Watercolor Doodling : Making more fun, less fuss.

1. Welcome to Watercolour Doodling: Hello friends and welcome to another Skillshare class. If we've not met before, my name is Brenda. I also go by art ingest and today I'm going to take you through watercolor basics. We're going to talk about how to make watercolors a little more fun than foss. I've been using watercolors for years now. And one of my favorite things about them is that there are really accessible medium that you can get a lot of mileage out of anything from super budget students, supplies all the way up to professional grade. I'll be taking you through a couple of really simple exercises to get acquainted with new paints. How to use a watercolor brush if it's your first time trying it out and a few simple exercises that you can do to break that creative block and just get some paint on paper. 2. Materials: In this session, you're going to need any type of watercolor that you can get your hands-on. I'm gonna be demonstrating our exercises with everything from student grade to professional supplies. But if you're new to the world of watercolor, I can recommend using anything that you can get your hands-on pan form tends to be really inexpensive type of watercolor. You can also get any of the color sheets that you can get your hands-on. You can use any of the tube watercolors if you're looking for something that's a little bit more luxurious, but any level or grade of watercolor we'll do. You're also going to need some watercolor paper. And I do recommend getting paper that's intended specifically for watercolor. This doesn't have to be expensive. Some of the exercises we're doing, I'm actually going to use Dollar Store watercolor paper. It just has to have a little bit of heft, a little bit more thickness than your average piece of paper. And it should have a little bit of texture on the surface. It can be any size, any shape. You can even get pre-cut postcards or greeting cards if you want to be able to send your creations in the mail afterwards. But ideally you want to have a type of paper that's specifically intended for watercolor. In addition to that, you're going to want to have at least one brush. I'm gonna be demonstrating our workshops with a water brush, which means that you'll have a little water chamber attached to the paintbrush for your convenience. But you can also get a student grade or a professional grade watercolor brush, something that's intended to hold water. 3. Extras and add ons : Once you've got your essential supplies, there are a couple of things that you can add that you don't have to have, but they're nice to have on hand if you've got them. One of them is a pallet of some kind so that you can mix up paints and add some colors that maybe aren't immediately available in your ready-made paints. This is actually an egg dish that is also from the dollar store. So just a reminder, putting the word paint palette on something can sometimes make it a little more expensive. If it's sealed and ceramic, it will work just fine as a pellet. It does not have to be expensive. You can also grab a couple. 4. Get accquainted with your brush: If this is your first time trying watercolor, it can actually be really helpful to start by getting acquainted with your brush. I want you to think of your watercolor brush like a ballerina. And like a ballerina, a watercolor brush wants to be on their toes. Anytime you're using a watercolor brush, you should be just pushing the toe of your brush down to make contact with the page. We never want to smash the branch all the way into the paper and make it go completely perpendicular because that's gonna be really hard on the bristles. Also, if you can control the pressure and how high or low on the toe you're ballerina is, you're gonna be able to control the thickness of your line. We're gonna do a little exercise to test this theory. So I want you to pick any color that you feel like working with in any one of your watercolor types. I'm going to be comparing a few different. 5. Swatching Paints: Depending on the paint that you're using, you might have a couple of colors to choose from. You might also have a whole range. This is a great opportunity to get to know how pigmented all of your paints are. And that's going to vary enormously depending on the type of watercolor you're using. So now that I've got a little bit of this purple pigment on my brush. I need to clear off the pigment before I can switch to another color. This is where having two water jars comes in really handy. Again, think of one jar as you're drinking water and one is your washing water. And you want to try not to mix the two. Anytime your brush has paint on it, you want to swish it around in the jar for washing it off in order to keep this other jar as clean as possible. One of the things that's unique to watercolor is that it needs a little bit of translucence and a little bit of that wet medium to work. But if there's pigment from other paint inside your water, it's going to double your saturation and it's going to start to muddy all of your colors. I want you to take another color from the same palette that you're using and do the exact same thing. Load up your brush so that the toe of the brush has a whole bunch of pigment on it. You can practice brushing it around. You can roll your paintbrush. 6. Let's make lines: This first exercise is going to give you a chance to test out your paints, but also get acquainted with your brush. If you're not using a water brush, it's going to be really helpful to have two jars of water nearby. One is gonna be cleaned and one is going to be dirty. We're going to try to keep those separate and I'll explain why in a second. To start, I want you to take your brush and dip it into a jar of clean water. You want to get it so that your brushes damp but not dripping. And then choose a color that you'd like to start with. It can be any color you want. And what I want you to do is moisten the surface of your paint and really try to load up the tip of the brush. Think of that ballerina TO YOU want to have paint all the way up to the middle of the brush, but you don't want to get it so far that it's into the bezel where the bristles meet this metal part. But you should be able to see at the tip of the brush a whole bunch of paint just on the edge. What I want you to do is take that very, very tip of your paintbrush and set it down anywhere on your page. Drag the paintbrush with just that bottom half, making contact with the paper all the way across your page. Go ahead and do one single stroke all the way across and see how long the pigment lasts. Get a feel for how much texture there is on your page. How long it takes before the brush starts to feel dry or the pigment starts to come off uneven. We're going to try that again with a different color. And now that I've got paint on the tip of my brush, I want to rinse it off in the dirty jar specifically so that I only ever have pigment in one jar. We want to keep a one jar clean so that we don't D saturate or muddy any of our colors. So make sure you designate one jar for rinsing off any other pigment and one jar for just getting your brush damp but not dripping. I'm going to choose a second color. And this time we're going to try to vary the thickness of the line a little bit. So this time I want you to do the same thing. Load up that pigment. Just on the bottom half of your brush. You can swirl it around a little bit until you have pigment just on that bottom half. I want you to place just the tip of the brush on the paper and see how thin you can make the line. It can be a very, very light pressure to still get a really, really fine line going across your page. And try this out with all of your colors. And see if you can vary the thickness to make a thin, thin line with the tip of your brush, right next to a really, really thick line. Using that whole bottom half of your brush fully in contact with the paper. This is a great exercise to get acquainted with the different colors that are in your palette. But it's also a really great way to get used to using whatever watercolor brush you have on hand. And a lot of times we don't specifically practice brushwork. So if you want to try and vary the thickness of your line, you can fill a page with colorful linework and just get your hand a little warmed up for our next exercise. 7. Watercolour paper types: For our next little exercise, we're gonna be trying out a technique called wet into wet. And I'm just going to show two of the main types of watercolor paper that you can use for this technique. If you want to invest in something that's a little bit higher-quality, these are really high-quality watercolor papers, but there are much less expensive options. The main difference that you'll notice in watercolor paper is the weight and whether it's a hot press or cold press, the weight will just be referring to how thick or thin the paper is. Thicker tends to be better because you can layer it more and it's going to be able to absorb more moisture. But when you see hot and cold press, it's going to be referring to the surface of the page itself. Think hot press hot like an iron. And iron is meant to smooth out wrinkles. So a hot press watercolor paper is going to have a really smooth surface, almost like a mixed media paper or Bristol. A lot of artists like this, if you want your pigment to really be able to move and drip around on your page and not absorb into the paper right away. My personal preference is for a cold press. And cold press is going to have a little bit more texture on the surface. This texture is what's called the tooth. And you'll be able to feel a slight grain almost like a really, really fine nail file on the surface of your page. This is so that your watercolors stays in place and it can absorb into the fibers of the paper. It's going to sink into the page a little bit more. So we'll have a bit more control over where your color actually goes. This is also a great option for our next exercise where we're using wet into wet because we're gonna be adding water to the surface and then adding watered down pigment on top of that, you're going to want something that has a little bit of body to it just so that it holds up to all of that moisture. 8. Wet into wet rounds: So now that we've played around with brush handling a little bit, I want to show you a wet into wet technique that can be a great way to warm up if you want to get acquainted with different colors in your palette, or you just want to give yourself a little bit of play before sitting down to a piece. I'm going to take a larger brush just with visible on camera. And I'm gonna do the exact same thing where I dip the brush into the clean water and get it so that the brush is damp, not dripping. I'm going to draw a circle just with the water on my page. It doesn't need to be a perfect circle, but you do want to get a fair bit of moisture onto your paper. Go ahead and add some water onto the surface so that you've completely filled a little circle just with some wet shape onto the paper, then what I want you to do is pick up a little bit of pigment from any watercolor, whichever one you're using. I want you to take a damp brush and just dip it into the pigment that you have a little bit of color, same as before. We just want the color on the tip of the brush. You don't want to dunk it in so that it's all the way up to the bezel. You should just be able to see color on the tip of the brush. I want you to just trace the outline of that circle. The idea is that we're going to let the water do some of the work. Go ahead and outline your circle with your pigment. And watch the water move into the color. One of the cool things about watercolor is that it will go wherever there is moisture. This can be a really handy technique if you want to get a little bit of feathering, some super cool effects where the water and the pigment will pull each other around that shape. Now, if I compare the inside of this circle, you'll see all of this lovely gentle feathering in the pigment. And if you take that exact same brush and just trace the outline of your circle, eventually you're going to come to a place where the paper was dry. Try just broadening your shape a little bit, making it a little bit larger. And notice how different the control is when you're using a brush with just wet pigment on dry paper versus adding a little bit of pigment onto a web page. The idea is that we want to let the water do some of the work for us. But if you want a lot of control over exactly where the color is going, you're going to want to be on a dry page. Once you've put down a little body of color, you can take just a wet brush and trace it around the place where your pigment meets the water. You can get a really beautiful natural gradient just by adding water to the edge of that color. Play around with these shapes. Give yourself a second and just draw a few little shapes, a few little circles, drop a little bit of color in there, and then work on blending the color from the edges into the center, using as much or as little water as you'd like. 9. Wet on dry lines: Now that we have a few little shapes of color on here, we're going to practice putting some fine lines around our shapes. One of the things to remember about watercolor is that it's really going to be drawn to where it's wet. So sometimes if you put a body of color down near another body of color and they accidentally touch. They can blend into each other. And you can get a little bit of color bleed. This is something that watercolor artists will use on purpose all the time. And it's a great idea to try experimenting with it to see what kinds of color you get when you combine them together. The thing to keep in mind is that watercolor is using the whiteness of the paper to get the brightness of the color. So more layers of watercolor is not going to give you a brighter color. It's going to gradually dull the brightness of your pigment and things are going to start to look muddy. So if you'd like to try experimenting with color combinations, I recommend taking your primaries. So primary blue, primary reading, primary yellow. And try this circle exercise, just letting a couple of the circles intersect. The nice thing about primaries is that they're meant to be able to blend together really, really easily without desaturating. And also, it shouldn't take more than one layer of each color. This way you'll still get the nice bright whiteness of your page coming through. And that's really going to help the color of your watercolors shine through without getting doled or muddied or desaturated. Try a few different little circles, intersecting and just experiment with how much water it takes before they start to blend. Once you have a few little circles in place, It's also a good idea to try making some little shapes that are just shy of contact with one of your other circles. This is a great exercise because it's going to help you in our next step. Keeping little planes of color from bleeding into each other when you don't want them to. So go ahead and add a few little shapes. Have some of them intersect, but also pick a few that you want to keep just shy of the edges. See how close you can get and how much you can control the brush and leave just a little bit of space between the shapes. It can take a little bit of practice, but this exercise is a great low stakes way to practice putting down pigment in a little bit of a purposeful way which we're going to need for our next exercise. 10. Your class project: After you've made some thin and thick lines, practiced saturating and swatching all of your different colors and made a few little bubbles and let them intersect and also stand alone. You are totally ready for the project portion class. We're gonna be making a window. And I want you to use all of the little techniques and tricks that we've used up to this point. So to start off your window, I'm gonna get you to load up a brush of your choice with water. You're going to start with a square in the corner of your page. Can be square, it can be a rectangle. But the point is just that you have a shape that's sort of follows the corner of your paper. And you're going to take a little bit of color and just drop it into this space. This is gonna be the first pane of glass on your window. I'm going to start with blue. And I want you to let the brush hit the edge of that wet surface so that you get a nice clean line at the edges, but then let that color bleed into the shape that you've made. Let the water do some stuff that maybe you wouldn't expect once you've outlined that little rectangle shape and you've got some pretty defined edges. You're going to add a little bit of water into the center of this shape and just let that color flow where it wants to. This is actually really similar to the way that sky reflects on glass. And you'd be surprised how much it can end up looking like an actual window. Right beside that, I want you to make another little rectangle, another little shape, but leave a little bit of space. These are the bars on the windows. Little panes of glass are being held in place by wood or something. I want you to put another pane of glass right beside that first one and get the edges pretty close without letting them touch. You don't want them to bleed just yet. And you can pick a totally different color for this next pane. And do the exact same thing. Trace around the edge of the shapes that you get a nice clean line on the outer edge, but let it bleed into the body of water. Try to fill this entire paper with little panes of glass and mix those really, really defined edges where you're using wet paint on a dry page with the much less defined shapes that come in the middle where you just drop pigment into water. You can add a little bit of water if you want the paint to flow together more. Or you can use a dry brush to get a more defined line. Go ahead and fill a whole page with pains on a window and see if you can get a slightly different color combination in every single pane. 11. Letting go: I cannot wait to see your windows. Try as much as possible to let the water and the paint interact without putting too much thought or control into exactly how the colors are going to turn out. When you're finished, you should have a bunch of little window panes on a surface. And if some of these little shapes touched her interact or blended to each other, That's okay, No big deal. This is meant to be fun and for practice. The project for this class is to try out your very own window. See if you can get those little window pane shapes as close together as possible without having them bleed unintentionally. Try using different colors and different amounts of water on each paint so that you can get a few different effects. When you're done your project. I would love to see it in the project section. And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out. Thank you so much for joining me for this intro to watercolor, how to make watercolor more fun than foss. It was such a pleasure to paint with all of you and I'll see you in the next class.