Simplifying Watercolor Painting: Techniques for Negative Painting and Creating Depth

1. Intro: [MUSIC] Hi, my name is Mirka Hokkanen and I'm an artist, an illustrator, author, and an educator. I've been painting with watercolors for 30 years and use it as a medium to create illustrations for picture books, puzzles, hung goods, greeting cards, and fine arts. In this class, you will learn how to create a rainbow under-layer using a wet-on-wet painting technique. Then how to use negative painting to create a magical sense of depth in your piece. I want you to approach watercolor with an open mindset. Don't judge yourself and just have fun with it. The reason why I love the wet-on-wet painting and negative painting techniques together, is because you can create these magical worlds that you can look into. There is an element of the unexpected and of magic, and even if you painted the same thing twice, you would never have two paintings that are exactly alike. We're going to start easy and do some negative painting exercises, and I'm going to share with you some of the tips that I do to create negative paintings. [NOISE] For our final project, we're going to put those skills to good use and create this magical scene of a greenhouse with the cat in it. This class is easy enough for beginners, but if you already have experience with watercolor, you can take the skills that we use in this class to create magical scenes of your own. Either way, everyone will be able to walk away from this class, feeling more confident and adding more color to your paintings and trying out new techniques. Are you ready to have fun with watercolors? Join me in simplifying watercolor painting techniques for negative painting and creating depth. I'll see you in class. 2. What is Negative Painting?: [MUSIC] Welcome to the class. In today's class, we are going to get comfortable with understanding what negative painting is. We're going to do simple warm-up exercises to get used to painting negative shapes and after that, we are going to dive into our main project of painting a magical [NOISE] rainbow and greenhouse like this. The reason I chose this project is because it's an easy, simple way to learn negative painting, and at the end of it you're going to have a beautiful painting that you can keep for yourself or give as a gift. I'm going to share my painting and design tips and tricks with you while we paint together. Before we dive into our painting exercises, let's look at what negative painting is, and how it can be an asset in your toolbox of watercolor painting skills. The subject that we have in our painting is called the positive shape, like over here, the tree. If we paint the area around it, that is called the negative shape and we can paint either one of these and reveal the shape of the object. When we paint the positive shape, a lot of times we'll paint all the details in it. But when we were painting the negative shape around it, you're getting just the silhouette of the object. In most cases we paint the objects themselves, so in this example, the trees and the grass. But in this class, what I wanted to concentrate on is what happens when we paint the negative spaces around the objects. You can see the difference between the two shapes or between the two little thumbnail paintings is when we're painting positive shapes, usually our shapes are the darker values and everything that's closer is going to be darker and when we're painting, the negative shapes usually ends up being the opposite. Whatever is closest to the viewer is going to be a lighter color and then the farther back we get, the darker values become. Before we get to our little exercises in this class, let's look at the supplies that we need. [MUSIC] 3. Supplies: [MUSIC] In my previous Skillshare class, wet-on-wet rainbow technique, I go over all my choices of tools 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. Let's look at what we're going to be using today. First of all, for the paper, I am using hot press paper that's 300 grams or 140 pounds, and I recommend having that weight of paper just because it's better with buckling, with the paper warping once you get it wet, and it usually returns back to its nice flat self. The reason why I recommend hot-press over cold-press is because I liked having the option of using pencils with my watercolor paintings and using cold press paper, you end up getting a lot of texture from the pencils, and so using hot press paper, it really enables me to get much more detailed lines in my paintings after I'm done painting it. That's the paper. I use Stonehenge brand, but you could also use other good quality brands. I recommend Arches or Stonehenge I like, and then Fabriano as well. As far as brushes, I recommend you getting three different sizes, so large and a medium and a small. These ones are a size 12, and size 8 and size 3, and these ones are just round brushes. Then alternatively, personally I really like these pointed filbert. These are by Princeton and you can buy this brand at most art supply stores like Michaels. I like these because they're skinny on one side, but then they are wide and so the top part will hold a lot of water and a lot of paint, but then it comes down to a really, really nice point, so you can paint really big areas with it, but also get a lot of details. As you'll notice when we're painting, I really like to just hold onto one brush. I don't like to keep changing brushes in the middle of painting, so I'll usually just try to finish one whole area just by using one brush. Then third, just get a large jug of water, and this one holds probably about, I don't know, 20 ounces or maybe even more, maybe 30 ounces. The bigger the cup of the less often you have to go and change the water in it. Then really simple, I have a roll of paper towels. I just pick one and take a piece off and hold it in my hand when I'm painting. Then you'll need a set of watercolors. This set is by a brand called Etchr, and I have a couple of other sets too, but today I'm going to be using this one. Then lastly, if you want to paint a little bit faster, it's nice to have just the hair blow dryer. Just as a reminder, if you have wet paint that you're trying to dry, don't go blowing right on it with the high-speed because then your paint is going to splatter. Always start from farther away and as things are starting to dry, then you can bring your blow dryer a little bit closer to dry things faster. Just for transferring your first initial sketch onto your watercolor paper, you can either use a regular old pencil for it. Personally, I like to use these Prismacolor Col-Erase pencils. I like having the red outlines on my drawings before I start painting. If you wanted to, you could use a little bit of an eraser to erase some parts of your sketch. But personally, I don't mind having the red outlines as much as I mind having dark gray outlines in my paintings, so I personally I prefer to use a colored pencil rather than the regular pencil, and also the Prismacolor Col-Erase pencils, are colored pencils that you can erase. That way if you make a mistake in your sketch, you can erase it and then sketch again. This is completely optional, if you want to use some, this is masking fluid and you can use masking fluid to get the lines on to your painting. Before you start painting, you would use the masking fluid and paint these in so that way you can color everywhere else, and then once you're done coloring, you can just rub this stuff off. But just a word of caution for it, sometimes I would recommend that you try it on a scrap piece of paper before actually putting it on your painting, because some different brands are harder to peel off than others, some of them might damage or discolor your paper. Personally in general, I don't use a lot of masking fluid, but because we have these really skinny white lines, it might be something that you might want to try and I'm also going to be using it for this painting. But another option that you could get around would be you could use white paper, and just cut that skinny area out and then glue it on the top, or you could use white gouache or white acrylic paint or paint markers to paint those lines in. It's up to you what technique you want to use for those lines in the final painting. Now that we've covered all our supplies, let's get to working on some warm-up exercises. [MUSIC]. 4. Exercises: [MUSIC] Now that we have our tools all set, let's start with our warm-up exercises. While we're going over these exercises, I wanted to go over the basic rules for creating depth. Rule number 1 is value. When we're talking about the negative painting technique, in this technique, the darker shades will always feel like they're further away, and so the bigger contrast you have between the lightest area in your painting and the darkest area in your painting, the further away from each other they're going to appear. Rule number 2 is that cooler colors recede and warmer colors come forwards. In art, that's called the atmospheric perspective. For example, if we look at this photo, we can see that the further we get from the foreground, the cooler and less saturated things get in color. We're going to be taking advantage of that by painting layers of blue paint on our paintings to make items recede. Rule number 3 is layering. Placing objects in front of each other creates a sense of depth. You want to avoid tangents, so even if you don't have a huge difference in value between two objects, one that's in the front and one that's in the back, we know which one is farther than the other because they are overlapping. Let's look at some of the easy exercises that you can do to practice negative shapes. For the exercises today and to also strengthen the ideas of the three rules, I have just drawn out a few little thumbnails over here that I'm going to paint with you. Before I start with anything with my rainbow underlayer, I like to premix my colors. I love this Retro color palette just because it has really, really bright colors on it, so it's really easy for me to get really beautiful underlayers of colors. I'm going to premix my colors, and I'm going to paint my underlayer for all of these before I actually start painting the negative layers. [NOISE] I've already lightly sketched everything, and so to play with my rainbow underlayer, I'm going to just paint my whole square and then I'm going to go and just drop in some colors, and because it's already wet, some of the colors are going to be bleeding. That's good for that. Then I'm going to just move on to the next one. You can also play just with different colors and how they mix. Right now, I'm just making backgrounds. After I'm done with all of these, I'm going to take my blow dryer and then blow dry everything dry so that I can start working on the negative painting techniques. As you can tell, I'm not really being super careful about staying inside the lines. These are just exercises, so it doesn't matter. [NOISE] These are just colors in general that I like, but you are welcome to make up whatever colors you feel good to you. You can create different moods by picking different colors for the background. If you're not sure about the how strong your color should be, it's always a good idea to start maybe with lighter colors because you can always make colors darker in the areas that you want colors to be darker, but you can't make them lighter anymore, so always start with lighter colors and then you can always paint them darker. If you want your paints to mix a little bit, you can swish them around. But a lot of times, if you're mixing opposite colors, you'll end up with muddy colors. I just try to let the water mix my colors and leave it at that. To work on our negative painting technique, I'm going to be just mixing a blue puddle of paint for myself over here. I'm grabbing a few of my, I have ultramarine and I have Prussian blue in here, and then whatever green I had in there before. It doesn't have to be really dark blue because we're going to be doing several layers of it. I want it to be a lighter or a middle-shaded blue, about that dark. We're going to work on our negative painting here in a simple way. Over here, I have three lumps or bumps or humps painted. I'm going to start by just painting around all of them first just to make sure that I know where my shapes are. If I paint over the shapes right in the beginning, then sometimes it's hard for me to see where my shapes are with successive layers because I've already covered them up with one layer of blue and then sometimes it's hard to see where my line work was. Usually, with my first layer of blue, I try to paint around everything. There's one. Then let's do the same thing over here. Over here, I've grouped my mountains together, and because we're doing these washes, they need a little bit of time to dry in-between, so by the time we get to the bottom, hopefully these top ones are going to be already over here. Same thing, I'm just going to paint. I have these, I'm imagining them to be maybe like little bushes or something like that. Then over here, [NOISE] I had drawn a bunch of squares on this one. For this one, I am doing leaves, and so this is a scattered pattern. [NOISE] The same way as over here, it's going to be easier just to paint some of those leaves in. There's that one. Then for here, I've drawn a whole bunch of like a jungle scene, and so these are just imaginary shapes. They could be a forest, but I've never seen quite a tree like this. But the important thing is just to have these different shapes that are overlapping. Because these are overlapping, it's easy for me to tell which layer they're in. Now I've painted all my negative areas over here, and so to create the depth, I'm just going to paint successive layers and cover some of my areas up. At this point, I'm going to cover one of these up, so I'm going to paint the same as I did before, but cover one up. I'm going to paint everything that I already painted before. With every layer, my background layer is going to keep getting darker, and I'm going to be fading areas in. At this point, I'm going to be covering this one up. Same thing with our next one. With this one, it's easier to see which one is in the back. With this one, we were doing a little bit different and we'll just paint squares out and you can just make this up as you go. Leaves, I'm just going to be adding same way as over here, adding leaves into over here. We've got the second layer done over there. I'm now moving on to our second layer over here. You can always make areas darker afterwards if you feel like things aren't dark enough, but you got to make sure things are dry because otherwise you're going to be lifting your paint up as you're going. Now it's time to paint a second layer, and my first layers are not quite dry yet, so I'm going to take my hair drying thing and dry them again. With these first two, they're very simple. We're only going to have three layers. When I'm laying my washes of blue down, I'm trying not to scrub my underlying layers. I'm just trying to put each layer down little by little. I'm just making these shapes up as I'm going. Depending how subtle your underlying layers, that determines how many layers you can get going. The darker it gets, then the harder it is for you to make layers anymore. It's always good to start with light layers and then move up. Or if you need to strengthen layers, for example, over here, it's really hard to see that initial tree that I painted over here, I can always go and just paint that in again with some darker color and we'll let it dry and do the last two. [NOISE] The important thing to remember with this technique is just values and when you have really bright brights, they're going to be the brightest when you put them against the darkest darks. If there's something that you really, really want to highlight, if you put something dark right next to it, then for example, right here, these leaves are really going to pop because they're going to be against the darkest darks in our painting. Now that I have all my layering, I can go and add leaves over there and leaves over here and add details if I wanted to. Then if there wasn't enough definition for my background where my first and last layers were, then I could go back and just add more darkness to my very first layer here. Now that we're all warmed up, let's get ready for our final project. [MUSIC] 5. Transferring Sketch : [MUSIC] There's a few different ways that you can transfer your sketch onto the paper. As part of this class, I'm providing you with a copy of our drawing. To make things simple, all you have to do is transfer this drawing onto your watercolor paper and then you're good to go. A few ways to do this is if you have a light table, this one is just a really cheap one that I've purchased from online. As you can see when I put my drawing underneath, I can then draw my picture on the top or my sketch on the top. But even if you go onto a window and you just tape this onto a window, that works just as well on a sunny day. If you don't want to do either one of those, what you can do is if you just color with a graphite pencil on the back of your drawing, [NOISE] you color the whole area out. [NOISE] Let me do it on a scrap. Then when you come to the top and you draw through, [NOISE] you draw your whole drawing through, and then those lines will transfer onto your paper underneath. This is probably my least favorite way to transfer a drawing just because, when I'm doing it like this, my lines are usually a little bit, they're chunky and they don't always line up perfectly. For me, it's easier if I sometimes I'll sketch on top just to make sure that things line up and are properly put together. With this technique, it really works best with the pencil. I don't think the red pencil would transfer really well from the backside. You do have to use graphite when you do this or even a transfer paper, but transfer paper, I don't think that's erasable. Then you're going to have dark lines in your painting, that's not the idea. But if you use graphite and pencil, then at least you can erase part of this and make it lighter if you don't want to have dark outlines in your final drawing. That's three different options that you can do. Option 1, use a light table, option 2, go up against the window, and option 3 is tracing your drawing through your paper. [NOISE] If you're using 300 pound paper for this class, this is 300 pound. You can see how rigid it is. You don't need to stretch or tape your painting down. Personally, what I like to do is that, when I'm painting, I like to be able to turn my paper around easily so that I can easily paint into all the nooks and crevices around my paper. If I take my paper down on a large sheet of something, it becomes harder to turn around when I'm working on it. If I was working on a very large painting, then I would probably tape it down or staple it down on a board. But with these small little paintings that are eight by ten or five by seven size, I usually don't tape anything down. If you chose to use masking fluid for your painting, then make sure that you paint that on and let it dry completely before you actually start putting watercolor down onto your paper. As you can see, I'm using a quill or a dip pen to apply the masking fluid onto my paper. You could also use a brush, but I find that the advantage of the quill is that, once the masking fluid dries on it, it's easy for me to peel it off and I don't ruin my brushes in the process if I was using just regular paintbrushes to apply it on. I do find that I get a little bit more control maybe with my paintbrushes, but I don't like this destroying them, so that's why I use the quill. [MUSIC] After you're done transferring your sketch onto your paper, we're ready to move on to the next video and begin painting. [MUSIC] 6. Rainbow Underlayer: [MUSIC] I'm so excited that we get to start painting our final project. To begin the painting, we're going to start by mixing some colors that we want to serve as the base rainbow layer of our painting. After the colors are mixed, we wet our whole image area up and drop the ready mixed colors onto it. I tried to think in general what I want my final image to look like. There's areas that I wanted to stay very light, I avoid dropping dark colors on there. For example, I know what my front plants are and where my cat is and I just want to make sure that those areas stay the lightest and I don't drop a dark purple where I want the light area to be. Also, if this is your first time painting a rainbow underlayer, don't worry about it too much. This is an exercise and I hope that you'll take a few times to practice this technique, to see all the possibilities you can create with it and with the exercises that we already did, hopefully you're warmed up with the technique already so try to have fun with it and use your favorite colors. Now between going too dark or too light, I tried to air between having too little color so that that way you can always go and add more later, but you really can't take the paint off without making a mess afterwards. If you accidentally put down too much color, you can always dab it with your paper towel and add more water and use a dry brush to mop up some of that excess. Then after we're done, we're going to let our rainbow layer dry and then we are ready to begin the negative painting. You can see it's relatively wet and the paper's buckling a little bit. We're going to take our time and let this dry or you can use your blow dryer and blow dry it dry if that's what you feel like doing. Once your paper is dry, we can move on to the first layer of blue. 7. Negative Painting - First Layer: [MUSIC] Now that we have everything dry on our rainbow under layer, let's begin with our negative painting. To begin with that, just like when we we're doing our practices, a little practice squares. I'm going to make myself some blue paint here on the side. It's up to you what shade of blue you choose in general, I usually like Prussian blue. Depending where you want to go with this piece, you can make more of a greenish blue or a purply blue. [NOISE] It's up to you. But since I have a lot of purple colors in here already, maybe I'll add a little bit of purple into my blue mix as well. [NOISE] You can always have a scrap piece of paper where you can test your colors. I'm adding a little bit of water in it, wanting to make it a little bit lighter. For our first layer, we are going to start with the technique or the negative painting where we're starting out with our smallest areas that we're going to be expanding into other areas. For the first layer, I'm going to just be painting all the edges. We're on the all the outsides. I'm going to be painting around all my plants and painting just the background. Making sure I'm continuing my lines through the different panes of glass. I find when I'm working on these a little bit more complicated than painting squares or rectangles, it makes it easier for me to see where my painting is if I do the first step, especially where I paint around everything because that way it's easy to see where everything is. I'm using a medium-sized brush, I'm using my size 8 round. As you can tell over here, I'm just [NOISE] turning my paper as I'm painting around to get all my little corners painted more easily. I'm just taking my time to go around everything. There is our first layer. Even if it's not perfect, you'll notice that there's some edges over here, like right over here where it dried a little bit unevenly. It's going to be okay because we'll be painting several other layers on the top and then that way it'll be less noticeable when we're done. Now, if you have any wet areas over here before you start working on the second layer of blue, I recommend that you blow dry it in-between right now. [MUSIC] I noticed I had missed a few [NOISE] spots right up over here. I'm going to paint those in really quick. I probably should have gone over here so I have to try to fix that a little bit later. [MUSIC] 8. Creating Layers With Blue: [MUSIC] In this video, we have the first layer done and we're going to start adding depth into our painting. So now we start thinking backwards and thinking what's going to be farther and what's going to be in the front. So we know that these two plants are going to be in the front and some leaves are obviously farther in the front than the others. Then we have this plant is behind this one, and then the cat is behind these two plants. We know that these will be the brightest, then this one can be the next one, then this one will be the next one, next one. I feel like the cat and this plant with the round leaves are on the same level. Then we have this palm tree looking thing that's all the way going to be in the back. At this point, we're going to take our blue paint again and paint everything. This time I'm going to be painting on top of my tree in the back. I'm going to be wetting my brush, [NOISE] you just have to make sure that your layers are completely dry in-between. I'm painting with the same paint I did the last layer this time because you can tell I'm going to be painting on top. Maybe since the cat is in its own layer, I'm going to paint on top of the cat too. Now it's up to you if you want to leave lighter eyes for the cat. But if you wanted the cat's eyes to really shine, you could paint around your cat's eyes too. With this window panes, it's easy to go in sections. When you start working on your successive layers after that, you don't necessarily always have to paint around everything. [NOISE] For example, for the next layer, I know I want this leaf to be behind this leaf. I'm going to be painting a lighter color behind over there, the same thing as I did over here on top. I'm going to do over here, start revealing that front plant over there. Then we'll have to paint at least one more layer over here just to make sure there is a difference between this plant and the plant behind it. This is the first layer to make a difference and then we'll paint another one after this side is dry. There we go. I'm with the same token. Let's paint over this plant over here. If at any point you feel like you're starting to lose your palm tree in the back, you can always paint an extra layer of blue behind just to pop it out a little bit more. You can see how we're starting to get nice layering going on over here. I was talking about that greenish color. I think this plant, I want it to be a little bit more green. I know this is going to be darker than this layer, but let's concentrate on this for just a little bit just to make sure we can get some definition for our leaves over here. I have [NOISE] whatever leftover green I had over here and I mixed some blue in with it, I have a blueish green. I have a light, green, so let's start mixing. I want it to be fairly light. This is obviously my darkest leaf, so I'm going to be painting this first. Then I'm going to let this dry and then paint the other layer. We're also layering not only with the blue, but also with a greenish color. I'm going to add some in the back over there too. While that's drying, maybe we can do same thing over here. Instead of fading with blue all these layers, I'm fading some of these layers with the green color too just to give them more of a leaf color. I'm trying to paint these layers relatively quickly, just glazing these colors on the top, you can see the fun thing happening over here there was the underlayer had yellow and it had pink. Now that I glazed this green on the top, I'm getting really beautiful fades between the different colors. While I was painting this, this side is dry so we could go and paint another layer over here. Let me see. Do I want to add? I want to add at least a little bit over here. I don't want it to be just completely yellow leaf. I might just add a little bit of green, going to wash my brush, and then just fade that edge a little bit so it's not so sharp. But now even with that simple layering, I have 1, 2, 3 and 4 different layers just with my background. As that's drying, we can start bringing in little details all throughout over here. If you feel like you're losing, like for me I feel like I'm starting to lose my palm tree in the back, I can add one more layer of blue over there. I'm just going to concentrate on popping out that palm tree a little bit, just to have a little bit more definition, and that enabled me to paint a little bit around my cat too. Maybe add a little bit more darkness in here. You just keep going around your painting and finding little spots that needs to go, well you can't go lighter, but areas that you can make darker to make give areas more definition and work on that layering things that need to be behind something else and things that need to come forward more. Maybe there's the trunk of the palm tree so we can make a little bit of a distinction for that too. As you can see, it's starting to come together. Then we can start thinking about what we want the colors of our plants in the front to be. Since this is a imaginary scene, not everything has to be the color that you would find it in nature. We could add, for example, if we have some pinks and yellows over here, we could add a little bit more of those and just strengthen those areas. This is quinacridone rose. I'm going to wash my brush. I'll just fade. I'm not doing everything at the same strength you could say. I'm adding just a little bit of red on this end just so it's not all exactly the same. There. I'm going to do something similar over here. I wanted to do some fades of pink and maybe add some red and yellow. Then just with a clean brush, shade some areas out so we get a little bit of uneven color. Maybe we have these yellow leaves, so maybe I'll go for more of an orange over here. I'll start with an orange at the tip of the leaf and then get my pink. I'm just supporting whatever under layers I have over there. I want this leaf to be behind this other leaf. I could even have a darker edge over here, maybe all that a little bit of red faded in the back and then get a brighter color too, faded into going up. Do the same thing down here at the bottom or where our pop is. That covers that. Then we'll add some details to these leaves here in a little bit too. I can tell that this is still wet, so I'm not going to touch that quite yet. The next I could just keep moving on my parts. Maybe let's work on this part since it'll be in the back. Here, I'm mixing all the colors in my yellow palette. Just painted my front pot corner. If you make a mistake like that, then just dry your brush really quick, then you should be able to soak up some of that before it completely dries. Then once this area is dry, I'll go back and fix that up a little bit. Everybody's paintings are going to be different depending on where you dropped colors before. You have to feel your way around and figure out what colors you want. Where do you want purples or pinks, I think I'll add a darker purple here. I start out with green and then I ended up with purple at the bottom. Then we'll have to darken this corner over here too. At this point it becomes massaging your layers and sending things backwards with consecutively darker areas of pain. You just have to go little by little and carefully and figure out what looks good and what looks bad. That's why I recommend for people to work small, especially in the beginning once they're still figuring everything out. Because if you're working on a smaller piece, then that way you'll have less time invested in it. If you don't like the way that it turned out at the end, then it was little time and little paint and little invested in it and then it becomes a great learning experience. Then you can paint another piece and then use everything that you've gained, all that experience to make the next painting that much better. There I feel like we still need some darkness in here. Let's see. I still have several areas that are drawing in this piece that are not quite wet yet, but I feel like I need a little bit more. I have some hot pinks down here, so I feel like I need a little bit more pink in here. What I think I'm going to do is add pinks over here and then fade it down into more of a purple down towards the bottom. Let's start with those pinks first. You can see it's a Ronnie light color. I like the color this one's already at. Then grab my purple. Start adding purples down here and kind of fading stuff out. I feel like it needs that some of this shade in there to make some of that next. Well, this is still wet, I think I'm going to drop just add some edges just to add some more interest in here so it's not all the same color. I'm just going around and figuring out where I feel like I need more. Let's see. I know I noticed that for at least myself. I have a green area right here and it looks lonely by itself. I might add some green just as a shade somewhere up over here too. Maybe there's something behind this palm tree or maybe I'll even just paint some of it on my palm tree. It's just trying to figure out where your colors are and balancing things out. Let's see, we have this part over here. Sometimes I'll even use just a piece of scrap paper to mix just a little bit of color in someone that lip. That looks nice. Then maybe I'll add some to the bottom over here. Then I'll fade that out, rinse my brush and leave it semi-wet. You'll see once it dries, it'll look a little bit better. Now that we have all of our layers established, let's start working on some details for our painting. [MUSIC] 9. Adding Details: [MUSIC] Now that our basic layering is done with the blues, let's start adding some fun details to our plants. We are starting with this front plant and adding some lines into the leaves. Depending what color the leaves are in your background. You can also change the color of what your lines are. Since we're doing details now might be a good time to change into a smaller brush. Let's see. So since I'm doing details, this is my size three round. Let's see, I was doing green. Maybe for that back plant, I'll do a purple again. It doesn't have to be super dark, but it'll just give some visual interest to your piece and see see. Trying to think what color I want my details to be in there. Maybe I'll make them kind of an orangey color. These I might do a second round just to make them slightly darker. For the inspiration for these plants, I did obviously look at some plant pictures, green greenery pictures online and you probably know a lot that you have a catalog in the back of your mind anyways. As you can tell, these do have references to real plants, but it's up to you, however, how close you want to stay to reality in these paintings. I feel because I'm not really painting super all my colors are really often not super realistic. It's okay to veer off from reality and do different things at different sizes than what they might normally be. While I'm working on this plant, I'm going to also add some outlines to it. Just very faint. Since I'm on this blue kind of purpley leaf, I'm just taking the same color and just adding a little bit of an outline there and just fixing some of those areas ups I've been painting before. Even if you wanted to add outlines for the different layers, you could do that too. With my color choices. I'm just trying to think how I can enhance the colors that I already had underneath over there. None of these are really strong colors. But just using colors that are already existing over there. We have this little mushroom. Maybe we'll add some color just to the top of it. I'm pretty happy with this area. I'm liking the colors that I have. If you wanted to. Maybe my green is a little bit faint over there. I'm going to grab a bigger brush again, glazing your colors is easier if you have bigger brush. If I wanted to add a little bit more of just a brighter green on that. I drew over there. Just to give it a little bit more on what I was saying earlier. If your colors are a little bit too light, you can always go back and add more later. Starting to look pretty good, then we have our little plant. Let's get our layer on our plant. There we go. That'll create a nice succulent plant for us. Then once that dries and we can work on our cat for this plant, I figured because I made the stripes over here, maybe it would be fun to do more of a splotchy broken up pattern over here. I'm going to choose colors that I already have and just add these dots over here. There might not be a plant exactly like this. This is more like a stylistic choice of how to add patterns to our paintings. Then for the front, front one, obviously, I'm trying to enhance the colors underneath, so I'm going to pick a green. Then it could even be a few different shades of green. I could do a brighter green on the outside of the leaf and then do a more reddish green on this end. I didn't change my brushes, I'm still using that big one. Go in-between, I'll add some green. But even that add some visual interests, just having two different colors of dots going on over there. We're starting to look pretty good. Let's add some lines to our plant. I'm going with the dirty yellow. I'll add a little bit of this brown to this stem over here. Leaving a little bit of extra space just to let it breathe. I still wanted to fade this a little bit on this side since I do have that belief that it's kind of overlapping. Now, we have our cat sitting over here waiting for us to notice it. For the cat, what I wanted to do was I wanted to just give it outlines for the eyes. Obviously we want to paint the inside of its eyes. Maybe depending what color your cat you want to be, you could color in the same way as we added green to these leaves. You could add a color to your cat as well. But I like my cat just being I like him being this color. Maybe I won't add too much to it. Maybe I'll add some, just a little bit of yellow maybe highlights to it. It is an abstracted cat rather than a realistic one. Not adding a ton of color to it. Just a little hint of yellow. While it's drying. Let's do some details around over here. For these plants I wanted to do these veins that radiate from the middle. Maybe for this one, I'll just do a darker version of it. We've just given everything. I want it to just fade in the back so I'm not going to give it too much detail. I don't want there to be a lot of stuff that's fighting for attention in the back. I'm going to do very light, very light blue details for it. At this point my cat is dry, and let's start working on those eye balls. Also, I've been using my rag and this is getting really wet and soggy. At this point, I'm going to put this as high then grab a new one. For eyeballs, let's do some outlines and I'm going to turn it where my cat is going to be the closest to me. I don't want it to be super-duper dark, but I do want it to show. This you could also do either with your colored pencils or you can do it, I'll do it with hand at least once. Then we might add some colored pencils over here too. Now to draw the actual pupils, I'm going to turn it right around so that I make sure that I get everything in the middle. You can always make it lighter and then come back and make it darker. There, trying to just match them up. Then if you wanted to add some hairs or some texture to your cat, you could do that too. I'm going to grab a reddish grayish color. The same way as we added over here. I'm going to add some ears for our kitty cat too. I feel like I need to go a little bit darker in this part. When I went to fade an area out, I paint up to it and while the paint is drying, I wash my brush and I dry my brush. Then with just a little bit of water left by my brush, I'm just pulling, teasing that color out from there. I feel I'm ready to grab my color pencils out next. If you still have wet areas, you can dry your painting first and then we will get to the final details. [NOISE] 10. Details - Part 2: [MUSIC] In this segment, we're going to be adding details into our painting with pencils. Now pencils are optional. You can also add details with a small paintbrush and watercolor, but I like the pencils because they're a little bit faster and also opaque, so I can get a little bit more color into my painting rather than painting with my watercolors. I've grabbed just a handful, a big handful of colored pencils, and they're the same colors that I see happening over here. We can use the color pencils just to shape some of the edges that we have going on over here starting from one end and going to the other. It's just nice being able to add a little bit of definition to some areas here and there. In some areas, I'll use a slightly different color than what I have. In the same way, as we were adding highlights with complementary colors, you can use complementary colors when you're doing outlines too, and even if you wanted to color areas in, you could. The nice thing is if you are using hot-pressed paper, then your colors should go on really nice and smooth. This is just the time where everything starts. At least for me, this is where everything starts singing and where everything starts coming together as you know. Everything will look just awful up until now, and then at the last minute, once you start putting those final details in, that's when everything really just comes together. I need to have a darker red over here. Here we do have a darker shape that's in front of a lighter shape, but that's okay. Adding these extra line details will help distinguish what is where. It is defining different areas that might've gotten a little bit lost, especially on areas where you've been painting multiple times over. I can tell that on this leaf right there, there's already a pinkish, there's a red outline that I did in the beginning, so I'm just going to keep highlighting that. I like the way that it shows up around over here so not all the outlines are at the same. Maybe we'll add some highlights over here. For that background, I will grab my darkest blue. [NOISE] We can do some outlines just to make sure what goes where. You don't have to shade everything in the background, but some areas it might be nice to help define a little bit further. It's up to you. Even after you do your pencils, you can still go back with watercolors and add more layers of watercolor if that's what you feel like. I was just looking at the painting, and I feel like I need to add one more layer of paint over here to fade this out just a little bit further. Sometimes you just need to take a moment and look at your painting and figure out what it needs moving forward. Everybody is going to be slightly different but I felt with this being so bright and this being so bright, the middle part just needed to move back in space, just a little bit. I still feel like this one is really bright, so we're going to be adding little bit more color over there. After your paper is completely dry, we can start removing the masking fluid. I've seen people use erasers, plastic cling wrap, but I usually just use my clean finger to rub it off. The brand I have seems to be really sticky, so I take my time with it so it won't damage my paper. [MUSIC] I can tell that some of my yellow areas are light around some of these areas, so I'm going to add just some outlines. [MUSIC] Now, if your masking fluid was a little globby like mine was and you have these uneven white lines, you can fix those white areas darker with a bit more paint or a pencil, or then in reverse, use a white acrylic marker, gel pen, or gouache to touch up the white line edges. [MUSIC] We're just about done. It's so easy to just sit there and tweak things forever and ever, and it's really up to you when you feel like you've been massaging things for long enough and you want to stop. [MUSIC] You'll see that I made the decision to paint the eyes of the cat green, and I immediately regretted that decision. The eyes were bothering me because they stood out as too dark, so I decided to take a clean brush and scrub the eyes gently and re-wet some of the paint, and then I dabbed the wet area with my paper towel and then repainted the eyes with a lighter color. [MUSIC] As I said, it's so easy for me to sit there for an hour and tweak little details in my paintings. Now, I sped up this last few things that I worked on for you because I did want to show you the complete process from beginning until all the way to the end when I was happy with it. You can see that I alternate between pencils and watercolors, and sometimes I'll even use my jar roller in there, just tweaking little things here and there until I feel that it's complete. I felt that it was important for me to share the whole process, including my mistakes because I feel that's a great way to learn from other artists. I just love seeing how other people's brain works and what their decision process is as they go through the whole painting from beginning to end. Now in the next video, I wanted to highlight how I use the wet-on-wet painting technique with the rainbow underlayer and negative painting in my more advanced paintings. [MUSIC] 11. Advanced Applications: [MUSIC] I wanted to take a few moments at the end of the class before we wrap up to just show you some of the paintings that I've done that use this rainbow wet-on-wet painting technique for the underlayer and then the negative painting on the top to create these magical worlds. I have a whole sketchbook of pieces that I've done in the past, that I've used for some different classes and we'll look at those a little bit closer so that you can see what they look like and what you can do with it. When you're painting like this, it adds a fun life and vibrancy to your pieces. When you're painting backwards, in some ways you're rewiring your brain to think in a new way. Instead of painting the objects directly, you're painting the space around them to reveal their shape. Creating depth with negative painting is a great tool to have in your watercolor painting toolbox. Setting your rainbow underlayer of colors into a dark background makes your painting look more vibrant, magical, and glowing. In these paintings that we're looking at right now, you can see the rainbow underlayer, but on many of them, I've taken a little bit more care to add details and definition to the animals and the plants themselves. That's a difference compared to the painting that we did today. But it's always important to start from the basics and then work your skills up to do more complicated pieces. [MUSIC] In the next video we'll be wrapping up our class. [MUSIC] 12. Conclusion: [MUSIC] Congratulations on finishing the class. I hope you had fun and you've learned how to paint with water colors using the negative painting technique. We've learned some basic design principles and how you can take those to start creating little scenes of your own and why working small is a great way to start building up your skillset. I also hope that I was able to inspire and give you some examples on how you can take this technique and use it for more complicated paintings. All the files that you need to complete your project are in the Project and Resources section of this class. They are easiest to access and print out on a desktop computer. Please upload a photo of your painting when you have completed it. You can find the spot for that in the Projects and Resources page. I love seeing all of them. If you're on social media, you can tag me @mirkahokkanen and use the #MirkaSkillshare. Remember to follow me here on Skillshare, so you get notified of new classes coming up. Take care. Happy painting. I look forward to seeing you in my next class. Bye. [MUSIC]