The Characteristics of Watercolor Painting

1. Introduction: Welcome to the characteristics of watercolor painting basics and beyond. This is the ideal class for beginners and anyone that wants to understand the intricacies of watercolor painting. My name is Robert Joyner. I have been a full time artist since 2003. I've worked for popular brands such as Carnival Cruz, Kentucky Derby, CBS sitcoms and more. You can break this class down into two sections. Section one, I will cover an in depth look at materials. We'll look at the basic Bosches. We'll also explore brushwork mechanics and have a deep dive into understanding wet and wet watercolor techniques. Then we will begin part two, which is all about projects. Some of these are very simple, but the whole idea is we will take these skills that we have learned in part one and we will put them to the test. And then you will have a good idea of where you stand, so you will know which ones you need to focus on a little bit more and others that you're starting to master. If you're excited to learn the characteristics of watercolor painting, learn how to manage water. Get your workspace set up correctly, then let's get started. I can't wait to share this class with you. 2. Materials: Let's go over some materials. These are the supplies I used in this class. We will begin with the brushes. All of these are extremely affordable and have lasted me years. The mop brush, this is a number eight Princeton Neptune. This is wonderful for laying down large areas of pigment when I need to paint a large area. This is my go to brush that brings us to the Princeton Neptune number four round. Ideal for details, and it can do some really good line work as well. Princeton, Neptune number four round. A great brush for adding small details and accents. You definitely want to have a small brush on hand. That brings us to the last brush, which is the Princeton Neptune 34 inch sword. A very versatile brush, as you can see by the shape of the bristles. It can do some very fine line work and some wonderful calligraphic strokes. I also keep a graphite pencil to B and a needed eraser on hand. Obviously, we'll be doing a little bit of drawing later on as we move forward into the projects. Now we have paper, I use Blick premium watercolor paper, 140 pound cold press. Cold press has a little bit of texture to it as opposed to hot press which is very smooth. I think this is an ideal surface and Blick papers are very durable and very affordable. That brings us to foam core. I will use this for backing, I will tape my watercolor paper to this, and then I will give me a firm surface to paint on. I usually cut these so they're just slightly bigger than the paper I'm painting on. That brings us to the paint. I use holbine. This is artist gray paint. This is one area you want to splurge a little bit. My colors are cobalt turquoise, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, cad, red light Alizarin, crimson yellow ochre, cadmium yellow, lemon, burnt sienna, neutral tent. And then a little bit of white guash. I've used Hole Bye paints since the year 2000. I highly recommend them, but any artists gray paint will do again. You do want to splurge a little bit and have premium paint because it does make a huge difference in your colors. That brings us to some miscellaneous items. This is a roll of two inch archival masking tape. I use that to tape the paper. I have a small Mr. This is good for having to spray paper, then also to spray your paints. If they dry up in the palette, I recommend having one of those around. Next up is a water reservoir. I have two of these. This is a one quart plastic reservoir. I like plastic because I tend to be a little clumsy. And if I knock it over and it's glass, it'll break and that's just a mess I don't want to deal with. Next up is my palette. This is a John Pike deep well palette. It has plenty of reservoirs, which I rarely use. I tend to keep my palette limited to about nine colors. As you can see, I have a large top area there as well. The John Pike gives me plenty of mixing area, and I've had this one for about seven years. I highly recommend having an old towel around, or you can opt to buy some paper towels. You will need this to wipe out any excess water on your brush. Also, it can help remove water and pigment from your surface. Then there's the hair dryer. This is good for speeding up the drying time. I will use that as well in some of the demos that covers all of the materials. I will leave a link in the description in case you have any questions. 3. Palette 101: Palette tips. In this lesson, I will cover some ideas on how to get better usage out of your palette. I will begin by putting the colors in the wells. Along the top will be my main hues, and then along the right hand side there will be my neutrals. I will cover that more as we move forward. It's important that when you put paint in your wells, you squeeze out a lot. Do not be too stingy with your paint. If you only put a small amount of paint in your wells, it's going to dry up much quicker. The more paint you put in there, the less likely it is to dry up again. Do not do this. Go ahead and squeeze out some more and move on. Going over my palette here, starting left to right, I have ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, cobalt turquoise, cad, yellow, lemon yellow ochre, a lizard and crimson and then cadmium red light on the right hand side is my burnt sienna and then my neutral tint. The white gas I do not put in the wells. I keep that separate. Basically, if I need it, I will use it straight out of the two. As I mentioned earlier, all my colors are grouped together. So the blues, yellows and reds, that's pretty much it. Now let's look at the top. The top is good for mixing a large wash, but also I use it to tilt my board. As you can see, I will put my palette in there, but stagger it in a way that the board is angled down. This allows the paint and the excess water to settle towards the bottom. Eventually, you're going to have a lot of water settling there, which is a much better place for it. Then moving back up into the wells of your paint, Always angle your board downwards away from your paint. You can also prop it up with an object. If you don't want to use the top or if you don't have a lid, just opt for something else. But again, make sure that your palette is angled away from your hues. As we move forward, my palette will always look like this. If you are ever curious about my colors, it will always be set up in the same order. 4. How to Manage Palette and Water : This is a very important lesson about managing palette and water. Believe me, as we move forward, you will quickly understand and realize water plays a huge role in the outcome of your art. The first thing we'll talk about is avoid excess water build up in your mixing area. We did touch on this and the previous lesson, but again, I want to remind you that your mixing area is important. You always want to have full control over how much water is mixing with your paints. The next thing is always be aware of how much water your brushes absorb. So basically, I have a mop brush. Whenever I dip that into water, it's going to be fully loaded with water. Which is good because, let's face it, in order to paint it well, your bristles should be wet. It's the only way they're going to absorb pigment and water. This is a dry brush and you would not want to dip that right into your paints when it's 100% dry. If you wanted to work effectively, you want to wet it and then tap out the excess water. We'll talk about that more in just a moment. Obviously, the larger the brush or bristles, the more water it's going to hold. As you can see, that's a lot of water building up in the palm of my hand. If I were to put that brush in my wells, all that water would discharge into my colors. Again, for best results, wet it and then use your towel or paper towel to remove the excess water before going to the palette or paint. This seems like a very simple lesson to learn, but it does take a little bit of time to form these habits. Use good technique. And always remember, water can easily invade your colors and your palette, making it difficult to paint effectively. Bad technique, again, you'll see my brush is fully loaded here. And look how that water is already starting to pull up into that well, and that's just one brush full of water. Imagine doing that over the course of an entire painting, a mess. I will repeat myself, Clean the brush or get water, tap out the excess water and then you're ready to mix paint. Always pre wet your brushes and avoid bristles that are 100% dry. You will notice that your towel or paper towel will start to build up a little bit of excess pigment there, which is normal, but your palette and paint are in great shape. 5. How to Prepare Watercolor Paper: Lesson I will cover how to prepare your watercolor paper. As you may or may not know, watercolor paper tends to buckle and warp when it gets wet, perfectly normal. And all paper does this in order to avoid some of the buckling we want to stretch it. This will help reduce some of the warping and give you a little more control over your washes. First, you want to use clean water. And the largest mop brush that you possess, again, wet your brush. It's nice and saturated. And this is where some excess water in your bristles isn't going to hurt you. The goal here is to cover the entire surface but avoid too much water. The goal is just to wet it and not for it to puddle or pull up. Also, you want to do the front and the back. This will give you the best results and the least amount of buckling, which is pretty much what we're after in this lesson. Once you're finished, let it dry. A hair dryer works well right here, so if you have one handy, use your hair dryer to speed up the drying time. Now this paper is 100% dry. It's been stretched and I'm ready to go. I will use some archival tape and tape that to my foam core. Some artists like to go around all of the edges with their tape, which I think is fine for finished art. But for small studies and the things we're doing this course, I'm just going to tape my corners. Sometimes I will roll the tape up and then put that underneath the paper as well so it's hidden. Now I'm ready to paint all the demos that I do in this course. The paper will be prepared this way. Let's talk about how to re size large sheets of paper. I tend to order full sheets. A full sheet is 22 by 30 ". That's pretty big. I don't often paint that size, but when you buy large sheets of paper like this, you tend to get a better deal than buying very small sheets. Again, 30 by 22. And what I will do is fold that on the long side. Once I fold it, I'm going to crease it firmly with my fingers. Once I had the first side done, I will fold it and then do it in the opposite direction. Again, crease it and press it firmly, which will help me when I'm tearing the paper later on. Repeat this process a few times until you feel you have a really good crease. Once you're done, tear it very slowly. I tend to hold my hand right there, the crease, that will be the left hand. And then use my right hand to pull slightly until the paper starts to tear. This is a really good way to take large sheets and reduce them to smaller sizes. Now I have 22 sheets. They are 11 by 15. I will reduce that to quarter sheets, folding it in half along the long side there. I will end up with 211 by 15 inch pieces of paper. Again, repeating that process, making sure I get a good crease, and then pulling ever so slightly until that paper starts to tear, I end up with these really nice rough edges. Those are my quarter sheets. I'm going to reduce those. Again, folding it on the long side and then repeating the crease process. I will end up with 27.5 by 5.5 sheets of paper, which is what I will use for my demos. 6. Color Mixing Basics: Color mixing basics. A very important lesson to understand some basic color theories. I will start with introducing you to the six primary palette. Back in grade school, they told us there were only three primary colors. But truthfully, to mix color, well, you're going to need six, basically, not every blue and yellow make a good green. I will prove that later on. Let's turn our attention to the chart I have drawn out. I have my circle up top, I have a smaller circle. The Y will stand for yellow, the R will stand for red. And of course, the B stands for blue. I have a smaller circle for each of those primary colors. I've drawn a line down the middle. On one side is a C, which stands for cool. The W on the other side will stand for warm More on this. As we move forward, you will always start with a clean palette. If you have other colors on your palette, it's going to taint our hues. We don't really want that for this exercise. Let's begin with our yellows. Again, we had the C on the left and the W on the right. On my palette, I have two yellows. One is a yellow ochre, which I am using right now. The yellow ochre is a warm yellow. The cad yellow lemon, which I'm using now is my cool yellow. You're asking, well why is that? That's because yellow ochre has more red in it. When you compare that to the Cad yellow lemon, you can see that that makes the Cad yellow lemon my cool yellow, which I will put in its appropriate place. Then I will clean my brush. This will give me more control and the best results. Now that it's clean, I can use my yellow ochre. Be sure to leave a little gap in between the hues. We don't want these hues to mingle with each other, we want them to stay separate. So now we can compare those side by side and see that these are both yellows, but they're very different. This will come in handy later on. Now let's look at our reds. I have a lizard, crimson and Cad. Red, light. My Alizarin Crimson will be my cooler red. That's because it has a little bit of blue in it. I will place that Alizarin Crimson where the C is in my red swatch area. Then I will take the Cad red light and place that in my warm swatch area. Again, leaving a little gap in between so that they don't mingle. Now we come to the blues. My two blues are och marine and cerulean blue. Ultramarine, which I'm pointing at now, is my warmer blue. That's because ultramarine has a little bit of red in it. I will mix up a thin wash of that ultramarine blue. Then add that to the W, where the blue swatch area is. As you know now, I will use the cerulean blue, which is my cooler blue, and then add that to the C. As we look at these primaries, we start to notice a difference between all of these hues, even though they may be reds and blues and yellows are all different. These are the six primary hues I will be using in this class, which also happen to be the main colors I use all the time when I paint. Now let's do the secondary hues, starting with orange. In order to mix the best orange, I will use my yellow ochre, which is my warm yellow and then my warm red, which is my Cad red light. Mixing an equal amount of these two will give me a good start. If I need to adjust the color, I can always add more yellow or more red accordingly. That will give me my orange, which I am adjusting here. And then I can move to my violet. To mix a good violet, I want my cool red, which is a lizard, and crimson and my warm blue, which is my ultramarine blue. I will mix an equal amount of those and do the same thing. We'll put my Spotch down. If I needed to adjust that, I will just simply add either more blue or more of the Alizarin crimson. Now for my optimal green, I want to mix my cool blue and my cool yellow, my cerulean blue and my Cad yellow. Lemon. Should do the job just fine. Again, an equal amount of these and if I need to tweak it as you know now you can just add a little more blue or a little more yellow. By using the correct primary hue, we were able to mix the secondary colors. Now we have tertiary hues. These are colors in between the primary and secondary colors. We will start with our orange. We have a yellow orange. Basically, I have my base orange there. In order to mix a yellow orange, I will just simply push a little more yellow into that mixture. Then I get to my red orange. By now, I'm sure you're getting the hang of this, but I'm going to talk my way through it so I don't leave any guesswork for you to figure out on your own. I will add a little bit of my Cad red light to that base orange until I get something that pushes it more towards a red orange. Now I get to my violets, I want a magenta, which is also considered a violet that has a little more red in it. To push that more towards a red, I would just add a lizarin crimson to make a blue violet. I would just simply push that bipe adding more ultra marine. That brings us to our greens. I want a blue green. I'll add a little more cerulean to that base green and that'll give us a beautiful turquoise color. Then a lime yellow green by adding a little more of the Cad yellow, lemon. Those are the best tertiary hues we can create. But no, none of that will be possible unless we used the six split primary color mixing theory. That was a mouthful. Here I'm mixing ultramarine blue and yellow ochre. That simply doesn't make a good green. It makes a good gray, but not a good green. The little green spot up top, I used cerulean and yellow ochre, which didn't work too bad if you want something a little more earthier and gray. Now let's try a violet. I'm going to use Cad, red light and ultramarine blue and yuck. That is a lovely gray, but certainly not a violet. So those are some tips on how to mix colors. And I hope that serves you well as you move forward through this course. 7. Common Watercolor Washes: Talk about common washes. Water color is basically a series of washes. That's what we call them in this business. Here I have drawn out some rectangles. Each one will be a slightly different wash technique. Now I'm going to angle my board downwards using the role of masking tape multipurpose materials. If you have it flat, the wash tends to sit on the paper, which isn't ideal because you can't get a good bead going more on that later. The first technique is the wet and dry wash. In this case, the paper is 100% dry. I am using wet paint, obviously, to apply that to the first rectangle. Notice because my board is tilted, how the water starts to bead towards the bottom of that wash. With each brush stroke, I will just join to that bead or the bottom of the wash and guide that in the direction that I wanted to go, which is downhill. If you do this correctly, you should end up with a nice even flat wash that is wash number one. Again, working on dry paper, wet and wet wash is basically where you're dealing with a wet surface. In this case, I'm just using water to pre wet the rectangle. In this example, I will use my cobalt turquoise and a very thin mixture here, which we will talk about later. And then use the same technique, starting at the top and working downward with each new loaded brush full of paint. I will just simply go to the bottom of that bead and then work downwards again. If you do it correctly, you should end up with a nice flat wash that is working wet into wet. Very similar to wet and dry, but with a wet surface, the paint tends to disperse quicker than working on a dry surface. Now again, these are flat washes. There is no variation of color or gradation going on, basically one color, and that's it. Now let's talk about a variegated wash. A variegated wash means you're using two or more colors. I will begin with a dry surface so I haven't pre wet this particular rectangle. Using Alizarin Crimson, I will start forming my bead and working side to side. Now I'm going to mix a little bit of the turquoise into that. Again, starting with the bottom. Notice how I'm joining the bottom of that wash with each new loaded brush. I can blend that back and forth. It's okay to work into wet paint like that. Again, we will talk about these techniques much more. As we move forward. I will end with a little more Alizarin Crimson. As you can see, the technique was the same. The only difference was I use more than one hue. Now let's talk about a gradated wash. This is when you have multiple values in a particular wash. In this example, I will have a darker value towards the top of the wash, and then it will get lighter as it goes towards the bottom. You can use multiple colors on this, but to keep it simple, I'm going to use only one. I will opt to use a little bit of a violet color, which is ultramarine blue and a lizarin crimson starting at the top. And again, this is a dry rectangle. I'm not working into a wet surface. This is a dry surface, but this can be done on a wet surface as well. Now as I get to the bottom of the rectangle, I'm going to add more water to my base mixture, and that's going to give me a lighter value. Even with that subtle change, you can start to see how this wash appears a little bit differently than say, the flat wash. Now I want to increase the value towards the top. I'm going to mix up a little more violet. This time there's less water and more pigment into that particular mixture. I will start at the top and then lightly blend that towards the bottom. As I get to the middle, I can add a little more water to my brush and then blend that out as evenly as I can. That is a gradated wash. I'm having a taped to the board as I do here, allows me to tilt it in whatever direction that I want the wash to move. In. Here we are, we can look at all of these common washes. I do recommend that you grab a sheet of paper, a few hues, and you create a similar wash study that way as you move forward through this course, these things become a little more familiar to you. How you handle your washes will have a huge impact on your watercolor paintings. 8. Three Common Watercolor Mixtures: Common mixtures. There are three you need to know about. Let's talk about how they work and how they will impact your artwork. The three labels I give them are a, milk and honey things we all are familiar with. Each one is slightly different. Let's begin with the very first one, which is a, is very watery. When I'm mixing a, a mixture, I want to use more water and less pigment. In this case, I have a lot of water and a little bit of red light that is very faint. You can barely see that hue on the paper. Now let's talk about milk. Milk is a little bit thicker, in this case, I'm using more pigment and a little bit less water. That brings us to honey. Honey is very thick and very sticky. A little bit of water and a lot of paint, that's going to give us the three base mixtures you need to know about. Each one has its own purpose and a really good painting has all three. Again, as a reminder, E has more water and less pigment. It makes it ideal for a sky or an area where you don't want a lot of color or a very rich value. We will talk about that more later on. Milk has less water and more pigment, as I mentioned earlier. More color, a little more saturation going on, and very useful for building up a painting. When we get to honey is extremely saturated and it tends to show the texture of the paper a little bit. You can see the little white specks peeking through some of that paint with a T mixture is very transparent. You can typically see through that layer with a milk mixture, it's going to be semi transparent and obviously a little more colorful. You lose a little transparency, but you gain a little color out of it. With the honey mixture, you're dealing with a very opaque layer of paint. Typically, you're going to use all three of these mixtures in every painting. A painting is built in layers. One layer, stacks on top of another one. It's important to get the order correct. Typically, you will start with a layer. As you know, these are very watered down and ideal for tone in the paper or adding a very light value to a sky or something of that nature. Usually you're going to stack thin to thicker layers. If you start with a really thin T mixture, the next layer will be slightly thicker and you will get that by adding a little more pigment and using a little less water. Now, this would be a good place to use a hair dryer. If you put down a T mixture, use your hair dryer, speed it up, and then you're ready for the second layer. As you know, this would be slightly thicker paint. I want to avoid a really watered down mixture. If I start stacking too many of those on top of each other, the painting will start to read weak. We will discuss that a little later in this course. As you can see, my violet is a milk mixture. I can put that down and it reads really well over top of that first layer of tea. I will move that over to the right, and then I'm going to use a little bit of water in my brush and blend that into the left hand side of that milk mixture. By adding that water to that mixture is basically stacking two tea layers on top of each other just for comparison. Now I will use a hair dryer to speed up the drying. For the third layer, I'm going to mix up something close to honey. Now, it doesn't have to be honey. As long as it's slightly thicker, it usually works pretty good. In this case, I'll just use a nice dark green and layer that over top of the section on the right here, you can see how all of these layers read. Well, this is basically an overview or an exercise and how you want to stack your layers Again, slightly thicker as you go, tends to work better in most cases. Let me show you a bad example. Here I'm going to put down a T mixture of cobalt turquoise. Again, you can see it's about the same as I used in the beginning with the red light. Again, using a hair dryer to speed up the drying time. Now, instead of going slightly thicker, I'm going to use a very watery mix of red light. It'll go on pretty good. It doesn't read bad, but as watercolor dries, it tends to dry a little bit lighter. Just for demonstration purposes, I'm going to add some swatches here. The first swatch is the blue, which is basically the mixture I used in the beginning. I let that dry, then I added a swatch of the red light, which I put over top of that dry blue. As you can see, it's not too bad. Two mixtures like this can work, okay? But as I add this third layer, which is a violet, it's going to start to look washed out. Subtle contrast may work well in some cases like a background, but you wouldn't want to build your entire painting around this. Ideally, you would want the paint to have more variety. So having some tea mixtures is fine, but if you start stacking too many of those on top of each other, it will just look washed out. Just be a little bit careful as we start getting into some of the projects later on that you're not using too many thin mixtures just for comparison. I'm going to do that same little study, but this time build it up using thicker paint as I go. Again, it's good to have that comparison trying to match the hues. I started with my weak cobalt turquoise, and now I'm going to add a little bit slightly thicker layer of red. Again, there's my swatch, so we can compare that to the other swatches as well. There goes my red. And already you can see that particular wash has a little more body to it, so it's a little bit easier to read. Obviously, I'm using my hair dryer here just to speed up the drying time, just so I can stack these layers more quickly for you. So once this is dry, I'm going to add my violet, and this is a little bit thicker violet. When you start looking at my spotches, you can see the difference. Stacking two layers is okay. I think it'll work fine for most cases. But avoid, again, building your painting around a bunch of thin mixtures. Once you get into the 34 mixtures and a painting, then it tends to just fall apart a little bit. There's not enough variety and value there to make it interesting. Thin to thick is the rule of thumb we want to use now for your project. You want to create a similar study. Explore a little bit of the tea, milk, and honey ideas. Create some small swatches and just stack them so that you start to build up that connection with the different mixtures and how they read on the paper. 9. Working Light to Dark: Working light to dark. Another good idea to consider and put to use wind water color painting. In this lesson, I will give you several examples of what I mean by working light to dark. I will begin by putting down a mixture of Cad yellow lemon. Again, that's going to be very light in value for two reasons. First of all, cadmium yellow is a light value. And then also a T mixture is very weak, as you already know, you're dealing with a color that's inherently light. And then a T mixture, which will dilute the color even more. Now this is a little bit different from what we just discussed in milk and honey. That's because we're going to focus more on a color's value. Which as we move into this lesson, it will start to make a little more sense to compare the cadmium yellow to something else. We're going to mix up another mixture of burnt sienna. I'm using about the same amount of water and pigment as I did in the Cad yellow. Lastly, I'm going to put a Swatch down again. A T mixture of a lizard and crimson. Now I will take a hair dryer to it to speed up that drying time. The main thing we want to observe here is that the cadmium yellow lemon is a very light value even though I use the same water to pigment ratio on all three hues. The Cad yellow is just simply a lighter value and color. Let's talk about value for a second. To do that, I'm going to use my neutral tint. I'm going to create a Swatch or a value scale on the left hand side of the paper. And it's going to work from light to dark. Obviously The lighter value is towards the top and then the darker value is towards the bottom. That cad yellow lemon value is towards the top of that scale. Pretty much one of the lighter values you can probably mix with a color. The burnt sienna is just below that. I would say the Alizarin crimson is in between the two. The Cad yellow would be the lightest, then the Lisarin crimson, and then the burnt sienna would probably be the darkest again. Just because you mix a T mixture doesn't necessarily mean that you have a light value. As I add a little bit of burnt sienna over the yellow, you will see it's very effective and that's because the yellow was so pale. So if I did another layer over the burnt sienna, which is a lizard and crimson and about the same water depigment ratio, it's not as effective because that burnt sienna was simply a little bit too dark. I'm letting you know this stuff because it's important to understand that each color has its own personality and color characteristics. Oftentimes, we will get in the habit of mixing the same amount of water with a little bit of pigment. And we think we have a T mixture. Because it's a T mixture, we have a light value. But if you're using a color that simply is darker in nature, out of the tube, like burnt sienna or even a lizard crimson. Then we have to water that down even more. Where other colors like cad yellow, light is light. Anyway, so a little bit of water will go a long way and making that a very pale wash. Again, you have to remember, a watercolor painting is a series of washes that are stacked on top of each other. In the end, we want to have a painting that works well, and part of that is just understanding the natural value of a color. You want to use lighter values in the beginning so you can stack darker values and thicker paint on top of them. When we look at Cad, yellow, lemon, that may not be an ideal color to use in late stages of a painting because it's so light in value that it's not going to sit well over thicker and darker values. Over time, you will start to develop a better connection to your colors and how much water it may need to get it to a certain value for your project, I would recommend you do a similar study. Just use the colors you have on your palette. Do some swatches and try to mix up some really light values that you would use for an initial wash. And take notes and observe how each color is slightly different than the next. The ultimate goal is to have more control over a color's value. In order to adjust the value, you may have to decrease or increase the amount of water you mix into the pigment. 10. Explore Brushes and Brushwork Techniques: Let's have some fun exploring brushes and brush strokes. Each brush is very different, but there are some similarities that you need to know. Here's my big old mop brush. I've got my pointed round, my small pointed round, and then my sword brush. Let's begin with a large mop brush. Obviously, this is suited for large areas. It has a huge belly on it and it can hold a lot of water and pigment. A loaded brush means, is holding the maximum amount of water and pigment. Whenever you have a brush like this and you fully loaded, it can really cover a lot of area. Now I can use either the tip and or the belly, the side of the brush. So there I'm using the side of the brush, I can hold it more upright and then use the tip to create these more callgraphic strokes. Might be nice for trees, adding texture to a building, some details, different things like that. Let's explore the same thing with the number ten round, which is suited for small washes and details. I will load it up again. Loaded means I had the maximum amount of water and pigment in the bristles and then apply that to the paper. Now notice again, I can use the belly or the side of the brush, which will give me a broader stroke, which obviously will cover more area. In the tip of the brush will create finer details and thinner lines. I can hold the brush more upright, which I know I'm covering up my strokes. But this will create these nice linear strokes. I can do that sideways, I can do that vertically. Whatever works, again, using the side of the brush to create a different type of stroke works good. And then using the point or the tip of that brush to create details. Obviously, a brush like this is suited for more detail work and smaller washes. That's going to work better than, let's say using a mop brush for details which wouldn't really be ideal. Now let's look at the number four pointed round. I'm dealing with a much smaller belly, it's very thin. Ideally, we would want to use it for more details. I can load a brush up like this and create a series of lines. It's good for adding accent colors and things like that. Note, with all of these brushes, I'm not just using one part of the bristle, I'm actually using the tip. I'm using the side. And getting a variety of brush strokes. Each brush is very versatile. You just have to get out of the habit if you're in one of using it the same way. Get familiar with applying paint with different parts of the bristles. Here you can see I'm adding some small areas of wash then using the tip of that brush to get some details. But a brush like this is fun to add little dots if you're trying to add no leaves or some texturing going on. This would be the ideal brush to use. Again, number four pointed around is a lovely brush to have at your fingertips. It can certainly do much smaller strokes in detail than, let's say a number four pointed around. But then again, we wouldn't want to use it to put down a large area of wash either. Here, I'm painting a couple of telephone poles here and I'll use the tip of that brush to add some wires and things like that. Just a little demo here. Just show you the versatility of these brushes, what they're suited for, then you can explore these things on your own. That brings us to the wild card, the 34 inch sword. This is a fun brush to explore. We've got the really fine tip, which is suited for thin, callgraphic lines and strokes you're going to find that's pretty handy in most of your painting subjects. We've got the side of the brush which can create these really unpredictable, uncontrollable almost strokes. And results, again, ideal for a lot of things. If you're doing trees and we're just trying to add some texture to the ground, you don't want to be too uniformed or predictable. This is a great brush to work with. I started using the sword a lot the last three years. I find it just a very handy tool to have a round, and I use it in every single painting if you like to do thinner line work, if you're doing subjects that require things like that, then it's great if you like to do strokes or if you need strokes that are somewhat irregular, they're good for that too. Here you can see showing you the tip of the brush. I can add all these nice little detail strokes. Then of course, I use the broad side of it as well to put down larger areas of pigment. Knowing the versatility of your brushes is key. A painting is basically a series of brush strokes. Knowing that you have a lot of ways you can use a brush is important that way it gives you you're painting more interest when you're using a variety of strokes. It looks more interesting than just using the same stroke with different brushes. Again, we've got the belly of the brush, we've got the tip of the brush. Be sure to experiment using all sides of it, because this is where you'll really start to enjoy and embrace applying paint and getting some fun, spontaneous results. All right, for your project, I want you to create a similar chart as I did here. And enjoy getting to know each brush and how versatile it can be that way. When you get to painting, you have more familiarity with strokes and the range of strokes you can make. 11. It's All About the Water: It's all about the water. Believe me, the more you understand how water effects water color your brushes, the better off you are. Remember these exercises. Tea, milk, honey. Using water to dilute the paint. We're going to do something similar, but we're going to do it in a few different ways. I will do a few spotches. I will do some Alizarin Crimson, and then put it down on dry paper. Now, dry paper is very thirsty. It's going to absorb that water and pigment off of the brush. It's going to literally pull it out of the bristles. Again, that's dry paper. Now I'm going to take a loaded brush that's loaded with water and pre wet an area on the paper. Now, I'm not going to over wet it, I'm just going to dampen it a little bit. It's wet which means there's already water there. And I'm going to put the same wash into that paper. Now the observation is slightly wet, paper isn't as thirsty as the dry paper. It's still absorbent. It's still going to take the paint, but it doesn't extract it as quickly because it's not as thirsty. All right, because it's already wet. Two scenarios there of painting on dry paper and wet paper. Now, for both of those examples, my brush was wet or damp. It wasn't overly wet. We talked about that earlier when we said, hey, wet your brush. But tap it out a little bit. You don't want all that water on the paper or palette. Now, with this brush, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to wet it, but it's going to be a little bit sloppy. I didn't really take any of the excess water out of it. Now, I may have some issues on the palette where things are puddling up. But as far as the paper is concerned, when I apply it to the dry paper, it's going to still slurp it right up. That's because the paper is very thirsty. It wants that moisture and it's going to extract it. Now if I use the same wet brush into an area that's already pre wet, which is what I'm going to do now. Notice how it doesn't really slur that pain up as much. It tends to puddle up a little bit. What we're slowly observing and learning here is that how wet a surface or a brush is will greatly impact which way the paint or water is moving. So in this case, where I had a very wet brush and very wet paper, the paper almost started to reject the paint. Almost like there's a battle going on over which one wants to refuse the paint more so a fully loaded and wet brush wants to discharge, get rid of the water and pigment. But if you have a wet surface, it's not going to accept it. We'll do the same idea, but this time with slightly wet paper. And just to be clear, the paper isn't as wet as the condition that I just did, but I'm still going to use a really loaded brush. But the paper accepted the paint better, and that's because the paper was drier than the fully saturated brush. One of them was ready to accept the paint more so than the other. Again, this is all about understanding how water works. Basically, when the paper is drier than the brush, it's going to pull water and pigment from it. Simple as that. Just to compare that to this scenario, I will start with a very wet swatch. Again, completely saturated and puddling up on the surface here. Then I will add some wet paint to it. You will see the paint just tends to puddle up as it did before. We did a very similar swatch when both of them are equally wet or overly wet, makes a really bad environment or condition to paint in. Watch as I remove the moisture from my brush, it will extract paint from the paper. Yes, water does move uphill and in the right environment. That just shows you that if the brush is thirsty, if it's drier than the paper, then it's going to actually pull pigment from it. Just like if the paper is drier than the brush, then it's going to pull pigment from the brush. Remember that brushes need to be slightly damp to work well. Dry paper can accept paint at any point. But a dry brush, this doesn't release the paint very well. Make sure you have a damp brush, but always pay attention to the conditions. Pay attention to how wet your surfaces and how wet your brushes. Are you trying to extract paint or are you trying to put paint down? If things are too wet, you may have to let it dry a little bit to add more pigment. To explore these ideas, I recommend creating a similar study. Go back and forth with really wet paper, really wet brushes, and just note how the pigment reacts in certain conditions. Try a really wet paper in a very dry brush to understand how it extracts paint in certain conditions. Okay, I hope you enjoy the lesson. I'll see you in the next one. 12. Timing in Wet Conditions: In this lesson, we will be working with wet conditions. And learning a lot about timing, when to add paint, and when not to add paint to a wet wash. To do that, I will begin with a flat wash. I will use my good old mop and some lizard crimson For this exercise, I'm not going to overly wet the paper. I will say this is like a T mixture applied to the surface. I'm not trying to push it in any direction, whether it be too dry or too dark. Just your good old average wash. Now, I sectioned off the area on the left hand side that is very wet because I just applied the wash. I'm going to immediately add paint a T mixture to that wash. This blue is a very thin mixture into the wet Alizarin crimson. Now when I work into that wet wash, and I do it quickly, it's fine. You just have to know that because I'm working in a wet environment, it's going to disperse quickly. It's going to really dissolve that mixture to a point where there'll be a subtle change, but it won't be too much. Now I'm going to mix up a milk mixture. Then add that again to the wet wash. Note how the milk mixture doesn't dissolve as much. The wet paper, I should say, has a more difficult time eating into the thicker paint. Now, the last swatch there was honey. I added a very thick mixture into that wet paint and it barely dissolved it. Now, when we look closely at it, it's going to have soft edges, but it didn't really dissolve it as much as, of course, the tea mixture. And it didn't dissolve as much as the milk mixture. The thicker the pain is, we'll determine how much dissolving or dispersing you get. A thin mixture again, is going to dissolve and disperse a lot. And then the thicker paint, not so much. Now as I've done this demo, the middle area has dried quite a bit. It's probably about 50% dry. So I'm going to repeat the same three mixtures. Okay, again, it's slightly drier. Timing is everything. If I mix up a T mixture and put into this area, now what's going to happen is it's going to start to cauliflower. I've waited too long to add the mixture to the slightly drier paint when you're doing a thin layer like this. And then you add a thin layer to it that's mostly water. If you're too late, it's going to start to balloon and Cali flower. You'll get these funny looking water marks in your washes. Now I will add the milk mixture. Slightly thicker paint going into the surface here is still semi dry. Notice it works fine. Okay. And that's because it has less water. The mixture started to Cali flower and that's because the water is moving the paint now where the thicker paint didn't really have that same impact. Now if I add honey to that, that works fine as well. Again, it's going to have soft edges, but the edges are going to be harder than the first one. That's because the paper is a little bit drier. For the last swatch, know that the paper is dry, that is probably 95% dry. And it's going to respond differently than the semi dry or very wet paper in the previous swatches starting with my thin e mixture. I will add that to the bottom. Notice no cauliflowering going on. Again, timing is important with paint that's almost dry, you can add a T mixture over it and it's just going to sit on top. And notice the edge quality to the edges are very hard as opposed to the very wet conditions. The milk mixture is fine, but because the paper is pretty much dry at this point, I'm going to have very hard edges. When we look and compare those to the previous examples, you will see how that edge quality is impacted by the wetness of the paper and the wash. Now, honey, as you know, is going to be very stiff and it's going to have very hard edges. At this point, it will probably show some of the texture of the paper. Again, timing is important when you're dealing with a wet wash and you want to work into it. You have to know where you're at on this scale. When the wash is wet, you can certainly work into it just fine, Whether it be tea, milk or honey. It's not going to have a huge impact or negative impact on the results. This is probably one of the more challenging aspects for beginners is getting their timing right. Working wet into wet with no delay shouldn't be a problem at all. I just showed you that again real quick in that little demo. In the next example, I put my Swatch down and I'm going to semi dry it. We're going to get it to a point where it's, let's say 50 to 60% dry because it's a very thin wash. You have to know when it's at this stage. If you go back into it with another mixture, it's very risky if you go back into it. At this stage, you would want to use slightly thicker paint so that you don't risk cauliflowering. Getting those water marks that are oftentimes undesirable. Again, thicker paint, you have no problem going back into it. All right? And also know that as you work into wet paint, the drier the washes, the harder the edges are for the paint that you're applying. That's a really good lesson on understanding how to work into wet washes. Something you're going to do a lot as you move forward with watercolor painting. Have a look at my results here. And then for your project, create a similar wash study experiment with different conditions. Try to create Cali flowers so that you understand why it's happening. And then tweak your timing. And tweak your mixtures so that you understand how to avoid them. Good luck. Have fun, and I'll see you in the next one. 13. Odds & Ends: Let's talk about some odds and ends, various techniques that you're going to want to use and at least know about as we move forward. I will go ahead and put a Swatch down. Now, you've seen this before, but I want to make sure you understand the proper technique on how to use it again. A wet wash, I want to lift or remove some of that wet paint. A good way to do that is simply to use a brush. You could use a paper towel or a napkin, but in this case, I have a damp brush. It's not saturated, it's only damp, so I'll wet it. I tapped it out because it's drier than the surface of the paper. It's going to extract that paint. An easy way to lift what you will want to do then let me show you the bad technique. This is where I have an overly wet brush. As you can see, the water is dripping off. And I go into that wet paint that's going to create the cali, flowering. The water is going to eat into that paint and you will be left with water marks. Try to avoid lifting with a brush or any material that is too wet. I'm sure by now you know how important understanding water is to the success of your painting and all of these techniques. Now let's look at softening edges. Occasionally, you will apply a stroke or two. The edge quality is just a little stiff. In this case, I'm just putting down a little bit of red and just some other random color here. The paint is still wet. But notice the both edges are extremely hard. Now, my desire is to soften those edges. I have a damp brush, but it's not excessively wet. Again, as you probably already know, this is the ideal situation for removing or softening edges. That little bit of moisture in my brush is going to soften the edge and just get that paint to loosen up a little bit. Now, with an excessively wet brush, I've got a bad situation on my hands because all that water is going to discharge into the paper. That's because the paper is drier than the actual brush which was really wet. You know which way the water is going to run in that environment. The last one is scraping or scratching into paint. You can do this with wet paint. You can also do it with dry paint if you have the right material, basically. In a situation like this, maybe you want to create some texture or maybe you just want some detail in your painting. I will put down an area of pigment here, Again, just random color. It's not overly wet. But notice that if you scratch into it too soon, while the paint is really wet, it may back fill into that groove. When you scratch into the paint, what you're doing is you're basically creating a little groove in the paper. Obviously, wet paint will want to go back into that groove. I'm going to speed up the drying just a little bit here and get this paint where it's semi dry. This is a really good condition to scrape. Now, I can use my fingernail and scratch some marks into the paint, and it's less likely to backfill. Another thing you can try is an Exacto knife. This will give you some really fine lines. Now that paint on the right hand side is very dry, but notice how it lifts and scratches that paper and adds a little texture that's lifting, softening edges and scraping, or scratching into paint. Three odds and ends you will probably use in your watercolor painting, create a similar study using these techniques that way. When it comes time to needing them, you know exactly how to do it. 14. Project; Colorful Eggs: Welcome to your first projects, colorful eggs. This will be a lot of fun. You're going to explore color, You're going to explore all of these techniques we've been learning. I'm going to create a series of four lines and then fill those up with some eggs. Obviously, my eggs are imperfect because I want different sizes to explore. This project is great for exploring. Remember the brush strokes we talked about earlier where we use different parts of the brush to create different variety of lines? That's what we want to do in this lesson. The first row, I will dedicate for my mop brush. I will apply some T mixtures, very thin, again, just very random. Now remember this lesson about water. I'm keeping all of these things in mind. How wet is the paper? How wet is the brush? As I add layers, I need to remember that timing is important. So I want to avoid ballooning. And I want to have control and at least explore these different conditions. Here I'm using some neutral tint, some random colors. As I get into it, I want to think about some of these different wash varieties too. The gradations, the flat washes, variegated, just mix and mingle all of these different techniques into it. There I'm working into the wet paint, adding slightly thicker paint, again, going back into the red egg, adding slightly richer pigment into it. Remember, if my timing is incorrect, then I'm going to start to get that cauliflower going on. Ideally, I would want to end this project with some interesting looking eggs. But I don't want the technique to be poor. I don't want a bunch of cauliflowers and stuff going on. Now, again, just working back and forth, doing some variegated eggs, doing some gradations, different things into that. Now I can work a little bit more wet into wet. To do this, I can use just random pigments and just mix into the wet paint, knowing that if I do it at this stage, it's going to be pretty safe because all of these washes are still very wet. Now I'm going to switch to a smaller brush. I'm going to try lifting the brush was damp and I'm just going to again, experiment with that technique now. I'm going to let that dry a little bit and then go down to my second row. I will dedicate that to my number ten pointed round. Notice how I used a series of lines there working back and forth to create a shape of the egg. Here I painted a big, you can see as I get further and further into this exercise, I'm doing things more randomly and spontaneously. All the while trying to use good technique, timing the amount of water, and so on. But again, mixing colors, dropping different pigments into it. It's a great exercise to explore color combinations because painting and learning sometimes can be so rigid. It's good to have these really expressive projects to do and exercises. We'll just loosen you up a little bit and bring a little bit of that spontaneous energy and fun back into the creative process. Again, these washes are still wet enough that I can work into it with even a mixtures or milk mixtures or even thicker paint with my number four pointed around. I will do another row, again doing the same thing. Now I'm experimenting with dots. Instead of painting a flat wash or gradated was basically filling the egg and making the shape using dots. Now I can use a series of lines and so on. Just having some fun, getting familiar and exploring brushwork. Letting the colors mix a little bit, again, a great way to explore and discover a lot about painting here without putting a lot of pressure on yourself. There was nothing but dry brush. I use a damp brush and very little water into that red and created that dry brush egg. I'm backing that up with a thin layer of blue. All the while trying to just come up with more ways and fun ways to paint the egg using some diagonal strokes there. Getting used to using that small pointed round for lines. It's wonderful for adding a linear interest to your art here. Just working that gradation quickly with some orange. Now again, that paint is really wet. The timing is perfect to work wet into wet. That's fine. I won't do it with every single one. I want each one to be a little bit different, but Feel free to explore and do whatever feels right for you here. I'm dropping thicker red paint into that blue. Just observing how that thicker paint doesn't disperse as much, it tends to hold that shape, that brush stroke a little bit more. Now I get to my wild card, one of my favorite brushes, and that is my sword. This one is a little bit harder to control. It's flimsy, it doesn't have that snap back that a good pointed round has. But that's what I like about it. There are times when you don't want to control every stroke and you're looking for something a little more abstract and random here, just exploring some curly lines, a little curly cues, dropping thick paint into it. Having a good time, just getting to know the brush. A little bit of exploring and trying to refine techniques and timing. Thin washes, thick washes, mix and matching paints. Not every egg has to be colorful and beautiful. Some can be gray, dark, sketchy. That thing here, experimenting with short lines, long lines, and whatever else I can come up with. But the main thing I want you to explore is just good technique and just getting familiar with putting paint down and getting the timing right. All the things that we've talked about up to this point, there's been a lot of information thrown at you. Experiment with like this, putting really dry paint down, that thick honey mixture, dropping water, just really thin mixtures into it, seeing how it mingles, because that's a huge part of being a beginner, is just getting familiar with the medium itself. Now that the eggs are mostly dry, I want to work into it a little bit. Obviously, timing is risky here. If you do it wrong, then you're going to end up with a bunch of cauliflowers. If your mixtures are too thin and weak. Again, you're going to have cauliflower depending on how wet the egg is, will depend on how thick paint you need to apply. Just make sure you pay attention to the conditions and then apply accordingly. Remember, when working into wet paint like this, the thicker you go, the safer you are. But at the same time, you don't want to just put a bunch of thick paint down. You want to just know like, okay, well can I be in between tea and milk somewhere? And put it into this wet paint and still do? Okay. You're starting to find and discover those boundaries, those areas where it made the timing or paint could have been a bad choice or like, hey, I got away with something that I didn't realize I could do. That's what this exercise is all about. And the whole time you're creating some pretty fun artwork, I must say. But these are the conditions you're going to be painting in. Working wet into wet. Again, the timing and getting your mixtures right. That's the key to understanding watercolor. There's other things like drawing and composition design and all those things, but for now it's just about getting your feet wet. The lessons in this course are really dedicated to eliminating a lot of the things that I don't want you to think about now. So that you can focus on what's important. And that's just simply becoming familiar with watercolor. I notice how I just use water in that one egg where all the dots, just to blend that up a little bit, all those dots stay there because they've stained the paper. Water color has pigment. And those pigments are like de, almost. If they sit on the paper long enough, it's going to permanently mark the paper even though I dissolved it with the water. Some of those marks stayed because they've stained the paper and they're dry enough to where they're not going to be impacted as if I wet it right when I had painted it. Anyway, again, using my sword here to explore some dots, do some different line work. So much fun. Again, so much you can learn from this exercise. That should pretty much wrap it up. There's a look at my eggs. You want to create a similar project? Just have some fun. I look forward to seeing what you do again. If you start to see a lot of cauliflowers and different things happening in your eggs, then you know you need to go back and think about your timing and your mixtures. 15. Project; Birch Trees: Now we're going to paint some birch trees. A nice, easy, approachable project you can do. You'll end up with a nice little painting, something you can keep for yourself, hang on the fridge, or give out come holidays, Using my number ten, point it around. I'm going to mix up a little bit of neutral tent. Think about a milk mixture here. We don't want it to be too thin, slightly thicker than T. And I'll create some random dots and I'm going to work vertically up the paper here. I want the dots to be, have a nice variety to them. You don't want all of your dots to look the same. Birch trees have a certain texture to them, all that texture is just very random looking. I'll curve the tree a little bit. I don't want it to be too upright and stiff. A lot of that will become more apparent and obvious as we move into the demo. Again, different sizes, different shapes, but all fairly small. Then give it a minute to dry, but not too long. You want the paint to still be wet, but we don't want it to be so dry. That's not going to be impacted by using a wet brush over it. Again, I've wet my brush and then I've tapped it out. I'm using a slightly wet brush here. I'm going to drag that down on the birch tree now. I'm using a good amount of pressure there too. I've got that brush into the surface pretty firmly so that it will dissolve some of those strokes. As you can see, it's nice and blurry looking. We got a little bit of tone on the birch tree, now I'll go back into it with thicker paint and just the neutral tent. Add a little bit of value, some darker dots into some of those areas of the tree. Not all of them, just a few of them. And be very random about it. Don't try to predict it or go back and forth in a zigzact pattern. Just do A random nature is very random. There's no sense in trying to control it too much. Now using my number four pointed around, I will add just branches and different details to the tree. Try not to have all of the branches the same size or the same angle or shape, all slightly different. Now using again, my number four pointed around a really light key mixture of yellow ochre, just to break up the gray a little bit and to add a little bit of earthy color to it. Some of that yellow ochre is thinner. You can use even more water if it starts to look too yellow this, add a little more water to it and then I'll just tone that color down a little bit for you. Just dropping that into certain places because the tree is still wet from where I drag the water down into the trunk. It's just taking that paint and dissolving it nicely here. Just a little bit of burnt sienna mixed in with that ochre that will create a subtle variety of yellow. And just make it a little more interesting to look at the purpose of this one is just to experiment with working with wet paint, getting your timing right, and also manipulating the wash a little bit so that you get it to do a certain job for you. Here I'll do the same thing, creating a series of dots and lines. But this time I'm using my brush, I'm going to have different quality marks. Things aren't going to be quite as predictable as using my pointed round because I have an irregular tip on that, but the technique will be pretty much the same. Again, letting these dry just a little bit so that we don't too blurry, we don't lose that texture of the birch tree. This is semi dry now, so I'll let it dry a little bit. I've got my wet brush and dragging that down, I really like how that brush works. This version of the tree, I think looks a little more natural, perhaps more believable than the first one, but here using a little bit of the yellows into that, just to, again, just break up the grays and to warm it up some, there's a little bit of that color and yellows and browns in birch trees. If you look closely enough now I'm lifting a damp brush, extracting just a little bit of that paint here. I'm just using some more intense yellows along that trunk. Looking pretty good. Again, this is a really subtle, graceful, almost fun painting to do where you're manipulating a wet wash. We put down a series of dots basically, and then we used a wet brush and drag it along that damp paint to create the trees. Again, interesting way to paint and explore and to work with these subtle wash techniques. Even though this isn't paint that's applied to a rectangle or to the entire sheet, it's still a wash. I'm basically working now, wet into wet in that wash. My wash is just simply a straight line as opposed to a rectangle. Anyway, the techniques we worked with there was just basically putting down a paint and then working wet into wet. We had that light gray trunk and we dropped a little bit of darker and perhaps more intense pigment into it to create our lovely little birch trees here. A fun thing for you to try for your project. Create two similar studies. Again, this is all about timing. Then using that wet brush to drag along into it with just enough pressure where it dissolves that paint just a little bit, and then you can start to drop a little bit of paint into that gray to give it some more interest in color. 16. Project Moody Forest: Welcome to the Moody Forest Project. This one we will explore some wash techniques, mostly wet into wet or wet into damp, and then also working with some dry conditions. I'm going to use my large mop to pre wet the painting area. For this particular demo, I will leave a little border around the edges. I'm not going to wet the paper from edge to edge. If you decide you want to do that, that's perfectly fine. I'm trying to evenly coat the water. There's not one area that is pulling up. Using my neutral tent, I will mix up a mixture to lightly stain the paper. Keep in mind that water color is going to dry a little bit lighter in value. Some people say even up to 20% maybe a little more than a little, but the point is, go slightly darker than you think you need. Once I have the paint down, I'm going to encourage the wash to go downhill. To do that, I'm just going to use my tape to encourage that. But before I break away from this wet wash, I'm going to use water to run down into it. What that's going to do is give me a lighter value up top and then slightly darker as it goes down. I want this to be semi dry before moving forward. Again, we're talking about maybe 75 to 80% dry. At this point, It's still slightly damp. Now, at this stage, I cannot use a mixture that's too weak. I have to make sure that my brush isn't too wet, that the paint is slightly thicker than what I put on originally. If my brush has too much water and not enough pigment, I'm going to get those cauliflowers. I want to avoid that having a wet surface or wet wash like I do now. You can see those edges are very soft, that's dispersing a little bit, which creates soft edges. I'm going to allow that to dry about, again, 85 to 90% As you can see. It's lighter but it's still slightly damp. I'm going to keep that tape under my board. I want to go a little bit darker and more saturated with my mixture. Somewhere in between probably and milk. I'm not quite like in the milk stage yet. I will say I'm somewhere close to it. But because my wash is still damp, you can see those edges are dissolving. I'm not getting a lot of detail with my strokes. Each brush stroke has gone down and then it's dispersing into the wet paint from the previous layer. This is a very challenging condition to work in, but because we're doing this random forest and there's not much detail to it, and there's a lot of wiggle room for interpretation, we don't have to get too fussy with it. Here again, I've got semi dry conditions. Again, about 80 to 85% dry. I'm going to use my smaller point around my number four and slightly thicker paint. Right. Each time I go into it, it's going slightly thicker. I want to start to create these lines that have a little more representational quality to it of a pine tree. I'll explore that on the left hand side over there. And now I'm comfortable, I'm going to move into my painting now because the paint is still wet obviously, it's still going to dissolve a little bit, but these particular trees have a little more detail than the previous layers which are really just blobs. But it's intended to be that way by adding more detail to the trees that get closer to us and then less detail of the trees that are farther away, we get the illusion of depth and distance. Now I will take a hair dryer to it and I want it to be 100% dry. This will give me full control for the last layer there. I've got my sword brush. I want this paint to be in between milk and honey. I don't want it to be too thick, but I don't want it too thin either. Somewhere in the middle should work just fine. Now, I'm using that sword to quickly add my pine trees. Notice I'm nice and loose with it. I'm not trying to control it too much, I just want to create the illusion of a pine tree and not get caught up into doing too many details and anything that's too exact. The whole point of this exercise is to work with washes, to understand the water to rigment ratio, getting the right color value with the pine trees. Again, it's such a random subject, or should I say, the subject has all these random shapes. We can get away with a lot of imperfection here at this point. I've got a lot of water on that wash and I'm going to tilt my board in various directions that I'll end courage the wash to move around and not settle into these pockets. Now I'm showing you how I'm using my small number four, Point around to splatter paint. I'm going to load it up with a nice watery mixture here. Just put a few little dots and splatters on the paper. I'll just turn those into birds by adding some wings to those dots. This is an easy watercolor painting, but the challenge here, again, is working with those wet conditions. That's why I put this project in there because it can be very challenging to get these layers the way you want them. So that when they, they read well. What we learned here and this lesson and what we explored was this idea of using a thin wash, a T like mixture. Of course, as we went into it, we went thicker with our paint. Even though we were working wet into wet, we didn't end up with those cauliflowers. Hopefully, we ended up with a nice little painting and a very moody looking forest with a few birds. For your project, you will create a similar study. For this study and the other ones moving forward, I have a template that I included with the assets. Be sure to download those there. You will get all of the artwork and demonstrations I created. Plus you'll get these templates that will help you draw these designs. But again, they don't have to be like mine. Something similar should do just fine. 17. Project Feathers: The feathers project. Another really fun exercise we can do to help you explore color wash techniques. Putting down thin lines, thick lines, and all that fun stuff. I will begin by drawing two vertical s down the paper. You can think of this as three rows of feathers. Now each feather should be slightly different. Some big, some medium, some small random shapes, But they're going to curve. Do I have a lot of feathers to draw? What I will do right now is cue the music And then let you guys check it out. And when we're done, we will start with the painting process. Obviously if you don't like a feather, you can always erase it and draw it again. That was a lot of feathers, I know, but it'll be worth it. In the end, I have my two small brushes, which is number four pointed around and my number eight. I will use the larger pointed around to fill in the feathers. And again, we will use random colors. Because these feathers have points, it's important to get a good point on your brush as you're loading it up, give it a little turn, rotate it like that, and that should keep your point together. If you have a really good point around, it should come or snap back to a point anyway. But sometimes when you load a brush, that point will get a little bit messy. But if you rotate it like that as you're loading it, it should come back to a pretty good point for you. Now, I've got a ton of feathers to paint. Again, I'm using random colors. I encourage you to mix hues that appeal to you, but then also mix some colors that you wouldn't ordinarily do. That way, you get used to seeing how certain colors mix. In the end, you may discover a color mixture combination that you really like. Use this time to explore a little bit and then also use it to obviously work on some of your technique. So as I'm painting these feathers, I'm trying to cut them in along the edges and paint them well. But, you know, if something is imperfect, I'm not going to panic about it. So I'm going to speed things up, cue the music and just kind of paint some feathers here. And when we get to the next stage, I will slow it down and we will go over what's happening. So a lot of painting, but a lot of fun. Now, I'm going to take a hair dryer to this and make sure everything is 100% D. If you want to be semi wet, that's fine. That's completely up to you. But for this one, I want everything to be dry. I'm going to use my number four round and go around some of these edges and create some texture to these feathers. Again, this is really good exercise for working on your brush control. Understanding that you don't need but just the point or the tip of those bristles on the paper to create a really thin line. In the end, you'll have a really cool piece of art to hang on the fridge or in your bedroom or wherever you want to put it anyway. Cue the music. See when this is. Ok. All right, so in this lesson, we learned to put down a thin wash, hopefully that you can explore colors this way. And once things dried a little bit, we came back over that and worked on some of our line drawing skills using a paintbrush. Fun stuff, hopefully yours turns out really well. Here is my demo image for your project. You want to create a similar feather study. A great time to experiment with color mixing brushwork and just have a little bit of fun with the learning process. 18. Project Colorful Forest: Welcome to the Colorful Forest Project. We created our moody forest. Now it's time to do something a little more bright and cheery. I will start with my large mop. I'm going to pre wet the paper, but there are certain areas I'm going to leave dry. I'm going to use my number two pencil here and draw everything out. It's going to be very light, but I think you should be able to see what's going on. Those marks I just made are going to be bushes. I want to wet the paper. But go around those bushes, there are a total of three. As I wet the paper here, I notice how I'm not wetting those three little areas. The key is I want to put a wash down, but keep the bushes dry for the moment. Having the water first will allow the wash to go down a little bit weaker. Of course, I'll use a mixture. But also notice how I'm leaving random areas of the paper dry. I'm only wetting mainly the top. Then as I get to the bushes and down towards the bottom, certain areas are left dry. Encouraging that water just to move around a little bit so it doesn't settle into a pocket. That's what I want to do. That looks pretty good. Now, I'm ready for my first wash. You can see it is still puddling there and I'm going to tilt that board and get that water to get out of those ruts. Even though you stretch the paper, sometimes it, that water can still settle into these little pockets. This is cerulean blue. And then a little touch of cobalt turquoise. I want to get a nice cheery looking blue to put down. Initially. Again, going around those bushes. And once I paint this first wash, you'll see where some of those dry areas are. But I want the edges around those bushes to be white, the white of the paper, but also to be hard edges, which is why I kept them dry. You can see I'm only putting blue towards the middle of the paper there. I'm adding a little bit of ultramarine to that wash. Obviously, working wet into wet, The strokes I'm adding now will disperse and bleed into the other blue paint, which is what I want here. I'm just tapping the board and getting that blue to move around a little bit. Now that that is starting to dry, I can add the orange, red color that I want for my bushes. I would even say they're probably lean towards a brown, yellow ochre. Cad yellow, lemon should work fine. A little touch of Cad, red light, then I'll leave a little bit of white above those bushes. I'm trying to avoid all areas of the bush to bleed into that wet blue wash. Again, having that little bit of a dry paper there towards the top will allow me to maintain the white space between the two washes. For now, now I'm getting a little more burnt sienna into that, making that a little bit more intense by adding more pigment and also a darker hue in general with the burnt sienna. Now I've got that water on the bottom of the paper. I'm encouraging that brownish yellow color to bleed and blend into that water a little bit. A little more abstract approach here, I'm using the tape to keep that wash moving downhill a little bit. Once the majority of that water has moved down towards the bottom, I can go back into it with some slightly more saturated colors, just adding a little more pigment to the yellow. And you can see there, I'm just splattering some of that paint along the bottom. Now I'm working a little bit into that blue, just softening some of the edges a little bit, but I still have the hard edges to the top of those bushes that's looking pretty good and I let that dry 100% Nothing on that artwork is wet. I've got full control over the artwork. Again, I will use my number eight pointed round, a little bit of Alizarin Crimson. Into my yellows. You can see I'm just testing that a little bit. Now, I want to use the side of the brush. I don't want to use the point the side of the brush is going to give me, allow me to cover a little more area, it's going to give me a little more texture with my strokes. That's because the side of the brush is going to graze along the paper without putting too much pressure into the surface. Plus, I want these strokes to look nice and bold and not too thin. There you can see I'm using the side of that brush and just dragging that along the surface. That's given me some really random strokes and overlapping that orange bush a little bit. This is a strong magenta color. The pigment itself is thicker than anything I've used so far. I'm building the painting up from thin to thick. I will use another magenta mixture there, but I don't want that to be as intense as the one on the left. I use a little bit wet brush to get that effect. That's looking pretty good. You can see I'm loose with my brush strokes, letting things blend and bleed a little bit and not trying to control it so much. Now taking a little bit of Cad red into this, I'm going to get something that's in the orange family and I'll work that into some of the yellows and browns and magentas I already have. Again, very loose with the brushwork. I don't try to control it too much. This is one of those paintings that it's not as defined, so to speak. And sometimes with art, it's good to have some studies that are more detailed and some that let the medium just work and flow a little differently. This is one where I want it to be, I wanted to flow a little bit more, and I want the colors and shapes to mingle a little bit. I need that to dry, but not all the way. It's about 85% dry. Now I'm going to use my sword brush and mix up a little bit of a bluish gray ultramarine with some neutral tint. Should work fine. I'm probably going to take a little bit of yellow and orange that's on the palette end of that. Just to soften it up a little bit, this mixture needs to be weak. I'm going to paint my vertical trees. But I want the trees to have a ghosted appearance to them. I don't want them to be too dark in value. I want them to look very transparent. Here I have some shadows that I put along the left hand side. Now I'm adding my tree trunk, this will probably be one of the darker trunks. I will clean my brush. Now I've got a mixture that has more water into it. You can see this trunk reads a little bit more transparent. We're getting a variety, not all of my trees are the same color and they're not the same value. This painting works better if you have variety versus painting all the objects the same. Just like I have one magenta bush that is more defined and a little more intense. And then another one that's a little bit faded and drifty a little bit. You get a variety of everything in this painting versus all the bushes and all of the trees being looking the same now, adding some shadows, some loose marks. And now lifting a little bit, using my sword to remove some of that paint. Now doing some of those callgraphic strokes, nice and loose into the wet paint. There you go. There's the finished product. Now your job is to create a similar colorful for study using the techniques I've shared. In this video, I have the template included with the assets for this project. 19. Project Variegated Leaves: Welcome to the Variegated Botanicals Project. Another fond and enjoyable painting that should be fairly easy and we're going to explore some wet conditions. Just a reminder, all of my paper is prepared this way. I know I didn't tell you on the other projects, but I do want to remind you that to prepare your paper so it doesn't buckle, I will start with drawing some stems and leaves. You will get the template for my drawing and the project assets. Be sure to download those. These can be random sizes. When you draw, yours doesn't have to look like mine. You can go on pins. You can go out in your yard. The idea is you have a little stem or a stick with some leaves coming off of it. I think I have a total of seven. I will go behind my work here and remove some of the unwanted lines. Now this particular project, we're going to pre wet our mixing area. The paper is 100% dry. I'm going to use my number eight pointed round and just some clean water and pre wet all the leaves and the stems. And this will give us an environment or condition where we'll be painting wet into wet. Even though there won't be any paint down, there is water. That water will act as a sponge or a conduit to move the water in a particular shape or direction. Because the shapes are pre wet, all I can have to do is just drop pigment into that and it's going to disperse and move into the shape of whatever I just put down. It's a fun way to paint. It's more random. You can't control the water and color as much. It's going to have a mind of its own. The only control I have really is just what colors go into the leaves. There's no science or anything premeditated here about what I want to do with colors. I'm going random and just letting things go or unfold as I go, using some magentas, gray, blue, grays, navy blues. Whatever comes to mind? Just letting the water and the pigment do what's magic. Let them decide how they want to mix and mingle and in what direction they want to go. I should say that my paper and board are flat. I don't have anything propping my paper up in an angle. Having it flat like that allows the paint to mingle in different directions as opposed to moving just downhill in one direction. An easy project, something fun to do. Again, I encourage you to not be predictable with all of your colors. Mix and match a little bit. You can lift some of the color too. I have a damp brush, but it's very dry because the brush is drier then the leaves, then it's easily used to extract paint and pigment from the leaves. We talked about that in the lifting area of this course. Now I'm going back in lifting, adding a little color randomly. I guess the key is not to overwork the paint. If you overwork it all, the colors will start to blend into each other and you won't have any variety. I have my sword, fairly dry brush, but again, slightly damp. I'm using just the tip of it to create these finer lines, mostly grays, but I'm mixing in a little bit of yellow. And then now connecting the leaves with some thin stems starting to come together. Like I said, it's an easy project. All levels can certainly experiment with this and all the other projects I've added in this course. Each one is designed to teach you a new skill and to help remind you of a lot of the things that we've learned in this course so that you can practice and get better. In the end, you will probably have a good idea where your strengths and weaknesses are. The skills we used were pre wetting the paper in a particular shape and then dropping paint into that shape, letting the water and the paint mingle as it wishes. And then, of course, we use some line work. If you have a small brush, you can do that as well. There's my finished project and now it's your turn to create a similar study. Use a lot of the ideas I shared with you. Good luck. Have fun, and I look forward to seeing what you do. 20. Project Negative Space Forest: Welcome to the negative painting Forest Project. We painted a moody forest. This will be very similar. We're going to keep the colors very muted, but we're going to do a lot of negative space painting. I'll talk about that more as we move forward. The idea is we will do a series of gradated washes and leaving some white space of the paper there. I have a couple of triangles at the bottom, and I'm going to paint around those. I want to leave that area white. Again, I'll remind you the templates for these projects are in the assets for you. So you will have something to work with when you're ready to try it on your own. For my wash, I'm using neutral tent and a little bit of ultramarine blue that will give me an indigo color. I've got my large mop brush. I'm using plain water to pre wet the area. Notice I did not wet the area that I want to keep white. I went around that very thin T like mixture, goes into the first wash and let it dry. Now the paper is 100% dry and I'm ready for the second layer To do that, I'm going to use a piece of paper and basically protect the area that I want to keep white. And I use my Mr. bottle to wet the rest of the paper. This is going to allow the wash to have soft edges. The Mr. bottle comes in handy, especially when you want to target particular areas of your painting. Having that paper there, of course, will help protect the white areas. I want some soft edges which is why I pre wet it. I'm creating this illusion of some pine trees back there. I use a Mr. bottle there to miss the top of the edges of the trees. Now of course, I can use my brush and tilt the board to encourage that wash to move around. Again, I'm going to let that dry 100% which is where I'm at now. I want a slightly thicker layer than what I used before. I will add a another layer of pine trees here. Because I'm using darker paint, these trees will appear a little bit closer to us. Now, I've got my good old Mr. bottle there. I'm allowing that to bleed down a little bit. Then also it will give it some soft edges. I want this to be a similar moody, misty environment that we painted before, but the technique we're using will be slightly different because we're going to really go fool on with some negative space painting. All that's looking pretty good at this stage. I'm going to work a little bit of thicker paint into these trees and that'll give it a little more body. It's so easy for things to disperse too much, but you can always work into the wet paint with thicker paint. As we've talked about in previous lessons, I will encourage that water to move down. Now, here we are 100% dry. As you may have guessed, I'm going to use much thicker paint. I will be in between milk and honey. Nice and thick, nice and intense. I really want this white tree to pop with negative space painting. Basically what you're doing is you're going around the edges or the contour of your subject that's going to paint what it is. In this case, I'm using a very dark value. I'm going around the edges of this tree. Now, in nature, this doesn't exist. You don't really have a bright white tree in front of a bunch of other gray trees. But this particular piece is more random and it's more abstract. As artists, we can get away with doing things like this and manipulating colors just for the effect. In the short time you can see I'm randomly adding some strokes. I shouldn't say randomly, some of these are fairly calculated. I know the idea of the contour that I want. And then there'll be certain areas where I'll let it go a little bit and just put down some more random strokes. Anyway, there'll be a larger tree on the left and then it'll have a smaller version on the right. As I get around the contours here, I can start to loosen up a little bit and then create this other row of dark trees behind it. Basically, I'm using that dark value of trees as a way to paint the white trees. Hence, what I named this project, which was negative space painting. A fun way to paint negative space painting is a very effective tool. I didn't want to go into it too deep in this beginner course. But you can use negative space painting in a variety of ways. It really is an effective way to do a lot and create a lot of interesting effects, I should say, with your artwork. But as you can see, we used layers of washes, mainly working wet into dry. But that little Mr. Bottle helped to give us some soft edges. Then we use that negative space painting to create the lovely white trees in the foreground. You can go back in and refine some of the details, but the key is to keep this somewhat abstract and don't try to get too fussy. But however you finish it and however much detail you put into it, of course, is totally up to you. But a fun project to try. In my opinion, it can be challenging to control the washes and then to get the negative space painting to work well. But I'm sure with a little bit of practice, you can pull this off. There's my finished project. Now it's your turn to give this one a shot again. Moody, forced here, but we threw in the added twist and challenge of the negative space painting. 21. Project Three Threes: Three Trees Project. I will begin using my two B pencil and I will quickly lay out the design. As I've mentioned before, I will include all of these templates in the resource assets. Be sure to download those so you can easily paint along with me or at your own convenience. The beauty of this simple landscape is that we're going to focus on some simple variegated washes. You remember those from the common washes lesson? And now we can put those ideas to work. Using my large mop brush, I'm going to mix up a mixture of ultramarine blue and a little bit of cerulean blue. Obviously work in the wash from the top to the bottom. Important to try to join each main stroke at the bottom of the wash. Eventually I'm going to mix in a little bit of Alizarin Crimson. I will tell you that Alizarin crimson is a very intense color. You have to water that down quite a bit. Once I get this wash to the bottom, I will do a mix of both the blue and the lizard and crimson at the very top of the blue. I want to make a gradation so it's a little bit darker towards the top of the sky and then lighter as we get down towards the middle. Now the key here is to let it dry, but I'm going to leave it propped like this to encourage the wash to run down. Now it's 100% dry and I'm going to switch to my number eight pointed around. I'm going to use the side of my brush for most of the tree foliage. Of course, you may remember we cover that in the brushwork lesson. You can use the tip of the brush, the side of the brush, different areas of the bristles to create a certain effect for my green. I'm using cerulean and a little bit of the cadmium yellow lemon. But I'm also mixing in some ultra marine and burnt sienna. Because I want the green to be a little bit on the brown side. I don't want a pure bright green. I also need the value of the green to be slightly darker. To do that, I'm going to add a little bit of red light. Red light will immediately make that green a little bit darker and a little bit gray. Now you can see that's a little bit too pale for what I need. I'm going to go into my neutral tent, which is a good color for grain it out, but also to add a little bit of value to it. The leaves need to stand out against that blue sky. If it's too pale, then it's just not going to make enough impact because the trees are the main focal point they need to be done well. Again, getting a value that is the right darkness is key to making this piece work. Here you can see me exploit the side of the brush a little bit. The beauty of using the side of that brush is going to give you more, less predictable stroke. That way you get some interesting foliage and shapes versus things that are too predictable. I did put a little bit of burnt sienna into that green. That's going to make it a little bit darker, but it's also going to brown it out a little bit. Now that I've got the base green and hue for the leaves, I'm going to go back in with some darker values. Remember, working wet into wet can be a little bit risky. You have to get your timing right. Also, lifting paint, which is what I'm doing here, is all about timing. As you're putting this wash down, it's a good time to do that. If I wait a little bit too long, it could easily ruin the wash and I'll end up with the cauliflowers and the watermarks. Now, I'm going to go with something a little bit on the brown side or can I use yellow ochre and a touch of the red. That was cad, red light. I'm going to obviously paint the ground plane getting a little more sienna, a little more yellow ochre. Now, because I feel that wash is a little bit too pale, I want to push that more towards a milk consistency so that it stands out a little bit. The ground plane is important, it's going to anchor the piece. If the ground is too light in value, it just won't have enough there to make it believable that the Foliage is starting to dry a little bit, but again, it's not too dry. I can drop a little bit of color into that, and that's just going to help create a little bit of variation. Now I'm going to add a little bit of a dark value there to the ground plane, and that's going to break it up, but it's also going to suggest shadows under the trees. This is only the second layer and there will be a third. But the key with this layer is to make sure I get some variation. I don't want the trees or the foliage in the trees. I don't want the ground plane to be a flat wash. That's why I'm mixing up a little bit different earth tones. And now I'm mixing up a little bit different green. And I'm going to drop that into the foliage that way when it dries, it'll have a little more interest to it. Now I'm 100% dry. I've got complete control over the colors and the washes. Again, I'm going to use my sword brush and create the trunks for the trees. As you remember, the sword brush is pretty interesting because you can get some unpredictable strokes. I think for tree trunks, it's a good brush to use because tree trunks are very abstract. They are nothing more than a line. But the line is often has kinks in it and very subtle angles. It's not just a straight boring line. I've got a slightly darker value there for the trunk on the right. Now I want some variation. I'm making the next trunk a little bit leaner. You don't want all of the trunks to be the same symmetry and it just doesn't work well with painting. You always want variety. The more variety you can have in your subjects, the more interest you're going to get from the end results. Now, I'm using the tip of the brush and I know my hand is in a way, I have to apologize for that. But this is where I only want to use the very tip of my sword brush. That's going to give me these really thin, faint lines, which works well for some of the branch work. Now I can use my towel that is dry and it is clean to just touch into those trunks. And that's going to break up the line a little bit. And we'll add a little bit of variation to the overall transparency of it. Here I will strengthen the shadow a little bit. That's working pretty well. Again, this is just a dry brush. I'm just moving that wash around a little bit, trying to get a little bit of texture going. That's looking good, but I feel like a little bit of red in there would just pop the focal point a little bit. Just bring a little more color and excitement to the piece. All in all this is coming together, as you can see, pretty quickly. This is just a wet brush with no color. And I'm just touching that into the wash while it's wet to encourage it to run a little bit. That was just a little bit of green, I splashed into it. Again, that's just going to indicate shadows and make a little interest in the focal point. And in the foreground, I have some trees or shrubs and bushes. In the very back, I can use a very thin key like mixture to indicate those. Maybe hit it again towards the bottom in the base just to indicate some shadows and some a cast shadow. That should work pretty good. That is a good way and a good project to exploit variegated washes. Also working wet into wet using layers, building up the painting from thin to thick. Hopefully you enjoy the project. There it is, that photo was taken a natural light so you get a better feel for the colors. Good luck and have fun with this one. 22. Project Water's Edge : Welcome to the Water's Edge Project. Don't be intimidated by this one. It's just a series of washes, some variegated washes, working wet into wet, and all those fun, basic watercolor techniques you're starting to become very familiar with. Again, using my two B, I will lay out my design, starting with the edge or the land edge, basically almost a z going across the page. Once I have that, I can add the mountain or the hills in the background. That's pretty much it. I will quickly map out the foliage towards the top and then make a few lines that will eventually be the tree trunks. I use light lines just because I don't want them to show through too much. On the final piece, you will get the templates. As I mentioned before, I will begin with a variegated wash. As you may remember that as a wash that has multiple colors, I will use the cerulean blue like mixture for the sky, then quickly change to a yellow, a little bit of ochre and cad yellow, lemon, before switching to a little bit darker blue, some ultramarine into that for the water. It's okay if that bleeds a little bit, it shouldn't bleed too much. I've got the board and the paper pointed downwards, so that should encourage the wash and any blending to come down as opposed to up. Now I will get a nice bright green using the cerulean with my Cad yellow lemon to get that vibrant green. Later on, I'm going to add some variation into that. It's okay if these colors, the blues and the greens bleed just a little bit because again, this is the initial wash and we're going to go over it a few times now. I've got a damp brush. This is my number eight pointed round, no color, just damp, pure water. I'm lifting a little bit of blue into that water. I will also do the same thing for the sky. That's just going to create a subtle variation for those two areas. That is a variegated wash. Even though we controlled a little bit about where it goes, we still use multiple colors. Now this painting is 100% dry, and I will move into the second layer again using my number eight pointed round. I will also go with some neutral tint, a little bit of ultramarine blue yellow ochre and burnt sienna. I have a little area at the bottom that's great for testing my colors. I'm really paying attention to the hue but also the value, how light or dark is this mixture. Because this will be applied to the mountains and the land in the background. I want it to be a T like mixture, so very weak. But I needed to be dark enough that it's going to stand out a little bit. I wanted to be a little bit darker than the water. That's working pretty good. And now I can add the hills or the mountains and then let that dry a little bit. Again, pretty simple. And to encourage the drying time, I'm going to use the hair dryer. Obviously that's about 85% dry. Remember, when you start to work into slightly wet paint, you've got to go thicker. If you have too much water in your mixture here, you're going to get the cauliflower and ballooning. Don't always dry your brush, Tap it out, and then make sure your paint that you're laying over top is thicker than what you started with. That gives me a little bit of layering and a little bit of interest in the background. This is not going to be the focal point. We don't need to do too much, It's just a little bit there to anchor the background. Now I've got the trees which will be going along the top. I want those to be isolated. I don't want them to really touch the background in any way. I'm going to mix up my green. I need this mixture to be milk. Okay? It needs to be thick enough to where it's going to look solid. The trees are the focal point, because it's a vertical element. It needs to be a little bit darker and richer in color. Plus it's a little more in the foreground. The trees are obviously closer to us than the distant hills. Therefore, they should be a little more vibrant. They should have a little more color then they should be a little bit darker in value as well. As things move away from you in a landscape, they tend to get lighter and more muted or grayed out or even more blue. That's working pretty good. You can see I'm mixing some burnt siennas and browns into that. Again, I don't want this to be a flat wash. Like I said in the very beginning, a watercolor painting is a series of washes, even though this wash isn't covering the whole paper, it's just to indicate the leaves. I still treat it as a wash. And I always ask myself, where does it need to be? Does it need to be tea, milk or honey? And then, do I want it to be flat, variegated, and so on. Most washes I do, and that you will do especially for landscaping will be variegated. Here you can see I'm working the browns into it. Some neutral tens, even some blues, Anything to give me a slightly darker value to create variation. Also switch to my number four pointed round to paint. In some smaller leaves, again we have the big tree mass. Then we have some smaller shapes and then some even smaller shapes that will indicate the leaves. You don't want a lot of detail in the tree mass that's farther away from you. Be sure to keep it a little bit chunky in the back on the left hand side. As the trees come closer to you, they should break up a little bit. You should start to see a little more detail. That's typically how things work here. Just again, working some variation, making sure the underbellies of the trees are slightly darker, the light source is coming from the top. Therefore, underneath the trees, the leaves tend to be a little bit darker green. Now everything is 100% dry again and I can move into the fourth layer. This will require a number eight pointed round. I could easily use my sword brush for this as well, but I figured I would just mix it up a little bit. I'm using some neutral tents and browns that are on the palette, along with some reds. I want this to be fairly dark, but I also need to be fairly transparent. I don't want the tree trunks to be too heavy and opaque. Again, a milk mixture. At this point, you have to remember, I'm only layering over a mixture. The water, the sky, the distant mountains, even the grass in the foreground. Everything I've done to this point has been very thin and water down. Just building it up a little bit at this stage but yet still keeping it very transparent. That's just going to, again, make the trunks not so heavy. Keeping a little bit of that transparency will just keep it light and airy. As I move back to the distant trunks, I'm using a little more water and less pigment into the mixture so that the trunks appear a little bit darker as they come towards us. Now I'm using some dark green there to add a little bit of texture to the grass as it comes closer to us. Again, just a little bit, you're trying to suggest things at this point and not necessarily trying to hammer out a ton of details. All of this is the imagination in general. If you just observe landscapes, you'll always find that the detail is closer to you. As things move away, they tend to flatten out a little bit, all right? Adding a little bit of a texture to the grass area. Just a few splashes and splatters of color. That's all looking pretty good. I've got a fly on the board there, excuse me for that. Now, using thicker paint, it's still in the milk area but a little bit thicker than what I've used so far to create some shadows and texture in some of the trunks. Again, using my hair dryer to speed up the drying time, I've got everything working pretty good. A few more shadows and texture on the trees. I should be ready to add the final detail, which will be the cache shadows. Again, a simple series of washes is all it takes a lot of times to pull off even a slightly more complicated design. It's all about the process, trying to envision the washes and how you will use them and layer them. That's what this painting is all about. It's a series of washes. Understanding the basic characteristics of water color, how to layer the paintings and the paint so that it doesn't read too weak. Then of course, getting some value hierarchy in there. So things that are closer to us are slightly darker and more detail. All these things we pretty much have talked about, there may be some, a few subtle details there about landscapes in general that I shared with you in this course. I do have an excellent landscape painting fundamental course. I created that when painting with acrylics. But all of the ideas I shared with you can be applied to water color digital painting. It doesn't matter. It's just a really good course for understanding how to paint landscapes as well. Anyhow, this is coming together pretty quickly. I think it's all done. There it is, the final piece. That picture taken a natural light so you get a better feel for the colors and good luck with this one. I hope you have fun. I enjoyed sharing it with you and I enjoy painting it. So I'll see you in the next one. 23. Project Friends: Welcome to the final project title. This one, Friends. This is a lot of fun. Again, don't be intimidated, it's a lot of easy. It's just a series of washes. Like all other watercolor paintings, I will use my number two pencil to lay in my drawing. I always start with the longest line, which is the distant background. Adding now the trees or the big tree, I should say in the foreground. That tree just needs to have an interesting shape. So important, but yet so many people miss out on something so simple. Because that focal point, it will be on the right hand side with the two figures walking under the tree. That really needs to grab the attention of the viewer. If you just have a boring blob or balloon shaped tree canopy, then it's just going to work again. You have the templates that I use for these. Be sure to check that out and just spend a little bit of time looking at the overall shape. Again, pretty easy. A few lines. Again, noticed with my drawings, I don't use a lot of details. I just put the main shapes and elements in there. And that's all you need. The paint brush can do the rest if you add too many details. And then you're going to paint like a coloring book and we don't need all of those lines. I think watercolor in general should be spontaneous. A little bit of neutral tint, a little bit of yellow ochre, a very gray, warm wash here, as I've mentioned before. It's going to dry even lighter. Now, I will put a little more pigment into that. I'm talking just a touch because I want a little bit of a gradated wash, a little bit more saturation and color towards the top of the painting, and then let it get weak as it comes down to the foreground. That's it, at this point, we've got to let that dry, and now it's 100% dry. And I can move on to the next layer. I will work from the very back to the front. So I'm going to tackle the distant background area. That's pretty simple. Just some grays, almost the same colors. I've already used, very simple, minimalistic palette. But I'm going to build the paint up just a little bit. I will still say we're easily within that key mixture range, is just slightly thicker. I want that to be dark enough to where it stands out. It catches your attention, but it doesn't distract from what's going on in the foreground, which is where our focal point is. I want the shape to be interesting. I'm using a lot of random strokes. I don't want it to be too boring. Just enough information there where it looks like some trees, maybe a building or something like that. Now, using a little bit of my cerulean blue to that gray, that's going to cool it off just a little bit. I can do that even more or add a little bit of green to it by using the turquoise and cad yellow, lemon. Again, I'm mixing that into the gray that I already had. Just another version of the gray mixture. I left a little bit of a space there between the background and the water. It's good to have just a few gaps in there just so the water and the background don't blend too much here. Using a dry brush and just dragging that along the surface to create some texture in that water. The water is not going to really be a huge interest here. Again, all of our focus is going to be on the bottom or the right hand side, I should say. Now I'm coming up with a green. Using the base mixture, which is cerulean, a little cad, yellow, lemon, and then using some of the grays that are already on the palette. Using a little bit of gray into that, we'll just keep it from being too vibrant. I don't want this color to be colorful and too punchy. I want it to be very subtle and grayed out. Color harmony is something that it takes a little bit of time to develop and work on. But in general, you have a vision for what you want to say with your color. Like if you want to go very chromatic and high color, or do you want to play it down and do something more subdued? You can do that as well and do a tonal painting. All right. At this point, things are still damp. I'm going a little bit thicker. Very important, Okay. If it's too much water at this point, it could easily start to cauliflower. Because I'm painting under bright film lights too. That makes things dry really fast. Always pay attention to how wet your paper is, how wet the washes. Know that when you start working into something that's wet and starting to dry, then you have to decide, do you need to go thicker or can you still get away with dropping a little bit of the same mixture into it? Variations. I'm using some darker greens, using some more neutral tint into that. I just want to create the illusion of detail. Some grasses, different things going on. On the left hand side, I'm going to use that same color to drop into the grass under the tree. Starting to indicate some shadows. Now using that again and putting that towards the background, just tying that color in a little bit. And this adding some subtle details to what I already have. Working wet into wet is something you're going to do a lot with water color. As you move forward, I can't stress enough how important it is to just regulate your washes and how much pigment you're putting into it and the timing. All right. As you can see here, I'm 100% dry. I'm ready for my third layer. When things are dry, you've got control back in your corner. You can mix up the color and go for it and you shouldn't really shouldn't have a lot of impact or disturb what's already on the paper. I'm going to go with a deep gray, but it's got a little hint of green into it. Probably still in between that tea and milk consistency, I'm keeping it still very light and color, still very light and transparency. I want a lot as much transparent quality at this stage as I can keep. And then as I move forward, I will go darker if I need to and more opaque using the side of the brush I'll laid in that foliage. And then I use the tip of the brush to add or suggest some details. Now I'm going a little bit darker, but using the same colors, yellow, ocher, neutral tint. Of course, this is all still very wet, so I can easily add into it. Now I'm coming at you with my sword brush. I will build up this paint a little bit more using some siennas, which is a nice rich brown, some ochres. And then pulling that into my neutral tent. I will think about what I want to do here. Get an interesting shape with my trunk, curve it in there, an S shape, and then suggests a few branches. Then I'll add another main trunk here, coming down. And right away that tree is starting to develop. That's really a main shape in this design and composition, and that's why you want that to be interesting. Again, if it was just a blob, then it wouldn't be enough to hold your attention and the painting as a whole would just fall apart. And it really wouldn't be a striking when it's all done. All that's looking pretty good at this point. It's easy to overwork things. You have to find that balance sometimes between is it enough detail, is it enough small shapes? Is there enough going on there that it's going to work? Because once it dries, then we're committed, we're done. This is an important stage of that tree. I'm going to just let that rest for a second, let it dry, and then gauge it how it was doing later on using that same color. Okay, basically graze with a little bit of turquoise in there. Again, keeping this palette very minimalistic. I will come up with a reddish tone using my yellow ochre, Alizar and Crimson still in the milk mixture. I haven't really even thought about going into anything thicker at this point. Keeping it very light and transparent. Yeah, everything is coming together. I've got the upper bodies painted in. I'm going to add a few cast shadows here. Just get those down first and then I will indicate or suggest some legs to anchor that in. But as this foreground is dry here, I can add a little bit of a darker value, slightly thicker paint, pretty much the same colors, and maybe some case shadows. But yeah. A nice little ways to explore landscape painting also to really get good control of your values. To me, that's what this painting is all about. It's not about splashing a bunch of color down. It's about handling the wet. It's about understanding values, getting the right amount of color into your, working wet into wet. Challenging but certainly doable. I'm sure you can handle it here. Just a finishing touches. I will work around in the green, brown, green area, touch a blue and get something that's going to add a little bit of life to the lawn area. I just want to suggest a few details. You can see I like to splatter a little bit that can be risky to splash paint down, but if you do it minimalisticly'll do the job. It'll suggest texture and detail without getting too fussy now, just dropping a few dark values into a few areas. Yeah, that's all coming together pretty good. I'm going to That's a clean brush. It is damp but it doesn't have a lot of water. And just lifting a few areas in the shadows and in the trunk and just to let that breathe a little bit. I hope you enjoy this one. I think it's really a good piece to work with. It's a good piece to end with because I think it's a little more challenging. Here is the final piece, obviously taken in natural light, so you're seeing a little more of the true colors. There it is, project water's edge. Good luck with this one. I hope you enjoyed it, and I look forward to seeing what you do. 24. Recap & Projects : Just a quick recap and a few notes about your projects. You definitely want to go through and complete all of them. And not just the projects, but also the demonstrations where I showed you the techniques and how to explore brushwork, the different washes, layering, understanding the tea, milk, and honey mixtures, so important that you follow through, learning online can feel a little lonely because you're trying to absorb this information and apply it on your own. But just know too, that I'm here for you. If you have questions about anything that you've learned, things I've shared with you, don't hesitate to reach out. I look forward to seeing what you do. Please follow through with those projects. I want you to get a lot out of this course because I know I've put a lot into making it take care and I will see you next time.