Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Welcome to the
watercolor painting series. This course is designed
in the way that each class can stand alone
and it's complete on its own. But if you are here
for the first time, this is the third episode. The first time we were dealing with monochrome
botanical patterns. In the second episode, we explored the analogous
geometric diamonds and now we are going to deal with neutralized
linear landscapes. Each class has
three ingredients, art theory, color theory, and a trending topic. In this class, we are going
to learn about stylization, neutralizing color palettes and the composition of landscapes. We are going to create free trending landscapes
in the topics of water, sky, and mountains. The class is ideal
for very beginners. This series are designed
in the way that it takes a very beginner
for art fundamentals, which are important
to understand and are essentials
for creating art. My name is Alexandra Gabor. I'm a professional art teacher with a master's degree
in art education and my passion is to help beginners to build a strong
base of knowledge. You can find me online by
the name The Artmother. Follow me on social media, on Instagram and Facebook, and join my growing
tribe off more than 12,000 members in the
watercolor painting for beginners Facebook group. Which is full of
enthusiastic beginners. What do you say, let's
get started. [MUSIC]
2. Neutralising Color Palettes: [MUSIC] Neutralizing
color palettes. Yeah, I know it sounds weird, but you will get it in a second. In my own painting style, I love to use vibrant colors. By vibrant I mean
really vibrant. Among my paints, I keep aniline paints, which are ridiculously cheap and actually the most vibrant
paint I have ever seen, and they are intended for kids. To compensate the vibrancy, I often use colors
to neutralize it, like gray, indigo, black, brown, and gold. Did I hear black? Yeah, you can paint black. There is the urban legend
avoiding black in painting, mainly with watercolors
because it can make your color muddy and flat, and you should mix your black
with some complementaries. That's a face emoji
for me because I love black and with
my vibrant paint, they are absolutely not
making anything flat, but rather pop and they really
make an amazing effect. But you need to be
able to use them. This urban legend
comes from beginners tending to paint outlines for
the paintings with black. Basically following
the logic of drawing, where you draw the outlines
and colored shapes, but not with watercolors. You need to use
black as a color, not as an outlining paint. That is true, but actually with all the colors that if you
mix it around like crazy, you will mix mud. So, you can use black, but in a controlled way. Back to these
neutralizing colors. They give the vibrant paintings, a bit of a harmony, and I know from my teaching experience
that beginners tend to use also too much color and do
not touch these ones a lot. My number one rule when
painting is to use not more than three
different colors plus some neutralizing ones. But now we're stylizing anyways. So we're going to use more
and more from these colors. [NOISE] Let me just show you. With the first painting, we are going to use two colors
and a neutralizing color. In a second, we're going to use only one color and two
neutralizing colors. In the last one, we are going to use only
neutralizing colors. What fun! I love experimenting.
3. Stylisation: Sterilization. Sterilization is referring
to intentionally simplified, and generalized visual depiction
of objects, or scenes. It is achieved by
simplification of line, form, color, and
flattened space. I emphasized intentional because sterilization often has reasons. Most of the stylized
artworks are rather declarative and,
or are expressive. Let's talk about Picasso, or some minimalist painters
like Piet Mondrian, who is rather an extreme example
for stylizing a concept. They didn't paint the way they did because they couldn't paint. Because so, for example,
at the age of 14, was able to paint
anything realistically, but he didn't want
to and started experimenting with stylizing some facial features
in his portraits, which actually led
him to success. Sterilization is often used in cartoons and animations too. Let's see the simple
process of sterilition. Let's say we have a watermelon. As we said, sterilization
is about simplifying line, form and color, and
flattened space. Therefore, we are
not going to paint a watermelon in a 3D form, only take the simple shape of a cut piece of a watermelon. A quarter of a circle, and that's right for the shape. We have some seeds,
so we can simply just draw it inside as
well as the color. The point is not going
too much in detail again. No deep shadows or highlights, only pure red, green, and black for the seats. We have a stylized watermelon. Stylized painting
style is suitable for very beginners because it simplifies the painting process. You don't need to think
about dimensions, shadows, highlights, space, but focus on painting
itself, mastering color, paints, and brush control, and still get wonderful results. We're going to paint
three stylized landscape, but let's learn a bit about the composition of
landscape first.
4. Composition of Landscapes: Composition of landscapes. There are two
concepts you need to understand when it
comes to landscapes. The horizon line and
the vanishing point. The horizon line
is the borderline between the sky and the land. The placement of the
horizon line is crucial because it determines
the focus of a painting. If we place the horizon line
low our focus is on the sky. If you place it high, the focus is on the land. Now, if you place
it in the center, usually our focus is not
on the landscape itself, but something different that
is placed into a landscape. The vanishing point
is a point on the horizon line
where things become so far away and so
small that they vanish. If we have one vanishing point, we are talking about
one-point perspective. If we don't have a
vanishing point, it is a linear landscape and that's what we are
going to deal with. We are going to paint three stylized linear landscapes and now you can write this expression up
to your dictionary.
5. Water: [MUSIC] Let's start
with the water. I have a 300 grams cold
press watercolor paper here. I have my Winsor and
Newton half pan set, a middle-size branch,
a detailed brush, some water, paper towel. What I'm going to use is this aniline paint actually
it is intended for kids. But it is the most vibrant
color I've ever seen. This is what I'm going
to use in this project. We're going to create water. As we talked about the
composition of the landscape, we are going to paint our horizon line in
the upper third, so that the dominance
is in the water. We are going to use
this color palette. I don't know if you can see it. Yes, you can see. Patella blue and sap green are going
to be my two colors. I can see my dominant color
is going to be patella blue. I'm going to use sap green
as an additional color. I'm going to mix these two, so there will be different
tones and mixtures, which will make the water
even more interesting. My neutralizing color is indigo
and that's what I'm going to use on the sky.
Let's get started. I also have a pencil
and we're going to create this round shape. Take something round and
simply draw it around, try to place it in the mail. Now, we have a nice circle. Let's find approximately
the upper third and simply just draw a white line. Now, what I want to say, we're going to use this style or this technique of painting
that we're going to paint. We're going to draw the lines of the waves and actually fill
the spaces between the lines. We're going to leave
this white space border. It is a perfect technique
for beginners and a weary beginners because
beginners tend to be weary. Not patient, impatient. If we don't want our
neighboring surfaces to bleed into each other, we need to either wait until the surface dries or
leave a whitespace border. It is a modern technique
and it's very cool. We are going for this. Simply draw waves and try to
make them cross each other. You can see like
this, second wave. They don't even need
to cross everywhere. All you need is to
have few waves. I missed a line here, so I'm going to
make it like this. Now, I'm going to mix my colors. I'm going to mix my paints on my palette because I want them to run into each other
to make different shades. For example, for teal. Now, look at this color. It's beautiful. I'm just taking the blue here and clean your brush
and take sap green. A little bit here. Nice vibrant colors. Actually they are
ridiculously cheap. I mean, this aniline,
they're beautiful. They are not too fast. If you place it on
a direct sunlight, it will fade quickly but
they're beautiful and see, makes them all around. We'll get beautiful tail, wow, this is so great. I love teal so much and
this paint as well. Dip your brush and try to fill these shapes. Try to keep an even
whitespace border. Apart from these pencil marks. Dip your brush here and
there so that you can get a variety of colors
within one one. If you don't have
this aniline colors, which I think you
don't, don't be afraid. Just take any blue and green. But if you have the sap
green and the patella blue because it really
makes a nice teal. But just mix them around and just personalize
this to yourself. Yes and I'm sometimes dipping my brush into the
original color to get the pure blue, for example. I sometimes use the
detail brush to make nicer lines at the edges but maybe I'm not
going to use it now. I think we need a
bit more blue here. Wow. What I'm basically doing is just filling
these shapes with deep colors and it's beautiful. Now, we have our
water finished and I forgot to draw the moon up here. A simple circle. I'm going to add
clean pure color. I mean, from the
patella blue up here. Yes. Cool. Now, let's get into the indigo. I have it right here. It is going to make this
vibrant water bit more neutral. Simply just paint
the sky with it. Amazing. This is our water. If you can see here, I made this water
color blue in fact, which I really like, I didn't do it here but I will show you simply just put your brush into the water and just tap water. When it dries, it will
just make it nice effect. You can do it on the water as
well while it is still wet. Because now if I'm doing it, it will not have that effect. But this is, for example, still wet so I can
just simply dab my brush into it and you can see it is making this
wonderful watercolor bloom, which I love so much. It has so amazing effect. I didn't do it here
but as you can see, it will look like something
like this if you want. Not everyone likes it. This is the reason I didn't
do it here too much. But okay. We're finished
with the water. Let's see the sky.
6. Sky 1: [MUSIC] In this second project, we are going to
create a galaxy sky. Yes, as you can see, we
are going to use black. As for the colors, I'm not going to use the lamp black from my color palette, but I have concentrated
watercolors of Dr. Ph. Martin because their
black is just, very hard, to put it, thick in pigments and we'll
have a really nice effect. But this one is
painted with the lamp black of the Winsor
and Newton Sand, as you can see, it is also okay. For the gold, I'm
going to use gold, but you don't need to. You can use brown, light brown, or yellow ocher. I think it could work. As for the composition, we're going to put
the horizon line low. I've painted these mountains this small so that they
don't distract from the sky. Yes, I think that's all. Let's just get started. I'm taking my help again and just place it
approximately into the middle. Drawing around. Yes, I'm going to draw the
horizon line this low. I think it is enough here. Paint the mountains. I think that's enough. Now I'm taking the
Winsor and Newton thing. I'm not going to use
the analogous colors, so I'm going to put them aside. It comes with this dropper, or how to call this, in my language is
called [FOREIGN] [LAUGHTER] Rub your
brush into the water. I'm going to wet my mauve. Yes, I'm going to
use this mauve color from the Winsor and
Newton color palette but any magenta would do it. Or something violent or pink. Or you can even paint a
blue sky if you want like this blue galaxy or if it
is green, how you like it. This is really not
about following me precisely what I'm doing, but like to try
out the concepts. I'm going to put this black. It is actually like it would be ink, just that thick. I'm going to wet it. Now, put the mauve and
it will mix a bit. But that's not a bad thing because my white has this red pigments in it. They made the shades of this
color and burgundy shade. I just really love it. I put too much of black here, but doesn't really matter. I'm going to use the
mauve down here a bit. I can use the detail brush
to make a nicer outlines. Just going to mix these two together and to try to
lighten it up a bit. Actually, it's gray,
it's looks good. You have this part, have this pigments
to the middle. Play with the shape. You can be more
precise with this. But to be honest, I can't really see
from the front because I don't want to put my head
under camera too much. But I think that's
enough for the sky, i mean the underpainting. But until it's still wet, I'm going to take this brush, this is a dry brush, it has some dust in it also. I'm going to use again white
concentrated watercolor. But you can do this with
any white watercolor. You need only to wet it a bit. I would need a bit clean water, but I'm just going to do this. It will make my
sky a bit lighter. I will add a second layer of these stars after it's dry so that it will be
more definite and not bleed into the colors. I really loved the
effect this ink did. There are like this pigments
that didn't water up, and they are creating
an interesting texture. I really love that. What I'm going to use is to use gold, and for that, I need
clean water. A second.
7. Sky 2: [MUSIC] I'm back with the clean water and what
I'm going to use is this gold set of watercolors. For example, I have this one. This is for textile art, but you can totally use it. This is also gold. Or as I said, light brown or yellow
ocher would do the job. Wet your brush, and I'm
going to use this blue gold. [NOISE] Wet it up, so beautiful. Now I'm going to carefully paint the mountains. I might choose the detail
brush that I have here. You can do this landscape without painting
these mountains. I'm just painting the land, with this color or
you can think of anything else like buildings,
a small cityscape. My point is that our horizon line is low
and we are trying to use the color palettes
I've presented to you. Actually that's our point. I just want to explain a bit, what's the difference
between learning from a working artist and learning from a
professional art teacher. Because I've learned from both and I really know
what's the difference. The artist will tell
you how to paint, and what to paint, but the art teacher
will tell you why to paint it like that. When you are like
learning a new language. If you are not really
talented, the languages, you don't catch
them that quickly, learning from an artist
is like watching movies or talking
to native speaker. You will catch the words, you will catch the phrases, but you will not
understand why you need to say it like that. With an art teacher, art
teacher will tell you, it'll break the things down to its elements like for vocabulary and grammar
rules and things like that. With this project I'm showing you in this course or series, or actually all my classes, is that I'm breaking down these art rules and art theory, art color theory and put it into a comprehensive curriculum. You might think that these
projects are ridiculous or too simple or too modern
or I don't know. But to be honest, it is like practicing to
understand the fundamentals. In this class I
already told you, you will understand
the compositions and the neutralizing color
palettes. That's all. I'm finished with the mountains. They might need
one more layer of this gold because
I wet it too much, but doesn't really
matter right now. [NOISE] I will add this deep black again to the
bottom of this painting. You see how nice
and thick it is. This is why I allow the concentrated
watercolors that much. Because you can do things
like this with them. I can add this second layer
of sprinkles up here, try to keep it on the sky. I really loved these dry brushes because it is so easy
to do this with them. [NOISE] I will just
make this clean. I think we're finished and I really love
how it turned out. Let's just get to
the third landscape.
8. Mountains: [MUSIC] In this third one, we're going to paint mountains. This is the landscape
when we are not going to use pure colors, but these neutralizing colors. We're going to use
black, indigo, and brown or gold, it depends what you prefer. If you don't have indigo, I'm just going to show you how you can mix it for yourself. Let's just get started. [NOISE] We're going
to do the same again. Simply just put this to the
middle and draw it around. Not the best, but
it'll be good to go. What we're going to do
in this landscape is to place the elements
into the center. Actually, our horizon
line will be down here, but the focus is not going to be on the sky or on the land, but rather on the mountains. This is a central composition. I'm going to draw the
horizon line down here approximately and simply
just draw some mountains. I'm going to put
one mountain here, I will put a second one here, and I can do a little bit
bigger here behind it. As you can see, I
don't really need to go like smaller as
I'm going far away, but the point is
or will be that, my color is desaturating as
I'm going far and far away. If you go out and
look at a landscape, you will notice that the
mountains that are far away are simply desaturated. You don't really see its color, there rather this light gray
or light indigo colors. I'm going to paint
the land black again and start with dark
indigo and just add more and more
water as I'm painting these mountains and being
more lighter and lighter. I've drawn here only
five of these mountains, but I'm going to add
one more like here, and one more like here, and they are going
to be really light. I can start, and
what I'm going to do at first is to mix my indigo. For that, I'm going to need the black and
the patella blue. The patella blue here, and I will add a bit of black. Let's see what it did. It's not really an integral, but it's a bit desaturated,
this shallow blue. As you can see, you can mix several blues
with the buck and get this desaturated like
a bit greenish color, but it will be good if
you don't have indigo. I'm going to use this one now to show you
that it looks good, but you can use the indigo
itself if you want. Let's start painting. As I said, I'm going to start with the
mountains and I'm going to paint the darkest one. Now, I'm just adding
more and more water and trying to desaturate. I think they are a bit dark. This, I will just soak
to water up a bit. It's bleeding. They look good. Now, I'm going to paint the sky. I can paint it with gold
or the light brown. I'm waiting for the
light brown to show you. I'm just taking my brown
and wetting it up. You should have clean water so I'm going to get
[NOISE] clean water. Take your brown, wet it, make this light brown, and just go over the sky, and paint it just to
really light brown. With just this indigo, or no, I have just
a greenish mixture. I just really love this color. I didn't expect, to be honest, to be like this but
it looks so good. Great. I might want to lighten it a bit. If I wanted lighter, I have a paper towel here, I could just soak it up. If you have too much pigment, fill up these steps to
take your paper towel, soak up the water,
then you can just, with clean water, go over it again and
make it smoother, so that this paper towel
texture can't be seen. We have a nice surface. Simply, I'm waiting
forward to back, black and paint this
part with black, and it just looks so cool. [LAUGHTER] See, this is what X prime parenting is good for to find these happy
little accidents, mixing colors or trying out
the shapes and techniques. You might find your own ways which you're comfortable with. I really love how it turned out. This was our mountains, which we created
with neutral colors. I'll just summarize this class.
9. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Well, we arrived
to the end of this class. I hope you enjoyed it. As a project, please
paint at least one of the landscapes and post it
into the project gallery. See you in the other episodes.