Sunrise over ocean waves

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Wendy Lee. I live in a small town in the Kuru, South Africa. I'm a mom teacher, and creative encourager. I teach art lessons to children on a weekly basis. I also run holiday art workshops and teach art lessons like acrylic painting, watercolor, and drawing to adults and beginners. Welcome to beginners, Watercolor and ink. Sunrise on ocean waves. In this class, we'll be learning how to use warm and cool colors and how they affect our mood, as well as the moon. In our painting, we'll be using decorative drawing to create a beautiful calming effect as well as salt to create texture. For our class project, we'll be working on this painting together. This makes it accessible to beginners, to children, and to anyone that is just wanting to do some painting to relax after a crazy day. Come on, what are you waiting for? Come and join me and let's get painting. 2. Lesson 1 Materials: For this class, we will need watercolor paper. I've used hot press, four size acid free 300 GSM watercolor paper, but you can use any watercolor paper or thick card. We also need water colors. For this class, I've used watercolor pans. But if you do not have access to pans, watercolor tubes work very well. You need an eraser, a pencil, and a marker. This marker that I've used is a medium sized black marker. It has to be a permanent marker so that the ink doesn't run when you paint over it. You need a ruler. You can either use oil pastels or wax crayons. Either one of these are fine. It depends on your choice. For this one, you also need as a jar of water, clean water. Two brushes, a large size brush that can spread water across the page nicely. It doesn't matter what size it is, As long as it is big enough to spread water and to spread color over large areas. Then a medium size brush, this one that I'm using is a size five. You need masking tape or artist tape to tape your page to your table or to tape it to a board to prevent it from buckling. You need salt to create texture. I've just used common table salt, but you could use Himalayan salt if you would like to. Then I just a circle a lid of a coffee container, but you can use a lid of anything. This is optional. You could also just draw a free hand or you could use a compass to create the round shape of the sun. Right. Let's get painting. 3. Lesson 2 Drawing the waves and sun: I've stuck my page down with masking tape or artist tape to prevent the paper from buckling once it is wet, it also creates a beautiful little frame for when your painting is finished. To start off, we're going to take about the third of the page. From the third of the page, we're going to draw a couple of lines. We're going to draw straight into our marker. And we're just going to draw some wavy lines. And we're going to draw a few more back, two or three, and they can overlap, right? Wherever these lines cross or intersect, we will be rounding those corners. And this is called neurographic inspired art. This is just to also create, help us create a soft, harmonious line. This is quite a relaxing drawing. We're just going to fill all of these in. Just make these lines a little bit more rounded. These will be the waves in our painting. As you can see, I'm rounding all these corners and this looks like the foam of the ocean waves. It's okay. Some of your lines are thicker or thinner. That also creates part of the texture I'm going around this side. If you want to, you can draw a couple of circles just to create some extra bubbles for effect. For instance, of here where it was looking a little bit empty. Of course this is completely optional to add these extra little circles. Once again, where the line intersects you are going to round those little corners on the outside as well as on the inside of the little bubble, so there will be no sharp pointed corners. Everything will just be rounded. Right. Now we're going to draw the sun. You can decide where you want the sun. Do you want it on the side in the middle or on the right hand side? For this, I'm going to take just a simple coffee lid and I'm going to trace the coffee lid, make sure that part of your sun is behind your waves because your sun is rising. I've decided I'm going to make it a little bit low, it's still early in the morning. I'm going to draw it with my pencil, just so that I have a perfect line. If you would like to use a protractor, you can use a protractor or you could draw it free hand as well. Then I'm going to take my ruler and I'm going to draw the sun's rays. I'm going to start at the edge of the sun and move across to the edges of my page. You can make them straight. Let's have a look here and just start at your son. Each time, draw them going from your son towards the edges of your page. You can draw as many of these lines as you want to. There we go. Now I'm going to do these with my marker. Just go over them with my marker so that you can see them clearly. Of course, you can use your coffee again to trace it if you want it perfect. But it doesn't have to be perfect. If you want the sun ray lines to be squiggly, you can do that freehand too. I'm just going to once again use my ruler here and go over my lines, son, neat. And then we have our sun's rays. And we are ready to paint with water color. 4. Lesson 3 Painting the waves and sun: I'm ready to paint, so I'm going to be spraying my watercolors. To just give them a chance to activate, I've got a little bit of leftover paint that I've previously used on my palette, so I'm going to spray that as well. This is the wonderful thing about watercolors. You can keep using the paint even after it's dried. If you like a color that you've previously made and you still have some of it left, it doesn't get wasted. Right? I'm going to start with my son. I'm going to use warm colors now. Our warm colors are our yellows and our oranges, and our reds and our pinks. They help us create. They create a warm feeling. These are usually the colors that make us feel good because they natural colors. You can decide what color you want to make your sun. You can make it any of the warm colors. It doesn't have to be yellow. It can be orange. It can be red. And we're just going to give it a nice paint. Feel free to mix any of your warm colors to create a new warm color. Feel free to explore with the mixing of colors because this is your own painting and you can do it like you want to try out your own creativity. Every single one of these sections, I'm going to do a different color just so that it creates an overall harmonious effect in my painting. Water color always looks very bright when you paint it at first, but it dries on your page. If you aren't happy with the color, you don't have to mix so much water with it. You can have a stronger pigment. Just realize if you have made it too dark for your liking, it fades. This is the lovely thing about watercolors. It's nice to have a little play with them and mix as many different shades as you want. As you can see, this red bled into the orange a little bit. And that's fine. It just creates another beautiful effect. I'm going to add a little bit of think in here. You see it might bleed into that red. That's okay. Because that's actually the beauty of water colors. They're a little bit unpredictable. That's what makes them such a lovely medium to use. I'm going to put some of that red on this side. I try not to use the exact same colors next to each other so that we create a bigger contrast. Yet it's still harmonious because the colors are all warm colors. I'm going to just move my water out of the way. This is starting to look beautiful. I'm starting to think of warm islands, warm island holidays. Wouldn't that be great? There we go. Now I'm going to start to my cool colors. Each of these little bubbles will be a different, cool color. Once again, I'm going to try and not put the same color next to each other. If your palette is starting to dry, you can just spray it again to activate it. All right, I'm going to start to this color that I've previously made. I quite enjoy it. You can repeat the colors in different areas but not next to each other. This just creates a more harmonious picture as well. These different blues and greens are beautiful. Cool colors create a peaceful feeling the darker you go with the blues, as we'll see later on when we do the bottom here where the deep water is, the darker you go, it creates a feeling of depth. Also the feeling of getting colder and cooler. You can see I've mixed a little bit, I've mixed a little bit of this purple into my blue just to create a deeper blue color. Of course, you can add some greens in here to those will look beautiful because our ocean is full of various colors, greens and grays and aqua colors. Feel free to mix up any of those colors that you would like. I'm going to add a little bit more blue to this one. Once again, if you see any of your colors bleeding into each other, that's fine. Because that's the wonder of water colors. Green, these greens, it looks like the sun shining on the water. You know, when it sparkles like that. I hope I'm putting you in a holiday mood here because I definitely just talking about this, I'm feeling like I'm on a tropical island, having a holiday. Watching the sun rise over the ocean and working with blues. It's lovely and peaceful. These colors, actually, it calms you down. If you've had a crazy day, I don't think we often realize the effect that colors have on us during our day. And doing water colors and using bright colors just help us to calm down peaceful painting, these waves as well. There's no pressure in making perfect art. This is your painting. So you can do it just like you want it. If you want the colors to bleed into one another, that's fine. Right. I'm going to leave it there for now. Next we will start on the bottom. 5. Lesson 4 Drawing the jellyfish: Right, we are ready for our ocean creatures. Now you can decide if you want to draw jellyfish or if you want to draw an octopus or any sea life. That's up to you. I've chosen to draw some jellyfish, I'm going to make a big one, it's just an oval. Then I'm going to just round the bottom and I'm going to draw some long tentacles. Some of them can overlap quick and easy. I'm just using my mark for this. In art, we always use odd numbers. I'm going to be doing two more jellyfish, also three different sizes. This just makes it a little bit more pleasing to the eye. I'm going to make a medium one here. Once again, you can have some of the tentacles overlapping. And then I'm going to draw a little mini one over here. Right? I'm going to use my crayon to add a couple of highlights. You can add your highlights wherever you want to on your jellyfish. You might not see it immediately if you are using white, but you're welcome to use any color. So I'm just going to go around the edges of my black outline, press nice and hard. And I'm going to do it here where my tentacles are as well. You don't have to do it on every tentacle if you don't want to. It just creates a nice effect. 6. Lesson 5 Painting the ocean and adding special effects: We're going to, we're going to use a medium to large brush, any size. The reason we use a bigger brush is because it spreads the paint better, especially for larger areas. And we're going to mix up quite a bit of blue, try and make it nice and dark. My little paint palette hasn't got a paints gray. I bought a separate one. These tubes work beautifully as well. So I'm going to mix some of my blues together to create a lovely effect and add some of the pains to create a dark effect. Then what we're going to do is we're just going to spread it over this whole bottom. Then you'll see the beautiful, beautiful whites or whatever color you chose to use. Because it's wax or pastel, it will resist the paint. This is deep under the waves. Look how that resists. Isn't that beautiful? Once again, to create some different colors here, you can mix some of your darker blues together and add them in on random places. Look how beautiful that is. Your water doesn't look the same everywhere. It makes a little bit of greeny blue in here too. See how this paint resists over the wax. We've created a beautiful effect here. Now this is my favorite part that's coming up while your painting is still wet, we're going to put a touch of salt on. Just going to add a bit more color at the bottom. Add a bit more color here at the top. All right, now I'm going to use some table salt. You might have a different type of table salt in your country or you might want to use Himalayan salt. That's also fine. Common table salt is also fine. So what I'm going to do is I'm, I'm just going to spread some of this color. Yeah. Quickly. I'm just going to spread a little bit of the salt. And this is going to create an underwater bubbly effect. As you can see already, where the salt lands, it absorbs the water color. It will leave all beautiful texture and marks on our page. Once it's dried, I'm going to leave it like this for a little while to dry. Later on, when my salt is dry, I'm going to just slightly scratch it off with my fingernail or with a soft cloth. I've rubbed off the salt. And just a quick tip, if you want to remove this tape nicely without ripping your paper, it's a good idea to take a heating tool or a hair dryer and to just blow the heat over the edges. And then hold your page and take your tape and pull it away from your painting that prevents it from ripping your picture. Your painting, I'm going to look how beautiful that is. 7. Lesson 6 Key learnings and Class project: Thank you for joining me in this class. I hope you've had as much fun as I have. I hope you feel more confident in using colors to create mood in your paintings, as well as using textures like salt and decorative drawing to create beautiful textures in your paintings. I'd love to see your final project, your class project. Please share it with me in the class project section so that I can celebrate it with you. I'd love to hear what you thought of this lesson. Please leave me a review in the review section. And don't forget to follow me on Skill Shape by clicking the Follow button at the top. You can also follow me on Instagram at Wednes Strad on Have a great day and see you in the next class.