Underwater Animals in Watercolors: Tropical Fish, Octopus, Jellyfish

1. Intro: Underwater Animals in Watercolors: Hello, and welcome to my home studio. I'm Emily, and in today's Skillshare class, our goal is to relax and have fun while painting with watercolors. In this Skillshare tutorial, you'd learn how to paint three different underwater creatures tropical fish, an octopus, and a jellyfish all using watercolors. You'll have access to printable templates for all three projects that you can either print using your home printer or trace using a light box or a window. You'll also have access to watercolor supplies and all of the colors used in this tutorial. This class is great for beginners as well as intermediate watercolor artists as we look at some of the very basic techniques in watercolors and we look at how to push them to really make R sea creatures pop. We'll also look at specialty techniques like salt splatter, blooms and learning how to underpaint your shadows first. So grab your watercolor paints, brushes, and paper, and let's get started. 2. Supplies: Alright, so let's talk about supplies for our underwater animals. So, I wanted to start out by mentioning that all the videos in this tutorial were part of a watercolor kit that I created with the same name underwater Animals. So you'll notice that the videos in the tutorial are all using these dot cards. So I'm using a very limited palette for these tutorials. I'm also using a limited brush, as it's what comes in the kit. However, know that you can use whatever colors that you have at home. You can try finding the same exact colors that's listed in the supplies guide, or you can mix up your own and use your own for all of our animals here. So let's talk about our paper choice first. So all of the projects were printed on arches, cold pressed paper. It's 140 pound paper. I do suggest using cold pressed for these tutorials as we're going to be wetting large areas of our paper, and we want to make sure that those areas stay nice and wet. And so we have the longest amount of time to paint. You'll notice in the tutorials that I did not tape my projects to a board. However, I do suggest if you have a plastic corrugated board or that you even tape it to your desk that you're working at just to keep that paper nice and sturdy while you're wetting a very large portion of your paper. You'll notice from the tutorial that it's not 100% necessary, but it might make your life a little bit easier. As far as brushes that you'll need for this tutorial, you'll notice I'm only using one brush. That's a round size two. However, you can use a variety of round brushes for this tutorial. You will want a medium to medium small brush, either size two or size four for painting the majority of your projects. You might want a slightly larger brush for larger areas like the head of the octopus or the body of the fish. It can be useful for you. However, from the video, you can see it's not totally necessary. And then you might want a small detail brush for some of the smaller areas of your painting. You're going to need a paper towel or a rag, a cup of water, your watercolor paints. And then there's also an option in the tutorial to use salt. Now, if you have coarse sea salt, your blooms are gonna be much larger. In the tutorial, I'm using just regular table salt from my shaker than I have at home, and those blooms will be much smaller. So you can decide based off of what salt you have at home and how large you want your little firework blooms to be. Alright, that's all. Let's get started. 3. Tropical fish, part 1: Alright, so to paint our two tropical fish, you will need the five by seven included in your kit with the fish template printed on your paper. You'll need your practice sheet with the colors down below. You'll need a mixing plate. I'm using the top of a yogurt container, a cup of water, the brush included in your kit. This is around size two and a paper towel or a cloth. Alright, let's get started. So the very first thing that we're going to do for a tropical fish is we're actually going to paint an underlayer of blue shadow. So this blue shadow is going to help give us a little bit of contrast to the yellow on top. So oftentimes we can use blue for a shadow color. And then when we add layers of color on top, the blue changes colors, and it's not quite as bright of blue anymore, but it gives this really nice shadow effect, especially for underwater fish. So we're going to start by adding some water to our plate, and then to that water, we'll add some of our turquoise color. Now, our first layer needs to be really nice and light in color. So I'm watering down some of this turquoise. But I also know that I have some turquoise here on the plate that's going to be a little bit darker. So my light, transparent turquoise looks like that. Whereas if I were to take some turquoise directly from my paper, it's gonna look a little bit darker. Okay? So we want those two tones. Now, I'm going to start by painting my fish wet on wet. So what does that mean? It means I'm gonna wet. The whole area that I want to work with, which is going to be the whole fish. And then I'm gonna drop in some color. Now I can go right over everything. And kind of the nice part about this is that if I end up going over the outer edge lines at all, we will be adding a slight background. So try your best to stay within the lines for wetting your fish. However, if you do go over the lines, we'll always be able to correct it. Now, as you notice, I'm grabbing more and more water. I want to make sure that this whole fish stays wet so that I can drop in that blue. So I'm tilting my head to one side. And I'm going back to where I started. I'm making sure that my whole fish is nice and wet. Remember that you can tell that it's wet you have if you can see the reflection and it's nice and shiny. Now that my whole fish is wet, now I can start dropping in some color. In the areas where it's going to be nice and light in color, I can use this watered down blue. So kind of around the outside edge of my fish, here it's going to be a little bit lighter of blue. So I'm going to grab and add a little bit of light blue to the outside edges. And then it's gonna be nice and dark blue here by where we've got this little section. So I can grab some blue directly from my paper, and I can add some of that blue directly to this section. If that blue starts to spread at all, that's no problem. We are going to allow it to spread for a little bit, and then we'll fix it. I'm going to add a little bit darker blue to the outside of the back fin. And then I might drop in just a little bit more blue here. I do really want, especially the bottom side here to be a little bit darker, since this is kind of towards the bottom of the water, towards the top, it might be a little bit lighter. So now we have this blue kind of spider veining all throughout. So I can wash my brush, dry it on my paper towel, and I can use that dry brush, just kind of soak up some of those spider veins. Now, your edges are still going to be soft edges. That means that the blue is going to spread evenly and nicely into the water. So I don't need this blue to have a really hard edge. That means I don't need to stop the blue where I see the little lines. So if there's some blue that comes more off of this edge of the tail, that's okay. I do, however, want to make sure that certain areas just don't have too much blue. So where I've got the mouth here, I don't want the mouth to be overrun by blue. So something similar to that. If you have blue that went too far into one spot and you need to lift it up more than what the brush can do, you can take your paper towel and blot off wherever you need that blue taken away. Now at this stage of my painting, I do not want to add more water. So what does that mean? I don't want to add a full drop of water onto one of these sections, which is why I'm always drying off my brush before I lift. If I add a drop of water, it's gonna push that pigment away. Alright, so we'll do the same thing on this lower fish now. We'll wet it first with water, and then we'll add our blue. Now, you might notice that as I'm working on this fish, I'm noticing that there's a little bit more blue going where I don't want it to go. So I'll use my dry brush and I'll soak it up as I see it moving. No. All right. And now that we have our underlayer of blue shadow, we're going to let this dry and then we'll look at adding a second layer on top. So we'll take about 5 minutes and let this dry and come back and see if it's dry enough for a second layer. Alright, so I gave the first layer of my shadow a little bit of time to dry. And so now I'm ready for my second layer, which is going to be a layer of yellow. So, if you have space on your plate, you can leave the blue. Otherwise, you can wipe it off with your paper towel, if you're not wanting your blue to accidentally mix with you, yellow. And then we'll do the same thing. We'll add some water to a new section of your plate. And then we'll get some of this lemon yellow here and we'll add it to our water. Once again, we'll do something similar to with the blue, where we will wet our whole fish first, and then we'll drop in some of our lighter yellows, and we can also drop in some yellow directly from our paper for those sections where we want it to be really nice and opaque. All right. So we're going to start by wedding on top of this blue. Now, if you start to paint on top of your blue, and then you notice the blues starting to kind of lift up slightly, that means that your first layer wasn't dry enough, and so you'll want to stop and try your best to kind of clean it off a little bit and wait until that first layer is dry. Alright, so now we're ready to layer on our second layer, which is going to be our yellow. So I'm going to start by adding my yellow kind of over pretty much everything. And now, since it is this nice light yellow, we're gonna notice a few things happening with our blue. Now, where we layer the yellow on top, it's going to turn a little teal. So if I want any sections of this blue to stand out, like, at the end of the tail or around the eye here, I'm going to want to try to keep that section clean from yellow. Now, I don't mind adding the yellow on top on the top fin and the lower fin. And now that I've got my whole layer of light yellow, now I can go back and I can add a little bit of this more opaque yellow from my paper. And I'm going to take a peek at where I want kind of some of these highlights to happen. So I'm going to want the lighter yellow along the body. And since my paper is nice and wet, it's gonna help with these edges. So if I don't wet my fish first and I just add my yellow on top, I'm not going to have these really nice gradient from dark yellow to light yellow. And so this is why we often add that extra step of wetting first. I can add a little bit of darker yellow along the outermost of the fin. So I'm kind of leaving a few of these sections to be this intermediate with the blue shadow underneath. And now I can always go in, while it's still wet, and I can add a little bit of orange, if I would like. So on the bottom side of some of our fish, we have a little bit of orange hue, since it's more in the shadow. So I'm going to add a little bit of orange down below. No, I can always have that orange slightly follow up on my fish. If I don't want that much orange along the belly, I'm gonna dry my brush and then kind of use my brush, my dry brush to just gradually allow that orange to fade into yellow. I'm going to add just a little hint of orange here at the tail and here as well. We can kind of play around with this as long as it's still wet. So maybe I'll add a little bit of orange in the shadow area. It's really up to you. You can kind of play around. Like I said, as long as it's still as long as it's still wet, you've got a little bit of extra time. 4. Tropical fish, part 2: Alright, and now we'll do the same thing with the fish below. We'll start by wetting over our whole fish. Now, remember that if this first layer dried too quickly on you before you are able to drop in your orange, make sure that now you add a little bit of extra water to this second fish. All right. Now, just like before, we'll add a little bit of water down yellow, basically to the whole fish itself. Except for, we're going to try to keep this area in front a little clean and also a little section of the tail in the back. We'll try to keep that a little clean from our yellow. And then we can take our yellow directly from our plate. So I'm having it nice and concentrated. And I'm going to add yellow first to the main body because I want that main body to be really nice and bright yellow over this front fin. I'm also going to add some bright yellow to the tail here. I can add some bright yellow around the edge here of my fish. Along the mouth area. And now before it dries, I can add a little bit of orange. I'm gonna roll my brush around in that orange. I'm going to start with my orange way at the bottom here. Try my best to keep it out of that fin. And remember if we need to blend it at all, we can dry our brush. Use our dry brush, just kind of blend that edge where we need to blend it. And then we can grab a little bit more, and we can always drop in more along these corners here where kind of the top and bottom flare out. I have that kind of going around just a little bit. I got a little too dark. And now, I'm going to just show you a little slight extra. Now at this same stage, if you had wanted to do any sort of, like, bright dots, dots work best if you do the first layer of dots using this wet on wet technique. So while your fish is still wet, you're going to want to grab a pigment directly from your plate from your paper, and you want to make sure you don't have too much liquid on your brush. If you have too much liquid on your brush, that liquid is going to push everything else away. So you notice I don't have a puddle of water with my mouth. I have just the move on my brush. And I'm just going to add some dots here. So when I'm adding these dots, I'm kind of just making it up. You could always use a reference photo. My kind of gut instinct is saying that these dots are going to get a little larger around the backside. And maybe as they come forward, they might they might get a little bit smaller and a little bit further away in distance. So some of these dots here close to the back side of the body, I'm going to make them a little bit bigger. Now, as you're making these dots, if you choose to make dots, if your dots, like I said, are starting to spread, you probably have too much water on your brush, and you need to tap some water off and grab just pigment. So when I grab some of this purple, this purple is dry. So I'm going to grab some of this purple with my brush. If it looks like it has too much liquid, I'm going to come to the end here, not the tip, but the end of my brush where it connects to the metal and touch it and grab a little bit of that liquid off. And now, when I touch it to my paper, it doesn't have quite as much liquid, and it's not going to spread all over. It's gonna spread just enough to give you this really nice effect where it's just kind of spraying out slightly. So I'm using this purple in some of the larger spots just to make it a little bit more dark and dense and opaque. You see where there's a little bit more water at this end, and I touched it there, and I went Osh. So, if that happens to you, don't panic. Dry your brush. Use a dry brush. Just kind of lift it off. Now that we lifted it off, if we go back in, we can add a little bit more pigment. And now, because there's not so much water on my paper, it's going to stay where I put it a whole lot better. And maybe I'll add just a little bit of purple to the tail here. We'll kind of make two slightly different fish here just so you can see the difference. Now, you could continue working here. You can add little details wherever you want. I'm noticing that my paper is starting to dry slightly, and so this is gonna be probably where I stop. Now, if anything got a little bit too dark, I can always use my brush, a dry brush to lift if it got too dark, or I can also use my paper towel and lift if it got too dark anywhere. Alright, so now we'll let these two layers dry and we'll add then some wet on wet layers as our last layers. As your layers are drying, you might notice the spidering effect happening. If you like that spider effect, leave it. If you don't like it, use a damp to dry brush and just go around the edges and kind of circle around the edges there. It's just going to help lift up some of that spidering that's happening. Alright, so I've let this layer dry just slightly. And so now I'm ready to add a little wet on dry. Now, I do need to be a little cautious here because wet on dry means that this first layer needs to be completely dry. So actually, I think before I do that, to give it a little bit more chance to dry, let's add some of our pains gray. So our really dark black details in the eye area, and that'll help us check. So I have a wet brush. I'm just going to take a little bit of pains gray here. And I'll add a little bit of pains gray to the eye area, and that's gonna help me see is this going to start? Is the pains gray staining where I put it? Or is it starting to bleed and spread everywhere? If it's starting to bleed and spread, that means that my paper is not dry enough. So I'm starting to see a little bit of spidering there. So it might not be quite ready yet. I can always add, though, a few little dark details. If I wanted to kind of highlight some of some of these edges of my fish, I can always add a few details there. I know this one already has a little purple, but I can add a little bit of black. Since that was starting to spider out, I decided to dry it off with my paper towel and then try it again. It's looking a little bit better. 5. Tropical Fish, part 3: Now that we've given it a little bit of time to dry, now I'm going to look at adding a second layer of wet on dry stripes. So for this, I'm going to be using my cadmium orange. So I'm going to add it to my water here. And I think I want to darken this orange just slightly. So I'm going to add a little bit of this mauve to my orange just to darken it up a little bit. I don't want it quite as bright as that orange. Now, how opaque is this? It's still transparent, as you can see, so we can still see the colors that are underneath. But it's just opaque enough that we can use it on top of our fish and let it be kind of this nice second layer of details. Alright, so I'm going to start at the belly of my fish, and I'm going to work up with my lines. Now, my lines are going to stop around this arch of my fish, and they're gonna start to kind of belly up and make this half moon shape slightly. So they're going to follow kind of this angle. Okay? So I'm going to start with my longest of lines at the base here. I'm going to come up and around and stop. Now, you can see that it's still my papers not dry enough. You can see the spidering. So I'm gonna dry it. And I'm going to let it dry a little bit more. That's a cute to me as the artist that says, Oh, that layer is not dry enough for your second layer. So let's pause the video and we'll let our paintings dry a little bit more. Alright, so I gave my fischer a little bit more time to dry. Now, my color did dry, so I'm gonna mix a little bit more of it up. Once again, that was my cadmium orange with a little bit of mauve to darken it. Alright, so now we're ready. Everything is dry. I've got my second layer of color, and I'm going to add some stripes here. So once again, I'm going to start at the base of the body, and I'm going to slightly curve along with the body here. So I'm slightly curving this way as I make my way up. And I'm going to start pulling my brush up and lift it mainly kind of around where the shadow starts because that's where I'm wanting the lightest of lines to be the skinniest of lines. I'm gonna do that again. Now my lines don't have to be perfect. Now, the further back you go, you are gonna want to start to come up slightly. And do these kind of slightly smaller lines. Now, before these lines dry, you can always drop in a little bit of that mouth at the base if you want a little bit more contrast between the dark at the bottom and then light at the top. But remember that this is easiest to do when these lines are still wet. Once they start to dry, then it becomes harder to do that. Now, here at the fin, we are going to have to add a line then just kind of jump up And then our lines are gonna start to get really thin. So I'm gonna I'm barely touching my paper here. And I'm just adding a few coming down at the base here. Make them a little bit darker. If those lines get a little too dark, you can dry your brush, and you can use your brush like a sponge and just soak it up. No, I'm also going to use this orange to add a few lines down the fin here. So I'm starting at this angle here, and then I'm just going to add a few lines coming out that way. And I can dry my brush off and use my dry brush to kind of help with some of those little tiny lines. I can also add some little lines from the back of the fin pulling in. So I'm really just looking at where do I want to add a little bit of extra texture and a little bit of extra definition to my painting? Looks like there's I can add, like, another little kind of shadow line just define this undershadow a little bit more. I'm going to do the same thing with this other one, so I'm using kind of the edge of my brush and just defining that shadow just slightly more. I do that on the top one of the slower one, as well. And now I did add all these little dots on this fish. I can always add stripes if I want to, or I can just leave it with just the dots. I think I won't add quite as many stripes, but maybe I'll just add a few to see what that looks like. It does give it a little bit more definition, a little bit more detail, kind of looks a little cool. Remember that anything that you add at this layer, at this stage of your painting, when you're painting wet on dry paper, remember we didn't wet these sections first. We're painting it on dry paper. So when you're painting wet on dry, remember that your edges are going to be hard edges. So at the edges there, that's where I have my hard edges. Alright, and then I think the last little thing that I'm going to do, I'm going to grab a little bit of blue of this turquoise. This turquoise leans a little bit more blue than green. And then now I'm going to add just a second layer of blue along this little blue patch in the eye. I just want to make it a little bit brighter. And then same thing if you had sections of yours that you wanted to add more blue to, whether it's kind of tracing some of these lines that you already made or adding a little bit more blue around the tail, you're more than welcome to do that. Now, to this blue, if you wanted to add a little darker on one side, you can always grab a little pains gray using your wet brush and drop it in in any section where you think you want a little bit darker. Using that pains gray to just kind of trace around. And then I'll grab a little bit of that blue. I'll do the same in the fish blow. It 6. Tropical Fish, part 4: Mmm. Alright, so now that we have kind of the tops of our fishes done, and we have our few layers of wet on wet followed by a layer of wet on dry. Now we're ready to look at our background. So we can do a few different things with our background. We can do a little bit of color. We can also add some salt. It doesn't have to be sea salt. It can be small salt. It could be coarse grain salt or just regular table salt. Any kind of salt will work. And when we add salt, we're going to get a little bit of texture. So with coarse grain salt, you're going to get a little larger texture. With table salt, it's going to look a little bit finer. So I think I'm going to try this with table salt, and I want to get my colors ready first. I'm going to wash off my plate. And I think I want to add some slightly darker colors, but I also kind of want it to look a little bit like coral. So I'm going to add my water. I want kind of a base color in the background that then I can add some darker colors too. Now, I think this base layer in the background I'm debating on if I want to do a purple or if I want to do a pink or if I want to do a teal. I'm not quite sure. I think I'm going to take a peek at what does it look like to have a little bit of a purple background. So maybe to this purple because purple is a complimentary color to yellow. It's a color the opposite of the color wheel. And so it complements that color really well. But I'm also gonna use a little bit of this Chinese white, and I'm going to add a little Chinese white to that purple to kind of make it more of a pastel. And maybe I'll add just a little bit of blue to that purple so it's not so bright. So it's looking more like a periwinkle blue. Periwinkle purple. Alright, and now here is where I'm going to start with painting around my fish. I think I'm going to go diagonal here. I'm going to turn my paper. I'll start by kind of outlining a little bit this fish that's down below. So I'm using this color that I just mixed. And I'm going to do this just a small section at a time, because I don't want this whole section. I don't want to go around and then have it the edges dry out. So I want to be able to pull my edges out. Now, I'm adding kind of a line of color, and then I'm pressing down with my brush so that the metal part of my brush is kind of pushing up against the paper, and I'm going back and forth. As I'm pulling my brush out, so I'm pushing down fairly hard. Now, this is called dry brush, where you can see all the texture of the paper. Now, we can let some areas be connected. We can add even more water to this. I can add just like drops of water. Because remember, I'm wanting to keep this kind of looking coral like. And so there's going to be certain sections of my coral that's going to be a little bit darker and other sections that are going to be lighter. So I'm just taking dots of water at this point. And now I'll start outlining. I'm gonna now continue to move on to this fish here since my water is starting to touch this fish. So I'm going to start by outlining it slightly. And then dry brush to the edge and add a little bit of drops of water if I wanted to. Now, before I continue moving around, I think I'm going to take a peek at this and see, do I want to add more color in this background? So what would it look like if I grabbed some mauve, for example, and added a little bit of mauve coming in to the wet. So I'm looking at kind of adding a little bit of extra color here. I can use really any of these colors that I have on my paper. I can mix them directly on my paper or I can mix them on I can mix them on my plate or I can mix them directly on my paper. Maybe I'll add. Let's see what happens if I add a little bit of yellow. I know that it's going to add some of these, like, darker tones. If I start adding yellow closest to the blue here, it's going to end up looking slightly green. If there's any mixing that you don't like, you can take your paper towel, blot it up a little bit, add more water to kind of force these blooms to happen. So adding water is a great way to kind of push pigment around and to make these hard edges. And now I'm going to continue kind of working around in a similar way. So I've got my base color that I'll start by kind of outlining a new section of my fish. And then I'll take the edge of my brush, and I'll push down and kind of scratch out leaving some of that white of the paper to shine through. Before I move on to new section, I can add drops of water to purposefully make those sections bloom. I'm gonna keep moving on before I drop in more color. I'm gonna try to purposefully leave a little bit of that white paper out there just to give it a little bit more variety, so it's not just the same shapes. And before I move on, let's add some blooms by dropping little droplets of water. And then to those little droplets of water or to that area that's still wet, I can add some extra color if I want. This is where watercolors gets quite fun where you're working with these different colors and allowing the water to just kind of blend and move. Right. And then before it dries, if you had wanted two, you can always add a little bit of salt. Like I said, the table salt is going to give you a little bit more actually, I shouldn't have put that in my fingers. Let's put it in my palm first. The table salt is going to give you a little bit more of a large bloom, but it's not going to be as solid in one spot. Whereas the coarse grain, you might actually notice kind of the outline of the coarse grain of salt as it stays on the paper there. So if I use a little bit finer of grains of salt, I want to add the salt while it's still wet. If your paper is dry, it's not going to do anything. If your paper is soaking wet, it also is not going to do anything. So it's kind of this in between stage of not too wet and not too dry. And all I'm doing is I'm just dropping in a little bit of salt here and there. And now we need to let it just sit and wait. The salt will start to soak up some of that pigment. And as it dries, you're going to notice some little, like, fireworks happening. Now, when the painting is dry, then we can brush the salt off, but we have to let it dry completely first. Alright, so after you let your fish painting dry completely in the background dry completely with the salt on, then when it's completely dry, you can rub your salt off just using your fingers. And then you'll be left with this really nice blooms that kind of represents coral. 7. Octopus, part 1: So we're going to be painting this octopus using a wet on wet technique first, where we wet the area using a color. And then, will that color is wet, we'll drop in some other colors to create these soft blends. So my base layer color, I want this move. So I'm going to grab my water and add quite a lot of water onto my plate. Now, this might be the section of the class where you just drop some water, pour a little bit of water onto your plate. We do need quite a bit. And then I'm going to take quite a bit of time to add some of this mouth to my color. Now, I'm looking for a medium transparency, medium to medium light. So I do want quite a bit of color in this water. I might have added too much water, actually, to be honest. Soak up a little bit of that water so that I have enough pigment left. Alright, so when I take a peek at what this mouth looks like on my practice sheet, I'm noticing it's kind of a medium opacity. That's great because to this color, we can drop in more moth, or we can drop in our purple or we can drop in our lemon yellow to create these nice peachy tones. Alright, so the very first step, I'm actually going to I know I'm wanting to start with this big old head here, but that's a really large spot to start with, and that's kind of where our eyes are going. And so instead of starting with where our focus is going to be, I'm going to start somewhere else just so that I can do a little bit of practice before I get to the section that's going to be the hardest. So I think this little tentacle that's kind of off in the background is going to be a great spot to start. So I'm going to load my brush up with this water down moth. And now I want to start where it's the darkest, which is going to be right up next to the body. And as I bring this color outwards, I am going to try my best to keep a little ring of white here on these tentacles. Because if you notice on the tentacles, the ends of these tentacles are really nice and light. So I don't want to paint my Mava on top of that. And leave a little ring. The rest of it, though, gets painted. Now, now that this is wet, now I can drop in some of my colors. I'm going to wash my brush because I'm going to start with my highlight, which is this lemon yellow. So this color is already starting to soften up because I had water on top. I'm going to grab just a little bit of it, and I'm going to add a little bit of that lemon yellow to the outside edge. That's going to act. It's going to mix with my mauve, and it's going to create this nice peachy tone. Now I can take my brush, dry it, and soak up some of that color. I want to do this quickly, though, because I still want time to drop in some darker colors. So I want to drop in more intense mouth here. Wow, this first layer is wet. Then I also want to go and grab some of that dots purple. I'm not washing my brush off for this because the purples will mix really nicely together, and so I don't need to wash my brush. Now, I can add some dots using this purple to kind of create some texture. Wherever you see a little bit of texture here in the skin, I can just kind of add some dots there. Now, if there's any section that you don't like how it looks, you can wash your brush, dry it off, and use a dry brush just kind of soak up if any of those pigments ran too far. Now, for this tutorial, we do really want to have our individual colors shine. We don't want to over mix our colors. So when I lay a color down, I don't want to go back and forth and back and forth while it's on my paper, or otherwise it's going to mix to a new color, okay? So I'm kind of being very aware that the color I place down, the water that's already on my paper is going to help to blend it. I don't really need to do as much work. Now, I can't paint any section of my octopus along this edge that's wet. So I'm gonna skip and jump around and paint some of these tentacles. And then once I've gained a little bit more confidence in this technique, then I can go back to the head. Alright, so I'm looking for some of these tentacles that are kind of smaller and cut off. So these ones here along the edges are gonna be great for that. Eventually, this one, too. This tentacle is connected to the body, and so this is going to be a little bit more challenging to do. I want to gain a little bit more confidence with these ones in the back. So this first layer of moth, I can wash my brush. I'm tapping it along the side so I don't have too much water on my brush. And then I'm going to grab some of that yellow. And I want this lemon yellow closest to where my tentacles are because that's where it's going to be the lightest. So along this little wrap around here and along the tentacles, I'm still trying to leave these suctions of the tentacles to be a little white. And then I can go back. I can add a little bit of that mauve where it would be the darkest, which would be along the outside edge. And I can also add a little bit of this dioxyine purple. Now, remember I did not add any extra water. I'm using these dark colors directly from my paper so that they can be the most concentrated and dark. We'll move on to another section. So potentially I'll do this tentacle in the back here. Wash my brush, tap it so I don't have too much liquid on my brush, and I'll grab some of that lemon, drop it in and paint along closest to the tentacles. I'm going to allow those two colors to blend together. And now I can wash and dry my brush and add a little bit of darker mauve and that dark purple to the backside of the tentacle. Now, if you have too much liquid on your brush, when you add these colors, the colors, if there's too much liquid, it's going to push everything away. And so this whole class here is for you to practice how much liquid is on your brush and how much is on your paper. If you have too much liquid, all of these dark colors are going to push and expand and blend with all of your lighter colors. If you don't have enough liquid and your brush is too dry, the color is going to just sit and your edges are going to be very hard and your colors aren't going to blend at all. So it's a very fine line between having enough water on your brush and having too much water. And so this is a great tutorial for practicing that. Remember that you might not get it right the first few times. That's to be expected. But this is why we're starting on some of our smaller sections first. Right, I'm going to take a peek at this tentacle that's wrapping around. Now, when we start to see some of the suctions here on the back side, we're actually going to do our best to paint around those suctions so that we leave those white. So as I paint my first layer of color using this water down mouth, I'm going to try my best to go around these. Now, I'm not worrying if I accidentally go over the edges, and I'm using still quite a watered down brush. And then I'm moving that watered down pigment and kind of tracing around these suctions. Going to stop part way here because I don't want this to dry before I get a chance to drop in some extra color. Then I can go back with my water down layer and I can finish the rest of this tentacle. H If I have too much water on this tentacle, I can soak up some of it so that when I add my yellow, my yellow will stay more or less where it's placed instead of mixing with everything else. So I'm going to grab a little bit of yellow. On these smaller tentacles, you might not have a ton of ability to mix these colors, and that's okay. Grab a little bit of that darker mauve. Try my best to add a little bit of darkness along the edge, although I know I'm not going to be able to add a whole lot because it's pretty small. As this is starting to dry, if I'm noticing it didn't get dark enough, I can always add more. You can pretty much continue working in any of these areas as long as it's still wet. Once that color starts to dry, that's our cue as artists, especially when we're doing this first layer wet on wet. That's our cue to stop working and let it dry on its own. 8. Octopus, part 2: So I'm going to start working on this one. I just want to be careful where it's touching up against the tentacle that I already painted. So I'm going to start on this bottom, and it looks like I'm going to have to do a lot of painting around. So I might stop halfway here because I'm going to want to drop in some other colors here before it dries. So I'm going to kind of chunk it into sections here. Now, let's say, as you're painting, if you go over some of these tentacles on accident, that's okay. You can take your paper towel, press down as hard as you can, and you're going to basically lift that color up. And then you can start over. Now, we can do that because this is high quality paper that you're painting on. This is arches, cold press watercolor paper. In my opinion, it is one of the best, if not the best watercolor papers that you can find in the entire world. And so, because it is a high quality paper, we're able to lift up these colors if we go over the lines. Now I am still going over some of these tentacle lines, and I'm not worried about that because I do know that this whole painting isn't going to be perfect. I'm keeping it a little bit, I don't want to say messy, but I'm keeping it a little bit looser so that it gives it a little bit more motion and movement. We'll add a little bit darker around the bottom here where it's twisting. That would be naturally where there's a little bit of shadow. And then I'm also gonna add a little bit of shadow along this top side of the tentacle. Grab a little bit more of that DaxinPurple. And then we'll continue painting the rest of the tentacle. Alright, so now I'm taking a peek at where I can section off some of my octopus so that I can do smaller sections so I don't have hard edges where it dries. And one of the sections that I'm noticing is that there's a little bit of a line here kind of where the underside of the tentacle with all the suctions and then the top of it. So I'm going to do the underside of this tentacle first. And then I'll let it dry completely, and I can come back and then do the main body here. So I'm noticing that the underside of the tentacle is a little bit more of a peachy color. So I'm going to make sure to add more of my lemon yellow here. Once again, I can do this in sections here. I'm getting up close to the other tentacles, but I'm trying my best to not touch it. And I'll continue now painting the rest of this tentacle. Now, this is perfectly okay if we've got a little bit of variant with the mauve to the yellow. It doesn't have to be perfect here. Then I can add a little bit of darker on the center, as well as a little bit of that dark purple. I'm going to do the same thing with this tentacle. I know we're kind of doing a lot of the details here first. But remember, we're just practicing all of these color mixing. So I'm going to do the same thing, and I'm going to arbitrarily kind of stop it more or less right here. And so I'll do from this section all the way out. 9. Octopus, part 3: Alright, so now that we've had some time to practice this technique of wetting and dropping in, now I think we're ready for the largest sections. Now, I still need to chunk this into sections because doing both the head and the body here is going to be way too much, and I do want to keep the sections wet. So I'm going to start with the head here. And I'm noticing there's a natural break here by where the eye is where it's a little bit lighter under the eye. And then it's dark until roughly here. So it kind of comes dark and comes up like this. This is the section that I'm going to paint. I also am doing this section because I gave these two tentacles some time to dry, whereas these ones down here are still a little wet. So I want to make sure that I still have quite a lot of my base color here. If you don't have enough, please mix some more to get ready. I also want to make sure that my accent colors here are wet and so I can drop a few drops of water onto my lemon yellow, and my purple. And now we can get started. Now, when I paint this really big section of the head, I can turn it if I need to so that it's a little closer to me, and so I'm not accidentally resting my head. If this is confusing to you, though, keep it in one spot. And now I do need to kind of really make sure that this section is wet. I can actually drop if you do this carefully enough, if you can't do this careful enough, maybe don't do it. But you can drop a whole, like, pool of color and then push that pool to the edge. It makes it a little bit quicker. The other thing that you could do if you had a slightly larger capacity brush at home, you can also use that larger capacity brush for that section. I want to be careful around the eyes here. So that I'm not going over this lighter ring around the eye. And I think this front part comes down roughly here. So we're going to stop it there. I'll come back. Before this section dries, I'm going to add my pigment here, make sure that my edges are nice and tight edges so that I'm going all the way up to the line. And now that I'm done, I'm not done yet, because, remember, I want to go back to the start, make sure that I have all of this evenly wet. I don't want one section of this head to start drying before I can drop in the color. Now that it's wet, now I'm going to start with my highlights first. So I wash my brush, and I'm going to grab some of that lemon, and I'm going to start with adding some highlights towards the top. Now, I can add more texture here by adding dots here. I can soak up some of that pink that mauve color at the base if I want more of this undercolor to shine through or more of the yellow to shine through here. So I'm going to keep some of these dots of yellow towards the top. And then before it dries, remember, we got to do this quick. I'm going to add some of that move to my base here, a little bit more water here. So I'm making it a little bit darker here, and I'm kind of following the shape of the head here. It's a little darker around the eye, it seems. You know, and there is a little bit of, like, a peachy color on the underside, so I can always add a little bit of yellow on the underside, keeping it really nice and wet here. And then before it dries, I can add some of my dxyine purple. Now, I have quite a lot of this purple on my brush, and I do really like how when I have a lot of this color, and I'm adding some of these dots here or some lines, you can also add some lines coming from this purple. Now, I do like how much texture you're seeing with that deep dark purple here. It's very watered down. So well, I shouldn't say it's watered down. It's a very wet section. And I'm adding some very intense pigment here. And I'm going to leave it then because I like that. I don't want to over mix. I don't want to overcomplicate. I do like the darkness of these colors. If I need to lift at all, I can use my dry brush and lift with my dry brush. If I need to fix any of these lines here, if they got out of control, I can fix. But because we're doing underwater animals, it does make sense for a lot of these a lot of these blooms where you see the pigment kind of spider veining, it kind of makes sense to have it like that. So I don't mind it. Alright, now, as we look at the body here, the body is a lot lighter in color. And so I can either attempt to do the whole body at once, or I can attempt to do this in little sections, just how I've been doing it earlier. I think I'm going to chunk it into sections, but I think I can do two or I can do three sections here. I can do this section along the side, and I can do this section along this side. And then these two together are going to be all one section. So I'm going to start maybe with this section. No, you know what? I'm going to let this edge dry a little bit better. I'm going to start with this section here. So I'm going to turn my paper so that I've got a little bit easier of a time here. And I'm going to follow kind of the natural the natural shadows here. So I've got this kind of edge where this upper tentacle is coming out. All right. And then when I take a peek at my reference photo, it does look quite dark here up on the top and a little bit lighter towards the base. So I can add a little bit more of my peachy color in towards the base here. And then I can add more of my mouth at the top. And more of my purple. So I'm using my purple here is actually quite a lot of water here with my purple, and that's how I'm getting these really nice blooms here where it pushes the pigment away and you get a lot of texture. So you notice that there's a lot of liquid here and this purple. Now I'm also noticing where this where this creases, there's a little bit more of purple. And I can just kind of add more texture by taking and dotting that purple wherever I want to.it. 10. Octopus, part 4: Alright, then we will continue to this section here. Well, no, you know what? We're going to continue on with this section because this is going to be the lightest. So I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to drop a little bit here. And then the rest of it is just going to be water because this is going to be my most peachy of colors. We can touch along this edge because we did just finish painting it. I'm using the edge of my brush to just kind of push that liquid around. And I'm gonna use this natural edge here to suction the rest of my octopus painting. All right. And then where we've got these edges here, I can just kind of re wet those edges and kind of scrub them a little bit so that it reactivates that edge, and I can scrub that edge out a little bit. Same right here. If I don't like how this edges, I can take my brush, kind of scrub out this edge a little bit. Alright, now, before this dries, we've got to drop in some of our yellows to get kind of these peachy tones here. I can also since it's looking like it's quite lighter in color, I can also use my paper towel or add more water here to kind of lift some of that up if it got a little bit too dark, but also know that we're using this reference photo as a guide. It doesn't have to be an exact replica. So I've got my lightest of yellows here. And then where we notice our darkest shadows, that's where we're gonna want to spend a little bit more time with our colors. So I've got my mauve here. I'm noticing that there's some darker colors coming in from the bottom here and around. I'm noticing there's a little bit of shadow kind of coming up from this bottom, a little bit of shadow coming in, a little bit of shadow on the bottom side of this tentacle here. Almost in this little suction in between. There's a little bit of shadow here. And then there's shadow along this right side of the leg. Now, this is where it's going to be the most challenging because we're doing a lot of area all at once. So know that if you have some hard edges where our wet sections are budding up against our dry sections, that's okay for now. Don't worry. I kind of comes around here. And then I'll add my watery purple. Remember, I'm going to add it to where it's the darkest first, which it seems like it's around kind of the bottom of the eye here, around the bottom of the tentacle here. I've got quite a lot of texture, so I can add some dots of texture along where I see some of these shadows dotting some texture using this purple is a great way of adding texture. So I've got kind of these two corridors. I've got this dark corridor and this dark corridor. And then I've just got some texture dotting this purple in between. Remember, I'm not mixing these colors. So I'm not sitting here with my paintbrush mixing them together. I'm keeping them separate by just dotting the color and then letting that wet paper mix it for me. And if it got too dark in any sections, I can take my paper towel and lift up. However, remember that this color is gonna dry just slightly lighter than what it looks like when it's wet. So, um, you know, I don't have to worry about lifting up too much color with my paper towel. I do want those vibrant colors. And then we'll do the same thing with the tentacle here. Now, I'm kind of out of my color. But I'm still gonna see if I can get a drop or so of color here. Her. Now, with this section, I just want to be careful touching the back of the head. And then coming up here, I'm going to dry my brush and use a dry brush here because I do want this section to stay really nice and dark. And if I touch my wet brush up against this wet section here, I'm going to move a lot of the pigment away. So I'm drying my brush off, and I'm taking just a little bit of that pigment coming up along the base here, and then adding a little bit of a shadow under the eye here. Okay. And then I can always fix that edge and fix the shadow later. Okay? So I'm just getting that pigment down here. If you're like me and you have too much pigment, you put too much on the paper. You can always dab some off. All right. And now this section, we are going to kind of slightly make up what it looks like. So I'm going to add some yellow right where I see this lightest section here. Can make it really nice and bright with yellow. And then I can add some darker along this backside. Same thing. If you need to lift up any pigment there, you can lift it up. Now here, I can always add just the slightest amount of yellow in this area here. It's almost looking like it was too white. So I can add a little bit of yellow to kind of make it a little peachy. Lift if it got too dark. The only section that I definitely want to keep that white is just around the eye there. Seems like it actually is darker here. So we're just gonna try our best, and then we're gonna let it dry. 11. Octopus, part 5: If you're like, M and you got any sort of little drops of water around the outside edges, don't worry about that. All right. So now that we're letting this first layer dry, we can go back to some of these white tentacles, and we can add just the slightest of color to these white tentacles. So I already have some of this mouth on my plate. I'm going to see what it would be like to just add a little bit of turquoise. So I want to add just a slightly new color here. So this is making kind of a blue tint. I still have a lot of water here. But if I mix it on my plate on my paper, it looks slightly blue. Now, you can have it be more blue or you can not have any mouth at all and have it be totally turquoise. We're gonna use this just to add a little tiny, quick, like, partial circle to some of these tentacles. So I'm coming on the inside where it's white, and using this water down color, I'm adding just kind of like either a ma on some, or for some of those that are bigger, I can actually add a full circle. I just want to be careful that I'm not touching these sections that are wet. So it seems like a lot of these I'm going to have, like, partial circles, just little commas. And you notice that I'm doing this quickly, so I'm not worried about having this be perfect. I just want to add just an extra little bit of color so it's not solid white there. Okay, so I'm going to go around and add a little extra of this blue, adding just some mas to these white sections. All right. And then I also do want to add just a little bit more black to this eye. So I'm going to wet my pains gray. And I'm going to do this carefully. I want to make sure that no section of this eye is wet. And then I'm going to take that black, well, pain's gray. Add that center dot first, and then pull a little line on each side. Now, as this is drying, I kind of like how that texture of lifting up with a paper towel looks. I can I don't think it's gonna actually lift up anymore, but you can always try to over accentuate that if you had wanted to. And now I can leave it like this if I want to. I have a few other options, though, if you had wanted to, for example, if you have some of your outside of the white of the paper that got a little too dark, maybe you have some stains there from little droplets, things like that. You can always mix some color and do a little bit of splatter more around your tentacles. And so I'm going to show you what that'll look like. I'm going to use a scratch sheet of paper first to just show you and then you can decide if you want to do it on your painting. Now, we can use whatever color is currently on our plate, or we can add more color to it. So here's I'm adding a little bit of purple to this. We do need it quite watered down. Now, I would move your final piece well far away so that it doesn't accidentally get any drops on it. And you can do this splatter one of two ways. You would fill up your brush as much as you can and tap it on top of your hand. If you have another brush or another pencil at home, you can hold that loaded brush in your non dominant hand and use a different brush to tap and knock it on top. This might create more splatter, and it might also help to keep the splatter kind of where you want it. So that's what your splatter is going to do. It's really all up to you whether or not you want to add a little bit of splatter. Splatter. What splatter is going to do is splatter is going to give it a little bit more motion, a little bit more energy. And so when I take a peek at my octopus, I might want to add a little bit of energy down towards the tentacles to kind of make it look like it's moving. And so I'm going to grab load at my brush and add just a few splatter marks along the bottom of the tentacles here. I want to try to keep it away from the head, but I'm just kind of going to go around the bottom here. And add a little bit of splatter along the outside. A little goes a long way, of course. And so I do think splatter does add quite a lot to our paintings. It also can help to give it a little bit more shape. So by keeping the splatter around this outside ring, I have really balanced my painting here. Now, although this is where I am stopping, I do want to mention that you might be interested at home on doing a second layer of color just to add a little bit more texture in certain spots. So depending on how dark your background layer of color is, you can always add a second layer of color. And now, if I were to add a second layer of color, I can use whatever colors on my plate. I might add just a little bit more mauve to that color. My second layer still needs to be watered down, so you notice it's still nice and watered down here. But I'm going to add it to just add a little bit of texture in certain locations. Now, I don't want to add any of this texture where my paper is still wet. So if I were to look at where it's dry, if I wanted to add more texture, I would add more texture, not with the tip of my brush because that's going to be too small of dots, but I would add a little bit of texture, making little blobs with the edge of my brush. So there are just different size blobs. Some of them can be connected. Some of them can be separate. And I would add these blobs more in where you see the shadow. So wherever I might see certain shadow spots, I can add some texture, and I can bring a little bit of texture up into where the highlighted area is. So if I'm adding a little bit of texture, say to this section here, I can add a few blobs of color. Now, you aren't going to notice a whole lot of difference here. But where you will notice it is in these lighter areas where you have just a little bit of extra almost like spots here. Now, I probably wouldn't add a whole lot of these spots in the center area here in the middle, but you can add some of these dots and spots along the base and then slowly make your way up and make them a little bit less prominent and smaller as you get to the highlighted section. And like I said, this is completely an optional step. If you like how your painting is looking, this is definitely not something that you have to do. It just all depends on how dark your first layer got and if you were able to get some nice texture spots using that wet on wet technique. And if you weren't able to get a whole lot of texture spots, this is a great way to add a little bit more texture in those shadowed areas. When I'm adding texture to the head here, I am only adding a little texture along this center line here. I'm not really going to be adding that texture to the top or to the bottom. Making sure that you're not over adding texture is challenging, but it is really going to help your piece overall. So I can add, like I said, a few more of these dots to where there's more texture, where I'm noticing more shadow. This also is a great way to kind of clean up some of these edges where you had two edges where you had to work in sections. And so if your sections dried, funny, where you've got a hard edge between your sections, this texture is a great way to kind of mesh those sections together. And I think that's all I'm going to add for now. I'm gonna let it fully dry because once this texture dries fully, since it is quite watered down, it is going to soften a little bit as it dries, and then we'll be totally done. 12. Jellyfish part 1: Alright, so we're going to start by taking a peek at our reference photo. Now, the fun part about jellyfish is that you can paint your jellyfish whatever colors you would like. So you can use your colors that are listed at the bottom of the practice sheet. Just know that we're going to need your jellyfish body to kind of stick around two colors. You need your lightest color for a lot of the highlights, and then you need a color that you can drop in for the shadows. So if I wet all of my colors here, I'm going to wet my yellow, wet my orange, my purple, my mouth, my blue, my pain's gray, and my white. And then if you are doing colors that are not the same colors as my jellyfish, I would suggest that you test out your colors on a section on your practice sheet first to make sure that those color combinations will work. Now, I'm choosing to start with a lemon yellow on the main body, and then I'm going to drop in this mauve color. I might also drop in a little bit of cadmium orange, so I'm kind of sticking between these three colors for the body. I'm also going to stick to those same colors, but just a little bit more transparent for some of these cloth like sections that are coming out of the body. Out of the head. And then for all of the little fine tentacles underneath, I'm going to use some darker colors, some turquoise, along with my purple, maybe even a little bit of pains gray. And then this is where I'm going to start using a little bit of my Chinese white. So I am not going to paint all the way to the edge. However, if you are painting all the way to the edge at home, I do suggest that you use some painter's tape and tape on all four edges of your watercolor paper onto a flat surface, either the surface you're painting on, or you can also tape it onto a corrugated plastic board like this. All right. So first, we are going to mix our base color. So I've got a bunch of water. I'm going to take some of that water and add it to a section on my plate. I'm looking to have around a half dollar coin size of water here I can always mix more if I need to. And then to that, I'm going to add some of my lemon yellow. Now, similarly to all of the other animals in this underwater kit, I'm looking to make a base color first that I will then paint wherever I want, and then I can drop in more concentrated color, or I can drop in shadow like cadmium orange or mauve. Alright, so I'm going to start with the head of my jellyfish. And so the head is all going to be just slightly darker than the rest of the bonnie. So I'm going to start by sectioning off for sure, this top section. Now, there's a little section here underneath. I'm not going to paint that yet because I want to chunk it into sections, and this section underneath is going to be the darkest. So I'm going to start by adding quite a bit of liquid with this mixture. Continuously grabbing more. I'm really soaking up as much of that first color as I can get. I'm just kind of adding, like, a puddle of that color and then pushing that puddle of color around. Remember, we do want this first layer to stay to stay wet while we drop in the rest of our colors. All right. Now, I'm already noticing that this section is starting to dry, so I'm going to go back, re wet the section, add a little bit more because, of course, this is where I started, so it's going to start drying a little bit faster over on that side. And now that I have a very even wetness throughout the top. Now I can add either more of this yellow. So maybe I want a brighter yellow on the underside. Or I can add some shadow. So it looks like there's a little bit of shadow on the top, so I'm going to use my mauve color and add some of that mauve along the top. Now, because this is wet on wet, I can allow these colors to nicely blend together. I can always outline some of these kind of vertical lines using that mouth. I can also somewhat outline the bottom here using this mouth. It looks like there's a little bit almost of a hard edge along the bottom. And I can always add a little bit of orange if I wanted to, so maybe I want to drop in a little bit of orange. This is pretty much where you can start to play a little bit. Remember, just like with our octopus, if you are adding any other colors onto a section that's already wet, you want to make sure that you are not wetting your brush and adding too much water into that section. Adding too much water is simply going to make that extra color move and bloom all around your paper. Alright, so I'm gonna leave it there because I do want to keep some of these colors, um, without blending them together. Alright, so then while that section dries, I'm going to move on to this kind of cloth like body. I'm going to mix a little bit more of my yellow. So I'm adding more water here to my yellow. A little bit more yellow. And now, because we have some really bright spots here, I'm going to do this section wet on dry because I don't want to run the risk of having some of this yellow go into a section where it is really light in color. So instead, I'll paint on dry paper, and then I can always drop in the same colors wherever I see shadow. I am going to make sure that I'm not connecting completely with the main body. So I'm going to actually take a peek at these little frills underneath. And I know these little frills are going to be the darkest. So I'm going to start here on this little under ridge. So I'm looking at this shadow section right there, and I'm going to add some of that yellow wet on dry, my paper is dry. As I get to the edge, I'm just going to use whatever's left on my brush to just dry brush down. So I'm continuing to make brush movements, but there's going to be some space in between my brush, and that's going to be the white of the paper. Now, to this, remember, before I let it dry, I do want to add some of that mauve color. Seems like it's drying up a little bit. So I can add it coming from the underbelly. I can also add just a little hint of that dioxyze purple where it would be the darkest. So it seems like there's a few little chunks of darkness under there, as well. I kind of comes out and under. Alright, and then I will take a peek at some of the other dark section. So it looks like this section immediately underneath is going to be lighter, and there's going to be a little dark section in this bottom corner. Now, if I go on top of some of these sections that are supposed to be light, that's okay. This is just kind of a rough guideline. So I've got this section under here. Seems like my mauve color is drying up, so I'll add a little bit of water to that. And once again, I'll drop in some of that mouth and then also just a little bit of that purple where it would be the darkest. Now, this didn't blend as well as I want, so I'm gonna wash my brush, tap it on my paper towel so it's not soaking wet and then use that slightly damp brush just to help mix some of those colors a little bit better. Alright, now from here, I'm going to take a peek at some of the little tiny frills down here. Now, I'm imagining that it's going to be a little bit darker towards the bottom. It looks like it's a little bit darker where it's here in the background. So I'm using the edge of my brush, and I'm dry brushing all along the bottom here. So that means that I am using the edge of my brush and pushing down so that there's some space from the paper that's shining through. So if I were to pick this up and tilt it, you're going to be able to see there's some paper that's coming through. And so that those sections are going to stay white. This is much easier to do with dry brush if you use the edge, and you just kind of push the edge of the brush along. Now, remember, before this dries, we do want to add in some of our darker colors. So I'll come down here, add in some of my mauve color. I'll bring a little bit of the mauve uptop. And I'm just kind of dotting it along here and there because I want some shadow, but I also want some of that yellow to shine through. So if it's a little darker in one section, that's great. Maybe I'll add just a little bit of orange. And then if there's certain sections that you don't like how they look, we can always use a wet brush, and we can kind of blend those sections out, or you can take your paper towel and you can lift, as well. 13. Jellyfish, part 2: Alright, we'll continue moving upwards. So, this whole section is pretty bright. I do notice there's a little bit of shadow just kind of within here. So maybe I'll add almost, like, a little triangle shape of shadow here, a little shadow along this edge line. Still starting with this yellow, just so that I can kind of control the shadow a little bit better. Alright, so I've got this kind of triangle and this triangle here. Now I can add just a little hint of that mauve. I might not want quite as much as down in these lower shadows. And it does seem like there's, like, some little texture along some of this edge. I can always add some little dots with some to add a little bit of texture. And then I'm going to add a little bit more yellow 'cause I'm running out of my yellow again. And then I'll finish with this section of shadow underneath the head here since the top is starting to dry. So the underside here is definitely going to be in shadow. It's gonna be the darkest of my shadows here. So, same thing. Add a little bit of that mauve here. And then I can also add just a little bit of that purple, as well. Now, I definitely don't want it to be the darkest of purples because this section here to the left is where it's going to be a little bit darker. So I think that's good. Now here, I'll just kind of finish up a little bit of these dots along the outside edge. So I'm taking my yellow. And I'm just kind of adding some dots here and there, some larger dots using the edge of my brush. And then to those, then I'll add some dots using the edge of my brush using that mouth. So all this is doing is it's adding just a little bit of texture around the edge. We'll add more texture once it dries. We just kind of want to get down some color first. Alright, and then the last little section of the body is gonna be this little shadow here. So, same thing. I'm going to start with that yellow painting on dry paper. If it butts up against this section here and it's not totally dry, it's not a huge deal. However, you can always let this shadow dry a little bit more if you wanted to. Grab a little bit of that mauve here. I want my darkest of values to be on this underside. But I can still leave a little bit of that yellow to shine through on the edge here. Kind of, by doing that, it does kind of give us this effect of it glowing. And I'm adding now a little bit of that purple while it's wet. I think I want to add a little bit more purple here on this right side. I think this will be a little bit darker, too. Alright, so we will let this layer dry. And as we let this layer dry, we're going to start working on some of the tentacles. Alright, so to work on the tentacles, I did a little practice of what I'm thinking or hoping that it might look like. I might change, obviously, as we're doing this. And so if it changes, that's okay. But what I want to do is I want to add quite a lot of water on this underside here where the tentacles are starting to come out and different colors to that water, that watery blue and purple, so dark colors here. And then I'll add some white blooms using my white paint. And also using my white paint, I will pull some extra tentacles out. Okay? So this is going to be something that I'm going to need quite a lot of liquid for. So I will clean off my plate first. 14. Jellyfish, part 3: Alright, so I'm going to add some water to one section of my plate. I'm looking to have around a quarter size of water. And now to that, I'm going to add my base layer of the darkest section of my tentacles. So for that base layer, I think I'm going to use my turquoise. So I'm gonna roll around on my turquoise add quite a few brushfuls here. Now, if you wanted to make this turquoise a little darker, you could add a little bit of paints gray to it if you wanted to, or you can just keep it that really nice bright turquoise. It's up to you. And then now with this turquoise here, I'm wanting to paint a section of the tentacles that's coming out from around this third way through point to around this bottom. And I'm going to look to create a big area of liquid here where I'm going to take caution and care painting along the upper edge of this pool of liquid. But then I'm going to make sure that this pool of liquid is really, really nice and opaque. Well, that it's very liquidy. So I'm going to continue to go back to where I started, and I'm really adding a lot of liquid from that brush. If I were to pick up my paper right now, it might start dripping slightly. And I'm going to end around this area. And now I do want this liquid to come this whole kind of pool area to come down just a little bit. So I have kind of like a triangular shape right here. And now to this pool, I'm going to add just a little bit more liquid. So right now I'm just adding liquid to this pool. If I get some splatters on my paper, that's okay. I'm going to add more intense color. So I'm going to add some color from my plate or from my paper, excuse me. I can add more of that turquoise. I can add some darker dioxyine purple. Basically, I'm just wanting to add more intense color. I can add a little bit of Payne's gray. I'm kind of just splotching the color right here. And then now to this, I am going to take some more of my color. I already have a lot of color here. So I'm going to start by dragging some of that liquid. It's like a pool. I hope you can see that in the video. So if I were to lift it up, it's kind of like a pool of liquid. And I'm going to use that pool of liquid to help me pull some tentacles out. Now, I'm starting off with just some of the whatever colors are here. And I'm making sure that these tentacles are overlapping. I can change kind of the border of these tentacles. So if I wanted this whole shape to be a little bit more triangular, I can kind of come in and close some of these gaps here. And I'm going to make some of these little tentacles coming off the edge here. I want to try to keep most of my tentacles within kind of this area here, but I can always play around and see what it would be like to add a little bit more color along the lines. I can add some thicker tentacles, so it looks like the center here is just kind of like a bigger mass of tentacles. Now, if you're getting some of this texture of the paper shining through and you don't like that, make sure that your brush is fully loaded. That means that I have as much liquid soaked up in this brush as I can get before I paint on my paper. And now, once I get a few of these little tentacles and I'm happy with the way that it's going, I'm going to wash my brush. I want to do this before this section dries, and I'm going to grab this Chinese white directly from my paper. Now, normally, we don't use white in watercolor painting, but we will use it to create a pastel colors. I'm using it to create almost like a little galaxy type coloring to the base of my jellyfish here to these tentacles. And if you like how this is looking, you could always kind of expand this big section of color here and make this galaxy look a little bit more intense. So right now, I'm grabbing as much of this Chinese white on my brush as I can get, and I'm dotting into the wet sections. I can also dot into these larger sections of tentacles below. And what this is doing is it's creating these little blooms to come out and appear. Now, I can also take some of this Chinese white, and I can add I might need to add a little bit more water to my brush, maybe even to a section of my mixing palette, still completely loaded up. And then I can always add some of these tentacles using this Chinese white. Now, I'm coming up and I'm grabbing a little bit of the pigment from this pool here with the Chinese white. And so what you're gonna get is you're going to get some of that color pulled down into the Chinese white. So you can see some of this is gonna some of that Chinese white is gonna pull into the purple. So is gonna pull into the blue. And this Chinese white is a great option for a lot of these tentacles that are kind of towards the edges because we want a lot of these tentacles to show up, but we want them to be just slightly more transparent and translucent around the edges. And so this Chinese white is going to give it kind of like an under the sea effect without having to paint the whole background and then leave these tentacles to be lighter. Now, I might just have to babysit these blooms here. So as the paper starts drying, I can always add more Chinese white on top to make these blooms a little bit bigger. Or I can just let it dry like that. Now, there's one other section here that I do want to add the same tentacle work to, and that would be the section up on top. And so I'm going to do that. Exact same thing that I showed you earlier where I add this blue first and then drop in dark colors and then add my white. And I'm going to add it to a smaller section here. So I'm going to turn my paper so I don't rest my hand here. Alright, I add more of just the liquid to keep it nice and wet. I can drop in some more of that turquoise. I can drop in more of that purple. I can drop in paints gray if I want this section in the upper corner to be really nice and dark. And then I'm gonna wash my brush. I can grab more of that color. Remember, we're going to add a few of these little tentacles coming out using just the liquid on the brush. So we're gonna kind of mimic some of these curves that were printed on the paper. I think I don't like it going in front. If you don't like any of these tentacles that you created, you can always use your paper towel while it's still wet and drop in or lift up using your paper towel. And now before it dries, I'm going to clean my brush and grab some of this Chinese white. Remember, we're going to add a few little dots first using that Chinese white. And now using that Chinese white, I can also add a few more tentacles using a Chinese white. Now, we do want slightly less tentacles up in this section. And if you are noticing that your painting is looking a little one sided, you can always add a little bit of blue to this right side. So here I'm just taking a wet brush, and I'm gonna kind of blend out some of these. I didn't really like how the tentacles were looking on the side. So instead, I'm going to take my water and just kind of blend out some of those tentacles. Let's see what it's like if I blend out some of the tentacles on this side, as well, so I can add some water here. Add a little bit of that Chinese white as well to kind of blend around these edges and kind of create almost like a little shadow here on these edges. If you like how your tentacles are looking on this left side, you definitely don't have to blend out with water. But just know that blending with water, adding water to certain sections. And I'm using actually quite a course. I'm pushing down hard with my brush. And what that does is it just lifts up some of that color that's underneath. You can hear how much I'm actually scratching. Now, because this is nice paper, the paper will be able to take that without ripping. And then I can always use my paper towel to just kind of soften up the edges a little bit. But since I'm using just water, your edges shouldn't be too, um, too crazy. 15. Jellyfish, part 4: Alright, so now, as I let this area dry because I will be adding a little bit of splatter, I do want to connect the blue from the tentacles to the jellyfish itself. And the way I'm going to do that is by painting a shadow on top of certain sections of the jellyfish using a blue. So, I am going to remix my color. I guess you could use the same exact color that you had, or you can remix your color. So here I've got water. I had a little bit of white in my blue, and that's why I'm remixing it. So adding to that water a little bit of turquoise. You can either keep this nice and bright or you can add just a little touch of Payne's gray. We're making a little shadow color for our jellyfish. Now, the shadow color still needs to be nice and light and transparent, so you should be able to see through it. And now to our jellyfish, we're going to add. We're going to see where our shadows are. So I noticed a shadow here along the top, and then it's also shadow around the base here. So I think maybe let's start on the base here of the center section. So I'll zoom in here. I'm taking a peek at this area here. So it's kind of all in shadow underneath the kind of cap of my jellyfish. I'm going to start by adding a very water down line here along the base of the cap. Going to fill in the whole cap underneath on this left side. But you notice I'm leaving a little bit of that original color. And now I can add some shadows in these little sections that we notice. So there's a little bit of outline here printed on your paper. There's a little triangle here, and then there's a little line here. So I'm going to fill both of those in using that blue. And then I can always add a little extra line of shadow running down here. Now, I'm not blending out any of these shadows, so these edges are going to stay hard. I don't mind that. And then I'm also going to use this shadow color down in these folds. So I'm noticing that right here on my jellyfish, there are some shadows that sort kind of in this upper area. Nice and loaded brush filled with all of this blue. I'll come underneath and first paint this underside with one layer. And now I can once again pull from that a few little extra shadow lines. So I've got a little bit of extra shadow lines running along this line that's printed out. Now, on this right side, where you've got all and this underside where you have all of this almost like lacey looking texture, we can always come in and add a few of these little dots. Kind of like how we did in the first time where we're using the edge of our brush. We're not adding dots like this. We're using the edge of our brush to add like little blobs blob shapes using a shadow color. And I'm going to keep these blob shapes kind of in these little sections that you see that are already printed out that have kind of these little cut out shapes. I'm also going to keep these blobs kind of towards the outer edge. The other thing that I notice is this whole section here is in shadow. And so I can add some of that blue to this whole lower section here. Just be cautious. If your other blue color is still very wet, you might want to wait for that to dry just slightly. I think this little kind of section right here. I should have I'm looking at this section here. I'm going to add and make this a little bit darker. Yeah, let's mix a little bit more shadow color so that we can add a little shadow to the cap of our jellyfish. So I'm adding a little bit more water. One brushfl of that turquoise. Nice and light and transparent. I think I forgot to add a little bit of shadow along this ridge here. Right now using this shadow color, I'm going to come in and take a peek at then the cap here. Now, for the cap for the shadowing on the cap, we already did the underside, and now I'm noticing that there's kind of a ring of shadow along this top half. And so I'm going to use the edge of my brush, a fully loaded brush that has lots of water on it. And I'm going to just paint this upper half using that blue going down to about this halfway line. It's very watered down. And then I can always take this blue and pull some fine lines I'm using a very gentle touch on my brush, and I can pull a few of these lines down the center as well. Now this blue doesn't have to totally touch that upper edge. We can leave a little hint of that colored background of the cap there, that yellow. Because if you do notice in a reference photo, because of the shape, it is slightly highlighted on the edge there, and that kind of helps us to see it as a rounded shape. Now that we've done this shadow color, you can see how then our painting kind of connects a little bit more instead of having two separate colors. Now they seem a little bit more joined together, which I appreciate. Alright, the last little step is an optional step for you. So adding splatter, just like how we added some splatter to our octopus, we can also add a little bit of splatter to show movement towards the base of our jellyfish. Instead of using I usually would use a dark splatter. I'm going to see what it's going to look like with a light colored splatter, something like that lemon yellow. I want to try to give a little bit more of this kind of look where it's almost dscent a neon like. So we'll see if my yellow will show up as splatter. Sometimes you try splatter with lighter colors, and then it's really hard to see the splatter. And so if I can't see the splatter too well, I can always add darker splatter. So we'll add some of that nice lemon yellow to our water. You can also just do this blatter directly from this lemon yellow. You just have to make sure that you have enough liquid on your brush. So you're trying to hold as much liquid in the brush as you can. Hold it in your non dominant hand and grab a different brush or a pencil, whatever you have at home. You'll want to keep any other paintings away. And I'm going to hold my brush fairly close to my painting, and I'm gonna tap it using that other brush. Now, if you're having a hard time getting these colors off of your brush, instead of gripping your brush really, really hard, have a light grip on your brush. And I'm going to add this yellow mainly to this lower section, but it can always add this splatter over the bottom of my jellyfish. Grab a little bit more. It's just gonna show up a little bit better around the bottom. Well, There we go. Now I can let it dry and I can see if I want to add more splatter. I can always add a dark splatter if I had wanted, or I can darken up some of these areas. If I wanted to darken up the area of the cap there, I can if I wanted to add more tentacles, I can. But sometimes letting your painting dry and letting it sit and seeing what it looks like afterwards is a great way to check and see if you really need to add all those extras or not. Alright, so I let my painting dry, and I actually decided to add some more splatter to the lower section of my jellyfish. I added some splatter using my purple and my turquoise. I felt like it just needed a little bit more dark details down here since the yellow dried, very, very light. And so I made sure to splatter around the lower little tentacles, but also around the bottom here, and that added a really nice texture, in my opinion. Here's the final piece.