The Watercolor Painting Series - Semi-Realistic Complementary Donuts

1. Introduction: Welcome to the watercolor painting series. These series are designed the way that, each class can stand alone and it's complete on its own. But they are comprehensively built upon each other, and take a very beginner from single brush strokes to complex paintings. In this class we are going to paint semi realistic complimentary donuts. I know it sounds weird, but I put together these titles by the framing ingredients of each class. That is art theory, color theory, and a trending topic. So art theory, in this case, is painting light and shadow. The color theory is a complimentary colors, and the trending topic is donuts. Here are the final pieces we are going to make. We are going to talk about composition, how to put together final piece, what effects we can create with watercolors. Basically, my easiest process of going into the manager. Because until now in this series, we painted flat. This is the first time we are going to add a realistic effect to our painting. It is called something realistic for a reason that it is not 100 percent of realism. But we are getting closer to that. The class is ideal for very beginners, because it is a really easy process. It helps understand how light and shadow works. If you are seeing me for the first time, my name is Alexandra Gabor and I'm a professional art teacher, and artist, and an online educator. You can find me online by the name The Artmother. I'm creating classes, hit different topics from our drawing, watercolors, accolades photography, digital skills, and more are coming because I have experience in so many fields of art. I'm just really passionate about sharing my knowledge and experience with you. I hope you really enjoy this class, so let's just get into it. [MUSIC] 2. Complementary Colors: Let's just talk about the complimentary colors a little bit. Here, I've got color wheels, I've made one of the episodes of the series. The main point is, the complimentary colors are those colors that are opposite to each other on the color wheel. The characteristic of these colors is that if you mix them, for example, the red and the green, they will desaturate each other, giving a muddy effect. But some artists sometimes mix them to create the shadows, and this is what we are going to do. We are going to use a color, its complement, and mix them together to create the shadows. I don't think we need to be strict about being absolutely on the opposite side of the color wheel, our main point is, if for example, there are several types of reds and we are going to pair them with several types of greens or yellows. You don't need to, for example, pair our desaturated purples, but you don't need to exactly pair, for example, this cadmium yellow with a purple, but you can use an orange, yellow or red orange. I hope you understand what I mean that we don't need to be strict. Use your heart, which colors you want to pair, and let us see what we have on our palette. I have the Winsor and Newton half pans set. I have a piece of paper here and I just wheeze it which colors are complements to each other. Here is the red color, and then its complement is green, so what is characteristic of complimentary causes the make each other pop. For example, I found some pictures on Pinterest. Let me just show you, here are some poppies. You see this [inaudible] is, this orange red, just works so well together, and here they are mixed and made this a little bit of muddy color, but it doesn't hurt the overall picture, it's just simply beautiful. Yes, you can create a teal color, a little bit greenish and it would like make amazing pair with this red. The second week is the orange and blue, so I have a nice orange here, and I will just take, let's say it is shallow blue and it just looks so great with this orange, they're compliments, and they look just amazing. I would say that if I were to paint my donut with this color combination, maybe I would neutralize this yellow because it is really vibrant rather with an indigo blue because it's still blue, but and I can make like darker tones with it. Maybe it would like look better, or I can mix the color blue, the indigo blue to make it less vibrant so that the vibrancy of this yellow remains. Now let's talk about the purple. Here is my purple. Here is the purple, and I'm going to take a yellow, because they're compliments. This is a yellow and purple and they work together as well. If you can see this yellow is, this orange is a bit more yellowish, and I would say that it would work really well also with this purple. That's what I wanted to say about the complimentary colors. 3. Approaching the painting: In this video, I would love to address how you should approach a painting, a watercolor painting, when you want to create a whole piece, not just paint individual objects as we did so far. I have an A3 size watercolor paper here. What I love to do is that I draw thin, one centimeter-wide edge around the paper so that it has finished look right away. Now let's talk about sketching on this paper. If your decide to pre-draw your artwork, there are two options you can do. For very beginners, I advise to use 2B pencil because it is seen enough, it is soft enough to be easily removable. Hard pencils tend to leave hard marks on the paper. But if you cannot draw or likely and you are not drawing like whole outlines, only just marks that this is going to be here, this is going to be here, I advise you to use an HB pencil and harder pencils. But the best for beginners is using a watercolor pencil. The reason is that it is soft. But still you need to like draw softly on the paper and you don't need to remove it. It will just blend into your painting and you will not have those pencil marks. What I love to use are neutral colors for pre-drawing, for example, this ocker, a light brown. So yes, rather or use lighter colors. If you know exactly what color you are going to use. For example you are going to paint a yellow doughnut or a magenta donuts, you can adjust colors of the outlines with the colored pencils. But right now I'm going to use this one, this is opera light to pre-draw my painting. I'm going to draw a big doughnut so that we can talk about the shadows and highlights a bit more and then, so that you can see it better. As what a composition, we are going to paint only one doughnut. You can paint more doughnuts like you can place them around. Just take a look on pictures or something first, there's so many compositions. For this one, I'm going to place my doughnut here. The reason is when you are composing the picture, you need to think of thirds. Let's say here is one-third, one-third, and by this one-third and one-third vertically. If you would connect these lines, you would have a center point summer here. Placing objects on these lines or using these imaginary lines as your guidelines for composition will make your artwork a bit more interesting. If you center one object into the center of the painting, the viewer of the artwork will not wander around the picture, but stay in the center. But if you put something off the center, it would seem unbalanced and it's always more interesting for a human brain and I would like to mention the rule of odds here, so don't use paired objects. Always think of 1, 3, or 5, or even 7. But then I think that's too much for the beginner. Either just paint one doughnut or three. Don't paint two, because our brain thinks in pairs and it will pair it right away and it will again not be too interesting for the brain. Let's just start sketching our donuts. 4. Sketching: So as I said, I found several pictures on Pinterest about doughnuts. What I'm interested about are the shadows. On this picture you can really see where the shadows are. The main point in drawing anything is to not just see the shapes of the object itself, but the shape of the highlights and the shadows. If you have taken any of my drawing courses, you have seen that my approach in drawing anything is based in under the reverse shading method so that I at first shade darkest parts, and then just fill in the mid tones and leave out the highlights. It gives an amazing realistic effect. That's what we are going to follow in this class. So let us find a doughnut where we can really see the shapes of the shadows. I think this is going to be in the latest green thumb. This is also good because you can see that here is a highlight, here is the highlight and this is the shadow. This isn't written, but the cast shadow, cast shadow is actually this shadow around the object. It is not that harsh on this one, but it can be seen. So we can combine these things and I really advise you to, to go through this and just observe, because observation is the key to being realistic. I'm going to draw a circle. What is great about doughnuts is that they are not perfect circles. So you can be a little bit off. There is a second circle in the middle and that's it for the shape. This is why I've chosen doughnuts to create or our talk today because it is not demanding on drawing skills. What is great about watercolor pencil is that they are easily removable. So you can erase. Now, what I'm going to do is to look for the highlights and the shadows. So now I'm going to draw the shape of the highlight, the most light part. I'm going to draw this a bit darker so that you can see it. You really don't need to draw it this harsh. Okay? Then this part is a shape, a highlighted shape and for the shadow. So these two are my highlight and now I'm going to define the shapes of the shadows. This is my inner circle and there is a dark shadow here, and dark shadows starting here. There is a dark shadow that's also in here and also here. Okay, so do this is in shadow. This is the highlight shadow of highlight and we are going to create cast shadow around it. So this is going to be actually really dark. Inside the circle, we also going to have a shadow. So let us revisit it; shadow, cast shadow, shadow, highlight, cast shadow, shadow, highlight. I think that's enough for this sketch. Let's fill in those shadows. 5. Shadows: In this video, we are going to fill in both, the shadows and the cast shadows. It is an absolutely simple process, reminding as a coloring book, but basically that it is, we are simply going to fill in the shapes we have pre-drawn. You will see it will give us an amazing result. Let's talk a bit about the shadows. I mentioned before that the color of the shadow will be given by the mixture of the complimentary colors. But we are not going to mix them literally, we are going to practice to play with the transparency of the colors. The base color of foreshadow is going to be a light wash of the darker color we have chosen. I'd say the blue or purple in my case. Then we are going to go over this shadow with a second color in the next step. But for now, let's just fill in those two shapes. For the cast shadows, we are going to go for a more concentrated color. Simply just fill in the cast shadows with a pure color you have chosen. But pay attention. Either leave a white space border between the donut and a cast shadow. It will give a more loose feeling or wait until the shadows dry so that they don't bleed into each other. I have two extra tips for this step before we continue. If you have pre-drawn the shadow with a watercolor pencil, when you are filling in the shadow, go over the outlines with your brush to blend it into the paint. It doesn't matter if you extend the shape by this, it is more important to have the two blended. If you have pre-drawn the shape with a graphite pencil, try to erase the shape before you paint it, or paint it first without touching it so that you can erase it later when it is dry. Don't paint over it. You will not be able to erase it afterwards. A second deepest to fill in the hole in our circle with a lighter wash around inner cast shadow. That's it for the shadows. We can darken them later on, but now let's continue to the next step. 6. Midtones: The next step is to fill in the mid tones. This is easiest because all you need to do is to fill in the shape of the doughnut with the second color. I was saying mid tones in plural because you will still have a variety of tones within discolored if you use more or less water here and there, exactly as we did in the first episode of this series. Pay attention to leave out the highlights, you can use masking fully to do this, or just paint very carefully around them and exactly this is what I'm doing. So when you arrive to the shapes of the shadows, just go over them with the second color and you'II see the transparency of watercolors now give us a clean mixture of the tube and makes a perfect shadow. You'll see the color of the shadow, but the color of the object as well. If you accidentally enter the cast shadow too, it is not a problem. This is a bit advanced topic, but the cast shadows are also reflections. So they usually carry the color of the object as well. But again, this is something for later. Now focus on feeling the full shape of the doughnut viola or doughnut is finished. Amazing, right? Now let's see what we can do to give a finish to the final piece. 7. Finish: We talked about that we are going to create a final piece, which means a piece of artwork that can go on the wall. By placing the doughnut of standard we already did a lot to catch the eye with her artwork. Now, we are going to extend the doughnut a bit so that it works together with the space around it. First thing you can do is to wet the edges of the cast shadow and paint a bit more lighter around the whole doughnut. This will add a feeling of a surface the doughnut is on. Then you can do things, either make a watercolor dribble that means that you add a lot of water to the lower part of your painting, then pick up your page and let the paint run down. This creates a really cool effect or just sprinkle a little paint around the paper, just pay attention not to overdo it and to protect the doughnut itself. That's it, t his is our final piece. 8. Final Thoughts + Class Project: Well, we arrive to the end of this class, I hope you enjoyed it. I can't wait to see your own tricks. Please paint at least one donut in the color combination of your choice. But please try to make them complementary colors so that you practice it a little bit and upload your project into the project section. Don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare to get notified when the other classes will be out there. See you next time.