Watercolor Brush Warmups

1. Class Intro: Are you ready to warm up your creative side? Right now, we're going to do some watercolor rush warm ups. So get your creative juices ready. This is the perfect class for people who are brand new to watercolor, want to practice their skills in a light hearted way, or for more experienced artists that just want to do a warm up before diving in to a more in depth project. My name is Marley Pifer. I'm a recovering perfectionist, and I've been teaching people watercolor, nature journaling, and how to get over their creative blocks for over ten years. The supplies for this class are really simple. All you need is a sheet of watercolor paper. It can be in a journal or a loose sheet like the one I have here. It doesn't really matter how heavy it is. You know, I would actually recommend probably a cheaper watercolor paper if possible. I usually teach classes using these water brushes that contain the water inside. But for this class, it'll be better if you have traditional brushes. It's possible to do the class with this brush, but I would recommend having a traditional brush. I'm not going to be using anything very small especially if you're a perfectionist, I wouldn't use this for the class. This is a size one, so I'm going to put that one aside. A size six round would probably be pretty good. A size eight could also be good. I'm going to be using a size six and a size ten round. Those will be our main brushes. These are really cheap synthetic ones. I recommend cheap synthetic ones. I have purchased fancy expensive watercolor brushes in the past, but I don't actually really recommend them. Here is a half inch. These are called squares or filberts. One of these would be fun as well. Those are the brushes that we need. In terms of palettes, I'm going to be using this cheap plastic palette right here. It's also possible to use a ceramic plate. This is a plastic thing that came with some mochi ice cream. These things are actually really useful, something like that for your palate. I'm only going to be using two colors straight out of the tube. These are Daniel Smith colors, but feel free to use whichever ones you want. I'm going to be using napamide maroon and quinacridone gold from Daniel Smith and squeezing them straight out. A palette knife could be useful. If you really like geeking out on art supplies, you could get a palette knife for this, I'll help you get the texture of the paint really nice. It's not essential. Another thing that's not essential, but I like to share with my students is if you've ever had the problem of trying to open these watercolor or other paint tubes, it can be really annoying and they can get really hard. They can be impossible to open. In my box where I keep all of my watercolors, I have this mini channel lock. This will be all in the supplies section. You can check the resources and see my full supply list. These channel locks are amazing. They allow you to grip these lids without hurting your hands and without hurting the watercolor tube and very precisely unlock them if they've gotten tough. It's just the perfect little tool here. You can adjust the opening here and just perfectly loosen these up if they've gotten tight over time and save your fingers a lot of work. It's a very small tool, very light weight, very slim. It doesn't take up that much space. You can just put it in with your paint box and never hurt your fingers again opening up. Old paint tubes. That's the supplies we need, get your area ready, and don't forget, you're going to want a lot of paper towels. We're going to need something for water. This ice cream mochi container would work for putting water in here because it has multiple areas, I'll be able to have really dirty water, less dirty water. But you could also use something like this, just one container, a little cup, anything that you have for water, you're going to need that. For in detail information about the materials, go down below the video to the Projects and Resources section. Within resources. There's a document with all of the links and all of the info. 2. Get Your Colors Ready: Choose the two colors that you're going to use and we'll just squirt a little bit out here on our palette or plate or piece of plastic, whatever you're using. I'm going to put a little bit of my napamidemroon Rumer. This is really strong when it's straight out of the tube, especially if it's quality pigment. Get some of my quinacridone gold. Now you could use your palette knife, but I'm just going to use my larger brush as a mixing tool. I'm going to come in here and create two different concentrations of this. But don't get too worried about this part right now. If you're a recovering perfectionist like myself, this is where everything can get messed up if you overthink it too much and we have a blank page, a terrifyingly blank page here in front of us. I'm just going to play around and actually try to have fun with the feel of the materials. The water, the consistency of the pigment, it should be fun watching it. Try to be more playful about it. Imagine how fun this part would be if you were a little kid. That's all I need for that one. I'm going to do the same with my other one, clean this off here. If you want, you could use one brush for each color. I'm not going to worry about cleaning it too much. Load it with water and do the same with my quinacrino gold. Basically, what I'm doing is I'm just getting a wash pre made in advance. These are really nice colors. They're not cheap. They're considered professional or whatever. But they are good and they do last for a long time. If you use them this way, you'll use your watercolor a lot faster, but you'll learn a lot and you'll have a lot of fun and you'll just get to know your colors better. Okay. Once you have something that looks like that, you're ready for the next step. Mm. 3. Diving In!: The most fun part and also the scariest part because we still have a blank page facing us. So let's try to change that, and we're just going to do some loop de dos. And so this is probably something you've done as a kid or maybe you've done doodling. And what we're going to do is we're just going to load the brush up, try to make sure there aren't any chunks of pigment on it. It's not super critical because we're just doing a fun watercolor brush warm up, but it's best if there aren't big chunks of pigment on it. I can see that my brush is a little bit wetter than I want. I can see a drip of water on it. One way to control how loaded your brushes is to take the edge of your paper towel like this and you can actually suck water out from this side of the brush and it'll take mostly water and less of the pigment in a more controlled way. Now I'm just going to come here holding my brush semi upright and I'm just going to do some loop de do. This is the first thing that I've drawn or painted all day long and that's always the hardest. Don't let your inner perfectionist come out and ruin things right now. We're just playing. Try to be loose, try different sizes. Notice how strong or weak your pigment is and how much the watercolor paper absorbs it. If you're using multimedia paper, the paper will absorb it less and you might get more of a fluid look. I'm adjusting by making my brush a little bit more loaded. I usually work with 150 GSM and just a medium grain mixed media paper. This paper that I'm using right now is a lot thirstier, so I'm just adjusting by loading my brush a little bit wetter because I want these smooth fun strokes. I'm just doing loop de dos. If you're feeling really uptight, one thing you could try is using your non dominant hand. We're just going to cover the page in these. If you want to switch to your other size brush, you can. But the most important thing now is just to fill the page with these loop de dos, have fun with it. I'm going to make some of these a little bit darker. I'm going to come back in while this is still wet and do some overlapping, can get some interesting wet effects. Feel free to play around with some wet effects and some overlapping now. If you want, you can change to your second color. I'm just going to keep going with the same one. Whoops, I dropped a big drop right there. I'm going to do some bigger strokes. I got a dry brush effect because this paper is so thirsty. Interesting dry brush effect. I'm just going to do a little bit more of that with a stronger pigment so I have some of that variation of darkness in here. I'll actually try dropping it in here while this is still wet. Not quite working. A little more water. This is just playtime. Don't take this too seriously. One thing that can happen with warm ups like this is you start really loose and you make something that's really nice because it's so loose and you were just playing. Then you start getting frozen because then you don't want to ruin it and it ruins the feeling. It stops being play and you get too serious and precious about it and you stop learning and experimenting. Try to just don't get too attached to it if it starts coming out, I'm starting to notice that feeling in myself, wow, I should just leave this like this because it actually looks really cool. Don't get obsessed with those details right now. We're trying to do watercolor brush warm ups. We're not trying to make something to go on the wall. 4. Coloring Warmup: This side is a little bit wetter. I want to keep going, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to flip it around so that wet part is a little bit further away for me. Now I'm going to clean my brush and I'm going to do the next part. We did these doodly does. Now we're going to do a little bit of basically coloring in. This is good practice, and it's a fun combination with this other warm up exercise. I'm going to go into my quinacridone gold here. And let's see where should I start? That looks a little bit wet still, so I want to have a little more control on my brush so I'm going to dry out a teeny bit here. Now we're going to be trying to do just bigger washes and don't get too uptight with coloring. It's okay if you go out of the lines here. That whole obsession about coloring within the lines is a little weird sometimes and I think some people have trauma around that from their childhood because other kids made fun of them because they couldn't color inside the lines or whatever. Now you can just experiment, see what happens if you color over the lines and see what happens if you stay within them. Also play with how much water you have in this mixture. Since our paper is not taped down, you might need to hold it. But what that means is you can also tilt it, and when you tilt it, you can experiment with what happens when the wash comes more towards the bottom, and you can see there's a little bit of settling there. If you're using granulating color, a granulating watercolor and a very textured paper, you'll get some cool effects. Don't get too obsessed with those right now or uptight about trying to control them. I think that's one of the things that challenges a lot of people with watercolor is there's aspects of watercolor that you cannot control. That actually is the part that is usually creating the things that people are drawn towards in watercolor. So you need to learn how to roll with the lack of control and use it to your advantage. If things are feeling really scratchy and not flowy, it might mean you need a less textured paper or a larger wetter brush. Just experiment with coloring in some parts, not coloring in other parts. If you want, you could just do a huge wash over everything with this color. The second color. We're not thinking too much about the brush stroke. We're just filling in areas. Because next, we will experiment and find joy in the brush stroke itself. Do to do. Okay, that's good for that. 5. Pro Tip for ADD?: On pro tip, especially if you're ADD like me, is to have a sheet of paper, even if it's just copy paper extra so that while your fancy watercolor brush warm page is still drying, you can use this one. I think that this is something that's helpful in a lot of art practices is to have a side project, and this is a trick also for perfectionists or people that are starting to get precious. If you start getting all tense about this one, even though we started it with the intention of it being a loose warm, if you start getting all tense and perfectionist about it, get a little side paper and just do some stuff on there, do some doodly dos on there, and while the other one is drying, just stay loose on here and remember that we're just playing. Remember when you were a kid, you would just grab a new sheet of paper, do something new. You didn't force yourself to make something perfect and you didn't keep doing something even if it wasn't fun anymore. Follow the fun keep a side sheet of paper on the side project, and while this one is drying, you can keep your creative juices flowing over there. You can also test things out. Here's a little preview of what we're going to do next. 6. Brush Shape Fun!: All right, this one is dry enough for me to go on to the next stage. I'm just going to get my brush and I'm going to go in here with my second color. This time, the type of brush you're using really matters because we're going to be using the shape of the brush as our main interest point. I'm just going to do these little things where I place the brush down just like that and you'll learn what shape your brush makes when you basically print with it. I'm just going to create a repetitive design using that pattern. Notice how my brush got a little bit dry, you're going to get practice maintaining a consistent load with your brush. I should have created more of a wash first. Let's create a little bit. Let's get a bigger zone of the wash going. A little more water, a little more pigment. Let's just keep printing basically. Mine come out looking like feather or leaf shapes. You can experiment pushing it down slightly different ways. This will definitely work better if you don't have too small of a brush. I'm using a size ten. If you're using around like me, you'll end up with a similar shape. Let's just see if we can fill this whole bottom area with this pattern. We'll get to practice space filling as well, which is one of my favorite concepts in art. 7. Overlapping Gets Wild!: While those are still drying, I'm going to go back to my first color and I'm going to get a stronger mixture, stronger washer and I'm going to go back over some of my original lines. This way we'll get a variation in tone of that first color, a couple levels of darkness. This is something that you'll learn how to do in watercolor painting is to have these built up layers, and that's called glazing. Of increased value, darkness and pigment and saturation. Don't go over everything. If you go over everything, then it's all the same. And try to keep it loose still, and we'll have some variation is what we're looking for in that first color. This is a place also where you could experiment with more dry brush. Loading it with more pigment and a little bit less water and seeing what happens there. You could also be experimenting with a little wet on wet. If some of these when you go over it, you'll get some interesting wet on wet effects. Remember, don't go over everything or else it'll all be the same. I'll just do a teeny little one here. You could also experiment using your smaller brush at this stage. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. This is getting messy and it's going to take a while to dry. Good thing I have that side sheet of paper. This would also be a good time to get a snack. 8. Loose Brush Lettering: While we're waiting for our messy masterpiece to dry over here, I'm going to keep the warm ups going on my loose sheet of paper and we're going to do the next warm up. Make sure you have a second sheet of paper and we're going to do the next warm up or if your first one's dry, you could fit it on there and I'm going to get a slightly more concentrated version of my color, similar to what I was just using on our main project, and I'm going to do some lettering. I'm also using my slightly smaller brush, but feel free to do some cursive which is very similar to the loop de dos that we were just doing. Fun, fun, fun, fun. You can see how your printer paper reacts differently. I'm also going to try some bubble letters here are really fun. Doing letters also helps you practice all of the different shapes and potential brush strokes. It's a really good warm up. Because the loop de dos are fun, but they don't make you practice all of the different angles and different other shapes and strokes that you're going to have to do. Doing a bunch of letters, writing out the alphabet with your brush can be a good practice. Now I'm gonna try a different style where I, um, sort of use the width of the brush. So try that. That's something we haven't done with the doodles. 9. Sprinkles on Top!: All right. I love how this is looking, but there's one thing we can do that will make this even cooler. Go into the bathroom and get your partner's toothbrush. It's going to be perfect for this exercise, just kidding, you can do it with a regular brush as well. What I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little bit of sprinkling. This is something that's going to take a little bit of practice. You need just the right consistency wash. I'm going to use my second color. Quinacridone gold there. I'm actually going to test over here real quick. I'm going to hold my finger like this of my opposite hand and I'm just going to hit the brush against that finger. What you'll notice is you're going to get some back splashing, so make sure you're not wearing your fanciest clothes right now. I'm going to go here and I'm going to splatter like that. That's supposed to be the second color, but it looks like it's gotten a little bit of the other color in it. This is the thing you can overdo it, but remember, we're not creating art. We're doing a fun warm up, we're playing. If you feel like overdoing it because it's so fun to do these sprinkles, go ahead. Go crazy. Don't hold yourself back. Now, I think this would look really cool if we had had some type of sparkly metallic acrylic ink, perhaps, that would have been a really nice touch. But this was a great exercise. We did a fun watercolor brush warm up here. Yeah. 10. You Did It!: Hey, I think that turned out pretty cool, don't you? I hope you're proud of your project, post it in the projects and resources section down below. That way, I can check it out and give you feedback if you want. And now that you've gotten over your procrastination, you've gone over some perfectionism and you're all warmed up for watercolor, this would be a great time to tackle a more in depth project or something you've been putting off for a while. It would also be a really good time to dive into one of my More in depth classes such as one of my nature journaling virtual adventures where it feels like you're going with me on an actual artistic adventure in the outdoors. Check one of those out. Or dive into any of the other artistic projects that you've been procrastinating for a while, because now your creativity is unblocked and you're all warmed up. Did you say Virtual adventure here on Skillshare? What does that look like? Right now, we're gonna go on a Nature Journaling Adventure in the CloudF together. Let's go.