Watercolor Essentials: Beginner Brush Control Exercises

1. Class Introduction: Watercolors are beautiful versatile and fun, but they can also be unpredictable and surprisingly hard to control. If you're new to watercolors, this class is for you. We're going to take a deep dive into the very beginning steps of getting to know your paint and brush. By the end of this class, you'll feel more confident and ready to start your own watercolor experiments. I'm Kelly Rees, an artist designer and teacher, and I'm passionate about helping people get started and helping them explore their creativity. I started watercolor painting about six years ago, and I still remember what it was like to be a beginner. I teach new students on a regular basis, so I see firsthand what could be tricky to learn as you get started. It's easy to brush over unintended. Some of the most important things about watercolor painting. But this class won't do that. We'll dive deep into the very basics of dipping your brush into paint for the first time and what to do after that. In this class, we'll talk about how to load your brush with paint, how much paint to use, how much water to use, and how to practice getting the ratio right. We'll also go through some brush control exercises that can be so helpful in getting to know your supplies and even warming up on a regular basis. This class is for beginners or anyone who wants to start experimenting with watercolors for the first time. To follow along with my demonstrations, you'll need a watercolor brush preferably around brush. I'll be using size six, but the size doesn't really matter. One color of watercolor paint, a few pieces of watercolor paper, a container of water, and something to blot your brush like a paper towel or dish cloth. If you don't have supplies yet and aren't sure what to buy, check out my class watercolor essentials, a complete guide to paint brushes and paper, where I talk about how to choose watercolor supplies in detail. If you're excited about begin our watercolor classes, be sure to hit the follow button, so you're the first to know as I release more classes in this series. I'd love to be your guide as you get started. You can also join my e mail list to keep up with everything I'm working on. Let's get started. 2. Your Project: I. Your project for this class is simple. Follow along with the exercises I demonstrate and post a photo of your exercises when you're done. The goal of this class is to learn how to experiment with your paint and we'd all love to see your results. Sharing your work can be empowering and it can also encourage other people to try it for themselves. Feel free to add notes or comments about what you learned. To add your project, go to the Projects and Resources tab and use the submit Project button. When you're done adding your project, use the green Publish button. You can see my example project in the class project section of that tab. I can't wait to see what you post. Now let's dive in. In the next lesson, we'll talk about loading paint onto your brush. 3. Paint and Water Ratios on Your Brush: Let's talk about putting paint on your brush or what is often called loading your brush. While this may seem self explanatory, with watercolors, it can be more complicated than it seems, and it's really helpful to practice a bit as you're starting out. The amount of water and paint on your brush will determine how the paint looks on paper. The biggest thing to know is that there's no one right ratio. Watercolor styles vary greatly from very realistic, smooth and detailed to abstract with irregular gradation and washes. The best thing to do is to play around with the ratios and decide what style you like best or what style will look best with a particular painting that you want to make. Here are some examples of general ratios that we can use to try to replicate as we practice. In this example, the color is extremely light, so there might not be enough paint on the brush. In this example, there's enough paint on the brush to get a deeper color, but you're getting these dark lines around the edges and inconsistent wash in the middle, where the pigment is sinking to the bottom of the tooth of the watercolor paper. In this example, you have a good color, but there's the white of the paper showing through, which means there wasn't enough water on the brush. In this example, it's just right. You have a pretty even mixture of paint and water. You're not getting any of those darker lines around the edge and it's a pretty even color throughout the middle. But it is important to note that each of these styles can be desirable depending on what you're doing. Sometimes people like to have a more uneven wash like this. Sometimes a dry brush technique like this can indicate texture in your painting, and sometimes you do want to really light color. It's not that any of these is right or wrong, it's just that we want to practice so that we understand how to get these effects with the amount of paint and water on our brush. Let's talk about loading your brush and then we can start practicing. Grab a piece of watercolor paper. An size will work. You'll also need your brush, a jar of clean water, a towel for blotting, and of course, your paint. I have three kinds of paint to demonstrate with because loading your brush can be slightly different depending on the form of paint you're using. It's not necessary for you to have all three of these forms of paint. I'll talk about loading your brush with all three forms and then I'll continue working through paint and water ratios with my pan paint. I'll start out with my pan paints. I'm going to be using this ardian green color and with pan paints, you want to add a few drops of water into the pan to allow the paint to activate for a minute before you start using it. I'm just swirling my brush around in the water to make sure I didn't get any of that green color on the brush yet. Now that my paint has had a minute to activate, I'm going to dip my brush in the water, and I don't want so much water that it's dripping off the tip of the brush. If it is dripping, I'm just going to tap it lightly on the edge. And then I'm going to take my brush and set it gently in the pan and swipe a few times while I roll my brush back and forth a little bit. Then we're not going to worry too much right at this moment about how much paint and how much water is on there, we're just going to test it out. I'm just going to set my brush down and test it a little bit. Now I'm going to talk about loading your brush for tube paints. I'm going to make sure that I rinse out my brush completely between each one. The way that you can tell if it's cleaned out completely is take it and wipe it on your blotting cloth and if you see any color, you'll need to rinse more. With tube paints, you want to squeeze a little bit onto a plate or a palette. I'm just going to do a tiny, tiny bit for this. I'm going to take my brush again, dip it in the water, make sure it's not dripping off the edge. For two paints, what I like to do is in the little dab that you have, I like to come to the very edge of it and pull out so that you're not mixing all of the paint that you have, you're just playing with the edge of it here, and it's going to be the same as with the pan palette where I'm going to roll my brush around a little bit. This allows you to control the amount of paint that's actually in this bead of water. I'm going to roll it a little bit, and then we'll test it out again. Okay I'm going to rinse out my brush in between and just briefly talk about how to get started with liquid paints. For liquid paint, you obviously want to have a palette with wells in it so that the paint can't travel across a plate. Just going to drip one drop in. And to load my brush, I'm going to swirl my brush in the water again, make sure there's no water dripping off the edge, and I'm actually going to just mix it all around. Because with liquid paint, it's a pretty consistent pigmentation throughout. You can see liquid paint is much more saturated. Make sure my brush is clean. Now that you know the basics of how to load paint onto your brush, let's talk about playing with the ratio of paint to water. For this, I'm going to stick with my pan paint, but you can keep practicing with whatever you have. As we practice, I'm just going to keep my little guide here as a reference. I'll dip my brush in the water, grab some paint, roll it around, and we're not going for anything specific this time, we're just going to get a baseline. Whatever I have on my brush here, I'm just going to lay it down and make a rectangle. The goal is to try to get the color as even as possible just to see what we're working with. Here, I think I have a pretty even mix. It's sometimes hard to tell until it dries if you have these darker lines around the edges, but I don't think that that's going to happen. Right here, I think I have a pretty good saturation of paint on my brush. Let's try to match the rest of these. Since I have a good amount of paint on my brush, all I'm going to do is not add more paint. I'm just going to add more water. I'm going to do it again. You can see now, what I've done looks more like this first one where there is still a lot of paint in the brush. It's just a lot diluted with the water. I have a lighter color. I think in order to get this effect, I'm going to need to add more paint to my brush but a lot more water. I said, I don't normally want to have water dripping off the end of my brush, but if I did, if you can see that, there's a big drip. Then what we're going to have is more saturated, deeper color, but a lot more water. You can even get this effect by laying your paint down, and then just dripping more water in it. Do you see how that does to the paper? It spreads around and you can see those darker lines forming around the edges. So I think once this dries, we might have more of the effect. There's kind of a washy internal color and those darker lines around the edges. Now, if we try to get this one where the brush is pretty dry, we're going to want to rinse our brush out but then blot it. You can press hard into your blotting cloth or you can even fold it over and squeeze off the water a little bit. Then I'm going to put more paint on my brush. Not very much. I'm going to try laying that down and you can probably hear that scratching on the paper. There's not quite enough paint on there. You might need a tiny bit of water. But basically, you just want not quite enough water on your brush. Okay. So now I might have a little more water on my brush. But again, this is trial and error. So if that wasn't quite what I was going for, I'm going to grab a little more paint and try again. So now that we've played around with that a little bit, if there's a certain one that you like or a certain one that you didn't feel like you got, you can keep trying. So I'm going to just keep doing some experiments. Okay. If you want to play with different shapes, that's totally fine. The idea here is really to just start playing with your brush and your water and get a feeling for what it looks like when you have more water, when you have less water, when you have more paint. How can you make it look different on your paper? You can also play with the gradation where you start and move to lighter because there's less paint on your brush now or you're reducing the pressure. The idea here is just to play around. So now that I have some water on the paper and paint, I'm going to add more paint without adding more water. See what that does. You can see that since this water is still wet, adding more paint is going to allow it to saturate that area with the color. If you have more paper or if you want to grab another piece, you can keep playing with us. The objective of this lesson is to just get to know the water and paint ratio and learn how to load your brush. Now that we've practiced loading our brush and getting the right amount of paint and water on it, let's move to four different brush control exercises. 4. Brush Control Exercise One - Lines: For our first exercise, we're going to just make some lines. All of the exercises we're going to go through are really useful in getting to know your brush and paint. They can also be useful as warm up exercises before you want to paint something else. Exercises and mark making can help to get your creative juices flowing and help to get over the fear of the blank page. For the first exercise, we're going to just make some lines. For these exercises, I'm going to use my pan paints, but you can use whatever type of paint you have. I've rinsed out my brush completely and I'm going to keep using the same color, but feel free to use whatever color you want. Just remember to rinse your brush out completely if you switch to a different color. For our brush control exercises, we're going to aim for having a pretty even ratio of water to paint so that our brush is full of color, but also has enough moisture to make several brush strokes. However, this is your exercise. If you want to play with having less or more water, less or more paint, feel free to do that as well. To start making lines, I'm going to get my brush wet. Load some paint. Okay. And I'm going to hold my brush almost straight up and down and just barely touch the paper so I can get as in a line as possible and just move my hand across the paper. You can see I was barely touching the paper and I actually didn't get some here, so I'm going to just fill that in. We're going to try that again and just try to get that line as thin as possible. Depending on how much paint and water you had on your brush, you might not need to refill your paint. It's just a feeling you get as you go. If you need to add more water or add more paint. I'm going to go ahead and make another line as thin as possible. Next, I'm going to try to press a bit harder to get a little bit thicker line. I'm going to repeat that. So you can see here I had enough paint and water on my brush still that I didn't need to reload. Next, we're going to do even more pressure. Now I'm actually going to press my brush down almost as far as it goes. Complete pressure to get the thickest line I can. Okay. Another thing to note with these exercises is once you go through them once, it's sometimes helpful to just go ahead and repeat it because then you're going to keep learning. You're going to give your hand that muscle memory and you're going to get to know your brush and your pain even better. Again, holding it almost straight up and down, as thin line as possible by putting very light pressure on the brush. No pressing a. Pressing even harder. Pressing as hard as we can on the brush. When I say pressing as hard as we can, I don't mean that we're jamming our bristles into the paper. We're still going to be gentle with our bristles, but we're just putting as much pressure on the brush as extends the bristles to their very widest. I'm going to rinse my brush out completely, make sure it's clean. If you want to, feel free to pause the video here and repeat this as many times as you want. In the next lesson, we'll do an exercise to practice using the side of the brush. Okay. 5. Brush Control Exercise Two - Thick Lines: For the second exercise, we're going to do a similar exercise, but we'll angle the brush to use the edge of the bristles mostly rather than the tip. The lines won't change in thickness as much, but we're going to just practice using a different part of the brush to make different marks and lines. I'm going to get some water on my brush. The paint, again, rolling back and forth. I'm going to hold in the last exercise, I was holding the brush almost up and down like this. Now I'm going to hold it flat towards me, almost perpendicular to my table. I'm just going to lay the side of the bristles down and go along the paper. We're not going for really an even mark here. We're just experimenting. You can see if I wanted to fill that in, I could, but we're experimenting with what it's like to just do one mark. Maybe I didn't have quite enough water or paint there to make it a little more even. I'm going to add even more paint. There we go. With this brush, you're seeing that is wider on the side and goes to narrower, and that's fine. We're just playing. Okay. In that one, I didn't press down quite as hard at the beginning, I used maybe the top half of the brush. You can play with that as well. If you press down not as hard, it's going to make a more even line because you're getting even pressure the whole way. Again, if I pressed down the whole, I didn't have quite enough paint there. If I pressed down the whole way and go across. It's more even. So again, I'm going to try pressing down at the beginning of even pressure. I really just depends. Sometimes it's going to be more even, sometimes it's not, but that's the point of these exercises. You can see that I've been painting for years and I can still benefit from practicing. You can try to wiggle your brush a little and see what that does. The point is just to play around and get to know your brush. I even try going the other way. Not the greatest results there. Maybe my brush wasn't quite so even. Next, we're going to try some scalloped lines. 6. Brush Control Exercise Three - Scalloped Lines: Our third exercise is scallop lines, and this one is really fun and makes interesting lines. I'm going to grab some water on my brush. Add paint. I'm going to start with really, really light pressure like we did here. And then I'm going to press a hard. Then come up again, light pressure, press harder again. Come up again and press down again and come up. The idea here is to try to get really thin and really thick lines. This is even a little thicker than I wanted it to be, so I'm going to try, light, press. Come back, light, press down. Okay. Okay. And then in the next line, we can start pressing down. Come up really light. Almost didn't get it there. Really light. We're going to just keep doing this. I'm going to try to save the bottom fourth of my paper for our last exercise, so I'm going to move over here. And if you need to grab more paper at any time, that's totally fine. Start pressing down, come up light. Okay. So you might also notice that when you're pressing harder, you're going to get more of the saturation of your color. And so you can play around with that as well. In the final exercise, we're going to make leaf or petal shapes. Okay. 7. Brush Control Exercise Four - Leaf Shapes: The last exercise we're going to do is leaf or petal shapes. This is one of my favorites and I often find myself just doodling these shapes for warm up. We'll get our brush wet, load our paint. Then we're going to start out with really light pressure and go down into heavier pressure and then come back up. You can see that this shape is similar to the petal or the leaf of a flower or a plant. We're going to just basically play with this concept and do it different ways. Here you can see that I had a pointy end on both sides. I'm going to start with light pressure, press harder and not come up quite as much to have a more rounded edge. I can play with doing two of them, light heavier and that gives you a wider leaf shape. You can even leave a space in the middle. You can see you can play with making it a little more uneven, that gives you more of an organic look. So you can see that I have less paint on my brush right now and more water. We're going to add a little bit more paint. But again, if you are actually painting a flower or leaves, it's nice to have a difference. Some of them be darker, some of them be lighter. That's where it helps to understand you can load your brush in different ways. You fill in the middle if you'd like. You can also play with the tips, make them pointer. So I'm going to practice going away from myself, so starting towards my body and going out. Then I can also practice away from me towards me. That gives me a different look. You can wiggle your brush a little You can even play with kind of making yourself a really light line and then wiggling out some leaves. Kind of alternate sides. You can see why this is kind of a fun thing to doodle or maybe I just love plants. We wiggle it here. Let's even try twisting the brush as we go. Gives you an even more shaky organic feel. Now you can use any of these exercises and also mix them up and vary your making in order to keep learning and practicing or to warm up before painting. 8. Final Thoughts: Okay. Thanks so much for practicing watercolors with me. We talked about loading your brush with paint, paint to water ratios, and went through four brush control exercises. I hope you feel more confident in your basic watercolor skills, and I hope you'll continue to use the exercises we learned to warm up in the future. Be sure to post your project in the projects and resources. I'm excited to see what you've taken away from this class. I'd love for you to leave me a review, and if you have any questions, please post those in the discussions area as well. Finally, hit follow under my name so that you'll be the first to know when I release my next beginner watercolor class. You can also check out my profile to see the other classes I'm teaching or head over to my website and subscribe to my newsletter to stay in the know. Have a wonderful day. I'll see you next time.