Underwater with Watercolor - The Magic of Transparency

1. Welcome to class!: [MUSIC] There's something extra magical about painting water with watercolor. It just works. One of the things that makes this happen is that watercolor has this beautiful transparency that is see-through if we add more water and we can use that to our benefit while painting something that is essentially transparent. Hello there friends and welcome to class. I'm Elisa and I'm a self-taught watercolor artist from Norway. I love lowering the threshold of getting started so that we don't overwhelm ourselves with perfectionism and that we have to get it right and perfect the first time around, which is a terrible tactic of getting to learn anything. In case you're anything like me and you will, in any book that you're reading, use an old receipt or a blade of grass or something else that you found, a napkin, it actually feels really nice to use an actual bookmark in a book, especially if it's something that you made yourself. Today, we'll be picking some beautiful underwater scene bookmarks so that we can keep practicing transparency both in the wet-on-wet technique and the wet-on-dry and that way, we can start building our toolkit of getting to know our watercolor paints better, getting to know our brushes better, getting to know our paper. You can get all of this information while also creating something that's finished, which is my whole philosophy with these classes. For this class, you don't need a lot of experience with watercolor. You will only need to bring one paint if you want, as I always encourage you to start with a monochrome painting. That way, you don't have to mix your colors, you don't have to worry about anything being muddy or your colors not working well together because we're only be using one. Play with that range from the darkest to lightest depending on how much water we're using. That being said, I love using sparkly paints. I think they work really, really well for an underwater scene when you get that light bouncing off. I'll also be using some metallic paints. They're not obligatory at all. But if you have them, you can bring those along as well. Or if you have sparkly, shimmery ink, those could also work really well. For the sake of efficiency, I'll also show you how to tape your paper down, whether you using loose sheets of paper or a block, and how you can take them so you can paint two at the same time without putting your hand into wet paint, which I will demonstrate that I did anyways, but I didn't put it on the paper. I'm really happy you've taken some time out of your day to be creative and in the next video, I'll be talking all about our class project. Let's go. 2. Class project: This might not come as a shock to you, but we are going to make bookmarks in this class. That is what we're going to do. I say bookmarks because most papers are in the A4 size postcard shape, and that shape makes two excellent bookmarks. The ones I've made today are these two, they're made from one postcard, and I also have these two that are slightly larger, and they're made from a block of 12 times 18 centimeters. Whatever paper you have, you might need to cut them down to make an appropriate bookmark shape. Although of course you can make half on an A4 page, which is you'll just be reading very large books. These two from the postcard are using classic watercolor paints, so these don't have a shimmer, but these two do. I've been using handmade paints for the sparkles in this one, but more and more brands are making sparkly versions of their watercolor paints as well. You might already have that, or you can add details with a golden marker or ink or a Dell pen, whatever you have lying around if you'd like to add those sparkles as well. Then, when you're done, I would love to see a photo of your bookmarks. As I'm ambitious, I'm going to say bookmarks as in you were going to paint more than one, in the project gallery below so that we can all see them, and we can start sharing ideas. Maybe you'll see someone else's, you'd be like that's a beautiful version, I would also like to paint the Titanic in the background, so that we can keep inspiring each other, and you always inspire me as well. I keep going through the project galleries like that's a much better idea than mine. It just keeps confirming that what you bring to the table, nobody else is bringing. Even if you're baking a lemon cake and I'm baking a lemon cake, it's going to be a little bit different, and we need all the lemon cakes we can, so please bring your version. I also prompt you if you can, can you take a photo of this bookmark being used in an actual book? Because I know for a very long time I painted bookmarks, and then I put them in a box somewhere. Then I continued to use receipts and blades of grass, and whatever else [LAUGHTER] I could find to mark the pages of my book. I hereby give you permission to use your own bookmark in an actual physical book, unless you use a Kindle, in which case a bookmark is [inaudible]. Are you ready to get started? I will see you in the next video where I'll be talking about our supplies, why I've chosen the ones I've chosen. Because I don't want you to fight with your supplies, it's so frustrating when your supplies work against you. I'll be giving my best tips for avoiding that. I'll see you in the next one. 3. Supplies: These are the supplies we'll be using for today's class. I'm just going to go through them and talk about why I've chosen them. Let's start with these brushes, and I have two different ones. These bigger ones, these are for our clean water. They're a bit fluffier. They'll hold a bit more. Then we'll have these smaller, springier ones, with a pointed tip. Those are great for details. We're doing all of our paintwork with those. You can have some medium ones, if you like, to put paint into our wet-on-wet. Then the smaller detailed ones, depending on the size of your paper, to get those finer details as well. You can actually get away with just two brushes, but you can bring a couple of different ones. Over to our paper, I both have a block like this, which is glued on the sides. That means, it will dry flat on its own. I'll just tape it to get that border around the edges and down the middle to split our bookmarks. But if you don't have this to make two bookmarks on the same block, you can also use something like this, which is a loose sheet. These are all 100 percent cotton, and they're all cold-pressed. This also has a print on the back. If you wanted to make postcards without that, you can also glue them onto something afterwards or use paper that doesn't have print on the back, even if they're postcard-sized. Then I brought this backing board. This is just what I'm going to tape my postcard onto so that when it dries, it will dry flat and not buckled because we're putting lots of water down on it. Something nice and flat, and then I have my tape. You can use masking tape or washi tape, but something that's quite narrow. This one's really nice. It's 11 millimeters, [LAUGHTER] which means about half-a-centimeter will be our border. Because we're cutting down the middle of that, the borders will be the same size, if we use half of the size of the tape. I'm going to show you what I mean. If we have a really wide tape, that's going to use a lot of our space for painting so that we'll have much thicker border. I recommend having a tape that's not too wide since we're using such a small format. Something like this or something like a washi tape. Then as far as paper goes, I'll also bring a sketchbook. This is the exact same paper as those postcards. They're also called pressed-in. They are also cotton. See that little llama there. That means it's the Etchr brand. That means that the information I get from trying this out in a sketchbook first is really transferable because the same thing will happen on the paper. You don't try it out with a cellulose hot-pressed paper with a different texture. Then you think you've practiced something that'll be useful on a cold-pressed paper, when the information might be really different. It's not essential, but at least having something that's the same texture and the same material. Cotton paper, if you're planning on painting on cotton paper later, which I absolutely recommend. It will stay wonderful longer so it's easier to do those wet-on-wet techniques. Then we have our watercolor paints. I'm using full pans like these. These are from two different brands. We have some White Nights and some Roman Szmal. They're not very expensive, but they have a really nice and rich pigmented colorful painting range. Each of the colors have a lot of pigment in them. They're easy to get and find. Nice and vibrant. Also, a water out and water down to those nice transparent shades. You're free to use any colors you want. I'll be using some of these turquoises over here, and also one dark stormy blue one. Then I'd like to bring two jars of water. That way, one is for clean water and one is for rinsing off my brush. One keeps getting dirtier. Then I can pick up almost clean water from the other one. That way, I don't have to swap them out as often. Don't forget to bring something to wipe your brush on. This is just a piece of an old t-shirt. It's nice that it's white so I can see, if my brush is clean. If you want to, you can use a mixing palette. This is just the lid from one of the jars. Often, a paint palette will also have a space for mixing inside the lid. But if you want a pallet, bring it, and something to wipe your brush. Now we're ready. Let's talk about some watercolor techniques. 4. Useful brushstrokes - Wet-on-dry: We've got sketchbook ready and this is just to practice a couple of other techniques that we'll be using in class. I wanted to show you the wet-in-wet technique and the wet-on-dry just to show the difference between those two and a little bit about how I hold my brushes just to make it easier for us to do the right thing, but let our supplies work for us. This is the same sketchbook as before. It's just a bigger size, but this one is exactly the same paper as those postcards. If you had the chance to use the paper that's similar or at least the same texture as the one you will be using in class, that's a really great help so that the practicing that you do corresponds with what you'll experience on the paper later. In my experience, the wet-on-dry is probably the most natural one we just get paint on our brush and then we start painting on paper. Let's do that one. Let's got our water here, getting some paint on my brush. With this kind of thing because we're not working from a reference, I don't need to know exactly what darkness my paint is. By darkness, I mean, how much water to paint ratio there is. As you can see from my swatches here, I made gradient when I swatch up my paints so that you can see which color is which because they're so rich in starch. I can see that this one, this turquoise one goes from really, really dark turquoise to a light turquoise. The only thing that matters is how much water is in my paint. The same over here, whereas something like a light yellow won't have that big contrast from the darkest to lightest. There's a smaller range from dark to light. That's something we can play with today. Because we want to use that transparent, beautiful effect, we can also use quite a bit of water in this class. Let's start with our turquoise blue. Let's go in with that turquoise and we'll see what that looks like. This one's not dry. But the moment I put my paintbrush into it, it'll start activating and start getting onto my brush. Some paints take longer to activate than others, but this one will immediately give us that rich blue color. As I'm going downward, I'm starting to lose pigment from my brush. It'll get lighter. It gets lighter because there's more water higher up in the brush because here there's only clean water, here there's paint, but I'm also losing amount of that mixed water. You see how I'm starting to skip parts of the paper. After a while, we get into what we call dry brushing, especially if we have a textured paper like this, but also even if you have a non-textured paper, like a hot press paper, we will get this effect of dry brushing. For me, I love that effect for making textures on houses and mountains, but I don't really want it in an underwater scene. Maybe I would on rocks or maybe if you're painting corals. But for these bookmarks, I really wanted to be super smooth. I want that seaweed to just flow. If I want to avoid this, I need to find that balance between having too wet brush, which gives me no control and having a too dry brush. Let me show you what I mean. Now I just dip my brush in and it's quite wet. If I wanted to make a seaweed one, for this one, I was holding my brush quite flat towards the paper, dragging it this way. If I want to make something super precise, I want to use only the tip of my brush. I'll paint like this and not like this. Using the tip of my brush with a brush that's too wet give me that precision that I need. If I'm trying to make a thin line, I got a little bit more water released from my brush than I wanted to. For this not to happen, I have my rag here and I can dab that, shape my brush back into that nice point it had earlier, and then it's easier for me to get those thin lines if that's what I want. For these jellyfish, we do want those thin lines. It's getting a little bit more on my brush to show you how those thin lines. Now I only added paint and now skip to my papers for now. This is a balance that will come with time and practice as well, like how wet is wet enough to get thin, precise lines but not so dry that it skips the paper. Playing back and forth with that can be something to practice. Or you can always call back in and like this one, this skipped the paper. Let me show you. See how that's skipped over some of that texture on the paper. You can also go in with your brush again and go over with a sturdy hand. Same paint activated again. You can save it. This is also why I wanted to do this class in the way that I'm doing it, keeping all my mistakes in so that way I can also show you how I fix them. Not if they haven't because most of the time they will. But when they have it, how do I deal with them? Instead of trying to avoid mistakes at all costs, try to find new ways of dealing with them when they occur. This is something to practice, and then since we're doing our seaweed motions, I want it to be thick at one end and thin at the other, so just getting that nice pointy brush. Usually, a flicking motion is nice to do. I'm starting actually on the outside of the tape and you can start there if you want. If I start with my brush a little bit too dry, it'll skip the texture of the paper like this. I'm going to show you it closer afterward. If I do it again, starting pressing, dragging back up again so that I've got a darker one. They seem to want to need more water still like that. Depending on how you hold your brush and angle it, you can get those seaweed flicks. You can always go back in and adjust at the bottom. You need to make that thicker if you want that grass shape. What if it's too dry? You'll get some skipping. If it's too wet, if I just take my brush and go back in again, I will leave a lot of water on there. See how that's now blobby and wet, which is fun, but it will also give us less precision. This is just something to practice as well. As you can see that those first two skipped that paper a bit, and that doesn't look as smooth and flowing in my mind for seaweed as those next two. This is our wet-on-dry. One of the techniques you'll see me do for one of the jellyfish as well is going in with my brush first with quite a bit of pigment and using that pigment afterward, rinsing off my brush, going back and fixing it. If I put down a line like this, quite a bit of pigment, let's say this is our jellyfish top there and I want to blend it out because I think this is quite dark. I'm going to rinse off my brush, and then I'm just going to wipe it a little bit on the edge of my jar or I can wipe it on my shoe. Then I'm just going into the very, very tip of my brush is going into the very edge of that, and I'm dragging it along the paper. See how that starts bleeding into the water I'm putting down. I can move back into the pigment because that pigment will go wherever is wet. I'll talk about that in a minute or wet-in-wet technique. We can soften the edges. We can start moving that pigment around while it's still wet because that gives us more time to work. The wetter it is, the more time we have to work. I'm kidding it to behave the way we wanted to. They can even start mixing of pigments. This is something in watercolor, which we've talked about a lot or again, maybe here people talk about a lot how they work from light to dark, and we do. But there's also a couple of tricks on how to go from dark to light. Say you went in with something that was too dark, which I will also say this line there. Let's just make a comparison line over here. This is how dark it was to begin with. Soften brush in clean water. We can start with mixing it and then I'm just dabbing away. Some of that can start lifting them back up again. What I'm using is a damp brush. Not too wet, but I want some water to mix into that pigment. It almost works as an eraser. Just lift some of that pigment back up again. The edges. Then this is of course much easier to do while it's still wet. It hasn't settled on the paper in this, and this is a turquoise. Turquoise is our famous leaflet staining, which means they'll be difficult to lift off from the paper again, so I will never get this paperclip. Let's look at the difference between those two. I can make it a lot lighter and you can fix my mistakes and little bit like that, especially since we're not working from a reference. It doesn't matter as much how super precise, for example, those tentacles are, those jellyfish tentacles. Practice a little bit of this wet-on-wet technique. Also just for the end here. Tentacles find a different order at the bottom of the jellyfish. There's also like a lumped-up little thing. For that, I just push my brush into the paper, staying connected, but just moving it around, pushing it down. It's not super precise. But I just drag my brush downward, blobbing it out to one side, blobbing it onto the other like that. In the resources, there'll be some reference photos for this as well just to show you what I mean. I'll show it on the screen here as well. This is also a way to seaweed if you wanted to. For all of these techniques, it's the same kind of thing when we were working with metallic sheets, metallic watercolors. You just might need to activate them for a little bit longer. You need some time and some of the love to get started because they activate in a different way. The pigments are dice loosely packed. Because those glitter pigments are more difficult to activate and get mixed into that water. We'll be playing with those later. Finding the balance between too wet and too dry and knowing that you can lighten if you want to mix in more pigment if you need that while it's still wet, it's easier to fix mistakes. 5. Technique practice - Wet in wet : Getting into our wet-on-wet technique. For wet-on-wet, it's nice to use a larger brush. This was not super large, but it's a little bit bigger and a little bit fluffier. [NOISE] I have some other suggestions here as well. For these ones, I paint on my thumb already, I'm going into my clean water and then I'll be putting painting after. This is a less intuitive way of painting in my opinion. I'm getting my brush filled with [NOISE] clean water, I'm mixing in there, pushing it against the side. Because it's dripping you're going to wipe it on the edge of the glass. Then I want it wet, but not super wet. [NOISE] I want it to be absolutely soaking. Just making a little area here, we'll be covering our entire piece with this, with that background layer. But you can see how that now has that texture, you can still see the texture of the paper, but there's no water pooling up anywhere. Your paper might behave differently than mine, this is always a challenge of finding the balance between your brush and your paper and the temperature of your house and everything. The only way of getting to know how your paints and sprays work is to try it, but I will give you my best tips anyways. Getting that nice and wet, so the texture is still there. This is a controlled wet-on-wet. With that same brush as earlier because I already know there's some paint on it, we're going into our turquoise and then we can start dripping that in, and this is our wet-on-wet. Just adding some pigment in there, you can see how that starts flowing around already. Say we wanted to do like a dark top bit and more of a [inaudible] bottom, I can also go [NOISE] back into this with my clean brush and start moving it around. Dragging some pigments around, making this downward. I don't want to manipulate it too much because I really like the way it just spreads on its own. But see how you can manipulate and move it around, it's like, I didn't want that to be there. I can move it away, so putting in water and push things around in there. Then I just want to show you what happens if we have way too much water. Say I don't really empty my brush, and then the paint doesn't go everywhere. [NOISE] Let's say we do something like this. See how that water is pooling up, flowing, makes this big blob over on the side here. [NOISE] Putting my pigment into that, it won't spread into those tendrils. [NOISE] It's going to flow around everywhere, which actually for underwater, it might not be a terrible idea. But if you want to make those rays of light, it might be difficult to control and it'd also go more everywhere and can create blooms as it dries where the water start pushing the pigment around. Let's just do one more over here. Let's try and get those sun rays. We use that thirsty brush again, that damp little brush. We try not to get too much pigment from the brush. Since this is out of frame, I'm just making three diagonals and what my brush does when I lift it off from the paper, it releases a bit of pigment. If you don't want that, you can also be even cleverer than me and start on the other side, so start with the end of the ray. That way that release of pigment will be up in the corner, but you can also fix it by going in with a damp clean brush, also known as a thirsty brush, which works as an eraser and a blending tool. It's one of my favorite ways to manipulate paints in the wet-on-wet technique, you'll see me use this a lot throughout our class. It's where I'll use probably a lot as well. Moving that pigment around like, let's make a little drag out this way. Now I wonder what we're going to gather in the same point. Again, because we're not working with a reference, we do need to get super precise mixing in the water and the pigment because we're covering in afterwards, we're adding other elements, it doesn't need to be perfect. In fact, that should never be the aim. Softening that wet-on-wet like so. We'll just get that effective, that gloomy light. Anyways, practice a little bit, see how far you get with all of this keeping some of that white magical part of the painting. Getting these a little more precise elements on top of this when it's completely dry. Let's try these with our paints. 6. Taping the borders: Let's tape our paper. I usually start on one of the short sides first. Let's put that in the frame. Because this tape is see-through, I can see the edge of the paper and then I aim to have half of the tape as my border because the middle part will be cut in the middle of the tape. That dictates the border at about half a centimeter. It's half a centimeter all the way around both of the bookmarks. I usually keep a hold of my roll of tape, so I pull off a piece and then I put it down and then I tear it off afterwards trying to get that seamless line. Tearing it off and then running my finger over it. That way, I will make it flat and tight and then there's no space for that sneaky wet paint to sneak underneath and mess up our nice clean lines. It will sneak underneath if you let it. On the long side, still doing the exact same thing. What we want is for the borders to be the same width all the way around and that little square where the tape overlaps is proof of that. So this rectangular little corner here, see how that's not a perfect little square whereas that one is. This one is showing me that on one of the sides I didn't make it wide enough so they didn't match up. I'm just carefully going to tear this off again and then we can use this one more time, just moving it slightly further up. That way the border will be equal. Like that and sometimes it twists so it might be nice to just push it in the middle first to see that end. It's more or less the same width. There we go and then running my fingers across it, making sure especially in the corners that there's no space. We're going to do the middle one to mark off the two bookmark sides. You can mark the middle with a ruler if you want. For this one, I'm just going to eyeball it, trying to go for the middle with a nice straight line, and then we're going to measure it for the other one. Down the middle trying to aim for the same size on both sides and a straight line, checking the top and the bottom and the middle, making sure they're the same width. Sometimes my tape kind of bends a little bit like this. Just making sure that both sides are equal, like so. There we have it, two spaces, and then the trick is we paint on this side first, I'm right-handed so I will paint on the right side and when I want to paint the other side, we're just going to turn it around. When that one dries on this left side now, upside down. We'll paint to the right side. Two things happen. I don't put my hand into wet paint and also the oils on our skin can block our paint if we put our hand on the paper before we paint on it. So that's just an extra tiny tip there to keep our hands off our paper. Let's do this other one, the block doing the exact same thing. Since the sides are all glued, this tape is just to get those nice neat borders. Just a small extra trick, if you are using a washi tape with a pattern, then that can be used as your guide too. Don't you say you have a snowman washi tape, I do. Then you can easily see if the patterns are matching up with the edge all the way along the edge of the paper on all four sides. I'm just smoothing this down with my fingers as well, making sure all the corners are little squares and of course, just a little reminder, make sure your hands are dry and clean and don't have oil or paint on them. I'm just speeding up this last little bit here, a tiny smitch, because you've seen me do it on the other one as well. Checking the corners are squares and then for this one we're going to use a ruler to mark the middle. Grab a ruler and a pencil. This was the pencil I found. It's very nice. I found this fun ruler and it has 0 in the middle. This block actually says how wide it is. It's 12.5. I'm just going to measure 6.2 and a little bit on both sides. I'll just mark on the tape in the middle. I'm not even drawing on the paper, even though afterwards we are going to make a line down the middle to cut our bookmarks and separate them. But for this one, I'm just going to make those little marks and we'll make that line at the very end. But if you want to, you can make it now. I'm just going to make it after we've done the bookmarks. At 6.2 at the bottom there as well. Getting my tape out, matching it up with that top mark. Stretching it making sure it's nice and straight all the way down to that bottom mark, getting that in the middle of my tape. Even though it's quite light, I can still see it through this tape. Running my finger over, making sure it's nice and tight. As you can see, it's easy to see that little mark through even though it's just a light pencil mark. There we have it. We are ready to go. I'm going to start on the postcard-sized one, but grab the one you have and let's get started. 7. Painting the ocean: When we're doing our wet-in-wet technique, yes, we lose control by being wet. But there's a difference between having it sopping wet and having controlled amount of water. Just to start, just going in with clean water over this paper. Make sure you get all the way down into the edges. I'm allowing a little bit of time for the paper, just soak it up. Then I do want to go in with the same brush into this ocean blue, which is a perfect color for the ocean. Because it's dry, I'm just putting my brush tip into it. It won't be super pigmented. Starting up in this corner, just mapping out lightly. This is ish where I wanted something like sun rays to come in just to give myself a guide. Maybe I'll just staple in very soft and wavy patterns here at the bottom. Try not being very precise with this at all. Almost like painting the sky. What I want to do is keep some of the white paper. Even that's already looking a bit under watery. If we want, we can add some more water. Now what happens is these are matched up here, giving us not a lot of white space. I would like some white space. What I'm going to do is, [NOISE] I'm going to stuff my brush, I'm going to wipe it. I'm just wiping it on the edge of the glass. Then I'm going to curl out, pick back up again, getting my rag out to dry my brush off. Then with a damp clean brush, just going to pick up a bit more revealing some more of that white paper. See how that gives us a bit more play up here. Like the sun rays interrupt it down here. Just going to help move that pigment around and while the paper is still wet, you see how that's all shiny like we talked about earlier with the wet and wet technique. While it's still wet, I can still manipulate it a little and create that movement [inaudible] darker down here. Let's see how that works. Wonderful. Because it's not sopping wet, it's not completely drenched. I believe that I can still safely now turn this around the same on the other side. This is not the top, this is the bottom. [NOISE] I'm going to do almost the same thing, but I'm going in with this turquoise blue, which is just a different version of an ocean color. This ocean blue actually splits into a little bit of green, but the turquoise blue is just one pigment so that will be more smoother shade. Before adding water, not too crazy much, you don't want it to be sopping wet and pull up and interrupt our flow. But we do want it to have that shine. You can see how that works. Then you can see it's bleeding a little bit under this tape here. But because we're doing the same color on the other side, that's not a huge emergency, if you want to you can take it back and squeeze it that way. Pick up a bit of that paint just so it doesn't sneak underneath into the white space that we will have when we take the tape off. Just making sure, especially those corners are not too dry to not let it flow. Then for this one, let me start here at the bottom. I can help with gravity and I can tilt my paper. Starting all the way up here, making this patterns upward. [inaudible] letting it flow upwards and then maybe just some like light strokes up there. [NOISE] More of a smoother waviness, and like I mentioned before we're going to keep this space. [inaudible] jellyfish or other fish you want. I can keep the bottom of it darker because I don't need it to be light to have space for the jellyfish. That's some more pigment so that the value isn't too dark for the jellyfish to show up, whereas it has space here in the middle [NOISE] to shine on its own. Because we're adding wet paint onto the wet paper, if I see anywhere that it's pulling up, which makes me worry that it might create a bloom. Just not a huge emergency, but I would just like to avoid it. I think it looks really beautiful. It's just super smooth. You can still play around with it while it's wet. What you can also do if you want to is take a smaller brush, [inaudible] paint and then just flick it off. That can create the feeling of bubbles. If your paint isn't so wet that it just goes back into where it was, a bit of water sparkle there. Now in just eight minutes, we have two beautiful backgrounds. One with a bit of a soft blurry sky effect, one with those rays of light. That's it for our first one, we're going to let that dry. You can use a heat gun if you wanted to speed up the process a little bit. I'll see you in the next one to add our jellyfish. 8. Painting jellyfish: Here we have our dried bookmark basis. As you can see, it is completely flat, which is lovely, and they're not shiny anymore. If you turn them in the light, you can't see any reflection because there's no water left on the page. Going in with the exact same color, [NOISE] put this over here. We're going to get our ocean blue right afterwards, but I'm going to make this little jellyfish shape first. I want to make it with just clean water. That way, when I drip in my paint, it's not a solid form. It'll move and leave within that shape. You can sketch this out first, if you want to, with a really light colored pencil, or if you have watercolor pencils, choosing a color that will match with your paint color. A turquoise or a light-blue one would work perfectly. I'm just going to do without for this one. Let me get my pencil for the second one. I wanted to get it just above the middle here so I have space with tentacles, strings. Just making a bit of a softly-rounded pile of a triangle. I want them to just float up towards the sunlight. We see a layer. Then with the same brush, just going into that ocean blue starting on a side. We're painting that paint making it flow and spread. I don't want to add too much too quickly because it will get quite dark. You want them to be this see-through glassy jelly creature. If I do make mistakes, I would like to adjust this shape. I can't because we're not going for hyperrealism. Because the sunshine is coming from this side, you can also add a little bit more darkness down here at the bottom. Where the light is coming from will be the lightest part, and then it darkens here at the back. Then depending on how much you want to move this paint around, you can get some more water in there, letting it flow and spread, trying to keep this top part quite light. It doesn't really matter that it's light because it will still show up because the background that we made it so light. Then what I'd like to do, let's add a bit more paint, I'm going to make those thick tentacles in the middle. It's on the reference photo. Just dotting in my brush. I'm just going to pushing it into the paper, and moving it a little bit back and forth. [NOISE] That's what that feels like. Just trying not to make it perfect. Some longer ones and some shorter ones like that around the middle, and then I can start with my tentacles. I also want to make those different lengths in different waves so they don't all wave in the same way. Starting from the top and just dragging them down, trying to flick towards the end. Only using the tip of my brush like we did in the demonstration. You can also have some very thin ones. As my brush is losing its pigment and it's paint, I'm getting thinner, lighter strokes. They're getting very nice and transparent, and see-through. It looks tangled and wild. If you feel like anything needs to be adjusted or added, you could do that as well like so. There we have them. If you want to, you can also add some rocks down here at the bottom. They look like doing that, and it seems like he's floated out of something. Also just with quite a light touch just at the bottom. Then adding a little bit of extra paint, just letting it flow into those little cliff, rock shapes at the bottom layer. That way, [NOISE] it looks like he's coming from something. You can even do the same as earlier. I'm just splattering water. Tiny little splatters around there as well. There we have our first jelly fish bookmark. Make sure to wash off your little finger up in the air. I'm just going to let him dry, but we don't have to wait to paint more while he dries. We could just move over to the other side. Just to show the difference, I'm going to make this one with the paint that [inaudible] instead of with the water first. I'm just getting some paint on my brush, and then I'm going to make him in more or less the same place. Just having quite a wet, but quite dark value. I'm going to rinse off. It doesn't have to be perfectly rinsed, but then putting cleanish water in the middle, working my way outward to get that paint to blend in towards the middle of our jellyfish. Because then I have all the pigment that I need on my paper, but since I want it to be different colors, I don't want to paint the whole thing with the same darkness. I want him to be glowy, and I get that by keeping the middle lighter. We have more water than most of the paint along the outside. We can adjust the shape like that. Then moving out from there, going back with some more paint, getting those thick tentacles in the middle first. [NOISE] I don't know why this is the sound of this, but it is. [NOISE] Then making sure there's some air in between them, some more light in-between them so they're not all bunched together because then it will just look like a bunch. Then same as before, making my way down. Some longer ones. Something was trying to hit my hand to swoop. Most tentacles down and out. If I need more paint, a little bit more, but I'll try not to make it too wet because then I won't have that control like we talked about, getting those thin strokes so it can get some more darker ones in-between the lighter ones. If you do like I did there, and start in the middle, trying to connect it back up to the jellyfish or it doesn't just have like that, random dark tentacles starting from nowhere. [NOISE] If it's too wet, we don't have enough control. If it's too dry, we run out of paint, and your brush will start skipping the paper. Then you can just keep adding. I would just recommend to not add so much that there's no air. You can't see any of the white darkness behind him like so. [NOISE] This one tentacle, a little bit dark. What I can do then is just rinse off my brush, and then just go over it a little bit to wash it out. Moving it in and out, we can get a little less stark like so. [NOISE] Suddenly, without a lot of effort, we've made two beautiful jellyfish bookmarks. I am going to do almost the exact same thing around this one. For this one, we're going to bring out our sparkly paints because, why not? Because we love sparkly paints, [NOISE] and sparkly paints work really well for underwater scenes like this. Grab those, if you have them, and I'll meet you in the next lesson. We'll also be making some seaweeds, and we'll be making one with two little jellyfish. We'll see you then. 9. Tape peel and cutting: Since this one is dry and ready, and this one, we're just going to keep mat. We could have added sparkles or bubbles or something, but I also want to show you that they're really beautiful just the way they are. When I'm peeling off my tape, I like to start with tearing them on diagonal as flat as I can, so I'm not hearing it upward. I'm tearing it alongside my paper, and that way it's not going to ripping upwards to side there and same here either way is fine, but on a diagonal, see those nice lines. Well, that's open please. You see beautiful? Beautiful crisp white paper and here as well making a nice correlated attributed. Usually the most sensitive parts is where the edge of the paper is because the fibers are stacked, this is very zoomed in your paper. You're tape start [NOISE] tearing off these edges because they're cut, they're more likely to frame. Just be really careful at the edges, what I like to do is going to tear it downward because then it's following the grain of the paper this way and then keep going. I see here we have a little accident, that's okay. We'll accident, it's. It's just wet under the tape and I have a trick to fix it with something you might already have in your house. Let's do the last one. Beautiful corner there, tiny dot there, and nothing on the other side. look at that, it's lovely. Now, if you have a postcard like this, suppress press, you could fold it and then you have a thicker, more solid, double-sided, like it'll look like this and they'll have to flip it because that's where this size will be. But you can also make a bookmark like that or cut it off and tape it on two side, black piece of paper or a glittery paper backing board situation and then you could have both of them and that also makes them a bit stiffer. Why is my head full of paint? What's this? Why did I put that? Where that come from? Ah, maybe this. What I would do if I was going to cut it is to make a line down the middle. Remember from earlier, we the figure it out but this was zero. No, we didn't have figured out this, this is 10.5 because this is a postcode. Two and half so that's 5.2ish and same on side. It will give 5.2ish, and it will just make a little pencil lines between those two and then we're just going to cut along this line. Before we do that, I'm going to show you how to remove that little stain there. This isn't magic eraser. This is literally just to that magic eraser thing little sponge that you can use to get stains off your walls. This also works for watercolor. What I like to do is take a tiny piece, I'll dip it in water and then I don't want it super wet so I'm just going to soak on back up to over my wreck put this, will act as a magic eraser. Feel a little dot that we had earlier so what I'd like you to do is to tear it up into tiny pieces, and then use them to remove the unwanted marks. It doesn't always work and if this doesn't work for you, dot on here, there are a couple of reasons why it might not. One is a turquoise colors are famously very staining and means they stain on the paper for very long time, and hard to lift off again. This is a very light stain. It'll sink into cotton paper and stain it, press "Okay." However, I also have a white gouache which I can fix this with afterwards. I'm not going to let that ruin my day, don't let it run yours. I'm not going to let it ruin mine or yours, so I'm just going to cut along this lovely line that we made. You can also cut this without the pencil line. I just don't trust myself to do that externally going rogue. Look at our little Bookmarks. I think so cute so I think these look really beautiful just all on their own. I would love for you to sign them just because you're not a seaside your work of course you've done your work. I just had my pencil here, and you can also sign it, will depend on will send the other ones with a pen, but full signature. Here we are, wonderful. 10. Bigger background: Round 2. Let's start with, our clean water first. My water is not clean, and the brush isn't clean but it's all right. We're going to go with the same color. It's okay, let's see how little it takes for this color to be tinted. Strong turquoise color in there. That's all right. Spreading the water around. It's actually slightly tinted but it's almost invisible. Were going to let it go also style. But then, because that was in it. Let's actually make this the darkest one. Let's do an indigo one. Indigo is my favorite color. Hey everyone indigo is my favorite color. Let's do fluffy dark, mysterious strokes up there. It's good. Get some extra water in there so that indigo to flow. It's kind of similar to the other one. But then we'll go in with our sparkly seaweed afterwards. I'm just going to, creating a bit of interest. I'm not going to lie, it's very similar to painting clouds. Just creating that flow, cause of using my thirsty brush, which just clean damp brush again. Soak up a bit of that pooling at the bottom. Because I don't want it to bloom. I don't want it to flow back into the paint. Into the painting. Create a hard edge that looks really dramatic. Let me just put it in. Now, it's a bit lighter and sneak it out because that's also tape, which, like we saw before, line to itself and something onto the paper. Not a huge deal, but let's draw it if we can. Again, just putting this over. A little bit water to flow, going back and forth picking up some of that excess. This is a bit of a stormy. Stormy waters. This just shows the versatility of watercolor because this also looks like if I did a forest here and some birds, this could have been. Bright sky in the woods. But it's not underwater, I promise. Then for this one, we've got to go back to our classic turquoise blue ones. We're going to go back to that. Let's work on that shine on it. Let's try those rays again. I'm going to go back and pick those up, and then here at the bottom. Just going to filling in a little bit. We're going to cover it afterwards. Placing flowy that there is one source of sunlight which is spreading. So it would be unnatural for it to be one line here and then one line here because then they wouldn't match up if that makes sense. Kind of a perspective trick. Just making sure that we let them come from this. 11. Seaweed and sparkles: This one has now dried and unfortunately there is a small mishap up in this corner. See how that indigo has bled over into our turquoise here. It's not huge problem. But what we can do with that is after we've cut them, we can cut this into a new size. It's only on this corner, so I only need about half a centimeter in here. Then cut off the top and then I can cut off the white edges. Then just have a color that goes all the way to the sides and that way we can rescue this without too much trouble. Then there's another example down here. Here you can see it didn't go all the way to the corner. I didn't feel it all the way out but since we're doing this little kind of seaweed here at the bottom, I'm able to cover this up. But I didn't really want to paint anything up here because of those rays of light. Let's cut this one after and then this stormy sea indigo one, looks like it's been behaving very nicely and stayed within it's lane so down here at the bottom. But it didn't invite any of the turquoise in on it's tuft. For this one, I just wanted to show you how you could do a little sketch to begin with. Here I have some watercolor pencils. This is just a kit from fabric pastel. This is a nice turquoise color, so this would disappear completely when we put that other. If you would like to, just like a little bit above the middle there. Just going to make that jellyfish shape. I'm holding it very lightly. That way I'm just going to be leaving pigment on the paper. I'm not pushing into the texture of the paper so I don't want to leave any marks. I can only write too hard and it goes into the paper. Just making this little marshmallow shape [LAUGHTER] up here. That's all I want to do because we're going to go just three stripes downward. If you want to be mixing the guidelines for yourself, I think I would like three of those thick ones, you can also do that. But I'm keeping it very light. You can see that doesn't disturb the paper, doesn't push into the paper texture. Let's put that one away. Then just using my brush from now on because we're not necessarily going in with clean water. It doesn't matter that this clean water now is a little bit tinted. You can see there's still a big difference between my dirty water, rinsing water, and my clean water. Going with this and then just going along the edges. As you can see, this already activating that colored pencil going along the edges of that jellyfish shape. I would like to activate the whole thing so I don't really have those pencil looking lines. Just really carefully. It's almost like a coloring book. Just coloring within those lines. Then going back into our turquoise. Giving it some more color. Letting it bleed into there. Like we said before, if you want to keep this top part where the sun hits little bit lighter. [NOISE] You can always go back in rinse my brush a little bit and then make sure that that didn't become a very dark value like a higher contrast and to dark up there. I'm going in with more color. I still have these little guidelines, so I'm just going to follow those down here. I'm just balancing my brush back and forth, making those blobby ones in the middle. If you feel unsure of these, make one extra. You can also look at a reference photo. Then while that's still wet, remember how we were going to do a little bit of glitter as well. I want to go into this beautiful turquoise. Usually I would recommend activating them before but since I didn't do that and we don't need to be a solid color yet. While this is still wet we can drip in some of that color and then with just a clean damp brush, I have move it, blend it around. Let it float around within the jellyfish shape. This one dried a little bit too much. That's okay. That's going to have a bit of a glittery effect in these. Putting in some extra ones, putting in a little bit of sparkle. Now, we can also use that sparkle. We can activate it quite easily to reinforce those blobby parts. I really should do my research and I figure out what they're called, but I don't know. Then using the same brush, not too wet to start making some literary. Let me say tentacles, but they're not, are they? These strings. As you can imagine, glitter paints, sparkly paints don't dilute in the same way as normal paint. I also do want to add some I think normal turquoise paint as well. You need some lighter, shorter ones out on the sides. Then filling it until think it's nice and thick. Then let's go down to the bottom and fill in those seaweeds down there. I'm using the same technique, I'm just dragging upwards, as we showed you in our training. Starting at the bottom and the more pressure I have at the bottom, the thicker the line will be and then I'll swoop upward. Just like that. I tried to cover up this little corner where some of the paper wasn't covered with paint already. You can always go back in if you need to little paint around. I'm just trying to flick my brush to get those thin ends. Then the more water and paint at least my brush, the paint gets lighter. Also going from the side here. The pink it's lighter but we can also end up with a brush that doesn't have enough water to cover the paper, which means we can get these dry brushing textured strokes. When that happens, usually it just needs a little more time so it doesn't skip the paper. Because I love the dry brushing effect, but for an underwater situation like this, dry brushing is a bit dry. As the word implies, which isn't necessarily what we want for something that's supposed to be fluid and underwater, which is also why the techniques I like to use are the wetting metallics and the solid, wets and dry. Then another one. Another round of that with our sparkly paints. Let's get it nice and thick and I'm just working my brush around and activating. Sometimes the metallic paints takes a bit more time to activate. Just do it like this. We're doing the exact same thing, getting some more seaweeds. You can find out, just explore what works the best for you if you prefer starting at the top and then swooping downward. Maybe starting at the bottom and swooping your grass or seaweed upwards. If you need to go in to fix the tip of your seaweed, you always can. This is also all right and that sparkly paint, nice, and shiny. You can see now that jellyfish is starting to dry. We're getting that kind of magical underwater glitter or sparkle. Some short grass at the bottom as well. [NOISE] Beautiful. Then if you want to, you can always draw and make some bubbles or some splatters I could do before with the glittery paint as well. Let's leave that one for now and go to our Indigo one. [NOISE]. 12. Indigo: With this one, I'm going to do the same technique as before with the painting first I'm going in with clean water. Getting a bit of indigo in that brush. Going in with that shape. Have quite a bit of water on my brush so, it's actually got wet. I'll just dry some of that off. I'll just move this around. My brush is already ready. This is not a super light one. Because we're here, because we haven't done that yet Let's make a little baby one. Same shape, same technique, just a smaller one down here. We'll sway their mom or dad. For this one that's going with this disk. [inaudible] Just put that downward, this kind of mixing in with the indigo. Don't mind. We'll get some of the glittery ones, and then we'll get some more. That's just the ink, as well. [BACKGROUND] Some of these could. These won't show up as much, but when you turn your painting light well in that just some small ones will hit the bottom and then it's going to do some splatters [BACKGROUND] bottom here looks like apples. Like so. Just wiping that off, going back into our indigo. Actually, because we're working with such a small, also working with a small and it's going with a smaller brush indigo. It looks like this is going in a lot. I'm just going to go over. See that seemed to way too dark. Let's go in and dilute that a little. Another layer. Kind of exaggerate in darking the color a little bit to get a strong Jellyfish that's only light on the top. These ones. It makes sense that these are a little bit darker. It's taking tiny it's just the tip of the brush. Also actually you are done this yet, but they could also disappear. Off the page like that. I do want to go in and get some of that. We don't part this [inaudible] with a darker, darker indigo, add some and then just tapping my brush a little bit. Time to get those little tentacles for our baby one. I'm just tapping my brush to get it too pigmented. I still want the shape of the jellyfish to be the same where we storm they jellyfish this one [LAUGHTER]. Like so. We can always go back in. I know we always say that or we can only go from light to dark with watercolor paints, but there are tricks to lighten if you have gone too dark like I did for this one. You know I'd rather show you this than show you how to fix it than to tell you that I will perfectly make this every single time. You will never make mistakes. Now we have a bubble party down here in the corner and beautiful sparkly couple of friendly jellyfish, and then we have this one with our seaweed down at the bottom. We're just going to wait for these to dry and then we'll come back and tear off the tape. 13. Tape peel and cutting - Part II: Of course, with sparkly paints, we can use completely the same thing as earlier, which is it's dry when it's not shining [LAUGHTER] because this will keep shining. But you can see that there's no wetness. So same as before. Tearing off our tip on diagonal. Because I trust this tape and I trust this paper, I'm tearing it off quite quickly. [NOISE]. I actually don't mind it. It's not that dark. Then this one has bled a little bit as well. Let's try this one again. You use clean one on it. [NOISE]. As you can see that is removing it, it's working a lot better than on the other one. However, it is also staining and dragging it around. This might be nice and light enough when it dries. Let's double check it. If not, we also always have the option of either going in with some white gouache or white gel pen. That's already quite a bit better. Now it's a little bit wet, but that's okay. Then we want to remove this from the block so that we can take it off, and also you'd like to do that middle part, eyeballing it. That's why we're lessening the middle. [NOISE]. Then the spirit of using the tools that we have. Here's an earring. This will find the opening which for this block is in the corner. Anything goes. [NOISE]. Just drying that along splitting off the edges, loosening the glue on that side and I love that this glue is white, so that it doesn't show. Cut off the block. Then just using our provided thin scissors. Cutting along this and of course, there's going to be a little bit of residue of the pencil on the sides of these bookmarks so feel free to erase that. That's what I usually do. Just a normal eraser, any eraser will work. There we have another couple of bookmarks. 14. Final touches! : This is the final lesson of the class and this is just to show you how I would fix those tiny little mistakes like when the paint has snack under the tape. If it doesn't go away with that little spongy magic eraser thing that I already demonstrated. First things first and this is just always a nice thing to check after you're done, that if there's any pencil lines along where we cut. For example, let me try to make that pencil like quite light so that it's easy to remove afterwards and it's not like I don't think you know how to erase so this was just to demonstrate that. This is also something that might be nice to do at the very end. Remember how we had a couple of places where the paint had snack underneath the tape and there are a couple of ways to fix this. I've brought a couple of options. One is a very easy one. These are just two different gel pens, and not all gel pens are created equal. Some are more opaque than others so depending on how dark the stain is, you might need to do a couple of layers, for example. The technique is usually to get more ink out of it, to push down. Let's just start with this one. Let me get this little one up here in the corner. I'm not a gel pen expert, but I do find that if could've I push that down more than can drag across, I do find that pushing, manipulating a bit of that gel coming out. That usually helps me with more gel, I guess. I guess that's what this means, gel pens is gel. I'm just going to leave it like this and then we'll see how it goes after when it's dry to see if it's still a little bit see-through or if it needs another layer. I'm just going to do the same thing on this one with this other one. Maybe this will work better or it will be the same thing. I'm just going to roll in to activate. It's not like it makes a huge difference, but it makes it better a bit of a difference. Then you have this one which is a great option for anything you need white for. This is the Dr. Ph. Martin's bleed proof white and it's a really thick gouache. It is water-soluble, so we mix it with water. It's really nice for making snow or splatters of stars. This also works because it's so opaque so it'll cover up whatever is underneath. My best tip for this is to make sure you have designated brush for it or you make sure your brush is really clean so that if you put your brush in and it has a bit of turquoise on it, you don't contaminate the entire pot. What I usually do is I use whatever is in the lid with a very clean brush. This one is clean, and you add clean water. You don't need a lot because you want it to stay thick. I'm just activating. We can have a bit of a pasty paint. This one just add a tiny bit here in the corner because this is where the magic eraser did work. Let's do that final tiny little part. Just to neaten up that corner. It wasn't really necessary. There is a tiny dot there as well. Do you see it? I'm super nit-picky because actually this one didn't have a lot of bleeding, but see that corner as well? Just going to get that just to demonstrate, this is completely necessary. But now you know how to use that as well. Actually, looking back at this one, that gel pen has dried a little bit gray. I don't know why. I feel like this one never dries gray, it dries really nice in white. I'm actually going to go top of that. Just a thin layer to whiten up where I felt like that gel pen didn't actually work as well as I wanted it to. It has worked before. Maybe it was just contaminated a little bit, but I feel like that looks nicer and brighter and whiter. Because of course you want the white to be invisible. Remember to always put your lead back on your lid proof white. If not, it will dry out. If I decided that I wanted to fix this, if this was atrocious or maybe it wasn't a nice matching color like this indigo. I don't mind this indigo with the turquoise. But say it had been something like a bright pink or something that didn't work together at all and really stood out. See how this metallic paint here is really opaque. It's really covering what's underneath. An option would be to use that paint, do that tape one more time, tape it again, tape off that corner to keep that nice sharp border and then use that sparkly paint in the corner, maybe drag it out. There was a sparkly sunshine situation. Alternatively would be to either cut it here and then maybe also cut off this border at the bottom. Then it will just have white borders on the side or I cut off all the borders. Maybe cut in a tiny bit here, a tiny bit there. Then you would lose a little bit of this side and a tiny bit of the top. Then just the borders from the top and the bottom. You would get a full bleed of this entire jellyfish painting instead. There are just options and solutions everywhere. Isn't that fun? Then these two are already signed. Our final thing which I always like to do is to sign these other two as well. Just at the bottom, I usually sign it with my initials and you can sign either on the white or up into the bookmark. Let's do one of each, I'm going to sign on the white for this one. Then for this one, I'm just going to sign up into the paint right Right at the bottom right corner. You can, of course, sign wherever you like. But I do encourage you to sign, it's the final touch. It's like the dots above the ice. We have our signatures for all of them and they are ready to be put into your favorite book. I'll see you in the next video for some final thoughts before we say goodbye. 15. Before you go <3: Just like that, you've finished the whole class, or maybe you skipped back and forth and maybe you've chosen the ones that you needed to see and maybe you skipped the metallic parts because you don't have sparkly paints. I don't mind. I'm really glad you're here and I'm so proud of you for having taken time out of your day to be creative, which is really hard to prioritize in a world that's like, "You have to do something productive and you have to work," and then all these things we have to do. Give yourself a little pat on the back for having taken some time to just play with your paints. I would love to see your version of this underwater jellyfish magical scene bookmark in the project gallery below, and also share it on Instagram and tag me in it. In that way, I can share it on my Stories. I usually save all of my student projects in Highlights on Instagram as well, and that way, you can go back and you can slide your own project, maybe see other people's projects and get inspired by those as well. If you enjoyed this class, you might enjoy my other classes here on Skillshare. They're usually the same kind of low-threshold monochrome class, just using one paint so that we can get started quickly so that we feel like we've created something finished while also practicing an essential watercolor technique. You can find them here or in my profile. If you click "Follow", you'll get updates for any future classes and if you follow me on Instagram, I'll also be sharing some behind the scenes there and maybe bloopers. Who knows this tends to happen? I don't take it for granted that you're here because I do feel like there was a tendency that we have to do something productive and we have to do something that makes money, or we have our obligations everywhere, so just taking the time to do something like this creates something that maybe is just for you. How nice is that? I hope you appreciate time that you've given yourself to do a watercolor class today and I'm proud of you and I hope you are too. I want to see you again very soon. [MUSIC]