Transcripts
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.