Simplifying Watercolor Painting: Smooth Surfaces and Soft Transitions

1. Introduction to Smooth Painting with Watercolors: Are you frustrated because your watercolors dry it in the middle of painting and now you have a line in it. Or your watercolors drying up, splotchy, irregular. Then fear no more because I've created this class just for you. I've created a series of watercolor classes to give you tools to overcome your obstacles. In this mini class, you'll learn how to become a smooth operator when it comes to our colors, you'll learn how to paint large areas of color without swatches and lines, and how to create areas with soft digits. These techniques work well on wet, on dry painting when you are layering colors to create depth, richness in your painting and to create smooth shading effects. Hi, my name is America, and I'm an illustrator, author, a printmaker, and an educator. I've been painting with watercolors for over 30 years and used it as a medium to create illustrations for a picture books, puzzles, home goods, greeting cards, and fine art. In this class, you'll learn how to create smooth areas of color and soft transition using the wet on dry painting technique. I created this whole series because I want you to approach watercolor with an open mindset. Forget judging yourself and just have fun. The reason why I love smooth painting techniques is because it enables me to add nice backgrounds, Richard, undertones, and smooth shading to my paintings. Sometimes having sharp edges looks nice in a watercolor painting. It's part of its charm and the look of it. But it's nice to have these kinds of smooth painting techniques in your toolbox to enable you to paint in a wider variety of ways. So we're going to warm up with a couple of simple exercises to get comfortable with new techniques. And then we're going to do some troubleshooting. And then we're going to move on to the final project of the class where we're going to put those new skills to the test and paint a font, fall themed pumpkin. You can pick from one of the two sketches that I have provided for you in this class. This class is easy enough for beginners, but if you already have some experience in watercolor, you can use these skills to create your own compositions. Either way, everyone is going to be able to walk away feeling more confident in their painting skills and adding smooth areas of color and shading into their watercolor paintings. Are you ready to have fun with watercolors? Join me in simplifying watercolor painting, smooth surfaces and soft transitions. I'll see you in class. Bye. 2. Orientation: [MUSIC] Welcome to the class. In today's class, we are going to learn how to paint smooth areas of color, without swatches or lines in them, and then transitioning colors from one color to another, or transitioning colors from darker to light. We're going to do some simple exercises to get warmed up and used to this new technique, and then we're going to jump into our main project, which is a fine fall themed illustration. The reason I chose this project is because it's a quick and simple way to learn the smooth and soft painting techniques, and the end result is a fun little painting that you can keep as a gift or use as a greeting card, or use it as little fall decoration in your house. Watercolors can feel like an unforgiving medium in many ways. When you're painting large areas out, they can dry out in the middle, and then they leave marks and lines where you didn't want them. Because watercolors are transparent additive medium, once you've painted the area, it's hard to erase to make areas lighter without damaging the surface of your paper or the layers of paint underneath. So in general, you should think about only adding layers of paint and making areas darker, instead of trying to make something lighter. For this reason, it's important to plan your painting before you start. You can even make a loose, small-scale painting to try the colors, and make mistakes on, and then that way once you've painted something once, it's easy to learn from the experience and try again. That's one of the big reasons why I like to paint small paintings in my classes. So that way you're encouraged to try the techniques again, and you don't feel too invested in your painting. I always think it's great to make mistakes, because then if we don't make mistakes, how are we ever going to learn? Let's look at the supplies we need for this class before we dive into our exercises. [MUSIC] 3. Supplies: In my previous Skillshare class, wet-on-wet rainbow technique, I go over all my choices of tools for watercolor in detail. If you're brand new to watercolor, it's a great warm-up class for this one to get comfortable with your supplies. Today, we're going to be using our regular set of watercolors supplies. I have a big jug of water that's filled up pretty much to the brim, then I have a pan for mixing paints, I have a set of watercolors, and then I'll be using three different brushes. I'll be using a big one, this is a size 12 round, a size four pointed filbert. It's getting on one side and thicker on the other side. Then, this is also a size 4, this is a round brush and you can tell both of these are size four, but the round one is quite a lot smaller than the bigger one so the medium one. I basically have a big and a medium-size and a small brush for details. Just those things, and then I'm using 300 gram Arches, cold pressed watercolor paper. A lot of times I use hot press and if you have a pad of that, that works just as well for this project. But I had this pad of cold press, so I just needed to get rid of it and that's why I'm using that for this project. [NOISE] Then on top of those, I use kitchen just paper towels, I reuse mine after they dry, I just keep reusing it until they fall apart. So that way you're not going through rolls and rolls of paper towels just drying your brushes in between. For optional supply, if you wanted to use colored pencils for your detail for your leaves, you can do that. So for example, I decided to use colored pencils for my leaf veins instead of using the dark. Then, your other option, you could just use watercolors and use those for the black lines for your leaves. Then lastly, this is the image that we're going to be painting today, and that is on a five by seven piece of watercolor paper. I cut it from a larger sheet, and I had a larger paper and I cut it into quarters and so it made five by seven sheets. I've masked it off with some Washi tape, you can do that if you want, but it's not necessary. You can either paint a whole five by seven, or you can make this composition into a square, or this is in between both of those, like a four by six or so format. Then you need either a pencil or a colored pencil to draw your outlines and the sketches provided in the class you can print it out and use either a light table or a window to draw through to transfer your drawing onto your paper. Let's get to our first exercises to warm up with our new technique. [MUSIC] 4. Warmup Exercise 1: [MUSIC] Now that we have all of our supplies set up, let's get ready to paint our first exercise. For the exercises or for the warm-ups, I just cut a one large sheet that I had into smaller sheets because it's just easier to manage. This is a five-by-seven sheet of paper. On this one, we are going to practice just painting an even color from one end to the other. If you wanted to practice a gradation, you can start with one color. In our final project, we're going to be fading from blue to a pinky purple, so if you want to, you can practice that or any other color of the rainbow that you feel like. Maybe we'll do that. We'll start with the blue and we'll end with the pink just to practice that over here. To get going on that, what you need to do is you need to have, I'm just grabbing a bunch of color or bunch of water. I need to mix two pots of pink. For the blue, a lot of times, I really like mixing my colors. I'm going to grab, this is ultramarine, I'm going to grab a bunch of this. Then I have some Prussian blue up on the top over here. I'm going to grab some of this. They don't have to be super dark for right now. Just enough to practice. I think I'm going to go with that just so you can see, it's about that dark right now. Then I'm going to wash my brush and we're going to get some pink. I still had some blue left on there, so let's make it a little purple. That's okay. Just practicing for right now. We're going to start with this. The general idea when you're trying to work on large areas, is to have a bead of paint running at the bottom of wherever you're painting at all times. So that's why I wanted to work on a smaller piece of paper because it's just easier to control the paint and work on getting that solid area. If you have trouble with a five-by-seven, you could even just do a half a strip and practice with a smaller piece first before you practice a whole sheet. Let's get going. I'm going to grab a bunch of my blue paint and I'm just painting it on the top and I'm grabbing more from my pot. If you can tell, I'm holding my paper a little bit of an angle, that's why it's nice to have a small piece of paper too, it's easier for you to turn it. Now there's a bead of water running or painting running on the top. Now we're just going to be moving that bead of paint down the page. You keep getting more paint so you can just keep going lower and lower. You just keep moving that bead of paint. If you wanted to fade it out, if you wanted a nice sky, you could start adding water over here and then just fade it out to clear water afterwards but we'll make the fun little fade with the pink, since that's what our main project is about. If you start running out of paint, just make sure you add. As you can tell as we keep going, it's just making a nice bead of paint. Then it's up to you to decide where you want that fade to go. Maybe at this point, I'll start grabbing a little bit of pink, bead it all the way across. Still grabbing a little bit of my, making sure I have that bead of paint sticking over here. There we go. We just keep going down. Just keep your paper at an angle. You can tell the color is starting to slowly transition as we're moving down the page. It's important to do this all in one go, have everything ready, and then just keep going down your page. I feel like I want a little bit more of a transition. While I have that thick bead of paint over there, I'm just going to grab a little bit more pink so that I can get a little bit more of a transition going over here. You can tell that I disturb my paper a little bit, [NOISE] so there's a little bit of a line over there, so I ended up getting a little bit of a line because I stopped in the middle. I think it'll be all right. For me, it always works best if I can just do it all in one go. There we go, all the way down to the bottom. You can see it looks like a really nice fade, nighttime sky. Now if you wanted to draw anything in a silhouette on top over here, like a tree or a forest or if it's a close up, it could be mushrooms. Then when you get to the very end, before I get carried away with my ideas, I'm going to wash my brush and I'm going to clean it. Now because I have a clean dry brush, you can tell how it's picking that water up. With my dry brush, I'm just going over here and just picking that up and once it stops picking it up then there you go. There we have our nice fade from top to the bottom. Then when we get to our actual final project, I'll show you how I paint going down and then how we're going to paint around objects as we keep moving down our page. This was our first exercise, and you can practice this a few times. If yours ended up a little spotchy, try it a few times and see how you like it. Now let's move on to our second warm-up exercise. [MUSIC] 5. Warmup Exercise 2: Now that we have our nice fade painted, let's work on shading some smaller areas. I have a little bit of this paint left over over here, and I'll leave a little bit of space up on the top, just so we can practice some shading from light to dark. Then let's draw some paint or paint some circles. We'll just use these to practice, just so you could just do a blob. If you wanted to practice your pumpkin shape, you could practice your pumpkin shape too. While these are drying over here, let's just work on our fades up on the other side of the paper. For the next part, I'm going to be just changing my brush to the middle-sized one. For this first one, let's just practice some lines and just fading them out. You can start with a fairly, this is about as dark as this color is going to go. I'm going to wash my brush, dry it a little bit so it's not sopping wet, and then with this semi-clean brush, I`ll start teasing that out. Now it's halfway. You don't want to use too much water. If you use too much water, then it'll end up pulling too much of the paint with it. I'm now at this point I almost have like a dry brush. You can practice a few of these. You can do different colors. Different colors behave in different ways. You can practice this with different colors. I find that when I'm working on the cold press paper, my colors bleed a little differently than when I'm working on my hot press. Just whichever one you're more used to, just work on that. Then let's do one where we're fading it on both sides. You can see there's a big puddle. I'm going to dry that up just a hair. But you don't want to do this with too dry of a paint either because if your paint is completely dry when you put it on, then it's going to dry before you have time to fade it. As what we were doing on the other side, just fading this out. I'm going to flip my paper before it dries, and then teasing this side out too. When I'm working on fades like this, what I usually do is I'll sit with it until it's completely dry. A lot of times, once you have it faded out and then you wait for it, sometimes you'll start seeing little edges forming and then it's just nice to be able to fix those. There was not an edge forming, but I feel like this is a rounded shape. I'm just trying to make it more into a straighter fade over here. If it ends up being a little splotchy here in the middle now that I'm going in here and disturbing my paint, I can always go back in there and add. Once it's dry, then it's easy to add more pigment in there later. I was getting a little bit of an edge there, so fade that out. There we go and we'll try another one. How about with red color? Maybe we'll do an S-shape and then we'll fade on one side. You can see it was starting to dry over here a little bit. I'm just trying to re-wet that area and make sure I can get it to bleed. In those kinds of cases a lot of times I'll have to go back in with a little bit more pigment later and fix that. I feel like whenever I'm doing this, it's a little bit like crisis management as you're trying to make sure that everything is all drying out and go in evenly. But I always suggest starting out a little bit lighter and you can always go back and make things darker. It's probably better left just like that. I'm getting a little bit of edges over here, so I'm going in here and scrubbing it. Then how about we could also just try our rectangle over here. Let it dry and then shade it a little bit more. Come back to it in a little bit once it's dry and then shade it, or you could even make a cylinder shape if I shaded it from one end and then the other end. Let's go back to working on these. For the first one, we can just do a very simple shading on it. Just paint on the edge and do like a half a moon. We're going to shade. Then also making sure I don't have a crease over here, not a crease but a sharp edge. There's one maybe. Keep moving this, shuffling this paint around just a little bit to soften these edges. Now we have a soft light over there. Then maybe we'll make it a little bit less over here and just be a little bit of a lighter, more like a little cat, maybe its shadow, maybe it's on a purple sheet of paper, and so its casting this a purply light over here. That's much of a softer shadow where we faded it on both sides. This kind of drawing, I can see that we painted this side, we didn't really paint this side. What I would do is once this is dry, I could go and add a little bit more paint over here. Then I would add a little bit more darker paint over here just to give it a nice illusion of roundness. Now let's go to our odd shape over here. Maybe there's a crease that comes in. Who knows? Maybe it's like a little cloudy shape or something. I could do around the whole thing. But then I'd have to really rush to try to fade everything out. It's better to do it in smaller increments and go slow rather than try to do everything at the same time. There's that. That was fairly easy. Then to our pumpkin, over here, we'll start by just creating the edge of the pumpkin. The pumpkin has those folds. The folds will be like what we did over here. First fading this in. I'm thinking that the light is hitting the pumpkin from this side or maybe from around here. That's why there's darker along this end over here, making sure all my things are dry. As you can see, this one as it's drying, it's creating some more edges over here. I'm going to go in here and soften some of these up a little bit. While that's drying, let's work on our little square. I think this is dry over here. Starting out with the dark color, straight edges are always much easier than trying to do curves or multiple areas. Now everything is wet, so I'm going to grab my blow dryer and just dry it really quick. [NOISE] There we go. As I said, I feel like it's instead of trying to get everything at once, I always feel better doing things little by little. Now I'll try to fix this spot just a little bit. Dropping in that paint. Then I'm also doing my very gentle fade. You have to be gentle once you're adding extra layers of paint just so you don't disturb the layers underneath. Just teasing it in there. That's a little bit wet already, so I'm trying not to add too much water. Then let's get a little bit of a darker. We'll, again, this is just a dark blue. We'll just add a really dark layer over here. If your color underneath starts lifting up, then I usually just stop working on it and just let it sit and then come back to it after it's dry and then try to fix those areas up, if you've been disturbing it for too long. This one's good as it is. I don't know if we need to add anything to that. Then we could add another really dark just to add more drama over here. I use this technique a lot of times also for animals. If I have a bird and the color fades from one to the other, then this is a nice technique to fade one color into another too. It's not always just for shading, you can use it for other things too. Maybe it's like a rock and there's pits in it or something. Maybe there's a sharp edge on one and then softer. Some of the edges are a little bit softer. That will give it. That's just some little ways to add texture. Then let's work on our practice pumpkin over here. We'll do one at a time just to keep it easy. Now we just want to fade it both sides. Maybe a little bit less on this side if there's a little bit more of a cast shadow on this side and then it's coming around more around this way. There's one lobe of our pumpkin and then same thing over here so it's going to go. I'm thinking it's going to be a little bit of a sharper shadow and then a softer shadow maybe this way. You could leave it sharp. It looks nice, but I'm just going to soften it just very gently. Then same thing over here. If we just wanted to darken that a little bit, I'm going to make it more dramatic by just adding that darker highlight on there. Maybe there's a little bit of a bend like your cylinder shape. If you wanted to, we could even practice adding just even maybe it's a lighter shade, shadow down at this end. Now this is our practice shape. If you wanted to practice more, you could make more swatches or practice just shading just on white paper. Then when you feel competent in that, grab your next piece of paper, transfer your sketch onto it, and then we will start painting our project for the class. 6. Troubleshooting: [MUSIC] So in-between painting our warm-up exercises and our final Halloween pumpkins I wanted to just take a moment and look at some different ways to troubleshoot if you run into issues when you are working on your watercolor piece. Some of the issues I try to replicate over here , on these pieces. Most of the time your issues or any problems that you might encounter during painting might come from either using, in my opinion, too much water, or at least when I'm painting, and then the other time when you run into issues is I like to work in layers and so then you start lifting up the paint underneath and then you start getting very splotchy paints. Then I guess the third issue you could say is getting these edges on your paintings and so how to fix those once those things happen. Let's go one at a time. Over here on this splotch, I was trying to blend these two colors, but I ended up using too much water. Instead of then trying to work and work and work, and mixing everything up where I would have just ended up with a big splotch of green, I let everything dry, and so you can see where I'm at right now. In this case it's better to just stop, and take a break and then come back to it after it's been dry. [NOISE] Just getting my blue little tub ready over here so I'll mix a little bit more paint, and then you can come in here and try to fix a little bit of that, so using those skills that we learned. Then also fade it, maybe add a little bit more color. In general you just want to make sure you're working fairly quick, you don't want to hang out in a location. Everything is wet so it's easy for me to drop in a little bit more color, just to fade that out. As my blue color is creeping in here on this end, again, this is a fairly dry brush, I'm going to go in here and just erase a little bit of it off. You can pull the color off with a dry clean brush. I'm just pushing my edge back a little bit and then fading this one, and then I'm going to let this dry, and then once this is dry. Then I can come back over here and paint a little bit more yellow. If there's still a little bit too much of a gradation right here I could come back after it's dry, and I would add a little bit more blue over here just to give it a more gradual fade. But that way letting things dry and then coming and working on it after it's dry, that usually works pretty well for me. Then, the second issue a lot of times is, as I just said you want to put your layers down fairly fast. [NOISE] Let me just grab some purple here. This is a dark purple. Let's clean it up a bit. [NOISE] Brighter purple in here. Let's say I'm trying to go in here and I'm trying to do another layer of pink. But if you sit in one area long enough, you start lifting the color up instead of actually putting color down. As you can tell, after I scrubbed it a few times instead of getting brighter, I'm actually getting a light area because I've been using my brush to scrub the area up. If you start noticing that paint is starting to scrub off underneath especially if you already have several layers down then, that can be a problem. The best way to combat that is to work fast so the layers underneath don't have time to hydrate and pull backup, and so you want to work fast. Then if you're working slow and you see that starting to happen, then you just want to stop, and let everything dry, and then once this area is dry then just in the same way over here, I would come back and then fix that area with another layer of paint. Now we messed with that one but I have this other one so over here, accidentally I put too much water so I ended up getting a dark and then a light and then a dark. I would fix this first by adding some more paint in this area, and then we have this edge over here. Just in the same way as we can scrub, you can gently try to erase, and scrub. You can usually at least fade the edge a little bit. You just want to make sure you don't have too much water, you want to have a fairly dry brush just enough water in there. But a lot of times when you start scrubbing then all the layers start moving. This is my pointed filbert, and so with this brush I'm able to just scrub. That takes the heaviest edge off of it. Now it's not as visible as was before. You can fix some of those edges, just with that or make them a little bit less noticeable. Now that really sharp edge that I had along over here is gone. What I want to do next would be then to just add a little bit more paint to round everything up, [NOISE] and make everything the same. [NOISE] Same shade as we're retroactively [NOISE] mixing. Now if I go back in here and I work on painting some of this out, everything that I had over there, you wouldn't even be able to notice it anymore. [NOISE] Then some other ideas to fix mistake areas or problem areas. Before we actually get to that, so with this one, let's say I wanted to have a highlight right here. In some cases, some colors lift better than others but in a lot of cases you are able to retroactively add a little bit or you can never get your color all the way to paper white. But you can certainly lighten areas up if you go around and you scrub it a little bit. That's a way to lighten areas if you wanted to add highlights. But let's say you're working on an animal and you just wanted to add little highlights for the hair, what you could do is, preemptively you could add masking fluid and just mask things out and then take the mask off, or you could use just gel roller pens or white colored pencils. If I draw over here you can see a white line. If I was working on an animal, I could add highlights for the eyes or for other areas. The gel pens, they don't end up drawing a perfect white, but it's a possibility to add some highlights, and then another option is usually your watercolor sets will come with white paint. Mine is dirty right now. But this is actually an opaque color. If I just hydrate it I could get a really thick. It's going to go on very white and as it dries you'll notice it won't be as white anymore. But you can always add [NOISE] details with white paint. Then another option is to just use white gouache and you could use this spreading white highlights too. [NOISE] Yet another option that I show you in some of my other videos as well I really like having texture in my artwork. Let's say for example you have the sky over here and it bothers you that there's some splotchiness and it's not quite even. What you could do in that case is you could get your color pencils out and add some highlights or some texture with the colored pencils. Let's see. You could either just go in there and just add color, [NOISE] and you could just do one solid area of color if you wanted to color that in and if you wanted it to be a little bit. [NOISE] You could go in areas and add, just colored pencils to add some texture to them, and in some ways mask some of those areas. But a lot of times like let's say if this was a apple or something it's really fun to add a little highlight on textures or even on the pumpkins. You could just mix a few things in [NOISE] to add visual interest and this is a light yellow. Then that completely masks what is underneath over here. Or you notice the color pencils more than any of this. The stuff that's underneath. [NOISE] This is just more of an even application but using several different colors, and then since it's a light area, I would add white on top just to lighten everything up. [NOISE] My marks can be as big as you want them to be or as small as you want them to be. Now you don't notice any of that splotchiness that was going on between these two areas. That's just some ideas with what you can do and [NOISE] ways that you can fix problem areas in your paintings that might arise while you're working on it. I guess same thing would go over here if I really wanted to work on this part, since we didn't work on this yet. [NOISE] I could try to scrub a little bit in the middle and see if I could pull any of this paint off. I'm not going to be able to fix it completely but I can make it at least a little bit less [NOISE] noticeable perhaps. Now I just made it worse. I was just going to say then I would stop working in that exact spot if I see the paint just completely starting to pull up. Some of these paints will pull off differently. Some will come off better than others, and so I would work on the whole area at once, and maybe even make it a little bit lighter than what it needs to be and then I would go back in there, and add a little bit more paint. This is almost completely scrubbing off to white. But I'm also trying to be mindful not to leave really hard edges in there, so I would rather get things a little bit, maybe lighter if need be. [NOISE] This is a little bit more for advanced. If it's a piece that you're working on that's going to be scanned in that you want to sell as prints for example, then some of these areas are perfect to just leave as it is, and then once you scan it in and you're working on photoshop then you could use the stamp tool and stamp from here, and apply it over here. We're fairly dry over here. Then I could just add just a wash here so that evened everything out. Then we could do the same thing, as we were working over here earlier. Now, this was fixed and this one, it's still wet so it's looking a little different color. Then here you can see our gouache as well. Those are just some tips for troubleshooting. I hope they were helpful, and now let's get to our main project for the day. [MUSIC] 7. Halloween Pumpkin: Background: [MUSIC] Before we start painting our final project, if you are out of ideas, how to transfer your drawing onto your paper I show you three different ways in my previous video. Option 1, is you can use pencil and then color the back of the printout, and then use that to draw through your printout paper onto your watercolor paper. This works well if your paper is attached to a pad and you don't want to peel it off. Then Option 2 is you can use a light table or a window, and you put your printout behind your watercolor paper, and then you draw your sketch through. Then Option 3 is, if you have an inkjet printer that can handle a thick paper like this, you can actually also just print your sketch directly onto your watercolor paper. When I do this, I set my transparency to around 15 percent, and that way I get very light lines on my paper, and then that way it doesn't show through my final paintings. For little pieces like this, it's easy just so you could also just free hand the drawing on here because it's not very complicated. I usually use the inkjet printer technique when I need to print very large sheets of paper that have very complicated drawings on them. Hopefully, you can find one of those ways useful for you, and then once you're ready, you can tape the edges if you want. I taped mine, but you definitely don't have to. On this other practice piece that I did, I did not tape the edges, and it's just up to you. For this one, I painted the whole sheet and so then if I wanted to scan this in I can scan this in and then write Happy Halloween on the top or some fun greeting if I wanted to do that. But then for this one, if you just want to keep it as illustration itself and you don't want to have any text on the top, then you can make it a little bit more short and square, so that's what I chose to do over here. To start, we're going to paint our background and we're going to do that exactly the same way as we did on our practice piece. I'm going to make my cuddle of blue water and then pink water. Just grabbing some water here, water on this one. You don't need as much for this one because there's much less area to paint. [NOISE] Just getting my blues [MUSIC] using some Prussian and some ultramarine. [MUSIC] Then I'm just going to add, I have a little bit of this dark brown, it's a color called hematite, and that's from deep lick. I have a little bit of that just to make this a little bit darker since we're looking for more of a nighttime scene. If you have this little extra paper on the bottom, you can check your paint consistency or if you have a scrap piece of paper, you could try that on scrap piece of paper too. I just want to pink. My pink going over here. This is Quinacridone pink. A color I've also purchased from Daniel Smith. I think that's enough. You don't need as much pink. It's going to be a very small area down to the bottom over here. [inaudible] wash my brush one more time. Just like in our practice piece, what we're going to do is start at the top and have our big feet of paint and we're going to just keep painting it down, and when we get to our first object over here, we'll just keep painting up to the object and then paint around the object. We'll do that until we get all the way down. Let's get started. Lifting up so I can [inaudible] my angle. If you wanted to, you could have a third part of paint that had an in-between if you wanted it to be a little bit more gradual than what we did last time. I'm going to keep going. I think I want to start adding my pink here in just a little bit. I'm just quickly, spoke without trying to pick up too much pink paint or trying to mix the paints too much. Now I'm at my crow down around. I think we just round brush comes to a pretty nice little point, so I'm just trying to paint around the crow. I have a large puddle of paint here, so I'm just going around. I also want to control my paint to make sure that I don't get any drips. A little bit uneven as you can tell, but I'm just going to keep going. I'm still grabbing a tittle of my ink. As I'm coming up to this crow. [inaudible] this stuff. Then I'm going to end up combining. Whenever I stop, I just want to make sure that there's no bead of paint sitting over there. That way it's not drying. It's okay if you get a little lumpy and bumpy. The pumpkin is a little lumpy and bumpy anyways. The crows feet are black, so I don't mind. I'm just painting over that so I can just combine this two around here. You can say I'm not in like a super I'm just taking my time and working down as I'm going. Because we're painting these leaves with the darker color too. Well, you can either paint right over it if you want. I'm going to leave this other one unpainted. I'm going to start bringing this other one down. Grab a little bit more concentrated ink here. Since we have a ground, the ground is going to be black, so if you wanted to I'm going to use my leftover paint. Here, combine this two. Then I have my crow, and then my pumpkin left, and now everything is sopping wet like it was before. What we're going to do is just take our blow dryer and blow dry everything dry. If you have a puddle of water, just like we did in the exercise, just make sure you get that puddle of water dried up. Otherwise, once you put the blow dryer on it, then it's going to splatter all over your painting. Just make sure that's dry or that's gone before you start blow drying it up. When you're working with watercolor, it's always nice to work from lights to darks. I know you can't see it on camera. I can still see my red outlines over here. If you lost them a little bit, you can always go in right now and add. You can take a pencil or colored pencil or a regular pencil and just go in and draw those in if you can't see yours [NOISE] right now. But let's work on. Like I said, from lights to dark so let's work on our lights next. With our pumpkin, as you can see, you want there to be yellow for the eyes. I liked having just everything yellow to begin with. If you took my other classes, some of this is very much what we've done for that. Some of it you can work a little bit with wet on wet, but we'll try to work on the skills that we've practiced in this class. We'll go little by little. I'm going to paint my whole pumpkin with this yellow just to have a solid color underneath. If you have a little bit of that pink color leftover from your previous paint if you want it to be that a little bit of pink to the edges over here just to give it a bit of an undertone. [NOISE] You can try it if you have solid, if not no biggie since there's a pink. Let me make it a little bit more brownish but running a little bit on wet. But not on the eyes because the eyes we want those two [inaudible]. That's fine. While that's drying, we can just start on our little crow over here. I'm just make sure you're not paying the crows eyes because we want that to be visible. For the crow since that's a little bit more detailed stuff. [NOISE] Right now you can see there's where I was painting my second layer is starting to granulate a little bit, but that's okay. We're going to be painting orange on top of that any way. I'm just making sure I don t get really big splotches anywhere. Softening things up a little bit. Just doing my palette so I can just mix a dark. Because the background is bluish color I wanted the crow to be a bluish black too, and so I'm grabbing some of my hematite, and then my blue that I had leftover here. The first round you want to just do a medium gray and then we're just going to paint over the whole except for the eye. At any point if you feel like you can't see your underlying painting then just stop what you're doing. Make sure your painting is dry and just go back in there, and make it a little bit darker so you can see what you're doing. That's our first layer. We'll let that dry. Then now that everything is wet over here we're going to grab hair blow dryer and [NOISE] blow dry it again. After you have blow dried your piece, then it's time to move on to some layering and details. [MUSIC] 8. Halloween Pumpkin: Details: Now let's continue with our pumpkin.This one's going to be dark, I'm going to leave that last to be one of the last things we paint. Now let's paint our main pumpkin. I'm grabbing that cadmium yellow , and then grab. This is cadmium red, pale from Winsor and Newton. These colors on the bottom are actually from the Winsor and Newton little travel case that they have and I feel like mixing these two together make a pretty little pumpkin color Obviously we are going to be painting around the eyes and actually let me make one color come in between with this color first. This is the color of the pumpkin and so painting the same way as what we were doing with this guy. I'm just trying to keep a wet edge as I'm going around over here and trying to move fairly quickly before things dry out too much. Paint it over my eye just a little bit, so just if you have a mistake and you overpaint something, I'm just wetting my brush and then just fixing it up and I just realized that I forgot to paint the eyes. I've tried it before, that's completely dry. Trying to go in there and fix that too. Now our fading practice. There we go. I didn't notice that there's a swatch over here, so trying to clean that up, so I'm just lifting some of this paint up over here. It's just massaging, massaging everything into places. I'm going to sharpen many edges a little bit. I think that's looking pretty good. Sharp edges. It was wet over here, so I'm just softening those up too, now everything looks pretty nice even if there's a little bit of a area right here, but I think I'm okay with that. It's not a big area. Now again, we've got to make sure things are drying and while this whole area is drying, we can go and work on our crow again. Now I want to mix just the same dark black-blue again, and I want my crow to be darker. If you wanted it to be lighter than your background, you could do that depending on how bright your background is but I want the beak to be lighter than the background and then I want the crow itself to be black. Then the wing is also going to be lighter. I'm going to paint one layer and then I'll see how it dries.Then if I need to paint another layer on top of it, then I might need to do that just to make sure that this is dark enough. Like I said a few times before, I would rather paint lighter layers and then go back and paint it again and make it darker a second time, than painting everything too dark and then you're stuck with it. You can't it's hard to go back and lighten colors up, and the legs also, I'm going to do those at the very end. I don't want to worry about those right now. We go to do that again. Now we're ready to move on to the next part and for that one, we're getting that darker purple or the darker orange that we mixed. We're going to be painting around over here and then fading it, then we'll paint a little bit of the shadows back behind here and around here and then the lobes. I don't want the lobes to be too dark, so we will paint those a little bit lighter, but we just want there to be dark areas all the way around. I'm going to start that and just go little by little. I changed to my smallest brush just to have a little bit more control. Between these, when you're working on your layers. Different brushes are, some of them are softer than the others. My Princeton brush, this is a synthetic brush and it's a little bit more coarse, that's great. It scrubs the surface of the paper a little bit more. Then this is a Kolinsky sable brush though it's made with animal hair.This one is a little bit softer in hand and it doesn't scrub the underlying layers as much as the other one. For the extra layers on the top, if you do happen to have a sable brush, then it always makes it a little bit easier to blend stuff without scrubbing. I just like to go one area at a time and then once I'm done with one place like before I start the lobes, I feel like it's good to dry everything up just to make sure I don't disturb everything else that I just painted. Then we'll work on our lobes after these runs are dry. Then going to grab my dark paint again and paint another layer on my birdie. I think I'm going to add a mouth to my crow to there. I might have to make it a little bit darker on the next round. Blow dry really quick again. [NOISE] Let's move on to the lobes so still using the same paint that I painted before and if you really wanted to, you could just leave it as a line to honestly.That would be just fine if you feel like you don't want to mess your painting up. Since we're working on shading, I'm going to soften them out a little bit. Then we're going to go around here. For the second one. Then I feel like I need a little bit more shadow around over here. So while I have that orange out, I'm going to add this one just feels a little weak so I'm going to add a wash of that over here. I'm assessing as I'm going, keeping everything nice and nice and soft. Then once again, it's about time to drop blow dry and I think to really pop everything up, we'll end up adding one more layer of dark over here just to really make everything pop. While we have the right areas should be pretty dry right now. The pumpkin has dimension, the eyes have dimensions, so we're going to add that dimension in there and so I'm going to make just a darker orange just with the hair of that. Then I'm going to add, and these ones will be sharp lines. There we go and then I'll do it for the mouse. It might eyeball, it looks a little bit washed out, so I'm just getting a little bit of just pure cadmium yellow and just adding a little bit more just in some of these areas. There you go. It's just a little bit brighter now and the same thing for the mouth. Just felt a little washed out. Then at this point, it's time to assess your painting. If everything looks good to you. For me, I feel like this line is not quite dark enough, so I'm going to add more shading over here. I think. Just added a more dimension. Soften that up a little bit. Softening them out. Then let's add our shades and right now it looks a little funny because it's just floating in space. Once we add our leaves around over there, then it will look a lot better so let's do our last shading and then we'll move on to other areas of the painting to finish it off. For the shading. I figure since we have the oranges, is the local color of the pumpkin and then we have the pinkie. It's going to grab, it ends up making a little bit of a I guess you could say the brownish color and then I don't want to do it all the way at the other end. I just want to do it partially but just having these little extra shadows over here really help pop things up. This is rounded around over here and that might even look nice as just a straight line without shading it out or fading it out. Actually, I like that being a solid line. It gives it a little bit of an intro right here. Let's do the same thing. Same thing over here. Now you can see as it's drying, this is starting to look ugly so just staying on that before it's drawing ugly. Then once this is dry, you can see that there's a darker edge right here, and then it gets to lighter ones. I'm going to leave it like that and then once it's actually dry, then I can add a little bit more of pigment down here just to fix that up. Let me show you how to do that. Just let me dry it. Then lets and I also feel like we need darker. Things are getting a little bit too. I add water as I go along. Just need to darken this up a little bit and just filling those out. I feel like this edge needs that to just touch of dark. Sounding a little bit wet on wet because it was being temperamental on me see how that starts trying. I don't want to make it too dark because if I make it too dark then my leaves aren't going to be. The leaves will really pop it out in there. We'll let that beat and start moving on to our other areas so I have this nice brown color now that I used for the shading, I'll just add a little bit water to wash it out or lighten it up. Then we can use that for a little pumpkin top over here. That orange with a little bit of that purple color added in and let's see, I need it to be a little bit darker at the bottom. I just grab that color that I had made for the crow and I'm just adding that in there. I wanted to do one more layer of gray for my make micro even darker than what it is. I'm just making these areas a little bit darker so that they don't, it's not such a big contrast. Now at this point, let it dry again. Use your hair blow dryer, and then let's work on our leaves. 9. Halloween Pumpkin: Leaves and Ground: [MUSIC] Now that we have our pumpkin and our crow is just about done. Now let's make some really deep purple for those leaves. I'm going to just start grabbing my colors over here. Just my pink and I just want it to be a fairly deep then ultramarine and I know that gives us a fairly and I still need it to be darker. Then I'm going to add a little bit of brown to it so that brings it more into a maroon color over there. Let's start painting. Since I'm right-handed, it's easy for me to move from left to right so I don't mess up nice things so then I'm just carefully going to paint this. Reef is going to be behind my pumpkin so I just want to be mindful not to paint on my pumpkin. I'm thinking I'll probably have to paint twice around over here. We'll see how dark this ends up being after the first round. The pumpkins have these ginormous, these lobed leaves with these little, protrusions. They're fun leaves to paint. I just wanted to have one little twisty tourney thing over here too. I thought that would be fine. There we go. While those are drying, we also need to paint the bottom but I don't want to be painting that when I have all these are still wet over here because then my color is going to bleed. What we're going to do is we can work on our crow while we're doing that and then we'll come back. Hopefully, this will be the last layer that I'm going to paint on this crow. Since we have our pumpkin painted, we're also going to be painting the legs. I'm going to add the legs for the crow now. I felt like I didn't need any toes for the crow but if you want toes for your crow, you could add maybe just two toes for it, and then maybe just one up on the top over here. I think I'm pretty happy with my crow and then the little stem of the pumpkin has little lines in it too so I'm just grabbing that color that I was using for the leaves and just lightening it up a little bit, just to draw my little lines over here. There we go, that adds a fun little element and then these are still wet. If your elements on the bottom are still wet after painting the top, then grab your blow dryer and dry them off really quick. Now just for our last little highlights for our painting. For the ground over here, I grabbed on the purple that I used for the leaves and some of the blue that I had mixed up for the sky earlier and I'm just going to paint that along over here and mine it's a little bit lighter than what my leaves are. I guess I could have used a bigger brush, but this is fine for now. In the same way as before when we were painting the sky since this is a big area too, I'm just trying to keep a wet front going over here as I'm moving over from one corner to the other. Then we can give the pumpkin a little bit of a shadow too but for that to happen, then we need to wait for this to dry. Just adding some more pigment around over here. There it's looking pretty good. Let's dry this yet again and then we'll add our last little details to it. Now with the same color, I was using before, I am just going to add a little bit of what you would imagine. There's going to be dirt on the ground and stuff. This is just dry on dry and it'll be I like to make it a little bit speckly and that way that just gives us a little bit added texture in there. Then I wanted to work and make my, grabbing some of my black from my crow just to darken my purple for my leaves and these leaves that are in the front, I wanted these to be really dark. It's not about them being really realistic. It's just pushing things in the front or in the back and having these dark, you don't bring these up to, it brings these in front of everything and up and up to the front there. I'm leaving the two back one's a little bit lighter, but these front ones I want it to be darkest ones at all and then once they're dry, if you wanted to add veins with the darkest of dark, you could do that and then we're pretty much done. I'm just adding a little bit more interest since, after the stride, this wasn't really that dark, so just adding a few things over here. Sometimes it's always dark when you put it on and then once it dries, it dries a lot lighter than what you thought it was going to be there. Dry again. Now just to add the final little details to our painting. As I said, I like to add the little veins to the leaves. If you have two options, you can either add it with the black and add black veins or you could add it with a lighter color if you had a lighter pencil like I have this light gray. I could add the lines with that, so it's up to you, which look you like better so today let's see. Let me add, or I have this orangey color. Maybe we'll use the orange and so use this to add the veins. It's nice because it's orange and that way it matches my pumpkin. In my practice piece that I had done for this class, I had made the veins with a black. It's up to you if you wanted to try that too and then I do like the idea of the pumpkin having a little bit more texture. Let's mix just a little bit more of that orange color. I just have a little bit too much water to it. I just wanted to add a little bit more texture to my pumpkin, so it's not quite dark enough, you can't see it. It's a little bit dark so I'm just lightning in this spot up a little bit. Just adding some little texture things is just, it just adds a visual interest since pumpkins aren't perfect things that grow up there. They might have little beauty spots and things so it's nice to add that in there. You don't want to add too many, just a few and then I think we're done. What do you think? Our happy little Halloween pumpkin. We have to do our tape peel because that's always very satisfying at the end. I hope you enjoyed painting with me. Now I know that you might not be watching this during fall and Halloween season or you might not celebrate Halloween. I have completely different second project that will be in the next video that you can paint just the regular fall-themed pumpkin with a little square on the top. I'll see you in that video. [MUSIC] 10. Alternative Pumpkin Painting: [MUSIC] For a little bonus video and project for you guys, I know that you might not be watching this video when it's right before Halloween, and so I wanted to include a second option for a painting for you. This is a daytime one, and for this one, we're still going to be practicing the same thing with painting the gradation for the background, but we're going to be using just a lighter blue and a lighter pink, and then we're going to be painting the pumpkin during the daytime. For this painting, I'm just including a time-lapse video for you to watch. It's very similar to what we did for our first painting for the main project, but if you would rather paint just a fall pumpkin with a little squirrel, then this is included in your sketches too, and I hope you enjoy the time-lapse. [NOISE] [MUSIC] [NOISE] [MUSIC] I hope you've picked up some fun tips from watching that video. Now, let's look at some advanced applications of how to use the smooth painting technique. 11. Advanced Applications: [MUSIC] As I mentioned in the video when we were painting our pumpkins, that I use this technique especially when I'm drawing animals. I just wanted to show a few examples of what I've done in the past. Over here, I've used the fading technique to paint the nose and the cheek red as you can tell. On the second example, I've obviously used it for the sky. Then you can also tell if you look at the little mouse on the bottom, how it has a color fade from a reddish brown to a lighter brown down towards the middle of the ball and off this fall, so there's fades in the snow over here and around over here. Then a lot of times when I'm painting birds, birds will have a lot of those gradations from one area to another. You can see some softer shading over here, and on the back of the waxwing around over here and around over here. A lot of times [MUSIC] I'll start with the fade on the bottom, and then I'll add texture to it, then I'll add a wet on dry technique to add the feathers to it. This technique is really useful for a lot of different ways. You can also see it here on the hummingbird, how it's got lighter and then darker on the edges. This is a really useful technique to use when you're using it with other types of techniques. Actually what I plan to do, is for the next video following this one, we are going to be putting everything that we've learned into use, and we're going to be practicing fur and feather textures on animals and birds. That will be our subject for the next class. [MUSIC] 12. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Congratulations for finishing the class. I hope you had fun and feel more confident in creating smooth areas of color and nice soft shading. If you haven't checked out my other watercolor classes, I teach you all the basics in watercolor. We go over negative painting, wet on wet painting, we talk about compositions, and which supplies are best for watercolors. I hope that this class spiced up some fun ideas for fall themed illustrations that you can use as decorations, as cards, and to give as little gifts. [MUSIC] All the files that you need to complete the illustrations in the projects in this class are in the Projects and Resources section of this page. They are easiest to access and print out from a desktop computer. If you feel brave, I hope that you will upload a photo of your final project into the Projects and Resources page of this class. I love seeing all of them. Especially if you need any help or you want some comments or critique on it or you had a problem, feel free to write that in your comments and I'll be happy to respond to all your questions. If you are on social media, you can tag me at Mirka Hokkanen and use the hashtag MirkaSkillshare. Remember to follow me here on Skillshare, so that way you'll be notified of all my upcoming classes. Take care, happy painting, and I'll see you in the next class. Bye.