The Art Battle - Explore The Process Of Pencil Drawing, Watercolor, Acrylic and Digital Painting | The Artmother | Skillshare
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The Art Battle - Explore The Process Of Pencil Drawing, Watercolor, Acrylic and Digital Painting

teacher avatar The Artmother, Professional Art Teacher and Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro Video

      6:47

    • 2.

      The General Sketch

      2:17

    • 3.

      Pencil Drawing

      9:12

    • 4.

      Watercolors

      13:03

    • 5.

      Acrylics

      10:42

    • 6.

      Digital

      10:11

    • 7.

      The Summary

      11:13

    • 8.

      Final Thoughts and Project Description

      4:17

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About This Class

Welcome to The Art Battle - Explore the Process if Pencil Drawing, Watercolor, Acrylics and Digital.

Have you ever wondered how to approach a full art piece in different mediums? What is the cost of the art supplies of some mediums ad even the cost of one piece?

Have you thought about what are values, layers, which mediums are transparent and how to approach a painting with opaque paints?  What do you need to do before starting painting and what to keep in mind when creating a plan and a sketch? How to get your sketch onto the canvas or simply how to get rid of the pencil marks?

In this class I will answer all of your questions in 4 different mediums: GRAPHITE, WATERCOLORS, ACRYLICS and DIGITAL!

I will recreate the photo of a simple succulent in all these mediums with a detailed description of the creation process and with a great, informative sum up at the end about supply cost, creation time and cost per art piece.

Within each dedicated part I will guide you through the entire process from creating a general Sketch, getting it onto the painting surface (sketching paper, watercolor paper, canvas), creating a color palette, mixing paints, matching them with the reference photo, dealing with layers, shadows and highlights, until the finishing touches.

This class is a perfect fit for :

- every creative who paints in any medium

- beginners who would love to see what it takes to create a finished piece in these mediums

- beginners who don't know which medium to create in 

- Intermediate artists in one of the mediums who would love to get an insight to the other mediums

- Creatives who would love to have a general knowledge about how the creation process in all these mediums work.

In this class you will learn:

- how to create a general sketch from a reference photo including highlights and shadows

- how to get the sketch onto your painting surface - sketching paper, watercolor paper, canvas

- how to choose the perfect colors

- how to create a color palette

- how to deal with transparent and opaque paints

- what supplies to choose for these mediums

- beginner level drawing skills

- beginner level watercolor painting skills

- beginner level acrylic painting skills

- beginner level digital painting skills

- how to deal with layers in different mediums

- a general but detailed knowledge about these mediums

and more.

In this class we will cover so much, I can't even put all of them in words, so just take a look on the above picture and you will see what I am talking about!

So, what are you waiting for? Watch the full class NOW!

Meet Your Teacher

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The Artmother

Professional Art Teacher and Artist

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Dive into there elements of art with my latest class, "Quick Guide to Art Fundamentals for Beginners in Procreate." Through 10 thoughtfully structured lessons, you'll explore art theory, engage in practical exercises, and enjoy unique coffee breaks where we discuss topics every artist encounters.

CHALLENGE: Watch and complete your class project to the class till the 31st of March to be eligible to WIN 1 YEAR ON SKILLSHARE or one of the 3 Paperlike Screen Protectors for your iPad!

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Intro Video: [MUSIC] Hi, guys. In this class, I am going to show you how to create a succulent with four different mediums. That is graphite, watercolors, acrylics, and digital. The reason I have chosen these four mediums is because they all have a big part in my everyday life. For instance, I use graphite pencil drawings to get better at my drawing and observational skills to sketch the stuff I'm going to paint and to actually observe the world around me. I am creating most of my illustrations with watercolors still because it has its positives, and I just love creating with it. Then with acrylics, I am painting approximately one painting a month with acrylics because I just can get rid of that painterly feeling when I have to finish Canvas in my hands. With digital, it is just so trendy and popular and practical. I started to paint digitally few years ago, but I got my iPad Pro this January, and I'm really into digital illustration now. It was just so interesting to translate everything I knew about the traditional medium to digital medium. I really want to share my knowledge with you guys. My name is Alexandra Gabor, and I am a professional art teacher and artist and illustrator and mother of dragons. No. Mother of two. What we are going to do in this class is actually, I'm going to create and paint this succulent. I'm going to draw it with pencil. I am going to show you the easiest way to recreate it really nicely. Then we are going to do the same with watercolors and create a full watercolor illustration piece. Then with acrylics, we are going to paint on Canvas. With digital, I'm not going to use my illustration style, but rather to replicate the process I'm applying in this traditional mediums into digital. This is the graphite drawing, and this is the watercolor painting, the acrylic painting. This guy. No, this is not a photo. This is a painting. Within each of these videos that I dedicated to the medium like the graphite part, the watercolor part, and the acrylics part, I'm going to go through several points in the process. From creating a general sketch that we will use, through the entire process. How to get it to the surface of the medium, like the sketching paper, watercolor paper, Canvas. Then I'm going to show you the supplies you need, then I'm going to point out the key points in the process. Most of these artworks took me more than an hour to create. We are not going to [inaudible]. I'm going to speed paint and note the key points. Then at the end, we are going to have a big summary, which is the art battle. I'm going to compare some things like, how much money do the supplies cost for that medium? How much time did it take for me to create a piece, and actually, how much that one piece cost me in that medium? It will be just an interesting info to do. Why is this all important for you, you might ask. The answer is because you might create in one medium, like you might just painted watercolors and never dab into digital or acrylics or you never thought about creating value studies in graphite. Maybe if you would just gas an insight to these mediums, you would just enrich yourself. Not just with knowledge, but maybe motivation to do them, or to try them out, or let go of the fear that you need to be exclusive for one medium like you don't need to. Another big question is, who is this class for? I will just read it up from my iPad. I created, does nice [inaudible] for it. This class in grade for every creative if you are a real beginner in even drawing. In the graphite part, you will see how an object is built up. You will learn what is grayscale values, how to apply beginner shading, true story. Then in other sections, you can see which medium requires, which supplies, techniques, abilities, and you can decide for you which road to take. If you are already creating, let's say in watercolors, you will see how different is to work with acrylics on canvas, how to build up a digital painting. If you are into digital media, it could be beneficial for you to see how real paint works, and it could add to your digital illustrations. Or if you are using acrylics already, you might see my own process and how I work with it, and maybe that will enrich you. [MUSIC] I think everyone can find his own important and useful information in the class. I think I just overdone this intro video. [LAUGHTER] If you are ready to see me creating these pieces, let's dive into it. Just a note. It was so demanding to paint it four times that I will not paint a succulent again in my life, but don't tell him. [MUSIC] 2. The General Sketch: [MUSIC] The general sketch. For the sake of time-saving, I'm going to create now a general sketch about the subject and what I'm going to use for it is my iPad. I could spend time to create a sketch by observing the reference, which is now a real succulent and I totally recommend you to do so but as I really want everything to match and to save time, and to show you also how I trace sketches, I'm going to do it like this. I make a photo of the succulent on a black background with the iPad. You can do this alternatively with your phone or camera, then put the image into your computer. Then I open up Procreate, which is a digital painting program. Set the image less opaque and simply draw the contour lines of the leaves onto a new layer. [MUSIC] I don't forget to include the shapes of the shadows and the shapes of the highlights as having these shapes on the sketch, is essential when using a transparent medium like graphite or watercolors. I also don't forget to draw the pot as well as I really need the circle to be precise, and I also note the cast shadows of the leaves. When I'm done, I turn off the reference photo and I have a nice clean sketch that I will use in all four sections. Now, an alternative for this could be just drawing onto a tracing paper on your computer screen, or printing out the photo and tracing it on your window, or drawing by observation. The point is to get this sketch with all the shapes needed onto a screen or onto a paper. I am including this general sketch for you in the resources section so that you can use it if you wish to follow me with your medium. 3. Pencil Drawing: [MUSIC] Let's start with pencil drawing. I would love to start with explaining a bit more why I have chosen to include graphite as an independent medium in this class. First of all, drawing is the most essential skill in every creative sector. Now we skipped actually the observational drawing, which is very important, and there are people who would call this tracing cheating, but keep in mind that is their issue. If you are using your own reference image and you have low drawing abilities, but still would love to have good proportions, you can trace outlines. Creating a sketch is like introducing yourself to the subject you are going to draw. Even after tracing, I already know the shapes I'm going to create. I know approximately where my shadows will be. If I have very contrastive highlights, so it is very important in transparent mediums like graphite and watercolors to know this. Because we have to work from light to dark and we need to leave the white of the paper as the whitest white in our drawing. Creating a gray scale drawing before painting, let's you know your subject, even in the sense of color, you will know where you will need to apply lighter or darker colors, for instance. For drawing supplies, I have a sketchbook from Fabriano, freebie pencil for Lindberg, and a 9B pencil for shading. Using a sketching paper is important because it's texture helps the graphite to come down from the lead and enter the paper texture, which adds to the drawing experience. You can create a lot nicer drawings with less effort with quality materials. The way I'm going to trace this general sketch onto my sketching paper is simple. I will use the iPad as a drawing light box. You can even purchase a drawing light box for this specific reason on Amazon from around $20. I will turn off all the lights I have in the room, darken the window as well and then I will be able to see through the paper and trace the main outlines. I might also need to set the brightness of my screen to the highest. [MUSIC] When I'm done with this, I just add the remaining lines I didn't see well and correct the sketch on my sketching paper. What I'm going to apply in this pencil drawing is the reverse shading method. This is a shading technique I love to teach for beginners because it gives more control over the values. Basically, there are five values we are going to apply here. There are a lot more, but five is enough for beginner shading. You remember I said that with transparent mediums, we need to work from light to dark. That graphite is a transparent medium in a sense that the paper can be seen through it and you need to keep the white of the paper. There are white highlighter pencils out there, but let's keep this simple. Now in the reverse shading method, we start with the shadows which are the darkest value. Then the lightest value is the white of the paper and then we have a mid-tone in the middle, which is the midway between our darker shadow and the white of the paper. What we need to do now is to fill in the two midways between the mid-tone and the shadow and the white of the paper and the mid-tone. Now we have the five values we will apply. Let's see how it works in the drawing. With the reverse shading method, you start with the darkest shadows. This is exactly what I'm doing. I start with a darkest shapes and fill them with my darkest value, which I can get from the 9B pencil. When I have this, the only thing I need to do is to leave the highlight shape of the white of the paper and fill the remaining part in with the mid-tone. To get it to other values, I use the eraser to make the gradation between the white of the paper and the mid-tone, and I use a pencil to make a nice gradation between the mid-tone and the shadow. I try to work from area to area, so I apply this process to all leaves separately. While drawing, I constantly observe the reference picture I have taken. I have it displayed on the iPad next to me, you just can't see it. What can help beginners with getting the values better in the reference images is setting its saturation down. Basically you will get a black and white image you can use, however, it is a good idea to practice setting the saturation higher and higher as you progress to practice seeing values in a colored image as well. A pro-tip here is also to use a simple office paper to cover up some finished areas so that you don't smudge everything. To keep it nice and clean, and to have a place to rest your hand on while drawing as it can get tired, mainly in detail and big pieces. By fixing your hand, you also get more stability. I go round and round in the succulent. The reason I started at the outer leaves is that as you can't draw white and the upper layers of the leaves are brighter, you can make them pop by making these lower leaves darker. This way, you can make sure you will not make your drawing too dark. That could happen if you would go the other way. One rule in drawing is not to draw out lines. Meaning that if you take a look on any real object, you cannot see any line-work, only light, shadow and color. When you are drawing outlines, when you are drawing, you are actually just creating guidelines for applying light, shadow, and color. This is why we should always draw these outlines really light, and if you look at a succulent, you can notice that the shaded leaves don't really have outlines now. It is because I include them in the shading, mostly into the parts that are behind what I'm actually drawing. In this case the leaves they're a layer lower. [MUSIC] At the end, I just go over the whole adjusting the values that I might have gotten wrong, and the drawing is finished. Now let's continue to the watercolor medium and recreate this succulent with it. 4. Watercolors: [MUSIC] Watercolor. At first, I would love to talk to you about the watercolor medium. Watercolors are transparent paints so you need to work again from light to dark. Even though at first it may sound like something easy, like kids are mostly painting with watercolors, actually, watercolors count to the hardest painting techniques, as they can be really tricky to master. You don't only need to plan ahead the whole painting keeping in mind transparencies and highlights, you also need to master the water usage. The quality of supplies make a huge difference. It is recommended to get at least 300 grams cold pressed watercolor paper so that it can handle the amount of water you use. For paints, there are mostly two ways to get them, in half pans and tubes. My personal recommendation is to get a student grade half pan set and upgrade some personal favorite colors to artist-grade tubes. For brushes, the market is again full of options. But to be honest, in this class I will be using the same middle-sized round nylon brush for both watercolors and acrylics. In general, round brushes are intended for watercolors as they hold up more water and you can more easily layer acrylic paint with flat brushes. But I wouldn't make any restrictions to brush usage. As I already mentioned, the key point in watercolor painting is blending. Now, I need to get the general sketch onto my watercolor paper. The way I'm going to get it there is the exact same process I did with the sketching paper. I will use the iPad as a drawing lightbox. But as the watercolor paper is thicker, it will be really hard to see through it. I will need to get only the main shapes, the pot, and the outlines of the leaves. I also already mentioned that you need to deal with transparencies. We also discussed outlines in the graphite part. Watercolors will not cover up pencil marks. You might not need to care about it. But if you want a clean illustration and as you cannot erase pencil marks below the watercolor painting, you might include this part into the planning. What I am doing is that I'm erasing the traced pencil sketch, but just so that I can see it and I redraw it with a watercolor pencil. Its mark will blend into the painting and will be seen. When I have a watercolor pencil sketch, I add the remaining shapes by observing the reference image and the general sketch. [MUSIC] The next step is optional. It is using masking fluid. As we need to highlight the remainder white of the paper, it is a good idea to cover them up with masking fluid. Masking fluid is basically gum arabic and it is easy to peel off when the painting is done and is completely dry. Now, you don't need to use the masking fluid. You can just simply be careful when painting and avoid painting over these shapes. It is important mainly at the first layers of paint. Another step is creating a color palette. What colors will we need? If you take a look on this image it is more vibrant than the actual plant which doesn't really matter. What we will need is dark green, light green, some yellow, and a little bit of pink here. I don't know. What I have here, I will just show you as I'm going to use the Winsor and Newton Cotman that I have. I have this chart I made for my paints so that I can easily recognize what colors am I going to use. I think I will use Hooker's green light and sap green. They would fit the best. Maybe a little bit of raw sienna at these parts and maybe a little bit of gamboge hue, but it is really vibrant and I don't want this to overwrite my greens. Maybe I will go for the yellow walker. It is a bit more muted. There are different tools out there which you can use. There is an app called RT. I will just show it to you. You can download this from the Internet. You should add your image here so you can import an image. If you click on the colors you have a color picker, it is actually designed for colored pencils. If you click here where is this polychromos. I just put this color picker anywhere and I can see permanent green olives, so olive green, earth green, light green, then it's chrome green opec, copper, raw umber. Yes, there's a raw umber here at this part. You can just go over and see what colors it gives you. Again, we are not going for hyperrealism or real I don't know colorings. Our point is to go through the process. Here is something that is black, burnt umber, Van **** brown. Can you see that? Here's Van **** brown down here. I might use that because I have it in my set. It is here. Burnt umber, raw umber. It is really good to know that these colors I have. I recommend you to get this app and when you want to replicate an image, just go over and note the colors it gives you and just try to match it. I had Venetian red, which looks similar to the Indian red I have here. Make your charts and just go over these. I will keep this app open and I will just go back to that for reference. With watercolors, I will not work from area to area, but from layer to layer. At first, I lay down the base greenish-yellowish mixture with already keeping in mind the values and constantly checking the colors on the reference image. As I progress to outer leaves, I try to add more greenish colors. [MUSIC] When I am done with this, I need this first layer to dry completely. In the second layer, I darken the values by adding more concentrated colors to the painting. I do this until I reach a level when I can't go darker with the colors I am using. [MUSIC] This is the time I'm mixing my shadows. I am using a mixture of Payne's gray and Van **** brown to fill the darkest shadows. [MUSIC] As the background is black, and I want my succulent to pop, I paint the background with black concentrated watercolors from Dr. Ph. Martin's. [MUSIC] I am almost finished. I need to wait until everything is completely dry, then I'll remove the masking fluid and soften the edges of these shapes with light watered down paint. [MUSIC] I love to use white gel pen to add some more highlights that I left out when masking. [MUSIC] It can give a bit of realism and detail to the piece. At the end, you can varnish your watercolor painting, but it is not actually necessary. If you want to hang it, you can put it behind conservation glass into a frame which will protect your painting. But I mostly digitized my watercolors and make prints from them. This was the process I follow when I'm painting with watercolors. Now let's see the process of acrylic painting in the next video. 5. Acrylics: [MUSIC] Acrylics. Let's start to talk about paints in general. Every type of paint contains pigments plus a binder. In watercolor, we have pigments plus a water-soluble binder, usually gum arabic. With acrylics, we have pigments plus a synthetic binder that makes the paint waterproof after drying. Acrylics dry quickly, which allows you to work quickly to create layers and to paint lighter colors over darker colors and to easily get rid of your mistakes. Acrylic paints come in three different versions. They can be transparent, semi-opaque, and opaque. It is usually noted on the tubes, but the best is to make a chart. Anyhow, with watercolors, you had the white of the paper constantly appear through the transparent layers of color. Now, with acrylics, to have this white, you need to mix it into your paint. Most of the time you wouldn't paint a clean color, you paint tints, tones, and shades. Tints are color plus white, tones are color plus gray, or white plus black and a shade is color plus black. Apart from having colored acrylic paints, it is recommended to have some extra tubes of white and black. This additional white paint also makes your acrylic paints opaque which is great when painting layers. The transparency of the acrylic paint can be useful in the already mentioned indirect painting method when you create an underpainting then layer the transparent colors on the top of it. With acrylics, you paint on all different kinds of surfaces like wood, glass, cardboard, canvas. In this class, I'm going to paint on canvas. Now, most of this pre-made canvas are jostled, but they would always use another layer of it. We again need the general sketch to appear on the canvas, but how do we do that? Generally, we are going to trace again, but with a different method. At first, you need a tracing paper or baking paper, or some thin waxed paper. You need to wax quality because we want the graphite to stick later to the canvas. Place the tracing paper on the general sketch, copy it on the top with a really soft pencil, then turn the tracing paper over. On a clean sheet of paper trace it again. [MUSIC] This way, you will have the drawing on both sides of the paper, but you will be able to transfer an identical image on the canvas. If we wanted to have done it this way, we would have mirrored the image, which sometimes matters, sometimes don't. Now, I put the tracing paper on the canvas and simply trace over it once again. [MUSIC] The graphite from the back of it will stick to the canvas. This is the reason you need to use a soft pencil, its graphite will stick more easily. Now you have the sketch on the canvas. Adjust it, fill in some missing lines, do minor corrections. As we will paint opaque paint over it, we will not need to take care about the pencil marks, and we will not need the shapes of the highlights and the shadows because they will not help us. Anyways, I traced them as well just to manifest their painting in front of my eyes again. As for the supplies, I am using a basic set of liquitex acrylics. All of these paints are transparent, so I will use a lot of white. I haven't done a chart with these paints yet, so I am doing it now to choose the best colors. [MUSIC] From the greens, I'm again going to use the hookers green and use the cadmium yellow deep and yellow oxide which is close to the yellow ocher. From the browns, I'm going to use burnt umber and then the quinacridone magenta for the pink. With acrylics, I again work from area to area, meaning that I will try to get the colors right as much as possible at the first try on every leaf. However, I might need to move on for the next one a little bit because sometimes I need more drying time to be able to make nicer blend in color. When mixing colors, I start with mixing yellow oxide with a little titany white and add a bit of hooker's green. This makes this really light yellowish-green color that start at the roots. Then when this layer is a bit dry, I add the mixture of hooker's green with little white to make the darker greens. [MUSIC] Later when I have these layers dry, I can add just both transparent colors on top to deepen some of them or make blends. I also add pure white onto at the top for highlights. Now, I don't have too much of a strategy when painting as I can repaint and correct as many times as I want. The only rule I tried to keep is not to paint leaves that are next to each other right away because neighboring colors might mix if they are not yet dry. For the darker leaves here I create a dark underpainting, meaning I lay down a transparent layer of brown, then paint over it with the green mixture with a very little white. [MUSIC] I also add shadows to already painted leaves with a mixture of brown, green, and a little white. At the end, I add some more highlights with the white and then work on the outer shadows with pure black, gray, and brown. [MUSIC] Then I paint the pot at some texture with white into it and then paint around it with pure black. Well, it is finished. I let it dry overnight. Actually, I painted this for a few days in several shorter settings, but you need to let it dry for at least a day before you varnish it. Just go to varnish and acrylic painting as it will bring out the colors and preserve it. This was the process I'm usually following for acrylic painting. Let's see, how would I do the exact same thing in digital? 6. Digital: [MUSIC] Digital. Now you might think why digital, if I could have done the same in oil color pencils or gouache. The reason is that because all these mediums would have similar processes and I don't really use them a lot. But what I do use and what might be interesting for a traditional artist is the digital medium. Painting digitally has its long list of pros. Like you have all the colors and brushes. You have a color picker so you don't really need to figure out the colors for yourself. You can redo and correct as many times as you want and only by a few taps on the screen. You can then print your artwork as big as you want, etc. But it has its cons as well. Like you don't necessarily end up with a physical painting if you don't print it, all of these infinite options might be overwhelming. Of course, you don't have the real tactile experience while painting. This is the reason I am not fully transitioning my art to digital yet. It just feels so good to work with real paint. But don't think now that painting digitally is something easy. It also needs a lot of skills to master. What I will be using is a 12.9 inch iPad Pro with the second-generation Apple pencil. As for the software, I'm using Procreate, which is a very popular creative program. This process would be similar in Photoshop with a simple drawing tablet. But the reason I prefer the iPad is because it is closer to the actual drawing experience. What is great about digital painting is that it is not a messy. You don't need any supplies, you have it all inside the program. I'm setting a new screen sized canvas and insert both the general sketch and reference photo into the file on separate layers. The reason I'm inserting a reference photo is not just for observation, but I will be constantly using the color picker button, which when I hold down and click somewhere in the image, it will pick the exact same color for my brush. I have an option to create a custom palette before I start painting by clicking on the color picker and placing the colors on the palette. But to have a better workflow I will use the previous method. What you need to know about digital painting is that you work in layers. In Procreate, you have limited number of layers. You can check it in the Canvas information. The bigger the Canvas, the lower the number of layers you can use. But no, it is not an issue. I need now to work from the top to the bottom so that I can get all the pixels filled. Let me just show you what I mean. Let's say I take a brush and I paint something like this. You can see I have empty pixels because the brush itself has some texture. It is not a bad thing because it will add texture to the whole piece. But if I paint just around it, I will not have it covered. If I remove the background layer, it will be seen through, and I don't want that. What I want now is to add another layer below it. When I'm painting with a different color, you see, I'm covering this up. This is the reason we are going to work from top to bottom. I'm going to put different levels of leaves on separate layers. I will work similarly as with acrylic, so have layers painted in full detail then moving to the next. Now about the brushes. I'm going to use two different brushes. I like to call them liner and shader. I bought these brushes on Creative Market named Gouache Brush Pack. I will include the link into the class PDF. The liner brush is fully opaque. It has some texture. I edited the brush itself a little bit and added a bit of streamline, which means it is not reacting to all of the movements I make, so I can make cleaner lines with it. My strategy when painting digitally is to block in a main color and then use the gouache shader brush, which is a really nice textured brush. I now lock the layer I block the color in, meaning I will not be able to draw outside the pixels I already have painted. I take a lighter color and add a transparent layer over it, which will make a really nice blend. Then I will repeat it with a darker color and add a bit of shadow. Then get the original color and add a little bit from it to the middle and voila, it is already a really nice shaded leaf with a variety of color. These are the two brushes I'm going to use. Let's get to painting. I create the first new layer for the top leaves. Take my liner brush, hold my finger on the [MUSIC] color picker, and I will just pick a color. [MUSIC] I draw the shape of the leaf with it it. [MUSIC] Fill it by dragging the picked up color from the top. But I will go around it once again to fill most of the remaining pixels the textured brush left out. [MUSIC] Then using the color picker, I pick up colors and place them with the shader brush and build up the color of the leaf this way. I don't forget to alpha lock the layer every time when I'm adding color so that I only paint within the blocked shape. I'm going to speed this up a lot as I'm going to just do the exact same thing over the whole piece. I just want to point out that I tried to work on the leaves that are not exactly next to each other. Similarly as I did with acrylics, because even if I have delay or logged too close shapes are not practical as my brush will be seen on the shape I'm not actually painting. [MUSIC] As I am progressing, I create new layers for the lower layers of leaves. This is really great. I can rearrange down as I want and I can move the reference image anywhere for a quicker work. [MUSIC] It looks so realistic. When the succulent is done, I place the port below it by drawing a circle and another one on the top of it with a lighter color. I use another textured brush called concrete block to add a realistic look to the pot. I also add domestic shadows and highlights and add a black background. To To add this real realistic look to it with the shader brush and adding a transparent layer of white to create the real grayish color around. Voila, we are finished. I think this is the most realistic one, but mainly because I used a bigger variety of colors that I could replicate with the color picker. If I would have spent more time mixing all these shapes with the acrylics, I could have reached a similar effect. Anyhow, our goal was not to create hyper-realistic paintings. Each medium has its character. My goal here in this class was to show you all these different processes and that you actually really need to use your brain to plan ahead and paint a piece. Let's just sum up what happened in this class in the next video. [MUSIC] 7. The Summary: [MUSIC] So here we are at the end, all the projects are finished and now I would love to take a look on some pretty interesting info and comparisons regarding these mediums. So let's start with the graphite, and let's start with the supplies cost. For the supplies, we have pencils and sketching paper. Looking at the middle range prices, a set of good puzzles and 80 sheets sketchbook would cost you around $30. For the time, it took me 51 minutes to complete the drawing. But remember, it was done with beginner shading and minimal details, so the time can be longer. What I wanted to add to the graphite part is that, it is important to create value studies like this to improve your skills and train your observation. You can of course use your pencil drawings as a final piece as well, mainly portraiture. You would need to frame it or either digitize it. So if I assume you would use up the full set of pencils for the whole 80 sheets, it will give us a cost for a single drawing of 0.37 cents. So the cost of one piece would be $0.37 cents. This was about graphite. So now let's move onto the watercolors. So the set I was using is found at Winsor and Newton costs around $50, for 100 grams cold press watercolor pad with 12 sheets is around $15, and a set of brown synthetic brushes is again around $15. I don't count other supplies like the white gel pen or masking fluid. Let's take them as optional. So it leaves us with $80 for watercolors. For the time, it took me 1 hour and 34 minutes clean painting time plus at around 25 minutes drying time. Let's say 2 hours to complete the watercolor painting. What you can do with the painting is to frame it, which will add to the cost or digitize it, then use it for various purposes. I would say you use 10 percent of paints for the 12 sheets of paper, which will give us 60 stand cost for a single painting. Keep in mind, this is a very general calculation, not considering smaller pens to paint other supplies, so the end cost could be lower or even higher. Let's move on to acrylics. [NOISE] The set of paints I use from liquid tax costs around $30 and the single 25 centimeter square Canvas cost around $9, and a cheap set of flat nylon brushes cost around $15. Again, I don't count acrylic varnish and just so. So the main cost for starting acrylics would be $54. If I assumed a single painting takes 5 percent from the 36 piece acrylic set, I will be left with $10 for a single acrylic painting. It might sound a lot, but you have a ready physical painting. You can hang on the wall right away and it's value is a lot higher. This artwork is ready for an exhibition for instance, or to right away put on the wall with simple varnish. But you can still digitize it and use it for various purposes. You can actually paint with acrylics on all different kinds of surfaces, not necessarily on Canvas. Popular is rude word, acrylic paper pads costing at around 10 or $20 with several sheets, which will lower your cost. But I think having a painting on Canvas is unreplaceable. For the time, it took me 2 hours and 20 minutes to finish the painting plus a day, at least, for full drying. It is true I have worked on this piece for several days, for few shorter sittings. But let's just sum it up into this timeframe. Now, let's go to the digital. This was surprising for me as well and now in this we we'll have a lot higher cost at first. The newest iPad Pro with the Apple pencil cost at around $1,300 plus procreate costs $10. I would say you can create an infinite amount of artworks which will lower the cost of a single artwork to a minimum. But let's take an example, if you use the iPad for five years and make an art work every week, so not even every day, but every week. It gives us 265 artworks. That will make the cost of a single artwork 20 cents. So we have the winner for the cost. For the time, it took me 2 hours and 15 minutes to finish the painting and I didn't have the drying time. If we take in consideration the drying time of acrylics, it has a lot quicker to finish a more realistic looking painting with just same effort I did with the acrylics. So that's it. Now you might ask, it is interesting, but what to do with this information? I don't really have a specific goal to convince anyone do anything, you don't need to be exclusive to any technique. We need to be flexible. From my own experience, all these techniques fit into my own life. Like, I love to create graphite drawings while use studies even just to draw a nice still life and then frame it and put it onto the wall or give it as a gift. It is necessary and essential for all of my other work to have their supplies and work with them to improve my overall drawing and painting skills and actually for relaxation. It is such a great feeling to do some graphite pencil drawings just for relaxing. I still create most of my illustrations that end up as art prints with watercolors. Because it is fairly cheap, I can work with it quickly and it is beautiful and cost effective, and I can digitize it and use it for various purposes. I can print them on various products or create art prints. Then original watercolor paintings still has its value, so yeah, it is amazing. Then acrylics, it is just an irreplaceable feeling to have a finished painting on Canvas. I paint commissions and paintings for exhibition with acrylics and even though it is more costly and it needs more time, but at the end of this process, you end up with a beautiful painting which can go right on the wall and it is just more valuable than having any painting on paper. So I wouldn't eliminate acrylic painting on Canvas from my life ever. Then digital. I do editorial illustrations digitally. It is just great that I have this infinite redo and correction possibilities. It helps me to explore more things, different angles, because I'm not afraid at it, ruin my supplies like paper or wastepaper or waste paint because I have infinite of them and I can create more concept. Each of these techniques have its unique character. I couldn't have done that illustration with watercolors or acrylics or pencil. It has its texture, it has its beauty, it has it's time effectiveness. I would say that I can create anything I want without really fear, I can return to it anytime and I have it here and it's just awesome. So all of these techniques have place in [NOISE] my heart, I wouldn't eliminate any of them. There's money effectiveness, things like surprise me as well too. It's just great to experiment, but it how much time I usually spend with a piece which is similar, and the end cost of a piece, and the supplies et cetera. So I hope it is beneficial for you to see these things and the processes. Let's just move on to the final thoughts and discuss your final project in the next video. 8. Final Thoughts and Project Description: [MUSIC] I hope you could really take something from this class. We've covered so much in it, like a few days of painting with different mediums. Wow. Let's just sum up what we have done in this class. We have painted the same subject. It was a succulent with four different mediums: graphite, watercolors, acrylics, and digital. We've gone through the whole process from creating a general sketch then tracing that to the sketching paper, watercolor paper, Canvas. I guided you through the whole process and the supplies and how to use them, how to layer, how to approach a whole piece, how to approach the layers we are painting with. Then at the end, we just took a few words about the comparisons of these mediums and processes and how can you use them and process them in the future? As a project, I would love to ask you to recreate the succulent with your medium. You don't need to choose two or three, you can just choose one and recreate it. I will include the general sketch in the resources and I would really be happy to see a gallery full of succulents, the same succulent with different mediums. You can change the colors if you want, you can change the composition if you want, but I want it to be a succulent in your median. If you will, maybe it could be a beneficial for you as well to recreate it with two different kinds of mediums. I'm sure you already have at least the pencil drawing and the watercolors, so at least two of these, but you can add pencils, oils, I don't know, mixed media, crayons, I like the doors open. My other point is to start a discussion about this topic, how do you approach a final piece, our full painting with your medium and what was your experience? Share with us. It would be really great to read about these things. Now the usual, make sure to follow me on social media, on Instagram, and Facebook. You can find me there as The Artmother. Also, don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare to get notified when the art classes will be out there and I'm planning a lot. You can also take a look on the other classes I have created. I have drawing courses, watercolor courses, and planning so many more in all the other mediums professional art. Lastly, it would be so great if you would leave me a review. It helps the class rank higher so I will be able to reach more people in the world, which is like, wow, great thing. But another thing, I really want to know what you think about the class, how could I improve it or did you like it? What was your experience when you went through the class? If you learned a lot, what was the most beneficial? Please save your time just a little bit for me to write a few sentences about, what do you think, because I really do care. Thank you for taking this class. Happy creating. [MUSIC]