Unlocking Creativity: Expressive Watercolor Painting Adventures for Texture and Color

1. Welcome To The Class!: Welcome art lovers. My name is Will Elliston and I'm super excited to be doing this class with you today. I'm going to show you two painting exercises that I promise will unlock your creativity and improve your painting skills. These two expressive paintings are purposely designed to be open for interpretation, leaving room for individual exploration. The first painting allows us to explore textures, different levels of paper, wetness, different consistencies of pigment, and how they all affect each other. The second painting gives us the opportunity to explore an entire spectrum of colors. Each stroke and wash will be a step towards unlocking the expressive possibilities of this captivating medium. I've been a professional artist for many years, exploring lots of different subjects, from wildlife and portraits to city scapes and countryside scenes. I've always been entranced by the possibilities of water color, but when I started, I had no idea where to begin or how to improve. I didn't know what supplies I needed, how to create the effects I wanted, or which colors to mix. Now I've taken part in many worldwide exhibitions, been featured in magazines, and been lucky enough to win awards from well respected organizations such as the International Watercolor Society, the Masters of Watercolor Alliance, Windsor and Newton, and the SAA. Watercolor can be overwhelming for those starting out. Which is why my goal is to help you feel relaxed and enjoy this medium in a step by step manner. Whether you're just starting out or already have some experience, you'll be able to follow along at your own pace and improve your watercolor skills if this class is too challenging or too easy for you. I have a variety of classes available at different skill levels. I'd like to start off with a free, expressive approach, with no fear of making mistakes as we create exciting textures for the underlayer. As the painting progresses, we'll add more details to bring it to life and make it stand out. I strive to simplify complex subjects into easier shapes that encourage playfulness. Throughout this class, I'll be sharing plenty of tips and tricks. I'll show you how to turn mistakes into opportunities, taking the stress off of painting in order to have fun. I'll also provide you with my watercolor mixing chart, which are an invaluable tool when it comes to choosing and mixing colors. If you have any questions, you can post them in the discussion thread. Down below, I'll be sure to read and respond to ever think you post. Don't forget to follow me on Skillshare by clicking the follow button at the top. This means you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. You can also follow me on Instagram at Will Elliston to see my latest works. Let's grab our brushes, embrace the water color magic, and embark on this artistic adventure together. 2. Your Projects: I'd just like to say, thank you so much for choosing this class. I'm very happy that you're here. Watercolor is a medium that allows us to dance with spontaneity and embrace the unpredictability of the creative process. We'll use houses as a subject, but they're merely a backdrop, providing a grounding context for our exploration. In our first painting, we'll explore how different wetness levels of paper and varying pig consistencies interact to create stunning textures and effects. Moving on to our second painting, we'll immerse ourselves in the vibrant spectrum of colors. The goal is to embrace the entire palette, experimenting with bold combinations, subtle gradients, and everything in between. In the resource section, I've added a high resolution image of my finished paintings to help guide you. You're welcome to follow my paintings exactly or experiment with your own composition As we're going to be focusing on the painting aspect of watercolor, I've provided templates you can use to help transfer or trace the sketch before you paint. It's fine to trace when using it as a guide for learning how to paint. It's important to have the underdrawing correct so that you can relax and have fun learning the watercolor medium itself. Whichever direction you take this class, it would be great to see your results and the paintings you create through it. I love giving my students feedback, so please take a photo afterwards and share it in the Student Project Gallery under the Project and Resource tab. I'm always intrigued to see how many students have different approaches and how they progress with each class. I'd love to hear about your process and what you learned along the way, or if you had any difficulties. I strongly recommend that you take a look at each other's work in the student project gallery. It's so inspiring to see each other's work and extremely comforting to get the support of your fellow students, So don't forget to like and comment on each other's work. 3. Materials & Supplies: Before we get started with the painting, let's go over the materials and supplies I use. Having the right materials can greatly impact the outcome of your artwork. I'll go over all the supplies I use for this class and beyond. They're very useful to have at your disposal and we'll make it easier for you to follow along. Let's start with the paints themselves. Like most of the materials we'll be using today, it's a lot to do with preference. I have 12 stable colors in my palette that I fill up from tubes. They are cadmium yellow yellow ochre, burnt sienna, cadmium red, Alizarin, crimson, ultramarine blue, cobalt blue, sill, blue, lavender, purple, di, black. And at the end of the painting, I often use white gas for tiny highlights. I don't use any particular brand. These colors you can get from any brand, although I personally use Daniel Smith, Windsor, and Newton for Holbein paints. Let's move on to brushes. The brush I use the most is a synthetic round brush, like this Escoda Perl brush or this Van Gogh brush. They're very versatile because not only can you use them for detailed work with their fine tip, but as they can hold a lot of water, they are good for washes as well. They're also quite affordable, so I have quite a few in different sizes. Next are the mop brushes. Mop brushes are good for broad brush strokes, filling in large areas and creating smooth transitions or washes. They also have a nice tip that can be used for smaller details, but for really small details, highlights, or anything that needs more precision. I use a synthetic size zero brush. All brands have them and they're super cheap. Another useful brush to have is a Chinese calligraphy brush. They tend to have long bristles and a very pointy tip. They're perfect for adding texture or creating dynamic lines in your paintings. You can even fan them out like this to achieve fur or feather textures as well. And that's it for brushes onto paper. The better quality of your paper, the easier it will be to paint cheap paper crinkles easily and is very unforgiving, not allowing you to rework mistakes. It's harder to create appealing effects and apply useful techniques like rubbing away pigment. Good quality paper, however, such as cotton based paper, not only allows you to rework mistakes multiple times. But because the pigment reacts much better on it, the chances of mistakes are a lot lower and you'll be more likely to create better paintings. I use arches paper because that's what's available in my local art shop. A water spray is absolutely essential. By using this, it gives you more time to paint the areas you want before it dries. It also allows you to reactivate the paint. You want to add a smooth line or remove some paint. I also have an old rag or T shirt which I used to clean my brush. Cleaning off the paint before dipping it in the water will make the water last a lot longer. It's always useful to have a tissue at hand whilst painting, to lift off excess paint. Also, you never know when an unwanted splash or drip might occur that needs wiping away quickly. I also have a water dropper to keep the paints wet. When you paint, it's important to have them a similar consistency to what they're like in the tubes. This way it's easier to pick up sufficient pigment. A hair dryer is useful to have for speeding up the drying time and controlling the dampness of the paper. Lastly, masking tape. And this of course, is just to hold the paper down still onto the surface to stop it sliding around whilst painting. Also, if you plan on painting to the edge, we'll allow you to create a very crisp, clean border. That's everything you need to paint along. I encourage you to experiment and find out what works best for you. Now let's get ready to start the painting. 4. Painting 1 The Drawing: The good thing about these drawings is that as long as we get a few details like the house and a couple of the trees, the rest of it can be pretty adventurous and you can explore your own compositions. I'm going to, first of all, just to fill out with a very soft pencil, some of the areas where I may want to go just to get a bit of a spatial awareness of what I want to achieve. Very soft lines. They're going to move to a harsher pencil and just draw in a little house starting with the roof. I do it at a slight angle, almost 45 degrees, move it along a bit and go back up 45 degrees there and connect the two. Then you can go down the other way. There can be a straight line, basically to keep it simple. Then you can come in a bit to have a bit of overlap. It doesn't need to be that accurate, we're just playing around here then we don't even need to apply the bottom of the house. We can just fill that end of some pigment later. Maybe if you want to be fancy, you can add a little secondary feature of the roof there. I don't know what that feature is called, but we can just add a bit there. Maybe put two windows in there. I put a few vertical lines to help guide me. And then horizontal lines. And then we can just use those to mark out some windows and then maybe a larger door here. Then we can use the pencil to just rub away those light on. And then add a tree here, maybe a secondary tree here. And then we'll come to this side, maybe add a few more mini trees here, maybe one big one here, and then a smaller one fading out the distance here. And I'll have the water color coming out here. I'll fade it, I'll do some fun textures. And that's all we have to do, we just get that detail and the rest can be quite expressive. 5. Painting 1 The House: For this first exercise, we've just got this house and a few trees at the top just to give some context to the abstract brush marks and textures we're going to create. Because really, this is just an opportunity to explore what you can do with watercolor and have fun being abstract and just experimenting with what happens if you, let's say, add water while it's drying or add more pigment while it's dry. It's very close to drying. You've only just applied a first layer of paint. And straight where you're adding a second one, it's a good opportunity to mess around how watercolor reacts at different drying times and how wet the paper is. This is what we're going to explore. It's a very important thing to know about when painting watercolor to have in your knowledge. Just for future reference. Really this is adding the house and the trees just makes it a bit more, adds a bit more context to what would just be a complete abstract painting. We can just imagine their hills or bushes. The first part we're going to paint a little house and a few of these trees. Again, it is very simple. I'm just going to use little bit of yellow Oka there maybe the smallest bit of vidian green just here. Just so that it's not plain white. But it could be plain white if you wanted it to be. If you want to make it even easier, I'm going to mix some infridan. I've got here a bit of blue. I'm using silian blue, but you can use cobalt or ultramarine if you want. This is the color scheme that I'm going for in this painting, Green and blue. I'm just going to paint in this roof, I'm using a small brush because it's quite a small detail. I was leaving that triangle there where that roof is, that bit there. Then I'm going to go back. There was some thinker pigment and a bit of black darken some of these corners and edges. And I'm just using quite a dry bit of black so that it doesn't spill out and just defining the angles on the roof. Well, this same black. I'm just going to go over these window markings. I went, I did my pencil, my brush. Go back with this purple. Go back with this green using a bit of dry brush. A few more texted lines. It doesn't have to be complicated, Fact, having it a bit loose adds more character to it for this style that is done. 6. Painting 1 The Trees: I'm going back to this black and is going to paint these pine trees starting at the top again. At the moment it's just pure black. It's good to get used to painting with thick pigment. You have to make sure your paints are wet enough to pick up that thick pigment. A lot of time when you're beginning water color, the paints are very hard in the palette. It's easy to just absorb enough paint onto the brush. We really have to activate the paints and get thick pigment at the base of these trees. I'm just going to put some pure green pigment. It looks like black, but when it dilutes later you'll see that it's actually green. Then one more tree. I'm not going to do this with all of them. I'm going to leave a couple to add later going back to that pure green. Okay, that's all the detailed part we'll need to do in this lesson. The next part is purely abstract, but it's abstract with intent. We're trying to learn what we can do with water color in this part of the painting. It's very important to have a tissue in your hand because we're going to use that to pick up the pigment and create some lighter areas. We have a nice variety of different tones. Like I say, I'm going to be doing a mixture of different greens. Oh. 7. Painting 1 Mixing The Colours: To start off, I'm going to mix these greens. Primarily I'm going to be using Vidian green. I'll make a big pile here because that's a nice forest color in that pan. In my palette, I'm going to have vidian. Then in the next pit long, I'll have a blue. You can mix your own blues depending on what kind blue you go for. I'm of course going to mix green into that blue, that's a greenish, turquoise blue. Then in the last one, I'm going to pick up some yellow ochre. Of course, I already have that blue on my brush, so it mixes it and makes it into a green. Here's a nice mixture of greens I've got in my palette. Once you're happy with the colors that you've got mixed, I can actually make this green, this blue a bit thicker. You need to make sure you have enough of the paint mixed on your palette because you don't want running out halfway. Because you'll have to mix it again at a precious moment when it's drying. Make sure you have everything pre mixed before you start your painting. I'm using a mop brush for this stage because it holds a lot of liquid. This mop brush, you don't want to have to go back and refill your brush all the time. I'm using a mop brush because I don't want to have to go and refill my brush each time with these smaller brushes. When it comes to a technique we'll use later of dropping in water, there won't be enough water in the brush to drop off. With this, you can really pick up a lot and drop it out. Also, the other way around, we can suck up pigment that's already on our paper and use a brush to suck it out and draw it out. Whereas this, it'll only do so much. Once you have your colors mixed, then you have to clean your brush. Of course, your brush will already have quite a lot of pigment in it. Make sure we mix enough so that once you've cleaned your brush, you still have enough in the pant. Now my brush is pure water and I'm going to just pre wet the areas that I've marked out, it's pure water because we don't want any hard edges at this stage. By pre wetting it, wherever you dab the pigment, it'll spread out with a soft edge or a soft line rather than a hard one. It gives us a bit more time to think about what we want to do while we're in the middle of the painting process. You can see I've got different rings and pencil markings for where I want areas to be darker or lighter. This is a painting that's impossible to repaint again in the exact same way you should really be following it as a guide and then just going with the flow of however or whichever direction your painting goes naturally. Okay, now it's all wet and I've got a tissue in my hand. It's time to start the fun. 8. Painting 1 Applying The Paint: Now I'm going to start from the top and work my way down. Starting with this screen, I'm just going to start interact at the bottom of those trees. Move it down and you can see because we pre wet it, there's no hard edge. Then I'm going to move on to this blue, maybe a bit more yellow ochre. Start to fill that out, see starts to merge with the other, other pigment up there. This process doesn't take long. It's a very quick painting to do because it's so abstract and you're allowing the water color to experiment and do its thing. I'll be play small. This back. Yeah, get a scream. You flex that. Now basically we've done a first layer of pigment. Now the important thing to practice is to see how it dries and interact with it while it's drying. To see what different effects you can do, maybe we can go in thicker pigment. In some of these sections, this is where the mop brush comes in. We can just drop in thick pigment in some of these areas. Maybe we can even use black in some of these areas. Maybe we can get a tissue and softly pick up some areas like that, then go back with a brush and just soften up those edges. If there's pools of water, we can use the tissue to suck those pools of water out. Don't be afraid of going in with nice thick pigment. We can keep on adding and taking away water. We don't need it to dry when it wants to. We can manipulate it a bit. This area is starting to get very dry, so I'm going to add more pigment here and just dot around like that. You can see the little granules taking shape with the cotton base paper. 9. Painting 1 Taking Away Pigment: Let's use the brush to take away some pigments. So I'm completely cleaning my brush now and I'm using my tissue to suck out all the liquids. Is a very dry brush now and I'm just going to go on the paper, just suck up some of that liquid. Then you can go back and soften it out a bit. Over time you can learn how wet you need your brush to be in order to make these changes and how the wetness of the paper affects the different textures that you're creating. You can get a small brush and splat pure water on there. You might have to replace your tissue very often. I think I need it a bit yellower up at the top here. And this is a good time to paint another tree. That tree a different color. Now, I'm going to be very bold. I'm going to take some pure black. We just drop it in here. You'll see the more it starts to dry, the edges start to become, when it's wet, it just blends out, right to the end, right to the very edge. And there's no transition either. But the drier it gets, the longer it takes for the water to merge out, put a bit more green rather than the blue. Some of these areas from Flick pigment. Some of these areas you can add water, then use a tissue to suck up that while it's wet. As long as it's wet you'll still have soft edges. You can be quite aggressive with it. As you soften those edges, it will work when you don't even have to fiddle round with it as much as I am. I'm just showing you different possibilities. Good. Yes. 10. Painting 1 Final Strokes: Now. I'm just going to wait for a bit. I'm quite happy with how it is at the moment. I can see by bringing my head a bit, the light reflects in it. I can see which areas are wetter and which areas are drier. Through my experience, I can see what would happen if I add pigment to certain areas and other areas. I just let, I can see here that it's still wet. It doesn't have the complete glossy edge where I can't even see the texture, but I can see the texture of the paper. But it's the shining texture of the paper. I know that if I drop a bit in there, I can add more pigment. But it will blend out in a nice smooth way. Let's say I want it lighter here. I can go up, then I can go back again. And that should create a nice smooth finish. I can have my brush full of water up, stroke it, go the other way. Just do these different, just play around. It doesn't have to be pretty at all. It's not about making a pretty painting today, it's just about seeing what you can do with water color. You can see if you look at my palette here, the pigments here are too wet. Now, my painting has dried to a stage where if I added this wet pigment, it would just blow out and create a hard edge. The paper gets the thicker your pigment then has to be, your pigment has to match the wetness of your paper. These are general rules, you can learn to break them depending on the kind of textures that you want. So now I'm just gonna let it dry naturally and I'll show you what it looks like at the end. Even once it's dry, you can go back and do some interesting things like re, wetting a section and then interacting with it, interacting with the middle, at least leaving the edges intact. Then you can get a tissue. Just suck out some of that liquid in the middle and then just let it dry again. Now this is completely dry. You can see just the range of textures we've had here and the things you can achieve by interacting with the paper and pigment as it dries. 11. Painting 2 The Drawing: Again. We start with a soft line, just to mark out where we're going. I'm just going to put a line that's slightly off center, a bit higher than the middle to begin with. Then I'm going to do a bit of a circle here, very soft. And then a larger circle like that. It's not really a circle actually, it's more like a potato. Now in the center, I'm going to start to draw the house. Start off of a vertical line, then a horizontal line that's completely parallel with the edge of the paper and the horizon line that go across there too. Then we can go up for a roof and that can go across there too. It doesn't have to be super accurate, we're just playing around. Then we come down there maybe at a chimney side of the house here. It comes along a bit more and then comes down like that. We bring it down the other end, drawing some little windows in between, maybe on this side through two windows, a window on the roof section. Very simple house. A little house on an island. Then fill in a bit of space here, and I'm going to add some trees here. 12.3 Now we can follow these down here and roughly mark where they would be as little reflections. Notices that the house is a bit below the horizon line because it adds to the sense of perspective. It's a kind of background island here I want to add, we're just a few bushes or trees in the distance there we can add a bit more to these trees just to zigzagging using the central line as a kind of mirror and criss crossing, getting slightly larger as we go down, it's rough reflections down there. There will be lots going on around here. But I'm not going to draw that in. I'm going to leave that for the water color. There's no need to draw that in for the time being. That's fine. 12. Painting 2 Underlayer: This is a fun one in which will be a good opportunity to explore color blending because we'll have a nice colorful sunset sky and a blue water section here. Whether it's a lake or sea, I don't know. Just a little house on the island. And we're going to start off by just wetting under the horizon line here. Then I'm going to pick up a little bit of yellow Oka. Just drop some in. This is a very light under layer using a little bit of pigment. Then maybe here we go, a bit darker and it is just a splash of red at the top, barely perceivable. And that's the first part done. Maybe a bit more yellow workers start to fill that out. Babe, bring some more of this back using a tissue. Just to Dave, some of the edges so I don't have a hard edge. 13. Painting 2 The Sky: Now I'm going to paint the sky and we're going to start off with a red down here. I'm using cadmium red for that. Maybe even a dab of a lizard and crimson. We're going to do red there and red there as it goes up, it's going to go warmer into a orange. Then at the very top it's going to be blue. What we can do to prepare ourselves, we can pre wet some of the areas like we did in the last painting, just so that we don't get those hard edges, unwanted hard edges. Rather, we're creating our edges here with pure water and then we'll use pigment and push it into these areas later. And you can see I've used a light pencil marking going around the composition just to help guide me, and I'll rub that out at the end. So starting with this red, I'm just gonna drop it into here, just where the horizon line is and go a bit dark if we want. Then as we move up we can add some other colors into it like this yellow, which will then turn it into orange. Of course, a tissue to clean up that edge because we re wet the paper pre, wet the paper, we've got more time to explore and manipulate the pigment. 14. Painting 2 Blending Colours: And I'm going against the Serilian blue. Starting from the top paint down. I noticed I've painted all that and I'm still painting it without lifting up the brush. I'm just moving that pigment around, smoothing that edge. So it's a nice transition. We're bringing that orange back down here, going back and forth between the pigments. Oh, I went under the horizon line, then you'll see the tissue to clean that up. The tissue just to soften that edge there. That's the sky done. I'm just going to let that dry by itself for the time being at least because it's too wet to use a hair dryer. Once the glistening of the paper has gone, we can use a hair dryer to speed up the process. 15. Painting 2 Some Ripples: But whilst we're waiting, there's other things we can do. For example, we can start doing the under lay of the house, which I think I'll use that same pink as the background on this side. Pink is red at least, and then it can transition into kind of blue on the other side. You can use a smaller brush if you want to be a bit more delicate. Also, we can paint a different section. Now I'm going to take some yellow Oca and mix it with that serilian blue, and that makes a lovely kind green. I'm just going to paint up to the tree, even up to the house just below the house, I'm going to start and the edge here I'm going to do a few ripples. Maybe at the very top we can do blue like that. And as we go down can add some red here. You can see the transition of colors. Pick up some more. I'll pick up some birds that is make it extra darker here at the bottom. You can go back to that green again if you want. Just having fun exploring the different colors. We'll squiggle here. Which will be the reflection of the trees that are yet to be painted there. Agree. And I'll let that section be. I'm actually going to use a tissue to bring out that because it's just going to be a guide. We're going to paint the water and then add the main reflections. 16. Painting 2 The Sea: Now I'm going to get my Serilian blue here, make sure it's nice and wet. Let me add a dab of cobalt and a dab of Vidian green, just to make it a bit more turquoise. Also mix that there. Now, starting depending on whether you're left handed or right handed. I'm left handed, so I'm going to start here. I'm just going to find that horizon line paint along like that. Then I'm going to carry that down, Pure water, just start adding ripples. Then you can have a tissue in your hand to dab away any bits that are too strong. If you want, you can start playing around. Some of the sky colors yellow. Oka here, bit of cadmium red here. Let's have fun dropping pigment around. Not being so strict on yourself, just allowing yourself to have fun exploring the medium of water color. S. 17. Painting 2 Full Circle: Start again on the other side will make it quite literally. Full circle, Almost full circle. I guess it doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, it shouldn't be perfect. There's a kind of beauty in imperfection. A few splits, a few big water spills down here. Intentional water spills, going back up here, popping in some thick pigment right there. Let's see how that reacts. I don't know how it'll react, just going out my comfort zone and allowing it to do whatever it does. A little green spontaneous green hill right here. That's what it is. It doesn't matter. The eye can make it whatever it wants to be. Now, I'm going to let that dry. It's easy to interfere with it, but I can feel myself wanting to do it already. The best thing to do is just after you've had fun playing around, just let it dry naturally. That's what I'm going to try and do. I'm just going to step away from it for about 10 minutes and then just come back to it and see how it ends up by itself. Now sometimes what I like to do is take a tissue and just when the edges of a section have dried, just dab it out like this. It creates a nice little effect of having dark edges and a light center, like a water splash feeling adds a bit of roughness to it. Intentional roughness. Now it's dry. You can go back if you want and add a few more ripples. If it looks like it needs it, that is, that will be fine. 18. Painting 2 The Island: Now it's time to go and paint the trees up here. To start off with, I'm going to add another reflection. A reflection of these trees here. Now we can go in and paint the trees themselves. I'm using this cobalt blue and a bit of a Lizarin crimson to make it darker and more purple. And at the tip of my brush painting out these trees, the tops of them looks like black. That's okay, because we're putting down this thick pigment. And then I'm going to use that to spread it out with some pure water, gets more diluted, lower down, it gets, then I'm going to get this di, green, the paint that just up until the edge of the house that we'll go back to that green list to find the edge there to make it look a bit like an island. I take this red and green again, mix it with burnt sienna. Although there's many different ways to mix these colors, if you look at the color charts, you can see how you can do it with what colors you might have. Now, painting the bottom of this tree of this house rather a bit bluer. Over here we can see we're starting to add full tonal range now. So we've had lights, mid tones, and now the dark colors into a new dimension. Few reflections there. Thing that's sating blue and cobalt blue. Now painting the roof again at our definition. 19. Painting 2 Colour and Tone: In this painting, we're exploring a wide range of different colors and tonal values and ranges. It's very valuable practice for several reasons. Firstly, it allows us to develop a nuanced understanding of color theory once we get a grasp of the intricacies of mixing and blending pigments. This not only enhances our ability to reproduce like a big spectrum of colors, but it also empowers us to create more vibrant and realistic artworks later on in our path on our journey as an artist. Also by experimenting with different tonal ranges, we cultivate a heightened sensitivity to light and shadow, giving us an opportunity to convey depth and dimension in our compositions. The versatility gained through such practice not only builds our technical skill, but also encourages creative expression. As artists, we learn to harness this emotive power of colors and tones to evoke specific moods and atmospheres in our future works. While these are fun, simple, expressive artwork, they also help us learn to do a bit more complicated compositions in the future, even realistic ones, because we're dealing with the same principles here. And this exploration of colors and tones contributes to a well rounded skill set for artistic growth. Yeah, yeah, captivating creations in general. I'm now to paint those background trees. I think I'm going to go for an orangey, well, a reddish purple. A reddish purple as if it's catching the warmth of the sun. Obviously, controlling the water to pigment ratio is a crucial aspect of achieving the best results you can get with water color painting because it ensures that your pigments are the right vibrancy and well distributed. When mixing water and pigment, it's best to start with a conservative amount of water to begin with and gradually add more as needed to be on the safe side. Aim for a consistency that flows smoothly without being overly diluted that mindset to have. Be mindful of the specific characteristics of your pigment. That, of course, comes through time and practice. As some may require more or less water to achieve the desired effect. Of course, experimentation is key, is one of the main philosophies of water. Color is to go with the flow more than any other medium. It relies on being spontaneous. 20. Painting 2 Finishing Touches: I'm right on the border here. I'll go very dark. A few reflections, ripples, dark ripples going out there like that. Of course, painting a reflections of these trees start off just doing dappled vertical lines, then gradually space them out. So it's going to be a quite an orange reflection. Orange reflection, a green reflection, and a purple reflection. So you can really experiment different colors. These reflections ptially turned to the land. Now if you want to go the extra level, you can get some white quash. And very carefully, a few window frames by window frame. Does N P crosses those back squares? That's this one done. Don't forget to make sure it's completely dry, then use a rubber to rub out these pencil lines. 21. Final Thoughts: Welcome back and congratulations. As we reached the end of this class, I wanted to share some final thoughts and reflections on this water colored journey we've taken together. Remember that throughout Bofa exercises, the houses are just a starting point, a foundation for your expressive journey. They only serve as a means for your imagination to run wild with hues, tones, and textures. Feel free to let your creativity flow interpreting the scenes in your own unique way, allowing for the beautiful fusion of technique and expression. The beauty of water color lies in its unpredictability and their ability to capture the essence of a moment With spontaneity, try things that make you uncomfortable. There's really nothing to lose. Only more insights to gain. Remember, watercolor painting is not just about technical skills, but also about expressing your creativity and personal style. I encourage you to continue exploring, experimenting, and pushing your boundaries to create your own unique watercolor masterpieces. As we come to the end of this class, I hope you feel more confident and comfortable with your watercolor painting abilities. Practice is key when it comes to improving your skills. So keep on painting and experimenting. I want to express my gratitude for each and every one of you. Your passion for watercolor painting is so inspiring and I'm honored to be your teacher. If you would like feedback on your painting, I'd love to give it. So please share your painting in the Student Projects Gallery down below. And I'll be sure to respond if you prefer, you can share it on Instagram, tagging me at Will Elliston as I would love to see it. Skillshare. I also love seeing in my student's work, so tag them as well at Skillshare after putting so much effort into it. Why not share your creation? If you have any questions or comments about today's class or want any specific advice related to water color, please reach out to me in the discussion section. You can also let me know about any subject wildlife or seen you'd like me to do a class on. If you found this class useful, I'd really appreciate getting your feedback on it. Reading your reviews fills my heart with joy and helps me create the best experience for my students. Lastly, please click the follow button up top so you can follow me on skill share. This means that you'll be the first to know when I launch a new class or post giveaways. Make sure to carry the adventurous spirit of today's class into your future artistic endeavors. I'm excited to see you all in future classes. Happy painting in the meantime.