Watercolor Coloring Book: Waterlily Greeting Card

1. Intro: Waterlily Greeting Card: Hello and welcome to my home studio. I'm Emily. And in today's Skillshare class, our goal is to relax and have fun while painting with watercolors. The best part about this class, you can print the design directly onto your watercolor paper, just like a coloring book. I created these simple designs to be printed on your home printer, meaning they're more transparent. In this class, I will guide you through printing your designs at home, or if you prefer, printing the tracing template to hand trace my design onto your watercolor paper. Then I'll lead you through painting the project using watercolors. Since this is meant to be a relaxing class, the tutorial isn't very long, just long enough to show you the techniques I use. So grab your painting supplies and your favorite drink, and let's relax and paint. 2. How to Print Templates: In this video, we'll look at how to print templates. Trace using those templates and trace using your phone. Don't forget that all of the templates that you'll need for this class are under the projects and resources tab of this Skillshare video. The resources are on the right-hand side. First, how to print your template. If you're painting a watercolor greeting card, I recommend using Canson watercolor cards. This pack comes with 30 cards that are five by 7 " and 140 pound paper. You'll notice that each piece has a crease running down the center to make it easy to fold. And they come with envelopes. After downloading the printable card template, you'll want to set your printer settings to seven by 10 ". Borderless. It does need to be borderless In order to print correctly. I like to pre-print using only black and white. I found that it works the best to load your paper through the rear tray of your printer. Loading it in the bottom tray will sometimes bend your paper and cause it to jam in your printer. My designs are specially made to be printed, so you'll notice that the lines are more transparent and not as dark. You're all set to paint. Now, if your project is meant to be printed on an eight by ten inch of paper, you will need to cut it first. I do recommend using a cold pressed paper with of at least 140 pounds. Once again, you'll open up the template and print it, making sure that you're printing settings match the size of your print, you'll need to find eight by 10 ". Once again, it needs to be borderless. You can choose to print only using black and white. And then click Print. Once again, you'll load your pre-cut paper, the rear tray of your printer. Make sure that the rough side is facing up. These designs are meant to be printed on, so you'll notice the lines are a little bit lighter. You're all set to paint. If you don't feel comfortable printing out the template directly on your watercolor paper. There are also darker templates that you can download to use to trace the template onto your watercolor paper. Makes sure to download the correct template. The template for tracing is quite a bit darker than the template for printing directly on watercolor paper. When you print, you don't need to worry about changing the size of your paper since you'll be printing on a regular plain sheet of paper. Traceable templates for any of the greeting cards are going to be only five by 7 ". When you choose to print that card. You'll also print it on a regular eight-and-a-half by 11 size sheet of paper. Since you're using regular plain paper, you can either load it in the rear tray or you can load it in the lower tray. You'll notice that your template comes out nice and dark. To use your tracing template. First, place your watercolor paper on top of your dark template. You'll need to line it up correctly. Then use some masking tape or painter's tape to secure your watercolor paper on top of your template. Use either a light box or a bright window to trace the template onto your watercolor paper. The last option is to use your phone to trace the templates onto your watercolor paper. I like to use an app on my phone called Da Vinci I. It's a onetime purchase where you can upload any picture or image that you'd like to trace. Using the classic mode, you can move and resize your image to help you draw it onto your watercolor paper. To use this technique, you will need a phone holder. So you can look through your phone as you're tracing your outline. Please do remember that these templates are for personal use only. It is illegal to paint them and then sell them for money. Enjoy painting them for yourselves, or to give them as a gift. Thank you. If you are interested in these designs printed on your watercolor paper, but don't have a printer at home. You can always purchase one of my watercolor kits on my website. Paper, paints and a brush are included in the purchase of your kit. 3. Painting your Waterlily Greeting Card: The first project and our Florio's kit is painting a water lily. The first thing that we're going to paint for our water lily is white petals. Let's get started. We'll use our plastic plate. I'm using the top of a yogurt container. You also need some clean water. First what your brush. Add some water to your plate. Then grab just a small amount of purple and add it to your water. I actually didn't grab enough, so I'm gonna go back and grab a little bit more. Now we're ready to start painting our petals. Clean your brush. We're going to be painting our petals one petal at a time. We'll be using a wet on wet technique where we wet the paper first and then add our pigment using a wet brush. We're going to paint just water into one petal. I still want to be careful during this step to make sure that my water doesn't go over the lines. Remember that wherever your water is, the pigment will also follow. Now that I have this section wet, I'm going to take some indigo and add some indigo towards the center of my petal. This is going to create a bit of a shadow. I'm going to control the density of my shadow by cleaning my brush, dabbing it on my paper towel, and then moving that pigment wherever I want it to go. On certain petals, I might choose to add a little bit of purple. And the purple I'm just going to put towards the center of my petal. We're going to continue this for every single petal mixture. The next pedal that you paint is not immediately next to a wet puddle. Remember that if we touch water with a section that's drying, we are going to have that pigment come into that new section. So I'm going to skip the ones around it and paint a different section with water. If there's too much pigment there. Remember, you can dry your brush and lift some of that dark pigment away. The center of the flower. I'm going to start by painting with this gamboge color. This is a nice yellow. First I have to wet my brush, wet the color. And with my paintbrush, I'm going to paint all of the little centers of this flower. To paint the lily pads, I'll use a sap green as my base layer, and then I'll use an indigo to drop in while the lily pad is still wet. Your brush. Wet the sap green. And uses sap green to paint your Lilypad. You might need to grab more water to activate more of your paint. I'm using quite a bit of water because I do want to keep this Lilypad wet so that I can drop the indigo in while it's still wet. I'll clean my brush. Now I'm going to grab some indigo. I'll use the integral around the outer edge of my lily pad just to give it some depth. Grab a little bit more. There. If I want to, I can always soften the edges between the two colors by cleaning my brush, tapping my brush on my paper towel to remove the excess water. And then using my brush to soften those edges. Now that the center of my flower is dry, I'm going to mix a darker yellow to paint in the very center. Grab your lead and add some water to your lid. The colors that I'm going to use to mix a darker yellow for the center of my flower. Are the gamboge yellow mixed with just a little bit of purple. Adding just a little bit of purple is going to deepen your yellow color. Remember that if you have too much liquid on your brush for the fine details, you can dab it on your paper towel so that you don't have quite as much liquid. I'm trying my best to go around what I already painted, but if I go on top, that's okay too. If the center isn't dark enough for your liking, you can always grab just a little bit more of that purple and add it to your center while it's still wet. Once we've given enough time for our lily pads to dry, we're ready for the background color of the water. We're going to use a wet on wet technique. We'll be using Prussian blue and indigo. First. Let's start by wetting the area we want to paint. Since the water is a large area of our paper, we're going to chunk this into sections. So I'm going to start with this lower section first. I don't want to wet the whole paper. Otherwise it'll dry. Before I have time to add color. Now right here, I had my water go over onto the Lilypad. I'm going to use my paper towel to block that up because I don't want any water on top of my lily pad because that's where the pigment will go. Now I'm ready to drop in my color. I'm going to start with Prussian blue. Drop some water over this dot to be able to get a nice dark color. And now I'll drop in that color. In the wet area. I'm going to use some of the indigo to add in some darker value to my water. I'm not going to add the indigo to every over all the blue. Just going to add a few spots of indigo. It's going to give some depth to my water. Now I'm ready to move on. As I'm working with wet on wet, I like to turn my paper so that my hand isn't resting on the area that I just worked. While you let your flower dry on the back of the card, there are few little hearts that you can paint as well. And signed your name where it says hand painted with love. By. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this tutorial, please follow me on social media, check out my website, and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.