, I'm just adding plenty of water to this so I can spread it out on the page, and then, I'm working slower as I get to the edge of the box to make it nice and neat. That's our second layer done, so now we can wait that to dry. Now we can prepare our next mix. Again, just adding a little bit more of the paint. This time, we're going slightly darker again, so probably aiming for about this. This is going to be our middle box area, so this is going to be the middle tine of the range that these color can get to or roughly around there. Going up to this third box now. That's our third box done, now we wait for that to dry again. So now that's dry, this time we want to go for our second darkest. We want to make sure there is less water in this mix. I'm going to mix this one pretty close to the source. We want to make sure there were some water in there. We don't want it to be completely opaque, we want have room to make it darker in that middle one. One more to go. For the final square, we just going straight to the source and not much water. We want it to be as opaque as it possibly can be, so as dark as these two swatches up here. That's our value box complete. If you want to practice values more, you can head to my relaxation class. In project number 8, we do a fun polaroid piece using the keys technique where we use different values to blend them together, and it's a really nice fun project. It definitely worth practicing these values as much as you need to, because they are definitely worth mastering, they really will make such a difference to your work. In the next video, we're going to practice brush control and painting fine details. 12. Practice Silhouettes Part 3: Brush Control: In this video, we're going to be practicing brush control and fine details. Because some of these silhouettes rely on the shape and the outline, this practice is going to help us make sure we have good control over where we're laying our paint and this is going to make our paintings more effective. We've already covered taking out excess water from our brush, so we're going to dive straight into paintings in different marks and shapes. Let's start with lines. I'm using my size 6 brush. You just want to practice keeping these as consistent as possible, keeping our hands steady and we're dragging the brush along the page. I'm not using much pressure, I'm just using the tip of the brush and keeping it nice and steady. We can practice this in different directions, this time we're going to paint this vertically, from the top to the bottom, and I'm going to paint it from the bottom upwards. Painting lines and shapes is a great warm up exercise, whatever stage you're at in your water color journey. It's also worth practicing all of these with different sizes of your brushes. Now let's paint some diagonal lines. Pay attention to what feels most comfortable with you, with the angle of your brush and the angle with your paper. If you need to, just move it around slightly so it's more comfortable, make it as easy as possible for yourself. Now we can practice varying the thickness by applying more pressure and releasing pressure. I'm just alternating, pushing the brush slightly more down, and then coming up. You can do this in longer strikes, this is great for really long paste of grass. Next, let's practice making some more wavy and organic lines. These are going to be great for things like twigs and branches. I'm just taking off the excess paint in my brush, there was quite a lot in there. This time instead of having a straight line, I'm just going to make it nice and fine and a bit more wavy. You practice these different lengths, I'm just making them a bit more wavy. Next, we're going to practice some flippy strikes, applying pressure and then just pulling the brush away quickly. These are great for things like weights, or small bits of grass, if you want to work quite quickly. Next we're going to practice some curves. This time we're going to lay the brush more flat on the paper and then just drag it along using that tip to get the nice crisp edge at the top. This is how we're going to be painting our mountains, so we're varying that and then we can just go along the edge, go along the bottom and fill that in. Let's try that again. I'm pushing the brush flat down onto the page, so it's covering over this area and I'm using the tip to paint in that nice crisp edge. If you need to, you can hold the brush out more of an angle to get an edge and then fill it in. I'm working on these nice organic shapes like mountains. Next let's move on to some more geometric shapes. Let's paint some circles. This is just great for practicing curves and getting these edges nice and crisp, and making the circle nice and balanced. You can see I'm moving my hand around to get a better position with the brush. Let's do another one. You can paint these shapes in different values as well to practice all of those things that we learned in the last video. For the base, I'm just moving the angle of my brush than my hands slightly higher so I can get that tip and have a nice amount of control along the bottom edge. Just play around with the angle of your brush to see what feels comfortable for you. Next let's paint some squares. With these, we want to focus on making the edges really nice and straight, dragging the brush along the edge using the tip of the brush to get that nice straight line, and then making those corners a nice sharp Y angle. You can see I'm changing the angle of my brush as I'm painting different areas of the square to give me better control. This is going to become much more natural once you practice. That's always really about practice. This are great warm up exercises. Don't feel disheartened if you don't get any of these shapes nice and neat straight away, just keep going, keep practicing. We can do another one. I'm going to do a paler one this time. I'm working on the center, and then I'll just build around the edges, going slower around the edges, changing angle to make it nice and neat. You see I'm keeping my paper still, that's mainly because I'm filming and I want you to be able to see clearly what I'm doing. If I wasn't filming and I was doing it more instinctively, then I would probably be moving the page around quite a lot. So again, just do what feels comfortable for you, try out different angles. I'm just using the tip of the brush to the very pointy tip of the brush to get those corners and make sure it's got that nice definition. Let's do a triangle next. I'm just going to start from the top corner, bring that down and then fill in a bit, then going slower down the other edge, changing the angle for the bottom so I can drag the brush along easily along that bottom edge. Sometimes it's easier to tilt the page because then you can say, if your shape is actually balanced, if you're painting like this, sitting upright and your pages flat on the table, you're not getting the best view. So if you want to be geometrically accurate in your shapes nice and balanced, you can just tilt the page up, just to check, or you can always work on an easel or put something behind your page to tilt it up. Let's do one more triangle. Finally, we're just going to make some more organic marks. This is where we're going to be a bit looser with our brush. Starting from the tip, I'm just going to press the brush down and then pick it up. I'm going to do that again. You can see it's not your pointing and it gets a bit thicker. This is great if you just want to do some really quick leaves on branches, or small petals or something like that. That can be a great way of just making little marks, especially for looser paintings. Finally, let's just paint some small dots or small marks and get the bigger there, just vary the pressure. You can use the tip to create some really small dots, or just a little bit more pressure to create some bigger marks. I hope you found that helpful. If you want to practice more, you can do all of these exercises again with different sized brushes. You can also check out my Christmas patterns class if you want to focus more on brush control and fine details. That class has some really fun projects at the end. Next we're going to move on to preparing our Bookmarks and Polaroid's for our projects. 13. Making Polaroids: In this video, I want to show you how I make the Polaroids, and the next video, I will show you how I make the bookmarks. You can draw these out as I have. Adapt this sizes as you like, or you can use the templates I have provided in the resources section to just trace them. I find it's quite nice to cut out a few of these so they're ready to go whenever I want to paint a little relaxing project. As mentioned in the supplies video, I'm using a Saunders Waterford block and this is 12 inches wide by nine inches tall. This can fit six of the Polaroids on one page or five of the bookmarks. But as I said, feel free to adjust these sizes to whatever paper you have. I'll be using as much of the paper as possible to avoid wastage. These Polaroids are 10 centimeters wide by eleven and a half centimeters high. The box inside where we'll paint is approximately eight centimeters square, leaving that gap at the bottom for any lettering that you want or just the Polaroid finish. I won't be drawing that in the box, I'll just be using the masking tape to map it out. Let's start by drawing these out on the page first. I'm marking a point at each 10 centimeters at the bottom of the page, and I'll do that again at the top so I can then line them up and draw a straight line to divide them up. I can fit two on top of each other, so I'm going to mark eleven and a half centimeters, which is a halfway point down the page as well. Now, we can line all of these up with our ruler and draw these lines. Just make sure to do these lines very lightly so we can erase them later on if we need to. Finally, we just want to draw that baseline of the square, which is nine centimeters down from the top. This is going to leave that gap at the bottom to make it look like a Polaroid and make the square shape for our painting. Now we've drawn all six of these out, we can cut them out. First, because I'm working on a block which is glued on all four sides, I'm going to remove my paper. It has this gap at the top. If you haven't used a block before, you just want to use something like a pallet knife, nothing too sharp so don't use a normal knife, otherwise, you can mark the paper underneath. I'm just going to slide this in and work my way gently around the edge to release it. Now that's detached from the block, so I'm going to cut these out. You can either use scissors or use a cutting mat and craft knife like me. I have my metal ruler. You want to avoid using plastic rulers for cutting because they will get damaged. I'm going to start with the edges. Next, I'm going to cut it in half, so just make sure you get the right line, and then we can cut out the rest of them. You can actually just leave them on the block and paint them when it's on the block, cutting them out afterwards. But it's quite nice having little stack of these readily available so you can grab whenever you want to paint something, and you don't have to worry about all this drawing and cutting every time. Also, you don't need to worry about splashing paint across the page and marking the other ones if you paint them individually like this. The next thing I'll do is grab a piece of card and tape it down, ready for painting. For this, I'm going to be using my masking tape which is 12 millimeter. I'm going to start by lining it up to that lower line that we drew in. Then I'm going to place it halfway over the edges, all the way around the rest of the Polaroid to make that square. Now, that's ready. In the next video, I'll show you how to draw around the bookmarks. 14. Making Bookmarks: We're now going to draw out the templates for the bookmarks. Again, you can use the templates I provided and trace them or you can just follow these instructions and draw them out. The bookmarks are six centimeters wide and 18 centimeters long. If you took the relaxation class, you might notice that these are slightly wider and slightly shorter than those templates. If you want to leave an extra space at the bottom and add some wording in then you can add a couple of extra centimeters at the bottom and perhaps make them 20 centimeters or just a size as to what suits you. I can fit five bookmarks on this page, so I'm going to mark every six centimeters and then do the same at the top so I can line them up and draw lines down the page. Now we want to make our bookmarks 18 centimeters long. I'm going to start one centimeter down to give a little gap from the edge and then mark 19 centimeters down, I'll do the same on the other side and then draw those lines in. If you want, you can draw half a centimeter border inside the edge. But I'm just going to mark that out with my masking tape, placing it evenly over the edge. Again, I'm going to remove this and we can cut them all out. Now we have a pile of bookmarks to work from as well, and we're ready to get started with our projects. 15. Project 1: Single Bird: For this first project, we'll be painting a bookmark with a flat wash and a single bird flying in the sky. I'll be using Windsor Blue, Red Shade and I'll be using my size 10 round brush for the sky and then my size 0 round brush for the bird. The first thing we want to do is place our paper on our piece of card and add our masking tape. I'm using my round size 10 brush for the background. We want to mix up our blue first to make sure that we have plenty of water in there so we can get a nice smooth wash. Now tilt the page and add the paint to the top. It should start running down to the edge and then we can just pull this down. Go back to paint pick up more and just keep pulling it down. I'll do that all the way to the bottom. Then once you get to the bottom, if you got any excess you can just dry off your brush, tip it again and then just gently pick that up with the brush. Now we just need to wait for this to completely dry and then we can paint are bird. Once that's dry, we can actually remove the masking tape now, if you want to, because we don't have any painting that's going to be going over the edges anymore. I'm going to take this off. Hopefully you have a nice even flat wash. For the bird, I'm going to switch to my size 0 round brush and I'm going to be using my Payne's gray. It's a nice contrast and I don't want to use too much water in this because we want it really concentrated. I'm going to position the bird about a third of the way down. Let's start with the bottom and you got to think that the wings are going to come up here, so I'm going to probably start it about here a bit below a third of the way down. Start with the bottom edge, I'm going to go up and then come down and curve it round to the head. Then paint in the beak. Then the head will come around and join that. Going back to the tail. This top edge is going to be slightly further out than the bottom. Then I'm just going to leave this edge, nice and uneven for that tail. Bring that in now. I'm just going to fill some of this in as well. Now for the wings, so just in about the middle of here, I'm just going to place a mark. Then I'm going to paint in a V shape. Then for this one, carry on slightly further out than the tail, curving upwards and then bringing it back in. Once we get down here, I'm just going to paint in a line. We can fill that in. I'm just going to make this little more even. Then on this side, I'm not going to make this as high up as this one because this wing is at the back. So this one's slightly bigger because it's closer. I'm going to curve this edge round and bringing it into the top of the head. Then fill that in. I'm just going to flatten this point of the V a little. Then you can just smooth out any edges. That's our first project finished. For the next project will be painting a group of small flying birds. 16. Project 2: Group of Birds: For the second project, we are going to be painting a polaroid. We're going to be doing the wet on wet clouds with a group of small flying birds. I'll be using my winter blue, red shade again, and then the payne's gray for the birds. With these polaroids, when we're putting down the masking tape, just make sure that bottom masking tape runs along that extra line that we drew. That would just make sure that the painting in the center is a square. It's going to give you that extra space at the bottom to make it look like a polaroid. But you can also add words or quotes to it if you want to like we did in the relaxation class. For this wet on wet, you're going to need some clean water. I'm using my size 10 round brush again for the background. Just lay your water down over the page and then you can tilt it. You can see there's quite a lot of excess there so I'm just going to spread this down so that there's not too much water on the page. If you have any excess at the bottom, you can just pick up, but mine looks because I used the water that was already on the page. Now we can pick up our blue. I want this quite diluted, I don't want it to be too dark, I think the clouds can look quite nice when they're just quite wispy. Start at the top. Then you can just start trying to make in some cloud shapes. Leaving the white of the paper for the clouds. This is going to be the most prominent cloud and then I've got a couple of smaller ones here. As we get down to the bottom we'll have some smaller, wispier clouds as well. I'm just going to add a bit more blue under this cloud to make it stand out a bit, and then under here. It's blending in nicely because that page is still wet. I don't want to overwork this. Just working quite quickly whilst it's still wet. I'm just going to add a little bit more. Just going to clean my brush and dry it off and just blend in some of these edges a bit more. I'm not going to overwork it, so I think I'll leave it like that. Now we just need to wait for it to dry then we can paint in our birds. So at this point, we can again remove our masking tape because we're not going to be painting over the edge. Hopefully, you have some really nice soft clouds now. I'm going back to my size 0, round brush and my payne's gray for the birds. I'm going to paint in about eight birds coming from this top left corner down to the bottom right corner. Again, we don't want too much water with this payne's gray. We want these brush strokes to be nice and fine, nice and controlled. So make sure you take out any excess water. If we start at the top here, I'm just going to paint in the wings fast, nice and delicately. That's the top wing, the left wing, and then I'm going to paint in the body and the tail, and then the head, and then the other wing. Coming to a nice point. If we have another bird to the right, perhaps slightly lower. This one can be flying in that direction, the other direction towards the left. Painting the body, which is just a simple mark with a tail, and then the wings can come behind the curving around into that point and then the one below as well. Keeping it really simple, because they're really small. We just want the body and the wings and the head showing. Slightly below this one, we can paint maybe one that's slightly bigger. I'll start with the head, it's facing towards the left again. Then bringing the body, back, and then the tail, and then up for the wings, and then another wing at the bottom. Let's have another one down here. This is around the middle of the page now. The head and the body and the tail. There's not much definition in there at all, but you don't really need it. Then the wings and then another wing coming back. Let's have another one just to the right of this. This time we can have their wings, both of them going above the body. The body first, and then one wing on the left coming to that point, and then another on the right. We've got five now. We can do another three around here. I'm going to do this one with wings either sides. We'll start with the body again. This is going to be vertical and then the wings can be on the left and the right. I think the other two, they can be a little bit smaller so they look like they're a bit farther away. This time I'm going to leave a bit more of a gap so that it doesn't look too uniform or consistent. I'm just going to do a little mark for the body and then the wings slightly smaller. Then we'll do one more down here. Another fairly small one with the wings top and bottom again. That's project 2 complete. I hope you're happy with your flying birds. In the next project we'll be painting some more birds, but this time there'll be sitting on some wires. 17. Project 3: Birds on Wires: For this project we'll be painting a bookmark with some birds sitting on wires with a couple of flying birds in the distance as well. I'll be using Winsor blue for the background with my size 10 round brush and this will be a graduated wash. This isn't a completely smooth graduated wash, which it doesn't really matter as it is a sky and adds to the effect. So if you want it to be really smooth, then just make sure you concentrate on using horizontal strokes as you move down the bookmark, and don't go above that bead of water because that will disturb the paint above. I was a bit more relaxed with this one as you will see. For the wires, I'll be using a size 1, Pigma Micron Fineliner pen, but if you don't have a waterproof fineliner, then you can paint these wires with your small brush. I'll be using Payne's gray for the birds with my size 0 round brush. I'm going to be using my size 10 round brush again for the background gradient, we want to make sure that we have plenty of paint mixed up to start with. We want there to be a really good amount of water in there because we're going to be painting this wet on dry and tilting the page again and using that tilt to help the flow of water down the page. We want there to be a good amount of paint in this mix as well, so there's a nice contrast from the top darker area of the gradient to the paler bottom area. Tilt your page and then make sure your brush is fully loaded with painting water, and then just start at the top and you should have this bead that runs down. Now we're going to go to our water, and just above the bead I'm going to pull that down. Then I'm going back to my water again, washing off some of that paint but making sure I've still got plenty of water in the brush to pull this down more and again, doing the same. Now I'm going to go to my clear water because I want this to start to get quite pale towards the bottom again making sure you've got plenty of water on your brush and then just pulling that bead down more, making nice and smooth. Going back to the water again, pulling that down and then just making sure you've washed off any blue in this last one and then we can pull it down all the way to the bottom. We can just keep tilting it, if the paint needs to run anymore and then we can lay that flat and wait for it to dry. Now I'm going to take off my masking tape. Now I'm going to use my Pigma Micron pen size 1 for the wires. I'm going to draw these about a third of the way down. Starting from the left side, I'm going to curve this around, going up slightly to the right, and then just a little bit lower, I'm going to do another one. This is going to come down a bit lower, a slight curve, and then I'm going to do one more and this is going to go even lower. There are three wires. I'm going to go back to my size 0 brush and my Payne's gray for the birds. We want this nice and concentrated, so they're solid colors. The birds are solid silhouette. Let's start with the top one on the left and this is going to be facing towards right, so let's start with the belly. Leave a little bit of space in between the wire and the bottom of the belly and will paint in the legs. I just curve this round, and go up to the beak and then the head, and then curve this round for the back. Then the tail can come below the wire, and fill this in. Then we can just paint two thin legs down to the wire. Now we're going to do two birds sitting on this bottom wire and this one is going to be looking at each other. Let's start with the left one, it's just going to be slightly to the right of the center of the bookmark. We'll start with the head, it's just a circle and then bring it down, this curve gets narrower towards the wire, same in the other side, and then we can bring the tail down below the wire. Then just a couple of little points either side and then we can paint in the beak so it looks like it's looking to the right to that bird. This other one, I'm going to paint this slightly smaller and it's going to be looking up. Just need to make sure we tilt the beak upwards slightly. Same again, slightly lower than this one. Start with the circle for the head, bring it out for the body and then bring it in so it becomes a bit narrower, and then this tail I'm going to do this off to the right slightly. Then the beak pointing up, and then I'm going to paint a leg in here because this is slightly twisted around a bit more. There are sitting birds and we can paint a couple of smaller flying birds underneath here. This can be quite small, they'll be in a distance. A wing above and then another wing to the right and then one below that as well, these wings are going to be up above, so it's just going to be a v and a little body in there. That is project 3 complete. 18. Project 4: Birds on a Single Branch: For this project, we're going to be painting a Polaroid, and we're going to be painting a variegated wash, using dusky pinks and purples. I'm going to show you how to mix these using your three primary colors. For this one, we're going to be painting a single branch with these two birds sitting looking at each other. It's a lovely romantic piece. For this one, we want to start by mixing up our dusky pinks and purple. Make sure you have some spare paper to test out your swatches on. I'm using [inaudible] as a base color. I'm also adding a little bit of the Winsor Lemon to my palette. I've already got the Winsor Blue from the previous projects. I'm just going to start by pulling out the pink. Then I'm going to add a little of the blue to this. I don't want too much. Perhaps just a little bit more. Then I'm going to add a little bit of yellow. I don't think that's the right color yet, but we can test out and see. Okay, I'm going to add a little more yellow to this. Perhaps getting there. I'm just going to add a little bit more blue. Then just a touch more yellow again. Okay, that's getting there. You can see I'm doing this quite gradually. Now I've poured in the rest of that pink. I think I'm just going to need a bit more of the yellow, and probably a bit more of the blue as well. That's a nice color there. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to pour some of this out over here, and I'm just going to add a bit more blue to it. We've got a couple of variations. Let's start at the top. I'm just going to add some water now. Then we can add in that purple. I'm not working hard to blend it in, I'm just letting the paint meet, so I'm just going to add some more to it now. A bit more water. I'm just pulling that down, because I want there to be some lighter areas. I'm going to pour some of this paint off, so this is a bit of a lighter area. Then we're going to add some of the pink at the bottom. I'm not going to overwork it, I'm going to leave it like that, and then we can see how it dries. Now it's dry, we can paint in our branch, and I'm going back to my Size 0 brush, and my Payne's Gray. Starting from the left just above the center, I'm painting this branch. We want this to start fairly thick from the left side, and then as it curves around towards the end, it will get thinner. It doesn't have to be completely smooth, We can have some little bumps in here, which we'll make it a little bit more realistic. Then we can curve it around to about three-quarters of the way over. Now we can paint in some twigs coming off of it, and some leaves. I'm going to paint in a couple of leaves here. Another one at the bottom, another little branch coming off. A couple of leaves here as well. Then I'm going to have another small branch coming off, one above and one below, and these are also going to have some leaves on, and perhaps some small twigs coming off. Paint another small branch coming off underneath. Then the two birds can be sitting here, so we can leave that area for now, and then just carry on towards the end. These should be much finer. Doing another branch under here with a few leaves on it, and one coming up here. Now we can paint in the birds. They're going to be facing each other, so we'll start with the left one. His body is going to be twisted towards the right, so we'll start with his head, so a small circle, and then we're going to paint his body off to the left, and his belly, and that's going to come in to meet that side, way down to a point, and then paint in the tail. Then his beak is going to be slightly facing down, so that it looks like it's looking at the other bird. Then you can paint in a couple of legs. Now I can paint the other bird. His body's going to be facing forward, but his head will be twisted around, so his beak will be facing up. You can start with beak, and try and make sure they're aligned. It's going to be the smaller one. Then the head, and then paint in the tail. Then if you want to add in any more twigs, or leaves, maybe some underneath. I think we're done, we can now remove our masking tape, and see how this looks. That's Project 4 complete. 19. Project 5: Birds on Branches: For this project, we're going to be painting a bookmark and we're going to be painting some more branches. There will be a couple of birds sitting on the branches and then we'll also do some flying birds in the sky as well. We'll be painting the soft clouds, wet-on-wet, with our dusty pink again, and then using our Payne's gray for the branches and the birds. First let's mix up some more of our pink. We want the permanent rose as the base. I'm going to add a little bit of my Windsor blue. Then I'm going to add some of my Windsor lemon. Now, make sure you got some clean water for the first wash, the first layer of water for a wet-on-wet and tilt your page up and then just lay down the water. Remember, we want a nice even coat. We don't want a pool of excess water on here. If you tip it up and you find you've got some running to the bottom, and just pick it up with a brush or your paper towel. Now we can pick up pink, our nice dusky pink and add this in. Remember, we want to leave some areas for the clouds, which would be the white of the paper. I'm just going to soften up this top back since it's a bit dark. I'm not going to overwork it. I think I'm just going to leave it like that. Now, I can let it dry. These branches are going to be coming up from the left bottom corner of the page. We're going to start with some paler branches, which look like they're more in the distance and then we'll move on to some really dark concentrated branches which will be closer. Now that our background is dry, we can grab our smaller brush so I'm using my size zero, again, and I'll be using my Payne's gray. We want to start by diluting the Payne's gray a little bit. We're going to paint in the paler branches in the background first. Starting from the left corner, draw the main branch, and then we can just add in some twigs, and then you can add in some leaves. We're going to paint in a few of these and we want this to come about halfway up the page. Just make sure to keep these really nice and pale. Add in some leaves. Then you can also add in some thin, wispy branches and twigs. We want to leave probably about this area so just on the left side of the middle free. We'll be painting some birds in here so that will guide the eye up to the sky. Doing this in the boarder, so it's going to come all the way down to the bottom. We'll have a few more paler twigs and branches down here. I'm going to paint in a couple more in this corner just to make this a bit fuller around here. They can be overlapping each other. Since we have drawn it, we can paint in some slightly darker branches before we move on to the solid opaque branches. 20. Project 6: Dandelion: For this next project, we're going to be painting a Polaroid. We're going to be painting this greenie gray variegated background for the sky with a dandelion in the Payne's gray. We'll start by mixing up our colors. We want a green and a gray. I've got a permanent rise and my Winsor lemon and bring that in. Then I'm going to bring in some of the Winsor blue as well. We want a little more of yellow in this. We can test this out. I want quite a murky color for this one. Well, that's going to be okay. Now, I'm just going to mix up a green and then just add a little bit of the permanent rise to it. Those are the two colors that I'm going to be using. Let's start with this more of brown mix for the top. I'm just going to add some water. Then we can add some of this green in. Add some water, a little bit more of this green, and then go back to this kind of brownie mix. If you want to, you can just go lift any of the excess paint and tip it a little. Then we can wait for this to dry. Now, I can remove our masking tape. I'm going back to my size zero brush and my Payne's gray. We want this really concentrated. This dandelion is going to come up from the left corner. We'll draw the stem first. We'll paint that curving round. Take off any excess off your brush. Then from the middle, you can paint in the fine lines. If you just paint a few to start with, at the same length, just to give yourself a guide for the circle area, and then we can paint some short ones in. Just hold that up and check that looks like a circle that aliquot even. Then we can just paint in lots more to fill in those gaps, so short ones. Try not to go outside of that circle area. Then rotate the page to make it easier. Just keep going all the way around. Trying to keep these nice and fine, and just check that it's still looking like a circle on the outer edges. Now, we've done all the lines, we can go to the tips and paint in the edges. For these edges, I'll just do a bigger painting a bit so you can see. This will be the line, so we're just going to paint in the ends like this with lots of little lines coming off at the end of each of these. As you're doing this, just remember you're breathing. Make sure you're not holding your breath. Take a nice deep breath. Make sure you're nice and relaxed, you're not holding any tension. I find these repetitive painting so relaxing. You don't really need to think about it. Just relax your mind once you're focused on painting the same thing over and over again. Now, we're done all the ones on the outer edge, we can just add a few in the middle and it would just make it look like they're coming out towards us a bit more if I just do it further down. Now, we can just paint a few flying off. Just single line and then the end. We'll have a couple in different directions. One going down this way and then pops just one more down here. I'm just going to paint one more in and better a short one because I don't get too close to the corner with a nice border around it at the moment. This project complete. 21. Project 7: Mountains: For this next project, we're going to be painting a bookmark and we're going to be painting some mountains. We're going to be using our values here, so we paint the lighter mountain first and getting darker as we get closer. For the background, we'll do a graduated wash from dark to light, and we'll be mixing up the greens with our primary colors. We'll also be putting a few birds in the sky with our paynes gray. First let's mix up our green. I'm going to use the winsor lemon and the winsor blue, and then I'm going to add a little bit of the permanent rose, and this is just going to make it into a bit of a dark green, but more of a neutral, more realistic green. I want to mix up quite a bit more than that because I've got much there lemon, so I just mix up some more. Just test this out. That's quite a nice green. We're going to start at the top, tip our page up and add the color at the top. Then we can pick up our water and pull it down. Lets go into my clean water now. Then we can just bring this all the way down to the bottom. Once that's dry, we can start painting in our mountains. The first mountain, which is going to be the palest is going to reach about up two-thirds of the page, so we want this really quite pale. Make sure it's really quite diluted and then just take the excess off your brush. I'm going to start probably about half all the way down a bit lower. This is going to come to a peak about two-thirds the way up. You can see this is nice and pale, I'm just going to bring this down to the bottom to make sure it's going to be nice and smooth. Then we can wait for this to dry and then we'll paint in the next mountain. We want the next one slightly darker. Again, you can test this out just to check you're getting the right darkness, you don't want to go too dark too soon. For this one I'm going to start slightly above the start of this mountain, and then deep down, and then go back up again. Again, just bring this down and wait for that to dry. We want the next one even darker, so I'm just going to mix up a bit more of my green. I'm just going to test that out. I'm going to start about here, probably a little bit too dark, so I can dilute that on the page. Then I'm going to make sure it goes above that V and then deep it down again. I'm actually just going to replace this side of masking tape because it's a bit loose and I don't want the paint to bleed underneath. You can see it already started to bleed a little. Once that's dry, we can paint in another layer. I'm going to add a little bit of paynes gray to this now, because we want it to start getting quite dark. For this one I'm going to bring this down. Once that dries, we can just mix up the final color. I'm going to use more paynes gray. I'm just going to add a bit more yellow to this, and this will be the one at the front. This one doesn't have to be black or really dark, just needs to be dark than the rest. I'm just going to bring this up a little bit higher. Then we can paint in our birds. It's quite nice to have a group of three birds and these can be quite small, so they don't need much detail in them at all. This one is going to have it's wings up in a V. Then this one will be a bit closer, so you see more of its body, that wing behind. Now, we can take masking tape off. My edge is a little bit rough around here, hopefully yours is smoother. If you have a white gel pen, you can just use this to neat it up. That's our project complete. 22. Project 8: Reeds: For this project, we're going to be painting a bookmark, and we're going to be doing a variegated wash with the blue at the top, and the pink at the bottom. We're going to be painting that wet on wet, so it's nice and pale and a smooth transition. Then we're going to be painting some reeds in with our Payne's gray. First, let's get our paints ready. We want some Winsor Blue. Well, it needs to be fairly pale, this is going to be quite a subtle background, and then we want to do some permanent raise. With the clean water, cover your page evenly in the water, ensure you take off any excess. We're going to start with our blue at the top. We want this fairly dilated. It's going to be nice and subtle, so we're just going to bring this all the way down. I'm just going to add bit more at the top, bring it all the way down. Just washing my brush, just so I can put it down little bit more. We can tip our page to help encourage the flow, the blue down. Then we can turn our page around. This time we are going to pick up our pink. We can run this all the way down through the blue to the very end. We just tip that the other way, and because it's quite subtle, it should blend in quite nicely. Now we can just wait for that to dry. Once that's dry, we can pick up our Payne's gray and paint in our reeds. I'm getting back to my size zero brush, and I'm just going to paint a reed all the way up to about, just do the halfway on the left side. Now at the top, we can paint some little lines off of there, and then on each of those we can paint some more little lines. That's the first one done. Now we can have a slightly short one probably coming up to just under the halfway point. Coming up to about there, and we do exactly the same. I start by painting in these little lines coming off the top part, and then the little lines off of it to raise. We can paint one more before we paint in the grass and the leaves. This one is just going to come up here, and lean over this way. It's not going to be as tall as this first one. I stopped here, I'm just going to turn this round slightly. There we go, and then paint in the lines, and then the little lines over each of those. Now I can paint in some long leaves. I'm going to start with this one right next to the stem, follow the stem up, and then a bit more pressure down, so it's a bit thicker than that stem. Then gradually release it, and it's going to come a bit higher than this, and then just leave it off to a point. I'm going to paint another one from here, but this one's going to go off to the right, so I'm painting it thicker. I'm releasing the pressure, and then I'm going to flick this one to this side so it's bent over. Now we can just paint in some long thin reeds of grass, and some short ones too. Make sure they are crossing over so it looks a bit more realistic. You can have some coming off from the side as well, and then just have a couple that bent over like this one. Go up and then just flick it down. I'm going to do a couple from the left as well. I think we're about done, so we can take off our masking tape now, and that's this project complete. 23. Project 9: More Reeds: For this project, we're going to be painting a bookmark, and we're going to be painting some more reeds, but they're going to be a bit more delicate this time. We're going to be mixing up a moody green, and then adding more of a background behind the reeds, which will suggest more grass, more reeds in the distance. At first, we're going to mix up our green. Use your Winsor Blue and your Winsor Lemon. Not quite a lot, especially for the dark areas. We can add in a little bit of opponent raise, just to make it a bit more neutral. Now, I'm going to clean my brush, and then we want to lay down a clean wash of water first. Pick up any excess water. Now we can add in the green. I'm going to add this in very dark at the top, and then just dilute it and bring it down. At the bottom, we want to add the green in fairly dark, and we're going to tip it up the other way, not too much if you want it to run too far. But then we can just use our brush to pull it out into long strikes, which will look like weights in the background, misty weights. We can add a bit more of this green at the top and let it run down, just pull it a little bit more. I'm just going to add a little bit more. More starts where they're going to bleed in nicely. They don't look too prominent, but they look nice. They look like they're in the background. A bit blurry. Let me do some longer strokes as well. Now we can leave that to dry. If you have a liner brush, you can use this for some really long, thin blades of grass. They're really nice for consistent long lines. If you don't, that's fine, just get back to your size zero, or the small brush you're using. I'll be using the liner brush here to show you what it's like. I'm using my Payne's gray now, and we'll start by just painting in some blades of grass, and then we can paint in some reeds. From the bottom. Then you can paint some short ones from the bottom edge. You can do some folding over. Just making this one slightly thicker at the bend. This one too. Once you think you have enough blades of grass and stems, we can start painting in the fan. We can just choose some of these longer lines, the longest stems to add them to. I'm going to start with this long stem here, and I'm just going to paint some of these lines in different directions. Compared to the reeds we painted in the last project, these are not as uniform or as consistent. They're going to get a bit smaller as we get to the top. Now we can get back in and just paint some really fine lines coming off this. Hopefully, you find the reeds as relaxing to paint as I do. I think as soon as you've practiced the brush control and you have a decent brush, then you can just paint as many of this as you like with different backgrounds, different types of reeds. This out one done now, so we can choose another of these stems. This one, we can just paint slightly differently. I'm just going to do lots of short, really short wispy lines getting shorter towards the top. Then on the other side, meeting at the top. We can do another one of those further down here. I'm going to choose this one, lots of short lines placed together, and then the same on the other side. We can do another one like this. That's over on this side. Drawing the lines first in different directions, and then you can draw the smaller lines off the ends of those. Just add a few more, so this taller one going up here, and perhaps this one down here. Now, at the bottom, I want to add in some of the Payne's gray for the ground. I'm going to go to my size for now, pick up my Payne's gray, and then along the ground, I'm going to point my brush upwards and just have it a bit jaggedy, and we can add some more really short blades of grass to this. It's not too deep. It's probably a centimeter at the most. Now I'm getting back to my liner brush with my Payne's gray, and I'm just going to pull some of this paint out. Lots of short strikes for grass. I think we're done. Since that's dry, we can take off our masking tape. I really like this one because it's quite moody, but also really delicate. You've got the contrast between the misty background and the really delicate fans. 24. Project 10: Palm Trees: For this project, we're going to be painting a Polaroid with some palm trees. The background is going to be a variegated wash, wet on wet, and we are going to be using Permanent Rose and Winsor Lemon to mix these pinks and ready pinks and oranges. I'll be using my Payne's Grey for the palm trees, so they really stand out as silhouettes, and I'll be using my size 10 round brush for the background and my size 0, for the palm trees. So I've got my Permanent Rose, and my Winsor Lemon on my palate, so they're all ready to mix, and I'm starting with my size 10 brush and we're first going to lay down a clear wash of water on the page. I'm just going to tilt my page up, pick up plenty of water in my brush, start from the top, and then I can spread this excess water down making sure there's an even coverage of water, and then pick up any excess from the bottom. We want to start at the top with pink. So this isn't going to be a smooth variegated wash, which is going to add these different colors in and let them blend on the page. I'm going to add some pink now to my yellow for more ready pink, and tip this up and then at the end. I was going to take off some of this, so there are some light areas as well, and I want to pick up some of my orange as we move down the page. I'm just going to flatten out a bit so it doesn't run too much whilst I grab my next color, which is more of yellowy orange for the lower area and at the end. See I'm not mixing in completely, I've left some light areas, and I'm going to lay that down flat so it can start to dry as it is. There a little bit of excess paint I see gathering around this masking tape, so I'm just going to pick that up with my brush. Now let's try. Hopefully you have a nice soft background with a mix of pinks and oranges in there. Now I'm going for my size 0 brush and my Payne's Grey, so we can paint these palm trees. I'm going to start with the one on the left, and that's going to be slightly smaller. I'm just going to turn this to the side, and I'm going to paint the trunk of this first palm tree. I think that's probably high enough, don't work to high, and then what we can do is start by painting the branches and then we'll add the leaves in. So these are just going to be fine lines and they'll just curve round. Starting from the center, we can just do lots of little flaky strokes down to the ends of each of the branches, and this will be the leaves on either side, and we'll just keep doing that on each of these branches. So that's the first palm tree. Our second one is going to be a bit bigger and it's going to be a bit more central, maybe slightly off to the right. We want to go and probably about two-thirds of the way up this time. I'm just going to make this a little thicker. Now we can paint in our branches, and again, these will be slightly longer than last time, and then we can add the leaves in. For the final palm tree, this is going to be just on the right, and it's going to come about midway between these two, just about there. Now we can paint in the branches and then the leaves. Now we can remove our masking tape, and once that's dry just gently remove your pencil line if that's still there. Using my patty rubber to do this, so it doesn't damage the paper. There is our finished project. 25. Project 11: Forest Trees: For this project, we're going to be painting a Polaroid, and we're going to be painting a forest with different values of trees. They look like somehow in a distance, and then they'll get darker as they get closer. Well we're doing a wet on wet background for the sky, painting a bit of a moody sky and we'll paint a few flying birds in this one as well. I'm only going to be using indigo for this whole painting to keep it nice and monotone. If you don't have indigo, you can use Payne's gray or you can mix up, or you can use your blue and then use a Payne's gray for the darker trees. I'm going to start by diluting my indigo. Then I'm just squashing off my brush. Then I'm just going to use the clear water to lay down the first layer of water for the background. I was going to tilt this again and pick up my excess at the bottom. Now I'm going to, I don't want a background too dark so this is fairly diluted. Then I'm just going to paint in some strokes. I don't want this to be really graduated and I don't want it to have to make prominent clouds in either. I'm just doing the simple strikes. I'm going to make it a little bit darker at the top. I think that will do. Now we can leave that for drying and then we can start painting in our trees. I'm going to use my size four brush for this and I'm going to start with the tress at the back. We want these to be quite pale. I'm just going to use the same mix that we used for the sky. If you start by painting in a thin line, not going past the halfway mark and then I'm just painting in quick marks on either side of the tree. This is actually a bit darker than I want it to be so I'm just going to pick up some of that paint, and dilute this a bit more. Quick marks on either side. Wider as we go down. I'm going to have a slight taller one on this side. Again just quick marks lots of jaggedly strikes since not too uniform. Then just making it a bit wider as we go down. Another one here, slightly smaller and another one on this side quite tall again. I'm Just doing really, really quick strikes. I'll just do one more in the middle here next to this one. Once that's dry, we'll go slightly darker and do another layer of trees. Let's pull out a little more of this indigo to make the next layer of trees slightly darker. We don't want to get too dark. We want to leave ourselves some braille meant for the really, really dark trees at the front. Start with your line going down. Then this is such a quiet dark so I'm just softening it a bit on the page and adding a bit more water. Another one here. I have another one coming near the edge here. That's a bit dark. Let's wait for that to dry, then we'll go one level darker before we get to our darkest trees. Pulling a little bit more of this indigo in. That's quite good. I still got enough rim to go to the darkest indigo, which is pretty much opaque. This one is going to be a bit smaller but shorter. Another one I have in this left side coming off the edge of the paper. Now let's wait for it to dry and then we can add a final layer. If you've got any areas like this where you can see this line, then you can just make sure to cover that up with your darkest trees, which is what I am going to do. I'm going back to the source of my paint now on my palette so I can get the darkest indigo. Just using really quick strikes, so that the branches don't look too uniform. I'm letting the brush to unload the work and making these organic marks that it naturally does because of the shape of the brush. I don't need to overthink these trees. Just keep them really simple. I have a short one over here on the right and then I have a few more just along the front. Just a couple more. I'm going to paint some branches coming off from this left side as well and the right side. Now we can paint in three small birds flying in the sky. That's our project done. 26. Project 12: Tree Trunks: For this next project, we're going to be painting a Polaroid, and we're going to be using indigo again for the whole piece. If you don't have indigo, you can use Payne's gray, and for this, we're going to be painting a soft gradient for the background sky. Then we're going to be painting in all these tree trunks and branches starting from some really power ones further away to those dark ones. It's another great project for practicing those values. The background is going to be wet on wet, so we're going to start by laying down a wash of clean water. Don't forget to take off any excess at the bottom, and then we can pick up our indigo. We want this quite pale, so start at the top. I'm just going to tilt paper up and just bring it down. It's just naturally being dilated by the water that's already on the paper. Just picking up the excess paint at the bottom, because it's getting a bit darker. Now we can wait for it to dry and then we can start painting in our trees. I'm using my size four brash. We're going to start with some really pale trees. So again, test this out if you need to. Even that is going to be too dark, so I want it to be really pale. Just take out the excess water because we want that brush control, and then we're just going to paint. This is about the strength we want. We don't want any darker than that. I'm going to paint all the way to the top making it thinner as we get to the top, and then we can paint some branches off of this. A couple more of these really pale ones in the background, so Some of them can just be lines. Thin trunks. Nice and pale. I'm going to go shade dark now. So again, I recommend testing this out so you don't get too dark, and then again, just start by painting straight line up pointing slightly narrow towards the top and then adding in the branches. I do another one. Now I can go and make darker again. I'm just painting out some smaller twigs of the side as well so it doesn't look too uniform. I'll do another one at that strength on the right side, and we can paint in some dark ones. Make it slightly thicker towards the trunk. I'm just making this one a bit thicker all the way up. Now we can go to our darkest indigo, start on the left side. You can turn this around if it's easier. I'm making this slightly thicker than the others to show that it's closer, and we can put on this branch and have it overlapping the others, which is another thing that will show that it's in front of them. Do some branches on the other side coming off the page as well. I'm going to paint one in the middle. I'm going to leave those branches just higher up, and then we can have another one on this right side, just for it goes off the page. Actually, I think I'm going to paint this one off the page so it's not the same as this one on the left, and then again just do these higher up branches. I think we're done. Let's leave that to dry for a couple of minutes and then we can take off the masking tape. That's another project complete. 27. Project 13: Boat: For this project, we're going to be painting a simple scene in a bookmark with a boat. This is one of my favorites, it's really simple yet really effective. I'll be using a Permanent Rose for the background. We'll be doing this wet-on-wet. The top part will be some soft clouds, but really loose, non-defined. Then we'll do a bit of a graduated wash at the bottom where the sea is. We'll add in some simple mountains in the distance on the horizon and then I'll be using the Payne's Grey for the boat. I'll also be using my fine liner for the mast and the cables of the boat. The first thing we want to do on this one is to mark in the horizon. Just grab your pencil and a ruler. We want the boat to be about a third of the way down the page, so it's the main focal point. We want the horizon to sit just above this, really probably just below the halfway mark. Just very lightly, pencil this in, not so light that you can't see a thing. The plan is we're going to cover this whole page in water for our wet-on-wet. Then above the horizon, we want to concentrate on a bit more of a cloudy variegated wash. We'll use our Permanent Rose and perhaps mix in a little bit of the Payne's Grey just to get a little bit more of a purple color as well. Then below this horizon, we want to make it more of a graduated wash. This will be darker at the bottom, becoming lighter towards the horizon. This will just give that subtle illusion of the sun reflecting on the water. I'm using my size 10, and I'm just going to start by making sure my color is ready. Just mixing up this Permanent Rose on my palette, giving it plenty of water because I want it to be quite pale, quite soft this one. I don't want it really bold and vibrant. I want this to be quite subtle, so just making sure there's plenty of water already in there. Now, I'm just going to clean my brush off, clean all of that paint out. I'm going to go to my clean pot of water so we can lay this water down on the page. As always, I'm starting at the top, the wet-on-wet, I'll lay down the first bit, and then I'm going to tip it up. If you've got excess that has run down to the bottom, you can use this and just pull it down, spread it all out so we get a nice even coat of water across the page. Just pick up any excess. I'm just tilting it to the side so I can see a bit better if there is more excess there is some there. It's not always obvious until you start moving it around. Now I'm going to go from my Permanent Rose and just make sure this is nice and soft and diluted, taking out the excess on the side of my palette, and then I'm just going to start brushing this in. You see, I'm leaving a few little patches. I'm not covering the whole area, and then just roughly down to the horizon. I'm just going to take a tiny bit of this Payne's Grey and add this in. Because that Payne's Grey has got those blue undertones, it's just going to make it a bit more purple and just add this in. It's wet, so it's blending in nicely. While this is still wet, we're wanting to work quite quickly, I'm going to this pink, I'm going to add it in. I'm tilting the page up in the opposite direction to what we'd normally would, and I'm just going to pull this paint down with my brush. It should get slightly lighter. We don't want this white. We want it to be pale pink. We just want it to be a little bit darker at the bottom of the bookmark where it's closer to us. I'm just picking out the excess now. Still looking a little bit pale up here, so I'm just going to darken it up a little bit. That's our background wash done. We can leave that to dry. The next thing we'll do is paint in the mountain on the horizon. Once that's dry, we can paint in our mountain. For this, I'm going to use that purple mix that was the Permanent Rose with a tiny bit of the Payne's Grey. We just want it to be a little bit darker, but again, not much darker, just one level. We can see it, but it still looks like it's in the distance because we really want that boat to be the focal point, and I'm using my size 1. We can start by running the brush along this horizon to make sure that line is nice and neat. You can see how pale this is, but it will stand out and it will look really effective in a distance. Then we can just pull up into some mountains. It's as simple as that, so we just need to wait for that to dry. Because the only thing left to paint is the boat, and it's not going over the edges, we can take off this masking tape, if you want to. You see, I've got a couple of little marks of paint at the top and the bottom. One little trick to get rid of these is to use a Uni-ball Signo gel pen, which is this opaque white, so I'm just going to cover those up. It doesn't get rid of the mark completely. If you do it a couple of times, it's going to look much better. Now we can paint in the boat. I'm using my size 0 brush, and I'll be using my Payne's Grey. Again, just make sure you don't have too much water in this mix. We want this nice and opaque, so this boat stands out as a solid color and as the main focal point. We want the main part of the boat to be a third of the way down the page. I would say that's about there, just a little way underneath the horizon lines we can start. We want to also make this central either side. We can start by just painting a line going across and then just make sure that's central and that's the top of the boat. Then either side just bringing this down and then curving it in a little bit either side. I'm just going to add a little bit here, curve that around a bit, just to make sure it looks more balanced. Now we can add in the reflection. I'm going to bring this in a little bit more for reflection, and I'm just going to work in horizontal strokes. I'm going to start at the base of the boat and then get wider. There'll be an almost like a curved V-shape as an active space on either side. These lines are getting longer, make sure it's not a solid shape. You want it to be distinctive from the top. You want to be able to see some of these lines. Then quite quickly, I'm going to narrow it down again. Then tiny little lines, and this is going to be the reflection of the mast and tapering off. We're going to add a couple of people here. So you can also add the reflection over those. Next, if you're using your pen, grab your pen for the mast or just keep with your small brush. From the center of the boat, we want to draw a straight line above the horizon. I'm going to draw it to about there and then at the top, we can just draw a tiny line across there. We can draw a cable running all the way from the top down to just inside the edge of that boat, keep that nice and straight. This side, I'm going to draw a little line just a little way down that mast. Again, I'm going to draw a line from here to just inside that edge of the boat. Next, we can go back to our brush, and we're just going to draw some details in the boat. We want a couple of people sitting in here. I'm just going to start with just a small circle representing somebody's head and then bring that round and cover it around a little bit. That would look like the silhouette of somebody's back, and then perhaps an arm. Then you can draw some shapes, potentially boxes or whatever, it is they have in boats, maybe they're having a picnic. It's quite nice because you can imagine all things in these silhouettes. Another person this side, so another circle, perhaps slightly lower down, and then again bringing that body, and then just some little details, small shapes to give the illusion of things going on. I think we're pretty much done. If you want to, you can add a couple of birds in the sky, but I think it's quite nice just having a simple, so I'm just going to add a couple more lines in here. We're done. In our next project, we're going to be painting a few smaller boats with a skyline silhouette on the horizon. 28. Project 14: Boats with Skyline: For this project, we're going to be painting a Polaroid with these gorgeous dusky purply-gray colors, which I'll show you how to mix up with the primary colors. We'll be painting a loosely graduated wash for the background with a skyline on the horizon. Then we're going to paint in three boats with shadows on the water, and then some over hanging tree branches. The first thing we want to do is to draw in our horizon again. This is going to be roughly two-thirds of the way down the page. Now we want to mix up our purply-gray. For this we're going to need all three of our primary colors. I've got my permanent rose, my Windsor lemon, and my Windsor blue. I want the main base of this color to be the Windsor blue. I'm going to start with that and put it into this well down here. Now I'm going to add some of my permanent rose and this is going to make it into a nice purple. Then we can add some of my yellow, which will make it more neutral. I'm going to test this color round first, just to make sure we're on the right lines. That's a nice purple. I think I'm going to add a little bit more yellow, just to make it a little bit more gray. I'm happy with that color. It's just mixing all three of those colors, and then just testing it out until you get to a nice shade that you like. We're going to cover the whole page with water again. We'll start with a graduated wash from the top, loosely down to the horizon, and then just add in a little bit of extra color over the water. Then just take off the excess and then pick up your color. Make sure it's fairly diluted, we know want it to be too bold. Then I'm just going to add this in, using just long quick strikes down to the horizon. This is going to give it a nice moody feel. I'm going to pick up some more now and just below this horizon, just add in a little bit more, especially coming in from the sides, perhaps leaving the sunlight areas. You can always go back in, just dry your brush off on your paper towel, just pick any off if you add too much. I'm just adding a bit more in from the sides and at the bottom. You can see this light area which is forming in the middle, is going to look really nice for the illusion of water. That's our background, done. Let's just wait for that to dry and then we can paint the skyline in for the silhouette. For the horizon, I'm using my size zero brush, and we want to make sure this is completely dry because we want the skyline to be quite crisp. I don't want to go too dark with this, even just having this watered down color, which is the same as what we used there, is going to stand out because this area near the horizon is a bit lighter. I'm going to start with that and just see how it looks. See actually, even that might be a little bit too dark, so I'm just going to dip my brush in the water. I'm going to gradually go along, running my brush along the horizon to start with, and then bringing that pain up. All we really want is lots of rectangles and lots of shapes here, geometric shapes of different sizes, to give it the illusion of lots of buildings on this skyline, and they can be different heights and different widths. I have a nice tall building up here, quite thin, and then we can go quite low, making sure to get that horizon nice and neat and you can paint in some odd little shapes as well, to give the illusion of lots of different things going on. I'm just going to water this down again. Just make sure you vary the height of these buildings. That's going to make it look interesting. You can add some different shapes in as well. So perhaps adding a triangle and you can connect them with lines. Don't overthink it, just think about lots of shapes, mainly different sized rectangles and lines. You can see I'm working quite quickly, I'm not really thinking about it. I'm just painting as I go. Because this isn't going to be the main focal point, this is just going to sit nice in the background. I just want the suggestion of things going on. I'm going to go behind now. Here I'll give it wider, is a big building, maybe with some details on top, just adding in a few little lines. I can have that dripping down quite low on the horizon and then coming back up. We'll just wait for that to dry and then we can paint in the boats and our hanging trees. For the boats, we're going to have three boats and they're going to be at different distances. We are going to be using different sizes and different values. We'll start with the one further in distance that's going to be closer to the horizon, it's going to be smaller and it's going to be paler. Just slight down from the horizon on the left, just painting in the small shape of a boat, and then to add in the line of the mass going up with the cables either side. I'm actually going to make this a little bit darker because I want to make sure it's darker than the horizon, so it really helps with that illusion of distance within the piece as a whole. Just keep checking yourself and let checking, stand back and just check that everything fits in together. I've made that a bit darker, and I'm going to add a small reflection now that displays lines. That's the one in the distance. We'll do one in the middle, which is going to be the closest one. We want to make sure this is quite dark. For this I'm going to go to my Payne's gray, it can be a solid color. I'm probably going to have this about central on the page. I can bring this base in slightly, and then we can add in that reflection so that it comes out a little bit to create that V shape within that negative space, and just bring up to a point so it gets really narrower. Then either you can use your pen to draw in the mass and the cables, so you can paint it. This time I'm just going to use my brush. We'll do one more boat, and it's going to be in between these two in terms of distance. We want it to be in-between them as we go up the page, and then it will be slightly more water down Payne's gray for this one. I think about the size, making sure it is in between these two. Mine's probably bit too similar to that size, but I think I can get away with that. Now adding the reflection, and adding the mass and the cables. There are boats, and now we can just add in some over hanging trees. Now we can paint in some over hanging trees, these are going to be really simple. We'll just start from the top corner and just paint in some thin lines. You can add in some wispy twigs coming off. I'm painting all these branches and twigs fast, and then we can come back and add in some leaves. Have a couple coming down a bit longer. Then I'm just going to add in the leaves now. Picking up the concentrated Payne's gray, and then just with a little marks, just pressing the brush down really quite quickly, loosely around these branches. I'm not painting specific shapes, I'm just making marks with the brush. You can see the different size marks, but they just help create the illusion of lots of leaves. Finally, I'm just going to paint in a little bit at the ground with the Payne's gray. This is going to help border it, I'm still using my size zero, and I'm just making this edge a bit rough, add some bits of grass. I don't want this to be too big, it's a little touch and I'm just going to flip the brush-up quickly for some small bits of grass. That will just give the illusion that this boat is coming towards the bank, which is where this tree is coming from. Do a little bit on this side as well, and this flicking up for the grass. Once that's dry, we can take off our masking tape, and that project is complete. It's a lovely moody, skyline with the boats and this pieces just give it a nice border. It looks like we're looking through another frame to it. 29. Project 15: Hot Air Balloons: For this project, we're going to be painting another Polaroid, and we're going to start with a variegated wash for the background, using yellows and oranges mixed up from our Winsor Lemon, and our Permanent Rose. We will be painting in some mountains as well, and then some hot air balloons, adding in more detail and contrast to the ones that are closer to us, to help create the illusion of distance. We'll be adding in some Payne's gray as well to these oranges, to mix up some deeper darker colors for the contrast in those balloons. We're going to start by painting a variegated wash from yellow to orange. We're going to do this wet one dry, tilting the paper. I'm going to paint this upside down because I want to have the yellow at the bottom and the orange at the top, but it's easier for the variegated wash to start with the light color and make it darker as you go down, especially when you're painting wet on dry. I've got my Winsor Lemon on my palate, with my Permanent Rose close by. I'm not going to start with the pure Winsor Lemon. I want it to be slightly orangey because this Winsor Lemon is really quite bright. I'm just going to add a small amount of Permanent rose and we want plenty of water in there to make sure it will run evenly down the page. Tilt this up, just making sure you've got it upside down as well. Then adding this at the top rather, and then hopefully you should have this bead that's running down. You can add more if not, and this is just going to help you with that transition. I'm just going to add some more Permanent Rose into my mix now, so it gets slightly more orangey, and then at the end, just in these horizontal strokes. You could see that that wasn't fully mixed in. I'm going to go back over there, so I'm going to start with the orangey mix. Just try and fix this quickly, starting from the top and I'm going to run it all the way down. That's a quick fix. I want this to be quite a bold orangey red as we get to the bottom. I'm just going to turn this up now. I've done this in a slightly different way. I'm just going to have this oranging from the top, and then run it all the way down, so it blends in nicely taking away some of that yellow. It's got quite red at the top. But we want this to be quite nice and bold, vibrant colors. Take off any excess. I can see there is a little bit of paint gathering around the masking tape. I'm just going to tilt this up a little bit the other way, just to encourage some of that darker color to run back down this way as it dries. It's quite fun to actually experiment with these different washes because it's mostly about actually responding to what's happening on the paper. If it is not mixing in, then try different ways to see what works to get it to go smoother. I'm going to lay that down flat now and wait for that to dry. I'm quite happy with the graduation there from this more ready orange to the yellow. Now that's dry, we can paint in the mountains. We want two layers of mountains, one paler and one slightly darker. I'm going to go for this orange, and not too dark. I'm using my 10-brush again, and I just want to paint this up. It's must you have a point. I'm not going to high, I'm still below even a third of the page, I'm not going up that high. Just vary the high of these mountains so it doesn't look too uniform. Let's wait for that dry, and then we can add in a darker mountain on top. Now that's dry. I'm going to add a tiny bit of my Payne's gray to this orange. I'm just going to do up in this corner so it doesn't take away from that mix too much. You can start quite low for this one. You can see it's a bit more of a brownie mix now, and go up. I'm just going to add a little bit more color for where it's going over the top of those mountains just because you can see. Just dotting a bit more color in to the top to give it a bit more contrast than the one at the back. Now, I can wait for that to dry and then we can paint in our hot air balloons. We can take off our masking tape now as well because we're not going to be painting over the edges anymore. Now, I'm going back to my size of the array. If you want to, you can draw these hot air balloons in first, but I'm going to just paint them in freehand. We're going to start with this orangey mix, going to add a little bit more more pigment in, so it's a bit darker. We're going to add in a little bit of Payne's Gray as well. This is going to almost central, going to start with the left curve and get down to a point, bring it up and round. Kind of holding my hand away so I can see and make sure it's central, see if I need to adjust any of the lines at all, make them bigger. Bring it back down, I'm going to bring this in even more. Now we're just going to paint this all in. This isn't a completely solid silhouette. We're going to be adding more contrast to this one. So it's still simple, you can't see any of the details because it's still a silhouette, it's just got a bit more color in there. Now whilst it's still wet, I'm going to go to my Payne's Gray, and I'm just going to start painting in this left edge. I'm working my way round, and then I'm just going to pick up a little bit more just that it's really solid and dark on that very left edge. Then I'm going to clean my brush and dry it, and then just work it, pulling that paint across so it's quite graduated to the rest of the balloon. This is going to give a great sense of depth, it's going to make it look like it's curving round. It's great practice for graduations on a smaller scale. Once that looks fairly smooth, I'm going to go to my Payne's Gray again now, and just draw the top line at the end of the basket. Then just draw the lines that are connecting the basket to the balloon, so a few small lines. Then go back to the orange or painting the square for the basket. Not too much water, and then again just adding some Payne's Gray. Just neaten up that basket so it looks like a square. So that's the top balloon. The one closest to us. The rest won't have that level of contrast. We'll go to our orange now and paint one over here, which is going to be slightly smaller. Now I'm just going to mix up a darker orange with my Permanent Rose and Winsor Lemon. Add in a tiny bit of that Payne's Gray, and then just add this to the left side, so it's still darker on that left side, that's not as dark as the one that's closer. Now we can paint in the basket, and because this one is farther away, probably just a couple of lines, we don't need as much definition in there. We do another one like that on the other side, starting with our more diluted orange. So once you've painted in the balloon, just pick up your Payne's Gray and mix in that darker, kind of browny orange for the left side. Now I'm going to paint in the basket. I think I just want to add a little bit more definition to these edges and to that basket. Now we can just use our diluted orange just to add some tiny ones in the distance. These aren't going to have any contrast, they're just the small shapes that I showed you in the practice session. Just to give the illusion that there's lots of balloons in the sky and these are quite far away. These ones are just almost a tiny mark with a little dot underneath. If you want to go back and add in a little bit more detail to the top of these mountains you can as well. I'm just doing a few strokes, just to the top, especially to this [inaudible] one that's in front. Just to give it that extra contrast, so just a few quick lines, I'm not going in too much detail, spending too much time on it, and that's that Polaroid complete. 30. More Inspiration: Now we've completed our projects, I wanted to give you some more inspiration if you want to go on and make some more. But firstly, a massive well down to you if you've completed all of the projects, that's amazing. Take a minute to be proud of yourself and reflect on how much you've learned and how many beautiful paintings you've created that didn't exist a little while ago. As I mentioned at the beginning of the class, when I was preparing for this class, I made a lot and I mean a lot of examples because there was so much fun and I feel like it's just been a tip of the iceberg for the potential colors, the combinations, and ideas that there were with these simple scenes. Really, there is no excuse for ever running out of inspiration if you enjoy painting things like these. What I would recommend is to keep some of these visible, perhaps your favorite ones. I know for me, being able to see work that inspires me around the house, really gives me an extra boost to create and that inspiration to come up with new ideas. Here are some more examples of different versions of our projects, and just by changing the start at the background, perhaps my graduated wash to a cloudy sky or changing the color from a blue to a pink or purple or an orange, it will create a very different piece, and I hope this inspire you to continue painting even more. Stay tuned for the final video. 31. Whats Next: Hello. Once again, well done for completing this class and thank you so much for watching. I really hope you've enjoyed it. I hope you've learned some useful tips, and that you have some lovely paintings, and inspiration for painting more. That was my goal for this class, so please do let me know if I've accomplished it. So three things I want to say before you go. One is, please do share your work in the project gallery, so that we can all see it. Especially any projects that you've come up with yourself, I'd love to see them too. Secondly, I would love if you could leave me a review. I read all of them, and they mean the world to me, and really do encourage me to make more classes for you. Of course, if you have any feedback, I'm always looking for ways to improve my classes. Finally, if you haven't seen my other classes, then do check them out. I've quite a lot now. If you're looking for more beginner techniques, then classes like the Ice Lollies one is a great one for practicing different techniques, and really fun too. I also have a watercolor greenery series, where you can learn about mixing greens, which is really useful for general color theory if you're new to it. That's followed by master classes on leaves and trees. Whatever you go for, I really hope you enjoy your painting, and that you find as much relaxation, and joy, and fulfillment from it as I do.