Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Jessica, and I am a fan of almost
all art processes. But somehow I have
never fallen in love with the process of clause. Somehow, all the
clause materials get stuck to me
and not the paper. And I just don't
like to make a mess. And I also really love
design that is simplistic. So once upon a time, about a week and a half ago, I was watching a
collage workshop, and I like the teacher. She was really sweet, and so I kept watching it,
even though I thought, my chances of actually making a collage with all those
things were slim and none. But I got interested in the fact that it was a tissue paper
collage and the teacher was adhering one
color tissue paper to the page and then another
on top overlapping it. As that happened and I saw the see through
effect and so on, my major medium came to mind, which is watercolor,
and I thought, I wonder if I could create the same effect
using watercolor. And so I sat down and I did it. And this is the piece I created, influenced by mid
century design somewhat. Anyway, I finished it and I posted and so many
people really, really got excited about
the process of using watercolor to basically
fake the papers in clase. And so I made this class. Our project will be to
do another rendition of this still life that you're looking at and
do it step by step. And along the way, as I
always do in my classes, I'll be sticking
information in on 50s design to fountain pens with a bent nib that make a nice crooked line and how
to work with watercolor wash, lots of fun things. With no further ado, let's go and have
fun doing this.
2. Supplies: Our supply list
for this class is very short and very simple
and won't make a mess, which is really the best part. We need some pieces
of watercolor paper, and maybe if you just
got one, that's fine. I'm working on a
four by six size. And if you want, you could have other
practice pieces of paper, but I like to have at least
one practice piece of the same paper that I'm doing a project because then it's
going to look the same. We need a pencil and an eraser. I know a lot of people
say that pencils are bad guys and you don't
need them and so on, but I need them. They're my best creative tool, and they help me plan
whatever I'm doing. And so this is a very hard lead, a four H, and I can
use it very lightly, and it raises perfectly
from watercolor papers. So that is a good thing. We are going to need watercolor. They can be any watercolors. I'm using different brands here. I picked them by color and put
them in a working palette, and going to need a paint brush. Now, there are several kinds to choose from in several sizes. And so you can pick
whatever you have. And I do show you during the class a difference
between using an angle brush and using
a pointed round brush, but a little bit bigger
is better than smaller. So you can spread your
watercolor quickly. But any size close to
this is just fine. We need a fine liner,
permanent ink pen. This is a Nibal eye. This is a fine liner. And I didn't really use a fine liner. And so if you'd
rather do what I did, what you would need
is a fountain pen, and this one happens
to be special. It has a bent nib, and I'll be telling
you about that. It's called Fudenib FDE. And I love to use a ruler
when I'm going to do things like this so that I
don't make a big mess out of it and make
straight lines. And I love this kind of ruler because you can see through it, and aligning it with the edge
of the paper allows you to make perfectly horizontal
lines and space them. And finally, I have a
pasca pin here in white. It's kind of a fine tip. Yeah, this is one of
their actual yeah, they have two kinds
of small tip, and this is the PC one M, just to make the white lines
in this symbol right here. And that's it.
That's all we need. No glue and no pile of
stuff. And we're off.
3. Gathering the Elements: Let's gather the elements. The first thing to be done
if you're not following this exactly is to determine what your linework is going
to be. It can be anything. I wanted to go for
a mid century look, and so I made my, you know, initial sketch like
this just with pencil. Then I wanted the
design overall to have that retro kind of feel. And so I was going
to this isn't really the atomic symbol from the 50s, but it's close, and it's one that's common and that
is pretty easy to draw, so I might use that one. And I want to balance whatever linework I put on one side with something
on the other side. And I really do I like the other symbol from
the mid century, which is a series
of parallel lines with dots on either end of them. It's just kind of I don't know, a cool design, I think. Now, I grew up in the 50s, and my dad was an architect, and he was into the very, very latest in the design world. And so we had drapes with paint splatters and
symbols like this and lamps with design elements like this in my home
as I was growing up. Alright, so this is the component that's going
to be our line work. After we have figured out
what our first ingredient, our line drawing is
probably going to be. The next thing is to
pick our collage papers. Now, in watercolor collage, we're not using actual papers,
we're going to fake it. But that doesn't mean
that we shouldn't go and choose the colors of paper
that we want to use. I have a couple of tips about what works best
for this kind of thing. We are going to be overlapping
the colors that we need. So we need to know a
couple of things about them that they will look
nice over each other. And if they have
some transparency and like this wouldn't
work as well with quash, it would be a whole
different thing. I want us to take a
look at a color wheel. This is just a real common one from the Encyclopedia
Britannica, and use it to choose some
colors that are going to have harmony with each other
and not make mud. And so just a real quicky
lesson on color theory. You have different things
called color schemes, and color schemes are
according to certain formulas. And one of them is
called analogous. And what it means is
that they get together, the colors go
together very well. And the way that you guarantee that is that you
choose a main color, and then it's neighbors. Up to a palette of five. After the palette of five, you take a switch and turn into where there could be more
contrast than you want, or colors could make mud. Now, what do I mean about that? We're going to look
at a second formula about colors on the color wheel, and that is
complimentary colors. What that means
is that the color across the color wheel is the complement
of the first color. The most common ones we know
are the blue and orange and the green and red and
the yellow and purple. Those are your main
pairs of compliments, and then their neighbors, of course, have that same kind of relationship with each other. What is that relationship
complimentary colors do two things which are
completely opposite. One thing is that they make
each other pop visually, just really wonderfully
when used a certain way, and when used another way, they combine to make mud. And when I say mud, I'm talking your
earth tones browns and warm grays and cool graves, depending on which
compliments you put together. But what we are doing here, we are pretending that this is tissue paper and we're
going to overlay it, we do not want Mud
in that overlay. We want a nice mix,
and for that reason, we are going to avoid a complimentary kind
of color scheme. If you're curious about how
they make each other pop, it is when you use one in a larger area and
one in a smaller area, for example, if you had a blue circle and
an orange outline, that blue would just
really, really pop. The trick is to not use the two compliments together
in the same coverage, you know, like equal
coverage will clash. You think about a
Christmas outfit where somebody might wear a red skirt and a green sweater
and you might go, Oh, my eyes just don't
like that at all. That's a clash.
And that's what if you use the two compliments
in the same intensity, and the intensity means the brilliance or the little
muted gray tone direction. That's intensity,
and high intensity is just bright, bright, bright, very low intensity, also called saturation is very grade back. And so you don't get clash when one of the colors is grade back and one is bright or when you make that
kind of variety, when you get clash is when
you have two of them at the same amount of area together and in the
same intensity, and then you're in trouble. So for this kind of
an overlapping deal, we have to make
sure that we stay away from complimentary colors, and we're going to
stick with harmony. And so on my choice of colors, my palette, I started. I picked a color
I knew I wanted, and just off the top of my head. And I'm going for that
retro kind of thing. And so I picked a cobalt
turquoise or teal, actually. It's called This one's
by M gram. It's nice. And when water's added, it's nice and transparent. And very pretty. And then I look at it
here on the wheel. And I don't want to in
this particular case, I don't want to go darker. That's the other consideration is that when you have
very dark colors, you're not going to do the see through thing quite as well. So I don't want to go from my tail into this blue
violet direction. I want to go this way. So up to five colors, if I go five colors from
here, I get to here. And I like this, and it is kind of Indian yellow. And what I used here was an Indian yellow
watercolor Bam gram. My green, I don't know. I did not feel like I wanted this real Christmas
see kind of green. I wanted a yellow green, but I didn't want
an ordinary one because this doesn't
look like the 50s. This looks modern day spring green or May
green or whatever. And so I collect color. I'm a crazy person, and I buy paints of
all artist brands, but I buy them by
color, by what I like. And then I mix from there. I am not to take
your three primaries out and mix everything
that you want, which, of course, you can do, and here we have them when I
get my accent color on here. But for right now, I'm just
telling you about why. I went and found a
more retro green, you know, how they used to call refrigerators
and stuff avocado. That was in this color. Not really an
avocado color unless the avocado is kind of older and not as happy as it
was in the beginning. But there's something
about this I like. And so I chose it, and it's called brown pink, and it's made by sanier
Aquarell actually, that line of their
watercolor paint. And then I kind of jumped out of my comfort zone to
get an accent color, which is more into the
territory of contrast, like what we were talking
about that we could run into trouble with we
can get contrast, which is nice from almost
going to a compliment. Okay? And this is almost a compliment to
this almost a green. And so it works in theory, and we're gonna hope
it works in real life. Actually, we know
it does because I already did the piece before. I'm teaching you
to do the piece. Okay, and so my accent
color is Quin Magenta, and this one is made by Holbein. And I just like it
because it's a blue pink. And we're going to talk about
this process in a minute. But I like what it
does and its edges. It kind of comes up with
kind of a blue almost cast, almost a violet cast.
4. Brush Strokes: We have our line drawing and
we have our palette chosen. And we talked about brushes
that will do this for us. And I've got out a couple
of angle brushes here. This is a pointed ram. It kind of has a nice big
color carrying belly. That's what this is called, and it comes to a point. We're not going to
really need the point. Except we'll experiment a
little on making our paper. And if we want it to be
more ragged or whatever. So I've got angle brushes which give you a lot of control, but kind of real even edges. And I've got those in two sizes. Then the other brush
that you can use at any size is a flat. This is called a flat brush.
There's no angle here. This would give you a
lot of swatch at once, a large brush like this. But what we want to do, and I'm just going to use
these two to show you before we go to our actual art paper that we're going to make
our collage on, we're going to do just a
little demo of how to make an interesting piece of paper when it's not
really a piece of paper. So I have some of my
cobalt teal over here, and this is what I do. You can do this
anyway that you want, but I take a palette, and I take my half
pan and I wet, you know, get a lot of paint and scrape it off into
a pallet well, so I don't have to go in
and out of a half pen. It's it's just easier for me, and I'm putting all four of
my colors in here to do this. But right now I'm demonstrating making our piece of paper. Okay, so we want a wet brush. I just dip this in water. It's very wet, and
I'm in Santa Fe. Everything dries quickly, so
this is already dried on me, but that can be remedied. And now I'm going
to take this really loaded brush over to the paper, and I'm going to
draw with the brush, I'm going to draw rectangle that I'm pretending
is a piece of paper. And you notice with
this angle brush, you can get a bit
of a rough edge. I don't have enough pigment
hair or color in hair. But you don't get
a real rough edge. We look at what the round
brush will do in a minute. Now, when I get my color on, I don't want it to just
dry flat like that, even though it would be realistic because
a piece of paper, colored paper is flat,
but I don't know. I like the fun of
the transparency and see through and the texture of the
paper coming through. And you can certainly do this on a hot press
or a smooth paper. But if you don't, if you
do it on a textured paper, you are going to end up
with a lot more fun in your case because
you're going to have the texture of the
paper showing through. I'm dabbing off my brush over here and just kind of
moving this a little bit. Just to make it interesting. And with watercolor, there is a stage of wetness where
you get out of there. And this is mine right now. Because any more brush stroking in there as the paint dries, is just gonna give you
a bunch of streaks. For us, for this
moment right now, we're gonna stop with that. And I'll be right back to try
the round brush with you. I've reloaded my palette
so that I can do another swatch slash
piece of paper with you, using the round brush
and seeing if we can get a little difference
in the look. The round brush carries a lot
of paint, and I love that. Um, right away down here, you can see what's
happening there. So let's just see if
we would just Now, you wouldn't have that bad of a tear in your piece of paper, as I have here, but that's okay because
it's not really paper, and we're doing a collage, and we might just like this. So this is what you can
do with the round brush. It doesn't really happen
when you're using a flat or an angle brush. And you'll take your choice about what you like about this. I'm gonna get a little
water in this one, too and see if we can create some real interesting
happenings in texture. I'm damping my brush off, and we're coming
back and just kind of picking up some colour. Because where you are
seeing this go light. If we were doing this
and there was already a dried piece of color
behind it, piece of paper, excuse me, we would see that color through
this whitest area, we would see it differently through the light in the dark, and you'll see how
that goes in a minute. But this texture that
we're adding makes it a lot more interesting
than flat color would be.
5. Creating the Collage: We are ready to get started
on our actual work of art. But before we do,
we're going to make a choice or think through a choice about where
we're going to put our pieces of paper
on our collage here. You made a preliminary sketch. This is a little bigger
than it would be actually. You made a preliminary
sketch to get an idea of the space
that your line drawing is going to take
because it's behind this space that you're going to put your colored
papers as a background. And so you want to get a look at that about how big it is, and it's about this big,
this big right here. And then I always start with an anchor shape
and build from it, and I try to have that be
somewhere in the middle. So in this case, my anchor shape was my
Indian yellow paper. Here, it was about not quite to the halfway point of
the piece of paper, and it was as wide as
I wanted to make it. But from this one, I am going to build
off with the rest. So I'm going to set these aside. And take this and take
I think an angle brush. And I'm going to
weigh that block of color right little
short of up here, not crossing over, not centered. So here's a halfway
point, a little lower. I'm going to start here
and go about this far. And I'm going to make it wider because we'll do
some overlapping. Alright. Um, like I showed
you when we were doing our swatching I'm going to add some water here to make things move around and to
make them interesting. And my edge might be just
a little too perfect. So I'm gonna just do
a thing like that. And the side over here is
gonna get blotchy anyhow. But I'm gonna do that here, too. Just not a lot. Not extreme, not so straight because if
I tore this paper, if I cut it'd be one thing, but I'm pretending that I tore and now you can
turn your paper, by the way, because
it's not glued down, and what a blessing that is. Okay. And then we do the exciting thing of
watching paint dry. Now, I see a lot of
online teachers say, you know, force it or let it dry or make it dry or all that. Using a hair dryer or
heat gun. I don't do it. And the reason I don't do it is because while this is wet, little pigment particles
are floating around. In the water, and they're settling out in
interesting ways. Like, I am going to
come back here and do this to make this even
more interesting. But this is still wet enough that we're going
to this is going to be blending in some real
interesting ways here. And if we leave it alone
and let it dry that way, it's going to make its own art. That's what watercolor does. It's going to continue blending. And sometimes if things
aren't wet enough, it makes a cauliflower. That's something you don't want in a real watercolor painting. But, you know, in decorative and abstract kind of things like this,
they're interesting. They're interesting marks. So we're going to let
this dry naturally. Here, it's not going
to take very long. If you're in Florida,
it's going to take a little longer, but it's fun. Maybe to run two of these
pieces at the same time. So you have something to do
while your paper is drying. Okay, our Indian yellow
is now totally dried, and I'm going to look
at my reference here, and I think that the second
piece of the puzzle is going to be my brown
pink or in other words, my green because it
intersects these blues, and it's going to if
I put this in next, I'm going to know how to
place my two areas of teal. So I have my brush wet. I have this bit of paint
here all set to go, and this is going
to be very random. I don't have my
brush wet enough. You see this about Santa Fe, right? Okay, very random. And I'm going to go right
over this and leave the edges kind of
Rough from the brush. I like that. And, again, we're going
back into paint dry mode. And so if you have
a second piece you're working on
at the same time, this would be a great time to work on it while this dries. Also, setting if there's
sunshine coming in your window, like there is here
at the moment, I would set this right in that sunshine and it'll
dry more quickly, but it'll still dry
by its natural, what it wants to do. If you use a hair
dryer or a heat tool, you are going to move those little pigment particles around as the air
blast into them. And that's what
makes a difference. You know, sometimes it makes a difference that you care
about and sometimes not. But I just really love what watercolor does if it's
left to its own devices. I am going to pick up a little
bit of color, you know, with just a damp brush from this area here
that the blue will over over paint from
this area down here. I'm not going to
go in here because I will be disturbing
the fact that this green is lying over the Indian yellow
and not mixed with it. So it's like looking through two pieces of colored
film, and it's different, a different effect on your eyes than when the two paints
are mixed together. It's a whole different thing. You can experiment with that, but I don't want to disturb this and mix these
two in this area. So waiting to dry. Okay, we are dry, and I apologize for any weather
events that you can hear. I have wind blowing
through here. I have it kind of squeaking
through a window, and there's just nothing
I can do about it. And so we're going
to just proceed and you'll know what's
in the background. Alright, so I'm putting, according to my
plan, I'm putting two areas of blue paper. And the first one is gonna
go somewhere in here, and I'm going to pay
attention to what I'm doing so that I have something similar to the piece that
we're replicating. Okay, and you want to be
careful that the part that goes over another piece
of paper that you don't do a lot of
brushstrokes there. And the reason for that
is that it will mix. Again, we have that
mixing situation. That'll make that more of a one flat thing,
and we don't want that. So when I go in and pick up, I want this kind of
light because it's up at the top toward my
daisies which are white. I'm not going to
go back in there. Just leave that B
because the one overlay seems to not disturb
the paint underneath. Okay. So that's our blue patch, one of them, and
then the other one I overlap the bottom
corner of this. And so a little more water,
a little more paint. And leave it kind of
kind of like that, maybe a little wider. This is all just your design
sense and your taste. You can have this be whatever, 'cause it's a ripped
piece of paper, right? Alright, and lightning again. I like the I don't like flat color,
you can probably tell. But I like the effect of seeing different drying patterns and blending patterns and seeing the paper and the texture
right through it. So more paint drying.
And we'll be back. Now it's time to create
a focal point from my bright color that is not an exact complement to
any of these, but closer. It's not really in the little neighborhood
of friends here. I'm using a three eighth inch
angle brush hair because I like the fact that it makes a nice smooth edge
on a painted circle. I'm gonna get that just
a little bit wetter here and turn my paper
for better control. Am I as big as I want to be or as good of a circle
as I want to be? No. And so I'm fixing that now. Alright. I'm going to add a little bit of
pickup moisture. This is my perfectionism, which I embrace wholeheartedly. In action. How I get better is
trying to be perfect, and I know I never can, but I never stop trying. Okay, I'm not going
over the blue there. I don't want it to run
in here at that point. And there is a little brush
hair, but that's okay. I'll get that later. I'm gonna shove it to the edge. And there is my focal shape. In the brightest color, so it's really gonna stand
out from anything else. And now that has to dry. I'm gonna make it a little
lighter still in the middle. Just kind of lift it. Dab off the brush a little bit and
come back damp and lift it. And then get out, while the kitten's
good. There we go.
6. Sketching the Linework: So our watercolor collage part of this project is finished. This is not a composition class, but I'm going to point something out because anytime that you can put out little information
for people, you should do it. When you have a good
balanced composition, you have a focal
point is a star, like in a stage production. And that is because it
catches the eye first, and we have a focal
point here that has two things going for it
to make it catch the eye. One is that it's a color that's almost a
compliment to this one, which means that it's
going to stand out more. And also, it is a circle, and circle is an eye
trap in composition. If you have a circle, you
never put it in the middle of your artwork because he doesn't want to
go anywhere else. When it gets here, you got
to pull it out of here. I would have to have
this was in the middle, I would have to have another
pink circle somewhere in order to even get the
viewer's eye moving around. But when you have a
balanced composition, what's interesting is that it should work from
any direction. Now, I could draw some
real interesting stuff on top of this
arrangement of paper. That's a little off
center, but, I mean, it's still a very balanced,
simple composition. But if we did it this way, it works this way, too. And what about this? Wow, now we got a cross. Here we could go a
whole different way. So point being that a composition that is good
is good all the way around. The next thing to do
is going to be to add our linework on top
of our collage work. And so I made this
preliminary sketch, and, That's my dog. Stop it. I don't want noise. Okay. And so let's also look a little bit at where
it landed on this first one. This is going to be different. But I want to stick with the same idea that our vase
is going to be pretty much centered in about
two thirds south of the horizon line and
overlapping the blue. Now, the beauty of dried
watercolor is that you can draw any erase
over the top of it. You draw a sketch and pencil and then you
watercolor over it, you can't erase it
anymore because the graphite pigment
particles kind of mix in with the
watercolor particles, and it's just in the mix, dried in there, and
you can't erase it. However, over the top
of dried watercolor, you can and so I
am going to draw my linework first in a pencil because that
is just what I do. That allows me to create
and move things on the run. And I know a lot of people
say, throw your pencil away, but that'll never
happen around here because it's my
best creative tool. So here is my horizon line. And so I want the top of my vase to go a little
bit into the pink area. And into this area. So there's a little slanted top, and the incline will go
across here for the top. So far so good. I try to get
it as horizontal as I can. See, this is the
reason for pencil. I use a very light pencil. This is a four H, and I'm using a feather touch, just kind of letting it fall over the paper
to make my sketch, and that makes it
easy to get off. I went back and made the top of my vase a little bit narrower. It just was looking
too fat there, and I'm going to bring the
bottom of it down, right? A here. And let's see where
this crosses through. We're gonna have a little slant, shape that was very prevalent
in mid century design. There a lot of lot of
triangles in use then, a lot more than have been
used in design since. And it was kind of a
trademarke thing of that era. Alright, I like where
my vase is landing, and I want to place my flowers. They might not be as big as
the ones in my sketch were. But I start drawing a flower
with a little middle, and I kind of place
their middle first. Sometimes just one at a time. And then put the petals on
and then go to the other. But anyway, I am going to
draw in my flower petals. A lot of teachers
go ahead and do their drawing on camera, and then they speed it up. I do such slow drawing. I love it. I'm not complaining. I draw so slowly that I
would have to speed it up so fast that you wouldn't even be able to see what I was doing. So I'm coming back with how
I finished off the flowers. In mid century design,
most things were, like, very, very cookie cutter. They were very perfect shapes. So when I drew my flowers, they had perfectly
balanced petals, but that's not my personality. So I had to do a
little something weird because I always do. I just bent some of the
petals to give some life. And so they're not all lined
up like little soldiers, like things were in the 50s. So the next thing I'm doing is I want to make this block of 50s lines with the dots on the end and figure out exactly
where I'd like to put it. I want it to intersect the
vase more than this one did. It's one thing I wanted to do. I also want it to balance the
composition to this corner. We're heavy this way. And so I want to put something
of interest down here. But not too huge of a thing. So I'm just going to rough
in a little rectangle here and see if that is where I might like
to put my set of lines, and I don't want to line up with this because I don't know, it's just better not to line
up with things when you can not line up because it's
more dynamic that way. So I think then I'm going to
like where that lands up. So the next thing I'm
going to do is choose a spacing for my lines. Like, I like
something like this, and then they're going to have little round balls on the end. I use a ruler. I think
they're great tools. I never apologize for it. So here, I can line
this ruler up. I love these kind. You know, from my other
classes sometimes, this kind of ruler is wonderful because you don't
have to think numbers, and a lot of artists don't
like to think numbers. But you can make
sure that a line is horizontal by just
making sure that one of the heavier lines here on your little ruler is on
the edge of the page. Then we know that
we're horizontal. And I love that trick. I do this for
guidelines when I'm putting writing in my journals
and my sketchbooks, too. I'm eyeballing here.
You could measure it, but I just 'cause, you know, in the 50s,
it has to be all even. But I think I can pull
it off without actually measuring when I do my text and my
sketchbooks, I do measure. I just take two lines of my printing and I get
that measurement, and then I make dots
at that measurement so that I know that the
writing is going to look like it's spaced, okay. But here, no writing. Just design. See what I mean
about slow drawing, right? So those lines are pretty even. And I'll erase all
the pencil guidance once I've made the lines. But we're going to
move on to inking. I'm going to show you
a special kind of fountain pen that
makes a special. You can see it here.
Look at how rough the line is on the
rough watercolor paper.
7. Inking the Linework: Ink lines are a very
interesting design element. And there are so many ways
to make them with brush pen, with a fine liner pen, with a fountain pen, just an infinite
way to make lines. This is a fountain
pen with a nib that I don't think you
can see it well enough. But the end of it, the nib is bent. And another word for this
kind of a nib is fude FDE. And what it does is it makes a line that is either
really thin or thick depending on how much
you slant the pen downward, lay down the nib or you can
put it however you want it. So this is this is on a
smooth post it note thing. I believe I don't do this ever, but I think some people can turn them over and make their
thin line that way. I don't. I just make
it with the tip. And then with a little
bit of pressure, you can even line that way. And keep it at the same angle. So, this looks
especially nice on a cold pressed watercolor
paper and you can feel it break up as
you're going along. I'm viewing real crooked
here. You don't have to. You can go straight,
and it'll still have this really interesting
textured line. It's kind of broken up,
and it's a fun look. It's probably doesn't go with the mid century design
because things were so clean. But I'm doing it anyway. Now, this pen, I will put the link in resources because
this came from Amazon, and it was really inexpensive. I think it's like $16, and it comes with a converter, which I'm going to show
you what a converter is. They're wonderful. But usually, you have to buy them separately
from fountain pens. This is the turning knob. And when you go
counterclockwise, you empty the cartridge of ink, and then you stick the
the tip into ink and go clockwise and it fills what is the same
thing as a cartridge here. And so that is a
wonderful thing, and they're usually
another $8 or something on top of the cost of say
a lamipin or other ones. This comes with it
already, so it's amazing. The other amazing thing is that I don't
use it constantly. I use it intermittently. And it does not dry out. And I think that is an incredible trick because every fountain pen,
you have to, like, baby it and write things
with it every other day, and this one is just
it just comes back. I'll put that link in
the resources in case anybody is interested in drawing with this
kind of a line. Now, back to the
project at hand. Again, I'm not going to
make you watch me do this in my tedious manner. But I'm just going
to show you what I do is I go directly
over my pencil lines. And so this is going to
be the stem of my flower, and the line is really
breaking up there. I think a little too
much right here. I'm going to try to
straighten out a bit. But that is a lot more
interesting than just, you know, a fine line stem. And you can, like I said, use any inking tool
that you'd like to and do it your way, you know? But I just think
this is interesting enough to have
told you about it. Now I'm going to do my
inking and I'll be back.
8. Final Touches and Extro: During this video,
you're probably gonna hear some wind howling. We've had quite the
weekend of weather, but I wanted to get this
class done, and so I did. I finished my inking, and I made the centers
of my flowers yellow, the same yellow
as this because I like how that will pick up the color and
move the eye around. And then we're going to add a little hit of
extra interest to our focal point and use
this not an atomic symbol, but close to it from the 50s. And I'm using a pasca pin, and this one, unfortunately, is not showing up as
white as it should. But we're gonna do it anyway, 'cause I'm just
giving you the idea. So I make a cross and
then in between each one, run a straight line
right through. And this, again, is a very
iconic 1950s thing that I think was supposed to be
an atomic something in atom. I don't know what
they were doing then. But anyway, it's kind of cute. So that adds, like, the final retro touch, and this one even looks like it's kind of
exploding inside. And that completes our
watercolor collage. When you do something over, it's never the same as you see. You can take this idea and go in any direction
because you can have your choice of color
palettes and you can have your choice of the
shapes of your torn paper. Sometimes it's fun
to take, you know, something like a colored
paper and rip it. Tear it into pieces as if
it were collage paper, as if you were going
to use it in a close. But what you're
going to use it for, in that case is a model
for your brushstroke, watercolor to make it look
just like that paper. I have a feeling I'm
going to be taking this on to some fancier levels, and if I do, I'm certainly
going to share it with you. I will put the link to the Bent nib fountain pen
in the resources section, and some folks have asked
about the glass palette. That I'm using. These
are actually made by me, and I will put that link in the resources section as well. They come in a lot of sizes, and this one is
called a paint strip. So I hope you've enjoyed the class and creating this
wonderful collage piece. I would love to see
your interpretation. And so when you
have it finished, please upload it into the
project section where we can share and you
can get feedback.
Jessica Wesolek, Artist/Teacher
