Watercolor Essentials for Painting Realistic Skies : Basic Techniques + 5 Projects

1. What this class is about ?: [MUSIC] Skies, clouds, and sunsets are endless inspiration for painting, but they also can be as difficult to paint as fascinating to watch. I know what I'm talking about. Hi everyone. I'm Maria, a watercolor artist and instructor. I've taken plenty of photos of skies and clouds, and get your dozens of sunsets in my paintings and sketches. I'm also a host of annual Instagram's Sky Challenge, where more than 1,000 paintings participated so far. What I see again and again is that while painting realistic skies, many beginners struggle with the same things all the time. Uncontrollable watercolor that spreads in all directions, difficulties in creating nice cloud shapes, and lack of contrast. It's your case too, and you challenge yourself to learn how to paint realistic skies with watercolors. Then I challenge myself to make this process easy and clear for you. This is why I propose you to begin with the very essentials. There are 25 short videos in this tutorial where you will find materials tips, technique explanations and demonstrations, exercises for improving water control and brushwork. Of course, five step-by-step projects of sky paintings that will help you to bring this information into practice, progressively, from very simple blue skies to more complex cloudy sunsets. To be focused on the skies, there are no difficult landscapes to paint in these projects. But you will discover how to create a simple city skylines and easy but natural looking horizons that I use a lot for my sky book sketches. I'll explain the class structure in the first video to navigate to you depending on your watercolor skills level. You'll also find the class plan in the PDF guide where I collected for you all the key information from the tutorial. I put it in the class resources, as well as additional sky photo references, so you could not only repeat sky paintings after my demonstration, but also practice similar plots on your own. Which is of course the key for turning your knowledge and your skills. Join the class and enjoy watercolors. [MUSIC] 2. Introduction : Course structure: [MUSIC] Hello and welcome to the class. In this short video, I'm going to tell you about the class structure and what content you will find here so you can easily start with the video that fits the level of your watercolor skills. I've organized the class in such way that if you're a beginner, you can just start with the first video and follow them one by one. If you're an intermediate artist, just pick up the video that interests you the most. The tutorial has three types of content: explanations, exercises, and projects with step-by-step painting process, demonstration. The class begins with explanation videos, I also call them tip videos. They are mostly for beginners. First there, I explain the key differences between the main material categories, such as cotton and cellulose paper, amateur and extra fine paint series, and things to remember when you choose between natural and synthetic brushes, and another one about the importance of brushes size choice. Next, there's also a tip video about the very basics of watercolor thickness and how we can get dark value for different colors. It may seem obvious, but honestly, a long time ago when I just started practicing watercolors, such information brought my watercolor skills to the next level. If you just begin your watercolor adventure, please don't skip this part. Next, there is another category of videos that I call exercises. Here I demonstrate and explain some technical moments that, in my opinion, could be helpful for your future painting projects in this class and in general, and I propose that you practice with me. There are basic techniques that I'm never tired of repeating, color gradients, and exercises for water control, and brushwork for clouds. Of course, you will find step-by-step painting projects to do. After the first exercise block, you'll have two simple skies paintings to practice wet on wet technique. One gradient sky after the color washes exercises, and in the very end, three sunset with clouds to practice brushwork and water control. If you'll do them one by one, you go from smaller to bigger size, from easier cloud shapes to more complex. You'll also find the key information in the PDF guide that you will find in class resources. I hope that you will find this material useful and that it will help you to build the solid base of watercolor skills for painting skies that will allow you to create more complex sky paintings in future. 3. Before you start: [MUSIC] Before you will begin, there's another thing that I'd like to discuss with you. I myself watch and paint with video tutorials from time to time too. I know that painting along new subjects, especially in watercolor, can be very challenging. So I'd like to share my way of learning from video tutorials with you. What I personally do is I watch the entire step-by-step process from the beginning to the end. Then knowing what the result is and how it's made, I start painting myself. I just pause the video in the end of each step and sometimes I re-watch some parts if it's needed. For example, here on the class, for the project number 3, I would watch the entire process, then I would put the video on pause after making the background, for example, then I would do the background myself. Then I will switch to the end of the clouds part, and I will do clouds part looking at the final step of the stage, and then I would switch to landscape. Like this, I wouldn't need to paint and watch the video at the same time, which is difficult. Also to make it easier for you, I've put steps of each project into the PDF guides that you will find in class materials, so you don't even need to pause your video. I understand that this way of learning from video tutorials takes more time to complete the class. But I really personally prefer doing this way because like this, I feel less stressful and I'm more likely happy about the result, which is of course, very encouraging. By the way, I'd be happy to know more about your way of learning from painting video tutorials, and don't hesitate to share your experience in the discussion section in this class. Let's discuss it. Also, I remind you that in this section, you can ask all the question about painting projects explained in this class. Now, let's begin. [MUSIC] 4. Materials Tips : Paints: [MUSIC] To begin our story about this, guys, I'd like to explain you several things about materials. Of course, if you already tried to paint with watercolors, you know that there are several components that are essential for that. These are colors, brushes, paper, and of course, water. Today I'm not going to tell you about all the types of brushes existing or what watercolors to take for painting skies or something like that. I would only like to emphasize and explain a few aspects about these materials and I hope it will be useful for you, especially if you're a beginner. In these and next two videos, I will explain you the difference between cotton and cellulose paper, between synthetic and natural brushes, and what is the difference between professional colors and amateur series. If you already know what these differences are, you can skip this part and go directly to techniques, explanations, or right away to the first painting project. I will begin this talk with some information about watercolors. I believe that we can start painting with watercolors with any quality of our paints. But there is significant difference between amateur series and pro-series. If you really want to dive into watercolor technique, I think it would be important for you to know what it is. I will explain this thing on the example of Sibilia colors. I paint with such colors quite a lot, although I use them mostly in tubes. In this video, I'm not going to explain the difference between pens and tubes colors. We'll talk about series of colors only. Here first, I'll show you the paint from this basic Sibilia set, which I consider as amateur and watercolors. Let's try one of these colors. I chose red color for this test, and you see I take it quite thickly, so I really work with my brush to get enough of a pigment. I will use the palette as usual, so I put the color here. I really put an effort to take it very densely to see the maximum of the color that I can take from it. Let's see what we will have on the paper. Next, I'm going to take the same red, it's not the same, but red color from the same brand. Now it will be in the tube and I will just put it here. I already have some on my palette and I will just add a little bit. To show you that I'm using this exact color and this time it's the extra fine pro-series. Now I will take just a little bit of a color and because it's fresh from tube, but it actually could be also the color in pen, but I would spend just more time for taking enough of a color. Let's put it here next to our first test. Hopefully you already see the difference. You see that was less if word, I have much more vibrant and very highly pigmented color. Of course, maybe it's not the same pigment used here for this or that paint, but still it's red, and you see that the main difference is that the concentration of pigment in professional series is much higher than in amateur series. As I paint in realistic manner for me, it's very important to get dark enough colors easily enough, especially when I go painting on bigger formats. If you only begin with watercolors, and you have the very basic set, or you're just thinking maybe to improve to buy new colors, my recommendation here would be is just to have maybe few pens or tubes of pro-series with very basic colors that you can mix altogether, rather than buying a huge set of amateur colors which will be more or less the same price. I really think that's buying professional colors will be much more pleasant experience for you. The thing that you saw here is not only for SIBILIA colors, you can find such thing with Winsor & Newton, for example professional and Cotman series, you will feel the same difference. If your watercolors feel a little soapy and you feel that there is not enough of a pigment, you should really consider buying a few colors especially dark ones from professional series. 5. Materials Tips : Brushes: [MUSIC] The reason why I decided to talk about brushes here is that if you're a beginner, you're probably asking yourself what brushes to buy because there are so many in the market and [LAUGHTER] you just want to know which one to take and I understand it. But I will probably disappoint you, but you actually really have to try different types of brushes by yourself to find something that you really like and that are more suitable for what are you painting. Of course, I want to help you with this choice and if you don't really know what is the difference between two big categories of brushes; synthetic and natural ones. Here I will explain you what it is about. Here. I took two brushes one is synthetic and the second one is natural hair brush. It's a squirrel one and they have the same size, about 10 millimeters in diameter. Now I will show you what our two main things that are different between these two brushes. To show you the difference I will take first the synthetic brush. The material is nylon for watercolors if I remember well, I am taking quite a lot of liquid here to my palette and let's take pink color. You can take whatever you prefer of course. But I only recommend for any types of exercises using quiet dark colors to see the effect. You see I loaded this brush with quite a lot of liquid, the color even like dripping from it. No tricks here, I will just try to show you what it can give to you as an effect. Here for the demonstration, I took a piece of cellulose paper and let's apply our color on it and let's see what size of the wash we can get with such brush. It's quite big one so I took a quite a big piece of paper as well. I was able to cover quite a surface with this brush and in the very end you see I even have this dry effects, which means I ran out of color. Let's switch now to squirrel brush and also I will take another color. In the same way I will load it with water and pigment, let's take blue one this time. I use my palette all the time even for doing some exercises and color tests like this. This allows me to mix the color well and you will almost never see me taking the color directly from the tube or from the pen. Now, let's do the same [MUSIC]. You see that the synthetic brush holds almost twice less of liquid inside comparing to a natural one. Of course, when we work with watercolor, it makes a huge difference. Of course for painting skies, it's also very important because we will paint a lot in wet technique and we will need quite a lot of liquid, but also sometimes we will need less of a liquid, you will see it later in this class. Brush choice can be really important for your future paintings, so think about it. But it's not the only difference between these two brushes. When I take my synthetic brush and use it like this, you see that it goes back to its natural state right away. It's very resilient it keeps it's shape. At the same time, of course, it depends on the brush, on the brand but natural brushes generally are much softer. When they are wet, they even can keep this weird shape that you can bring to it. It's important to bear in mind that it can be quite tricky to manage such brushes. To conclude, there are two main differences. The first is the amount of water that you can put to this edge brushes and the second is how easily you can manipulate those brushes for painting details, how easy they are to control. For more control but at the same time quite a lot of liquid you can try using mixed brushes. They're made of synthetic and natural hair at the same time so it can be useful. Of course now you have all type of vegan options with synthetic brushes that's really made for watercolors, for example this one, but there are really many. Try different types, different hair, different brushes of different sizes and shapes and you will find your perfect one. 6. Materials Tips : Paper: [MUSIC] Now last but not the least, is paper difference. Let's see how cotton paper is different from cellulose paper because maybe you already asked yourself why there are different types and how they are different from each other. It would be wrong to say that one type of paper is better than another one because of course, there are artists who make amazing things on cellulose paper and others on cotton paper and those types of paper are just different. Let's see. The way of manufacturing paper and also the material of this paper determines how water and color absorbs into this paper and how it behaves on the paper surface as well. This will give us the main difference, which is when we paint on cotton paper, we basically paint inside of the paper and on its surface and when we paint on cellulose paper everything like all the liquid stays more on the paper surface. Let me show you what it gives to us. For example, let's take a cellulose paper with our color test. Even when your pigment is already dry on such paper, you can actually wash it away because it stays on the paper surface mostly. Just by simply remoistening the paper surface, I can move the pigment and if I needed, I also can remove it from the paper surface. You see it works both for professional and amateur colors. Also, depending on the paper quality and the pigment characteristics, you almost can wash it until the almost white paper. Let's see what we will have if we take a cotton paper. Here I even have a painting on cotton paper. I will try to wash the color away from the paper surface. Of course, depending on the paper type and my effort, I can move a little bit of a pigment that of course still stays on the paper surface but it's just a little and you see that mainly it's fixed actually in the paper. What this information gives to us? It means that if you want to make for example the second layer of the color on cellulose paper, I just take another color and you see what's happening? It gives me the first layer washed. They are mechanically mixed each other. It can be quite tricky if you want to work in multilayer technique on such paper. Also for cellulose paper as the most of the liquid and pigment stays on the paper surface, it will be drying more quickly than on cotton paper. At the same time, the cotton paper feels more like a tissue paper and it will stay wet longer and you will have more time to work in wet technique on it. Also once the pigment is dry, you can paint over this first layer and maybe even over the second and third layer, it depends on type of paper. You will have more different opportunities and techniques to make on this paper. Although you will see that for the skies, I prefer to use only one layer, only one color. I wash and once it's dry, I normally don't touch it anymore. I don't do multilayer technique for skies. Of course you can use second, third, fourth layer for painting landscape for example, and even for doing some corrections in the sky, of course, if you wanted. 7. Beginner Tips : Tool choice importance: [MUSIC] When you're a beginner in watercolor, another very important thing is how to choose your brushes before painting. I'd like to really to make a point on this. I'll show you it's on the example. Let's imagine that we need to cover such rectangular shape with some color. To begin, I'll take this small synthetic brush. It is a square limitation and let's try to fill the space with the color. The more direct way to fill it, we just take the color and start painting. Of course, the color is not any less, so we need to refill our brush and I continue painting. I take more again. You see the first part is almost dry already. I ran out of the color again. Maybe we start to cover and recover the same spot again and again. In this case, if you work on cellulose paper as I do at the moment, you know that we will move the pigment of the first layer. In the end it takes time. We have to do lots of manipulations, and it's quite complicated to fill the space evenly. What can be useful in such case is just to think about your tool and maybe it's really worth it to take a bigger brush, but sometimes we just think that for such a small format on the small brush will be enough. Of course, it's doable, but also you can do such things in easier way. But if I take big brush, you see I just load it with color once, and I do all the work in just one movement. It's effective and we don't need to do that many manipulations and actions. I think that you agree with me that timing with watercolor is quite important, so really think about your tools in advance. Of course, it also will depend on the subject that you paint. If you paint a huge washes on big format, you will need big brushes, or even more being like this one. For tiny details it can be handy to use a small brush. But also in time you will discover that you can do tiny details with big brush, for example here, if your brush has a pointed tip. You see such different brushes can do almost the same job. But of course I can't cover such surface with this small brush. You probably will discover that some brushes are more versatile than others. Let's move to the last beginner tips. [MUSIC] 8. Beginner Tips : Paint thikness and contrast: [MUSIC] This will be the last video of always the very beginner tips and of course, if it's not your first watercolor class, you can skip this video, this will be about contrast and density of watercolors. Something similar I have already explained in the light in the forest class, so if you watched it already, you can skip this video for sure and go directly to the project. [MUSIC] If it's not your case, let's talk about watercolor contrast and how to make watercolor really dark when we need it. Let's do some basic watercolor things. First, I took a cellulose paper for that and as I'm working with colors from tubes, and it's professional series, for me, it's quite easy to take the color really dark, you can probably have such colors with pans of this type or even with the very tiny ones, it's not that important, you just need to try it and to try properly. To paint, we need water and pigment, let's take some classic ultramarine blue, if I take it very liquid, you know that it will give me something very light, it's really easy to get watercolor light, and it's nice because with watercolor as it's transparent color, we work from light to dark in most of the cases, not every time, but still it's like the logic of this material. To make it darker, we need to add more pigment to it. It's a little darker, I'm not sure if you can see through the camera, but it becomes and a little bit darker and you also may get such effect when you have an impression of adding some pigment, but still your spot is almost the same darkness. What I recommend to do in this case, you just take a little drop of water somewhere aside from this first watercolor puddle and then add here more and more pigment, so the pigment concentration will be higher and sometimes it really takes some effort from you to get your pigments from the pen, especially if you work with pens. Like this, I have this creamy dance color and I'm only working with one pigment and I feel like I can't make it even darker than I have it now, and you see how dark it is comparing to the previous one, although it's not the darkest blue I may get but sometimes you will see later that for making shadows on clouds or whatever subject it is, we need to get a very dark color. If I see that my blue is not enough to get such color, I can use something else, I can add something into it, for example the color I have next to it, which is phthalo blue, so the amount of water stays the same, but I have more and more pigment and now it looks darker and much thicker than it was before, so the result color is very dark as you may see. I know that this consistency of color can be something difficult to achieve when you just begin working with watercolors, so once again, if you want to make your watercolor darker, it's not only means to add darker color, but to get a higher pigment concentration in your paint and normally you can get it with such thickness of your watercolor. Now I take again this transparent color that I already used and let's add some dark color to it, for example purple, I have it on my palette here, and indeed in my palette it looks now a little bit darker, but if I put it right now to my paper, you see that it's not very dark, even though the color itself is more purple now. It happens because still in this color we have quite a lot of liquid and not enough of a pigment to get it really dark, if I do the same thing now, I take ultramarine very densely and I add quite a lot of purple pigment, you see what I will have, and once again, I don't wash my brush between these two colors, and I get a very dark color once again. Let's try now another color, for example something that will be a little bit less dark than blue, for example this pink, even if I take it very densely directly from the tube, it won't be dark enough itself, almost like it was with ultramarine, but here it's even lighter. For this color, I will need something else to add to make it darker and for this, it not only means to take another color darker, for example purple here, but also to make the color base like of our pink color thicker. For example if I take more and more purple, of course it will give me a darker color, but the color itself is becoming more purple rather than pink and it's not what I'm looking for. It of course can be an option, but I want it to have a pink but dark pink. How to do it? I first take a lot of pink pigment, and then when I see that it's maximum of darkness I can get from this color, I start adding another color into it. And in this case, I get the same darkness of the color, but the color itself is different and it looks more pink than the upper one. Hopefully you can see the difference and you see what I mean, you will also find these examples in the PDF guide that you can find in class materials. Where I may need such thing with shadows. For example when I have clouds and I have some shadows in such clouds, normally the shadows should be more or less the same color, but just darker than the cloud itself, and these light and dark contrast will create the volume in my clouds. On the gray cloud, I have in gray shadow, on the bluish cloud, I will have the shadow which will be more blue. [MUSIC] 9. Exercise : Basic techniques: [MUSIC] Now it's time to show you the very basic technique of watercolors, which are wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry. I already explained the difference between these two techniques in my very first Skillshare class, so if you watched it, you of course can skip this block or you can refresh your memory by watching it. Of course, there are another technique options and we will discuss them later in this class. Let's begin with wet-on-dry. Wet-on-dry techniques means wet brush. I really loaded with some color. This is something that we actually already tried and let's just paint some random shapes. In my case, there are clouds because this is a class about sky. Here for this exercise, I use cotton paper, but of course, if you want to try it, you can do it on cellulose paper as well, but my general recommendation for all the exercises is to paint and try your techniques on the paper that you are going to use afterwards for your painting because like this, you are getting used to it and you know how it will behave and this is the main sense of the exercises. Now let's try a wet on wet and then we will see the difference between these two techniques. I moisten the paper with this big good brush. For me, moistening the paper is to make its surface shiny without excess water or puddles or something like that, just a shiny surface. If you use cotton paper, it may take some time. Now I take the same brush, same wet, and let's do it and compare the results. You can try this with whatever random shapes of watercolor spots. I'm trying here to do the more or less the same clouds that I had in the first step. Here as you may see there are two main differences. On dry paper, I have all the borders of my watercolor spots very defined, so I can clearly see where the paper ends and watercolor spot begins. In the contrary, here we have all the edges very soft with such very blurry shapes, which interests us of course, because we're going to paint some soft clouds and a nice color gradients in the sky. Of course, I have to mention that wet-on-wet doesn't necessarily mean a wet with clean water. It also can be a watercolor spot with some color, but while the paper surface is still shiny. You see my paper's still glistening. For example, I can even add some new color here and I will have the same solved borders between these two colors. There will be this wet-on-wet defusing effect inside this watercolor spot. I'm not trying to paint a nice cloudy shape here but just to show you that the border between these two colors will be also very soft and blurry. For painting skies, for example, we can use this technique not only for painting clouds with the color, but also to paint so-called negative spaces, which is basically the space around our subjects, and in our case, these are clouds. I moisten the paper in this spot. I'll take one trimmer in blue and let's imagine some random white clouds in the blue sky. [MUSIC] I paint blue sky and it creates such a soft edges of these white clouds because the paper is wet. For example, with acrylics, it's more logical to paint white over the blue, but here, the widest white we can have in watercolor is the white of the paper. We basically paint the sky, but at the same time, we create the shape of our clouds. You will see in few minutes how we can apply it in practice. This wet-on-wet technique can be applied for painting soft shapes and also for painting contour forms, something that's around our shapes. Also in more complex cases, which are not the topic for this class but still I want to show you, we actually can mix these two techniques, wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry in the same subject for painting, for example, white clouds with some defined borders but with soft shadows in the volume of such clouds, for example. First, I start by painting on dry to create such contours of this cloud and then I can wash some contours with clean water and also I can moisten the space inside this white shape and then to paint in wet but locally. I'm doing it just to show you that it's not all the time the choice between wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry, sometimes we can mix them to get more complex and interesting effects. But if you're a beginner, maybe it's something for later. Sometimes also removing the color can be an option, can be a technique that we use. But in the end, the thing that I want you to remember about such techniques, so first that we discussed already that the difference is in soft and hard edges of water color spots in this or that technique. The second thing that I want you to notice is that for getting the same intensity of the colors, same darkness, you need to bring more pigment when you paint on wet. You see here I took the same amount of pigment, the same amount of liquid, but the clouds here are much lighter. I also know that painting on wet can be quite tricky because of the water and pigment control, and we will discuss this aspect in next videos later, but first, even with this information, I propose you to try your first couple of projects of painting skies on wet. 10. Project #1 : Blue sky: [MUSIC] Let's do now our first painting project in this class. You may be thinking that the easiest sky you can paint is something like blue sky gradient. But I personally think that the easiest sky is something very random shaped that you can paint using wet technique and in this first project, we will discover how to paint with some very light white clouds. This time, I'm going to use high-quality cotton paper. I taped it to my plastic board to keep it stretched, and as I mentioned that we are going to paint on wet, let's moisten our paper. I'm using a big, good brush for that. I'm going to create some random shaped clouds. But if you can't really mention something in the sky by yourself, you can use photo references that I propose you in class materials. This will be something like that. Here in this video, I'm going to explain you the order of work, so you can understand the process of creation such as skies and then use whatever for your reference you prefer. I take a big round synthetic brush and ultramarine color and adding a drop of light blue color into it. You can also add a phthalo blue, choose the color that you prefer. I will do my painting with something like this, and I need my color to be quite liquid. Before starting painting, I check once again if borders of my paper are still wet. If it's not the case, I just slightly re-moisten them. Paper should be just shining. Hopefully you can see how it looks like here and let's begin. Here in the very beginning, my goal is to cover my paper with some color and leave some white spaces for clouds. I paint with quite a lot of liquid and also wash my brush from time-to-time to have it less dark. The bottom of the blue sky normally is lighter than this, it's upper part. The idea is to keep some white spaces, but not to make them too big. You see now are few white spots and some white space around them. But I want to make it more deep. For this, I'm going to take more pigment at the moment. You already know that to make watercolor darker, you need to take more pigment and less liquid, and I will darken some spots in my light blue areas. I'm not covering the entire light blue spot, but somewhere in the middle of it, I make darker areas which will create the effect of the depth of my sky. I put the excess liquid from my brush to the napkin. Now with the tip of the brush, I'm just blurring the contours of my clouds, of my watercolor spots. Let's darken them a little bit more. Sometimes I'm working almost with the tip of the brush. Sometimes I put my brush and paint with this its side. Actually, we are going to discuss the brushwork later in our exercise section. You will clearly see what's the difference is. But here I propose you not to think too much about exact movement of your brush and just to play with your watercolor on wet paper. I always have my paper towel somewhere next to me and using it to leave the excess water on it. You see that the sky in the bottom will be lighter, there will also be in landscape. For painting in landscape, I will take small synthetic brush in the next exercises. I also will explain to you why I'm using smaller brushes when I want a more liquid and color control. Here now I'm just taking yellow and mix it with my blue color. I'm also adding Payne's gray to the mix. If you want, you can take ready-made green for these trees that I'm going to paint. The color is quite dark and let add more yellow into it to make it more green. I see that my color looks quite light on the paper, so I'm adding more pigment into my blend and adding some darker spots to this greenery. This will be a forest or something like that. I have trees that are far away from me and I only can see the general shape with some lights and shadows inside. You also can try to do it with a bigger brush. But at this stage of work, I prefer to go to smaller one because very likely the sky at this moment will be drying already, so this may be helpful to have better liquid control. Here on the bottom though, everything is still wet. You see how the color is running. I also can try to paint my trees just by touching the paper with the brush. You can vary the color, adding more blue or more gray or more yellow. I could paint something like a lake here, for example, adding some reflections of my trees. But I want to make it simple, so let's paint a field here. I take yellow color and put it to my blue with such horizontal movements. I took yellow because there was already blue so mixing them all together, I get green. Maybe let's add just a few dots of shadows here and there. Also, what would be nice is to emphasize the border between these two elements and this also will bring some more light into the field. For this, I squeeze my brush and I remove the color from the paper surface. You can only make it while the paper is still wet. After you remove the color, it stays on your brush, so you need to clean it again before doing the same action once again. I really like how simple this landscape is. If you want, you can make it even more simple. Just paint the field only or imagine some hills. Now let's dry the painting. Once the paper is straight, and you see that it's completely dry, you can remove the masking tape. Practice this type of the skies, if it didn't work for you from the first time, ask your question in the discussion section in this class. In the next video, I will show you how to do skies on wet using several colors, but still keeping it very simple to do. 11. Project #2 : Pink sunset: [MUSIC] Let's try now the second project. Here we have the sky, which is not very complicated to do as well but here we have a few more colors than before. But here you see there are no particular shapes of clouds that we need to draw to keep the perspective, to give some specific colors in them so here we actually can be quite free and work on wet technique. Why on wet? Because you see all the shapes of clouds are very soft and color transitions between them as well. As usual, my goal is to make the paper surface shining but not too wet so I spent quite a time moistening it. To get rid of excess water you always can just squeeze your brush and remove this excess water from paper surface. Now I take a brush for painting. I will take quite a big one because you know that we need to properly choose our tool. We've already discussed it in one of our exercises. I begin by taking some pink color and I take it quite transparent. Also, you can add a drop of orange color if you want it will make it a little bit more peachy color and I just put my color to the paper surface with this big brush. You see the color is not very intense. I look at my photo reference, but to make the copy is not my goal so I'm just, try to repeat some aspects of it but not to completely reproduce what I see in the photograph. You see I don't take more water but only add more and more pigment because I have enough of water on the paper now and on my palette as well and also I work with quite big brush so this is what helps me to make my color spot darker. Also remember that the color will be much paler once it's dry. Now, let's clean the brush and take another color. Let's switch to the blue color now. For this, I take royal blue color and the drop of phthalo blue into it. But honestly here you can take whatever blue you have and that you like the most. Notice what brush movements I do here. I don't make them vertically like this, but almost all the time horizontally this way. Now I want to make darker parts of the sky and for this I need to make my paint denser. For this I need to take a thicker paint and I think it will be easier to make with smaller brush. I mix with trimoline blue and phthalo blue altogether, and even a drop of pink color that I already used for my painting. Also notice that I don't clean my brush between these two colors so I basically put my blue brush into pink color and that's okay. If you want to get a more purple color, you can add more pink into it or even take a ready-made purple color if you want. This is what I'm doing now. If it seems too blue, you can add a drop of orange. I have more pigments now in this mix, and you see that the color is darker. [MUSIC] There are some lines here in the bottom, so I can also try to do them. Now, I'm adding more blue. Here we practice color values and also to paint on wet and what is important is to always keep an eye on paper drying and here on the bottom it starts getting dry. When I see that my paper surface stopped glistening for me, it's also the signal to stop. I only can paint in the areas that are still shining otherwise I won't gets wet and wet effect. For example here in the upper part, I can add some more clouds. Let's bring a little bit more of a contrast. Doing it I'm barely touching my paints it's because I'm working with paints from tubes and they are soft and very easy to take enough of the pigment but if you work with pens, colors, please make an effort to really take enough of a pigment from them. [MUSIC] Now I can dry it with a hairdryer. Now I want to make a landscape here and for that you can do it the simplest way. Just try to repeat the silhouette that you see in the picture to paint trees or landscape or whatever you want. But to make it in the most simple way, what I propose you to do is just to make the very simple landscape here. For this, I take quite translucent color. I mix it with the same pigments I used before. My brush is wet enough at the moment and I just paint over these parts directly on dry paper. [MUSIC] Then I added a drop of Payne's gray to this mix and make the foreground a little bit darker. [MUSIC] I also can add few details here in the bottom, like if there were trees or something like that. All this I need to create a contrast, something darker in the bottom. [MUSIC] Of course, if you want, feel free to try to reproduce the landscape that you see on the photograph, or even imagine your own landscape if you want. Just a few more details while the paper is still slightly wet here, and let's dry it too. You see it's quite light, if you want, you can make it darker you can even paint with black color, it's all about the taste. Of course, I will show you in next projects how you can make it in different way. Here it's the class about skies and we will be focused more on the skies. As for landscape, I will try to keep it simple as possible. Now let's remove the masking tape to get this beautiful, clean, white frame around the picture that we all love. But before doing it, make sure that your paper is completely dry. You see you can also make it with a darker skyline and I will show you in the next project, how you can make it. What you also can do is to play with format, with the paper orientation so you can try horizontal landscape format or vertical portrait format if you prefer. The main thing here is to practice and for that, you will also find a few additional photo references for such exercise in class materials, so don't hesitate to use it for your independent practice and if you want some commentaries, share them in project section of this class. Let's go to the next part. 12. Exercise : Gradient from light to dark: [MUSIC] Next short few videos I'd like to talk about color gradients. What happens quite often when we paint color gradients is that instead of having a nice color transition, we have stripes almost like a flag, even though the border between such colors is quite soft because we're still working on wet. But still we don't have the impression of the very nice color transition. Here, I'd really like to talk about how to make it really soft. But before starting doing color transition, I propose you to take a look at monochrome version. I split my working paper into several parts. Here on the left we will try simple gradient, and here we will add an additional element. If you feel that you need some practice in doing gradients, you can do such exercises with me. You already know that when we see soft color transitions, no defined borders, it means that we work on wet paper. As I said in this part, we're going to do monochrome gradients. This first will be the gradient from light to dark, and the second from dark to light. Basically, it will be the same picture if I may say so but it will be different approaches to do it. Let's begin. I took quite a big brush to moisten the paper. You already know that for me it means to make the paper surface glistening and stay glistening for some time, but not too wet. If you see that there is excess water, you can squeeze your brush and remove this extra water from paper surface or even maybe to use paper towel. You see nothing is dripping when I'm doing it and the paper surface is shiny. For this, I will take quite small synthetic brush, but you can also use something bigger. Now I'm taking this blue color, very, very light. I'm going to create the gradient from very light to dark. I begin with the very light blue first. I cover all the surface on the right, and I left a small piece of white paper. Now I'm adding more pigment into this color, starting a little bit further from the gradient border that I'm going to create now with this color. If I have some extra color, I can leave it on the napkin. But the paper and the color is still quite wet, so the color spreads easily. If you see that the color on the brush is too dark, you can wash it a little bit. Adding more pigment now. Notice that even I have a gradient which goes more like in horizontal way, I do vertical movements with my brush because very often when I paint such gradients is for painting water or skies. Well, sky is not really a surface but you see what I mean. It has a direction. You see if I will work this way, it will be harder to make the very soft transition of the colors. We will see the brush strokes. The further I go, the thicker my color becomes, and also the darker my color becomes, of course. I can make it even darker here in the very right part. This left part is almost dry here, so I'm not going to correct it or to go with my pigment left again. I will keep the gradient as it is. Once again, when I see that my color is dry, I just stop. Now, let's completely dry it and then move to the next element. 13. Exercise : Gradient from dark to light: Now the same way I start by moistening the paper with clean water because I know that it will help me to create a soft transition and also to work on wet longer. I take the same indenturing blue color and I take now it's very dense. I start painting and you see, I will have less and less pigment on my brush so the color will become lighter and lighter. I also can leave some color on the napkin or even clean the brush at completely but a little bit. Then I just blur the border of this color. Let's see, I have the color gradients. What I propose you to do now is to try both exercises and to think about which method you like the most and why. I could try to guess and say that you'd probably like the second one and you can leave me a comment in discussion if I guessed well or not. I also have to say that in my work I normally use this first method. Second one, of course, I use too, but normally not for painting skies, especially not for big formats. You're probably asking yourself why, and I will explain you why because normally, as watercolor is a transparent color, we paint from light to dark and actually we always can make something darker. In the worst case, we just can't paint over our sky or whatever we paint. But here, for example, if you made it too dark, it will be harder to make it lighter once you notice it and also to correct things in the first part because this will be dry in the first place. If you don't feel confident doing such exercises, please practice a little bit because you see, for example, for painting the blue sky in the middle of the day can be very useful to do it this way because it will be darker in the upper part and lighter in the bottom one. Or it also can be water surface on the lake or something like that. Of course, they shouldn't be perfect but I hope that you will feel confident doing it for our next projects. If you have any questions doing it, don't hesitate to ask your questions in the discussion for this class. 14. Exercise : 3 Colors Gradient: [MUSIC] Let's continue with colors now. Let's make it a little bit more simple. I'm not going to take five colors as I used here, but let's take only three colors, yellow, red, and blue, for example, but you can take whatever you prefer. Let's imagine that I want to have my color borders somewhere here. That is, here I'm going to have my yellow then red here, and finally blue. Of course, I want to have a soft transition, not a flex style. As usual, we begin by moistening the paper, and this time I will speed up this video so you don't get bored. [MUSIC] This time I will take a bigger brush. Let's paint right away. I begin with yellow color. What seems logical is just to stop somewhere here on the border between colors. But actually, to make the transition softer, you need to go a little bit further with this color. Next, I'm taking the pink color. I begin in the middle, and then I do the same. I go with my pink into the yellow spot. They mix with each other and create some transition zone. If it looks too pale, you can add more pigment. While you paper is still wet, it's completely possible. [MUSIC] I do the same, I go with my pink into the blue part. I all the time leave excess liquid on my napkin. [MUSIC] The color, though, in general, should be liquid enough. Let's go back to the yellow and I need to clean my brush first. Or you also can take just another brush for yellow pigment, for example. We're back again for the blue. In the transition area, I work almost with only the tip of my brush. If you're doing such exercises on cellulose paper, you will have a little bit different effect because it will be slightly harder than on cotton paper, but it's okay. It's nice for practice anyway. Once you will do it on cotton paper, you will feel the difference. It will be much easier. I take away the color from my masking tape. [MUSIC] You probably noticed that sometimes I do such movements in this transition area. When my brush is the same wet than the paper surface, it means that it doesn't bring color and it doesn't take away the color, it just helps to blend with a spoon. I also recommend you to practice such type of gradients. You can take another color, you can take more colors. You can really switch from one to another and do the entire paper. Once again, notice that I do all the time vertical movements and I really think that it's more convenient way to do it. Good luck with your practice. [MUSIC] 15. Exercise : Gradient + Sun on dry: [BACKGROUND] Sometimes when we watch sunset, we also see the sun, our light source. When we look at the photograph, we can see it sometimes with very defined edges and sometimes soft. Let's add this round elements to our color gradient. For this exercise, you can even draw it with the pencil. Although in practice, I wouldn't do it because that there is a risk that your graphic line will stay on your drawing. In the white area, it's not very beautiful, but here for the exercise, I will do it very light. [BACKGROUND] Of course, as usual, I will moisten the paper, but here this time I'm not going to moisten it completely, but I will keep the sun area dry. I put the water but I'm not touching the sun area. Our watercolor will flow inside this moistened area. I'm conjuring the future sun with this water. You can take smaller brush for this purpose if you want. Everything here is wet and glistening and I have the dry spots here, almost in the center. [MUSIC] Let's imagine now another sunset gradient. Around the sun it will be rather yellow. [MUSIC] It seems I had some blue on my brush. The yellow is not very clean here. You actually can take orange or whatever color you prefer. I remind you is just an exercise. Now we can really see that the border of the sun is very defined, it's a clear edge here. I will add some orange here. We can even imagine some cloud. With this orange and pink, I will go more to colder colors. Here in the upper part than trying to make a softer gradients. Same, I go with my blue to the pink part and back. [BACKGROUND] If you want, we can even play a little bit and add some bright details. Here we have a combination of a wet-on-dry and wet-on-wet technique. Let's dry it now. For painting such white elements, the sun here was defined edge, we can use masking fluid. Basically, you just mask this part. You paint your car gradient, sunset, whatever. Then you just remove this masking fluid and you will have this white spot reserved from the color. Here on this exercise, I'm not showing you this, but in our next project, number 3, you will have and you will see how it works. [MUSIC] 16. Exercise : Gradient + Sun on wet: [MUSIC] Now I want that the sun had a soft edge. This time, logically, I'm going to moisten the entire surface of my paper here, including the sun. I moistened it, I wait a little bit so the paper absorbs some water. Now, I take a small soft but synthetic brush. It's a squirrel imitation. You can take squirrel r 1 or whatever you prefer. Painting the sun in this technique can be quite tricky. The key here is not to begin painting right next to the contour of the sun, but a little bit further from it. Because at the very beginning, I don't know yet how far my color will spread. If I need I have some time and place to make my brush dryer and to control this area better. Because normally if you see the colors spreads too quickly, it means that your brush is too wet in most of the cases. Once it's done, I can continue with my color gradient, same with some orange in the bottom. Here, I'd like to make my yellow a little bit darker and orange too. You see, I use my napkin all the time. It helps me to control the liquid and we will discuss it later more precisely. I will show you a few more exercises about pigments and liquid control. I'm doing now the same pink-blue blue as I had before. Hopefully, you can see the difference between these two approaches. Let's dry it. When I have my paper completely dry, I can try to erase my pencil drawing. Normally it may work well on cotton paper because your pigment stays in the paper and the pencil can still be on the paper surface so erasing can be possible, but it really depends, so do gently. Especially be careful when you paint on cellulose paper, as you remember, all the pigments stays on the paper surface, so it actually may happen that you erase the color from the paper. That's it for this exercise, let's go to our third project. 17. Project #3 : Gradient sky: [MUSIC] It's time to turn the skills that we learned in exercises into practice, and to do such a twilight sky with the color gradient. You see here the color proportions will be different, but it doesn't change the principle that we're going to use. I promised to show you how to use masking fluid, so this is something that I'm going to begin with. I took some liquid to the brush which is very small and I'm applying it to paint the moon. If you need, you can make the preliminary drawing for this moon first. I'm doing it right away with the brush. I know that it's difficult to see what I'm drawing because the masking fluid doesn't have any strong color, so it's just a little bit greenish. I'm using the one by [inaudible]. I'm also adding a few stars with the same technique, with the same manner. Don't forget to clean your brush right away very carefully. After drying, the masking fluid will create a hydrophobic layer, which will protect our paper from color. After the color is dry, we will remove the masking layer and we will have our paper white. Now I have to wait until my masking fluid is dry, and I will use this time to prepare the color. This time, I don't want to use very vibrant colors, so I will go more into pastel ones using some Naples yellow. This Naples yellow contains some white pigments inside, so it will make all the colors mixed with it a little bit creamy, like pastel tones. Also the color will be quite dense even for the light paint. But if you feel so, feel free to use some transparent colors, it's totally okay. Just take a look at the picture and choose what colors you have. Now my masking fluid is dry. I see that the layer became a little bit more transparent and changed its color. If you don't have masking fluid, no problem. You can just paint your moon and stars with white gouache, for example, when you will finish the sky painting, or you also can use white pen or some markers like POSCA Marqueur or something like that, like something very opaque and white. Of course you can just leave sky without any stars and moon. Let's begin. As usual I start by moistening the paper. You already know this process if you watched the exercise section. While doing it, be careful and try not to scratch your paper or touch your paper with the wooden or metal part of your brush. Because maybe at this moment you will not see the effect. But when you will begin painting with watercolors, you will see that color may stay in those damaged area of the paper. Really, I recommend you to notice that you should be very gentle while moistening the paper. I normally begin with warm colors, but it really depends. If you want, you can start with blue and then go down and paint the pink color and yellow color. [MUSIC] I remind you that when your brush is not too wet, not too dry, it just helps the pigment to move on the paper, so you can really do this mixing process without adding any color, almost. But of course I want some more color, so let's add it. This time as I said, I really want to have a nice opaque layer of the color. [MUSIC] Now I'm doing this color gradient transition. [MUSIC] Now I'll change the brush to yellow one and back to the blue again. I like the transition here, but I want the color to be darker, so probably need to to repaint it once again. Here in the upper part, the paper starts getting dry, so I need to put some color here. As usual, I keep my horizontal brush movements. [MUSIC] Switching back to another brush for warm colors. You see now that the paper stays all the time shining, so this is a state of paper I always try to keep when I paint wet on wet. [MUSIC] Also, if we tilt our paper, it may help to create nice transition, so let's do it. I prefer not doing it because I have here the camera so tilted paper won't be very nicely seen. Although I really recommend you to try it. Now, I'm using darker blue to create a nice contrast to the moon. I finally decided to tilt the paper and I'm going to put the roll of paper towels. I think it will be just okay. Or of course you can tilt it in another direction, so your yellow and red will go into the blue. [MUSIC] For the best effect, you better have the color evenly wet in all the parts of your painting. Otherwise, for example, if in the bottom part it's almost dry and in the upper part it's too wet, it will move and create some effects on the border, which is not very beautiful for this particular picture. While doing it, pay attention to such nuances. [MUSIC] Now, you see I have my upper part, more wet than the bottom one, so I will just repaint the entire picture actually. I switched to light royal blue color. Change another brush and going back to yellow and pink. Now I like that I have enough of a pigment and the colors are dense and dark enough. The paper and color are quite wet now, so I'll just put a little bit more pigment and we'll wait until it spreads. Of course, the lighter and the more transparent your colors are, the less the gradient imperfections will be visible. But once you go like me into more opaque and dark colors, it may take some time to create a nice color transition between such colors. Of course, I have to say that I consider this picture more like an exercise because very rarely I paint the sky with such like only gradient without any clouds. [MUSIC] When we paint with some clouds, the perfect color gradient is not really needed because it will be covered with clouds anyway, and we will practice it later, so you will see how it works. But nevertheless, I hope that this picture and this exercise will be also useful for you. Removing the extra color and liquid that stayed on masking tape to avoid some effects if it will go back to the paper and now I will move to the skyline. 18. Project #3 : City skyline: [MUSIC] As the city landscape has quiet sharpened edges comparing to the background, it means that we need to dry up our sky first and then to paint it on dry. Let's do it. For the skyline, I prefer to have a dark color, but maybe not too dark, not black. To mix it, I use the same colors I used for the sky, it will help me to keep the color harmony of the entire picture. You see it's dark, but it has some color, so it's not just black or neutral gray. You can even keep it just like we did before for pink sunsets, and it will also be okay, but I really like how the city skyline looks here with some lights and skyscrapers. At this point, think about the brush that you are going to use for that. You can use small brush, you can use flat brush, it really depends. I'm using the normal one, but it has a very pointed tip, so I can do such small details. I'm not copying the entire skyline, but I just want to repeat some elements of it. I see that they're the group of buildings, and then there is another one somewhere side, so this is something that I'm trying to capture. Adding a little bit more pink now. The skyline dries very quickly, so I don't repaint it. Even if I don't like maybe some aspects of it, I only work in the area where it's still wet. For details, you can take a smaller brush if you want. Now, I'm taking the darker and thicker color and adding a few more darker details on the foreground. For me, they look more like horizontal lines and vertical small elements and dots. Now, let's try it. By the way, if the sky is completely dry, which means the paper is flat and not shining anymore, and worn by touch, you can remove now the masking fluid. Here for this study didn't work really well, so I will have to repaint it with white gouache, but for the moon, it went well. Now, I will correct it with white gouache. I use the same small brush I used for applying masking fluid, and I take the color now very densely to keep it opaque and white. I have this star back again, and I will add city lights now. I really like how it works with the sky, with this moon and stars. They can be different shapes, different size, and different places. I also can add one more star if I want. No rush here, just enjoy the process, put one, and then see if you want to make another one, and you will see maybe at one stage or another, you'll feel that it's enough. I really love this effect. Try not to make them regularly without repeating the distance between them. Once it's dry, we can remove the masking tape. This is the landscape we have, and you see it can be really different depending on what type of colors we use. Here on the left, I use more transparent color, and more opaque on the right, and I also try to make it darker in the picture I showed you. For you, it will be also the different result, and I'm really looking forward to see what you have in the project section, so don't forget to share the project you get. If you want to go further with this subject, you can take a bigger format, and also don't forget to take bigger brushes for that, this will be easier to achieve. Good luck with this project, I recommend you to do it first and then to move to the next one. 19. Exercises : Dry on wet technique: [MUSIC] Now, before starting painting clouds, I propose you to take a closer look on the technique and on the color and liquid control. For this, let me remind you the basic technique that we already discovered in the first block of these exercises. For that, I'm taking liquid color and I put it to the dry paper, creating my clouds wet on dry. In this case, I have nice controllable shapes, very sharpened edges, and everything is quite easy to paint and to control. Now, let's take a look once again to wet-on-wet technique. Though for these, I have wet surface of the paper and I have the same liquid color for that. You know that in this case, the color spreads quite quickly and very often for painting clouds, our question is, how to avoid it? How to keep the shape of clouds while we're painting on wet. Normally, when we have the color bleeding this fast, it means that there are too much liquid on the brush or on the paper, so to control it better, we need to reduce the amount of liquid. For this, I take synthetic brush of quite small size. Of course, I keep paper towels next to me all the time and I can put extra liquid on them. I take my color very thick and now I apply it to the paper, and you see what's happening. On dry paper with such color, I get dry brush effect, and in this case, you see it's very textured. Of course, it will also depend on the paper surface texture. What will happen if we will try to do the same thing, to apply the same color on wet paper surface? Let's see. For this exercise, I will put just simply clean water, but it also can be a color, of course. Once again, I have the shining paper surface. [MUSIC] I prepare again very thick color to get this dry brush effect here on dry paper. If I put this color now to wet paper, you see what I get. I still get these soft edges, but I have much more of a control on the shape of the clouds I paint. Of course, even in this case, it still can spread too much, and it will mean that your paper is too wet, so wait a little bit before you begin this. But in most of the time, bleeding color means that your brush is too wet. So almost all the time I begin by touching my napkin with the brush. In the worst case, you won't have enough of a liquid in it to paint. You see, if I tried to put all the liquid to the napkin, I will have just a little trace of a color. Of course, for the borders of your watercolor spot the paper texture will play the role. So it may be different on the paper that you're using, but really try to do it to see how it behaves before you will begin painting, but anyway, you see that the effect is quite significant between wet-on-wet and dry-on-wet technique. In the same way, we also can add some shadows to our clouds. For this the same, I use my dry brush and I apply it to wet cloud. Once again, first of all, we need to have a very thick color, which means lots of pigment, very few water. Second, I'm using napkin all the time to keep my brush dry. It's also important to say that you can do it with bigger brushes, of course. Synthetic ones, natural ones, it's also possible. Although with small synthetic brush, it will be easier because in general, it will contain less water than natural one, and when it's small, it's also easier not to take too much liquid on it comparing two bigger brush. In the next video, we'll propose you to do several exercises to improve your water control, so it's just for your practice. Of course, I will also explain to you some aspects of brushwork for painting nice cloud shapes. 20. Exercises : Water control practice: [MUSIC] If you feel that you need more exercises to practice pigment and water control. In this video, you will find a few of them to do. You can begin with the very simple things like painting some elements on the color or water background. You can moisten the paper with water first, or you can do it directly with water and color. Just taking off the liquid and quite a big brush for that. Of course, if you have a chance to do it, better to practice, to do exercises on the same type of paper that you're going to use for painting next. Like this, you are getting used to it. You can do it of course, with whatever color you prefer. I take dark color for exercises and now with small brush with a very thick color, I'm going to try to do some lines. Here it's very important to take quiet a dry brush. Because if you take quite a lot of liquid, even with such small brush in the end of the line, you very likely will get this water drop and the dryer your brush will be, the less this effects will be possible. Try to do the same effect with longer lines. [MUSIC] Try to change maybe the widths of such lines. Try to do a few small details, for example, notice how every touch leaves a drop of water on your line, so really try to understand how water behaves. Notice how every touch with your brush will leave a drop of water here. In this case, you may get different effects. You could also try to make such lines darker, or even try to change the color a little bit. You see for example when we had multiple touches, the line was wider and in the first technique we had the finer lines. All the time really try to keep an eye on it and to practice in this water pigment control. For the next exercise, we can go back to the circles. I prepare here two round shapes. But of course you can take another shape if you prefer. I moisten it now completely and you can do it with color or with just clean water as you wish. The idea is to paint the shape on wet, but make it this way that all the borders stay inside this circle that you drew. This usually begin by touching napkin. I put some color. I wait to see how the color will spread. Then adjust its contours. Like this, I will have a defined shape with soft edges. Doing such exercises you can learn to control watercolor better. Now for example we could also try to do the same work, but outside of this shape, something very similar to what we did in gradient exercises. Here, for example I'm trying to do a round gradient, changing the color slightly in the corners. For this, of course, as usual, I will need a dry brush and very thick color. We can keep playing with shapes but make the water current spot a little bit more complex. Now here I will try to make a color value gradient inside this shape. I will take my color drier and drier and with more and more pigments inside, you will see. I think I will do it a little bit darker so you can see the effect. Now we'll make the center darker and darker. Here you see I'm working with pink color so I can't make it super dark, so I need to add something else into pink, so for me it will be purple and I will have the very dark central part of this spot. Or of course we can try to do it in the opposite way and let's do it with a couple of colors this time. Here you see I'm painting with the side of my brush. It's still small, synthetic one. I begin with purplish color and now I will take a very dark gray one with maybe the rest of the blue I have on my palette and I will add some dark edges and you will see later why I'm showing you this technique now. We are going to use it in our final project. Here I would like to correct a little bit the shape of this line. For this, I will clean and squeeze my brush to remove some color here and to correct its shape and we'll add a little bit of this purple color back. Let's make it a little bit more dark here. For a better contrast. You see how dry the color is now? You're probably asking yourself why we are not painting skies yet. But here is just exercises that will help you to better control liquid and color on your brush and on your paper and then you can use such skills for painting skies. Of course, you can go directly for your sky practice. We can try to do the same exercise that we did with circles, but now this time to use more complex shape, so let's do some sort this time finally. But it will be more likely this straight type of clouds and this will be our final exercise for water control. Let's put some color with quite a big brush here. Now I try to make this shape on wet with another color using a small synthetic brush for that, with such round shaped movements. Notice that I normally put my brush to the paper and I do my circle movements without taking my brush away from the paper surface so I don't do multiple touches. The very final thing, we will do white cloud on the color background, which can be tricky because sometimes we need to remove the color to give the initial shape as we want. We don't really need this exercise for our last projects, but it can be useful for you in future and also you see like if you're struggling with color control when you create such conflicts shapes and maybe you need to exercise yourself more and more like to practice more this type of shapes and exercises in general. Of course here I would do this clouds without any pencil drawing. Here I only put the pencil for you to see what kind of a shape I'm trying to create and you can practice this exercise with or without preliminary drawing. If you see that the color enters the contour, you can clean it up with the brush. For this, you need to clean up the brush first, squeeze it well, and then remove the color. Very likely you will need to keep doing it until the paper is dry or almost dry. Now let's dry everything here. If you do these exercises, feel free to share them in the project section and if you have any questions about them, don't hesitate to use the discussion to ask your questions, and I will be happy to answer them. 21. Exercise : Brushwork for clouds: [MUSIC] The last but not the least, important moments I'd like to emphasize is a brushwork for painting skies, and especially clouds. No matter what brush you're using, if it's small or big, if it's synthetic or natural one, you always will have the lots of variations of brush strokes that you can do with this only brush. I will show you on the example of this small synthetic brush. It doesn't have very pointed tip, but still it's quite pointed, and we will see now what we can do with such brush. I will use the remains of the paint I have on my palette. If I will paint with the tip of the brush and if I will hold it vertically like this, I can get very fine lines. Let's turn it this way. To draw them precisely, very often, I will put my hand on the desk to have more control. Also doing this, I can change the pressure that I put on my brush, and this will vary the width of the line. Also notice that I will keep the same position of the brush. I press on it, and let it go and press again and let it go. Actually, depending on the pressure I can make with the same brush wider lines, were to make it changing. Also, I can take the same brush and paint with its side. I basically put it like this, and to paint not with the tip of the brush, but with its side. Like this, I will get wider stripes. I can fix my hand on the desk or I can give it more freedom. It depends. If I put my brush even more horizontally, you see what I may get even wider stripes. But you see it's still the same small brush. I'm not sure if you noticed, but here I just put my brush and made a movement. Or you can try to do the same wide stripe, but with the plenty of small touches. Notice how different the texture of such spots will be. Let's try now more round shape for more round clouds. Of course, at first I can just take my brush and try to draw it like I would do with the pen, for example. This actually may look as a cloud. We actually have this natural habit to hold our brush as a pen, and we work with such shapes in the same way so we can draw some contours and then fill it with some color. We try to create a big shape with lots of small elements. But here, especially for working wet on wet, we have to remember that every touch of your brush will leave a drop of water and liquid on your paper, so this brushwork can be quite tricky. How I do very often to paint my clouds like of the big round shape. For this, I don't hold my brush vertically, and I also don't hold it too close to the brush because it will be difficult to change the angle of it. Imagine the paper surface and me trying to put my brush flat while I'm holding it like that. But if I take it here, it will be easier, and I put my brush once to the paper and then I start moving it on the paper without taking it away from the paper. Of course, I can take away from time-to-time, and this just by the brush movement will create some areas with different color value. You see? We will have lights and shadows of the cloud without even painting it. Notice that even with such small brush, you can do such a big shape, and quite quickly. At this point, what I recommend you to do is to take your favorite brushes, and with each brush, try to discover what brush strokes it may give to you. Also don't be afraid of doing such brush movement to press really strong to them, because this also may give you a very nice natural shapes, sometimes spontaneous contours, which are very beautiful in the sky in the clouds, and I really recommend you to try doing it. It's your tool. Don't be afraid to break it. It's made for that. You see how many variations I can do with it, the only brush. Imagine that you have all this variety for each of your brushes. Also notice that understanding of this variety is important because very often when you paint cloudy skies, you will notice that there is a perspective effect in the sky, for example, you can see it on this photograph. In the same picture we will need this lines, shapes, and the higher we go, the more they change from this more horizontal shape into something more abstract. I'm going to explain to you the perspective through at the moment. But just notice how different the shape of clouds can be, and how important is for you to understand with which brush you can do this or that shape. Also notice that you can vary the angle of your hand and this also will help you actually to create more different movements for painting clouds in skies. Now, let's finally take all this knowledge that we learned from exercises and bring them into practice with the last three exercises. 22. Project #4 : Orange sunset: [MUSIC]. Let's do our first sky with the color gradient and clouds. I took quite small format. You see it's my hand size. Here I propose you use something very simple to begin with and let's start right away. This time I'm going to use not very usual colors. I'm going to use these two complementary colors as a base for this picture. You will see that with only these two colors, you can get very nice things. As usual, I begin by moistening the paper. The format is small, so I suppose to do this work quickly. As for colors, I will take this warm yellow color, maybe with a drop of red color inside. We'll see, red or maybe pink. In the picture, it will be something like this orientation. Look, what will it be if I add a drop of purple here? The color is very nice and neutral. You see even if I take this purple quiet dark and mix it with a very warm yellow, I get a very nice dark color that I can use for painting clouds, for example. Of course, you don't need to have exactly the same colors. Just do same color test with your own palette and choose your 2, 3 colors for this work. Meanwhile, I see that the paper is getting slightly drier on the edges, so I re-moisten it. Let's begin painting. I take bigger brush now for that and begin with yellow right away. The lightest part will be almost in the middle. Removing this excess liquid from the borders. Now I will cover almost like everything with this yellow color. I will put the base of the color. Now I'm taking more pigment to darken it in the bottom. Here I will have the gradient from dark to light, or actually from light to dark. If we can see there the way we painted. Let's add a drop of red to the bottom now. The excess water from the brush I can all the time leave on the napkin. I'm adding more color and washing the border. The central part, I tried to keep lighter. Now it's time for a drop of purple. I take it quiet liquid in purpose not to have it too dark. I'm making my gradient from dark to light, putting it on the yellow background. If it seems too cold to purple for your taste, you can add a drop of orange or yellow to the same spot, or in the opposite, you can add a drop of blue, for example, and here I have my color gradient. Now I'm getting rid of excess color on the borders. Now, it's time for clouds so I'm switching to this synthetic brush. Now I take very densely my yellow and add a drop of purple into it and have this color. Yellow with purple and let's begin. Once I see how my color behaves on paper, I can adjust the thickness of the color mix. Remember to create something like dark yellow, we need to create first a very dense yellow base, and then to add something like purple to darken it. My paper is still quite wet so you can see how our color spreads. Even my brush wasn't too wet. But it's also okay, I will just have very soft clouds or if you don't like it, you can wait a little bit to get slightly drier paper and of course take quiet dry brush for painting clouds. If you want to have them more seen and precise. In my case, the color's still spreading. Let's add a drop of blue maybe into our blend. Notice my brush strokes, I paint with the side of the brush. Remember how I explained it in previous exercises? Mixing even more densely now, blue, purple, and yellow. I'm adding blue to get slightly colder color for the upper part of my clouds. Don't be afraid to make it really dark you saw how light your watercolor becomes once it's dry. [MUSIC]. Now I can add even darker shadows to this bottom part. Next, I'm taking the same purple bluish color and we'll add this royal blue color into it. I'm drawing the horizon line. Notice that the bottom of my painting is still wet. I made the very foreground even more dark. I have some color collected here on the border. I don't really like it. Well, this happens sometimes, so it's okay. I really like to keep it simple for the landscape. Like this, you can be focused on the sky itself. But if you want to, of course, you can complexify the bottom part to paint more complex landscape. When you see that the paper is getting dry, it the signal to stop, so I'm going to do this as well. Let's dry our painting. I'm just taking that my paper is completely dry, which means it's flat and warm by touch. This is our fourth project. I hope everything went well for you with this simple landscape. Now I think we can move on to the next one. 23. Project #5 : Background: [MUSIC] Now we're going to do just another variation of the same type of landscapes. This time, I took the horizontal format just to change a little bit, and the color also will be a little bit different. As usual, let's begin by moistening the paper. Please be careful and don't damage your paper with the brush handle. [ This time I'm going to use flat squirrel brush for making the background, but of course it's totally doable with the Round 1 The big round synthetic brush I'm going to use for our cold colors here. Before starting making the background, I'm taking that all the borders and the paper itself is still evenly wet. I begin with Naples yellow color. You can even take a bigger brush if you want. Sometimes it happens that I have some tiny hair from my brush and it's better to remove it right away from the paper surface. I'm using the brush itself for that. Now let's add some pink color, and blue with another brush. Normally you already know the process how to make this background. I'm not going to give you a lot of instruction at the moment. At this stage, you also can tilt it a little bit the paper if you want, if you feel so. Just put something under your board. I'm using my masking tape so it won't be too high. I'm mixing two blues to get more complex color. As usual, you can use whatever you prefer as colors. Just my advice is to test those colors, to mix them with each other before you begin painting, to know what hues you may get while mixing them. I clean my brush but not completely, and it will help me to create the gradient. Back to warm colors. Here you can add orange or add red or pink. Honestly, whatever you prefer. If your blue seems too vibrant for you, to saturated, you can mute it with drop of orange or red colors that you already used for the bottom part. You will see that it will become more natural. Without any pause, let's create our clouds. I'm going to do it with a small synthetic brush. 24. Project #5 : Clouds: [MUSIC] I'm going to do this with small synthetic brush, let's begin with such horizontal clouds-like lines that we discussed in our brushwork exercises. Let's make it a little bit more pink, you see there are some pink clouds in the sky in this place. You see how I'm holding it? Not too close to the brush tip, I'm using a napkin all the time, so all the things that we discussed in our color control exercises. I will take the brush now with the more round tip, taking [inaudible] blue color, Payne's gray, and what I have left here was pink and orange colors, and I will also add a drop of orange to make it a little bit more natural. Add a little bit more purple for the bottom, I always keep an eye on my paper drying, and if I see that some areas will be dry soon, for me it's a signal that I need to paint them now or never. Let's do now bigger clouds. I'm trying to do it completely the same as I see it on the photograph. I'm just inspired by it. Well, I try to reproduce some elements of it, but not really copying it. Also, I don't really believe that it's possible with such a technique, at least not that quickly. The color became thicker now as my paper is drying little by little, the more it's dry the more thick should my color become. You see, as I shown you before, I just put my brush to the paper and I move it without taking it away. Of course, for details and shadows I can do multiple brushstrokes. The bottom part is almost dry now. It's not shining anymore, so the wet-on-wet technique is almost impossible, but at the same time the paper is not completely dry. We still can move the pigment if we touch it with our wet brush. Here my color is still running a little bit, but honestly I like the effect of such soft clouds, so I don't try to adjust to correct anything here. I'm just adding the shadows here and there. I also recommend you to do the same. Don't try to make it perfect, especially like right away if it's your first tries in watercolor skies. Now I'm adding small tiny detail here and there to make it looking a little bit more natural, more like I see it on the photograph. 25. Project #5 : Landscape: [MUSIC] Now before the bottom of my painting is completely dry, let's paint the landscape in the same technique we did before. I'm taking this royal blue color for that. Also I can mix it with what I have on my palette left. You can do the same. Maybe some more darker blue for that. No need to add at this stage new colors that you haven't used in this painting. The paper in the background is still a little bit wet, so the horizon line will be quite soft. To finish it, let's take smaller brush to easily get a more dark and thick color. I take Payne's gray for that. I already have some color. By the way, this color contains a white on the paper. My dark gray color mixing with it won't give me really black color, so I really need to spend some time to make it dark. For this, I also could add, for example, some neutral tint color. Basically, it's also very dark gray but more warm tint. I like this way of making landscapes. It's very simple, but also very effective, and looks quite natural. The idea is to finish it until the paper is completely dry. All the lines, all the colored transitions, even in this part, will be very soft. I dry the paper. I check once again if it's completely dry and then I can remove masking tape. If even after all our exercises, this picture seems too complicated for you in this size, please just try to do it in a smaller format and maybe this will be easier for you. You can practice the same techniques, same things, but with maybe less of a stress. I think that it can be really useful and will also take less time from you. I wish you good luck with this practice. Let's go now to our final project. 26. Project #6 : Background: Let's begin our final projects and no surprises here. We also will do it starting with moistening the paper because it's the same type of the sky with the color gradients in the background and darker clouds on top of it. At the very first stage when you begin to work with such plots, it's important to split in our head the background from clouds and really to try to see what color you have on the background, because sometimes, we have so many clouds, so it's really hard to notice the gradient behind them. As you may see, we begin with such gradient. This can be quite important. Here, we will have some yellows and blue colors, and we will begin with them. Let's do it. I'm going to use quite big brushes for that and I will put my round brush for yellows. I will take this big one that I used before for moistening the paper. Now, I'm going to paint with it. It's the goat Chinese brush. As usual before making any color, please, take a look if your paper is still wet. I will also prepare right away some color for my clouds. I take blue, gray, and purple color for that. In different proportions, different combinations, you will see that it can be a little bit more blue, it can be a little bit more gray. It really depends on what you want to see on your paper. But the main thing is that it should be dark enough comparing to our background. Now, I see that the paper surface keeps shining for some time and it's already a little bit wavy. It's okay. It normally happens with whatever type of paper you use. Maybe only with very thick paper, it will stay flat. Sometimes, depending on the sky picture that you choose as a reference, you may notice that the background, the gradient, can be not only straight like we did before, but it also can be a diagonal or even like round shapes. Here, we will have our sunset spots somewhere a little bit aside on the left and you will see that the gradient in the sky is not the same as we did before. It will have a little bit diagonal shape. Then let's take a bigger brush and let's do this color transition as we did many times before already. This time, I take this a light very cold blue that goes more into turquoise color. Of course, before making this picture, I checked if this blue with my yellow will give any ugly greens or something that I don't want to see in my picture. So all the time before taking new color, please, make sure that you will get nice blends with another colors that you are going to use for such picture. [MUSIC] You see here on the right, we also have some more blue than on the left because the sun is on the left side. I'm switching from one branch to another if I feel so, if I need it. Like for example, I do need to wash my big brush from all the pigments it contains to just make some pigment movement on my paper. I'm using the small brush for that and then I just take my blue, let's say a brush for a continuing painting the sky in the upper part. Amazing darker color to it now. For that, you can add ultramarine blue, you can add purple, [inaudible] and even gray, whatever you want. The idea is to make it, at least, a little bit darker than the central part. So like this, you will have some light effects in your sky, as well. I really like the colors of the original picture, so this is why I chose it. But if you want to change something in the color, feel free to do this. You're an artist, so really, it's your choice. Now, we will do our clouds. 27. Project #6 : Clouds: [MUSIC] Right away, without waiting until my background is dry, I begin painting clouds on it. For that, I mix all the colors I've already used and also to begin to have the lighter color I even can add a drop of naples yellow to the blend. I tried to keep my brush dry enough to better control the shape of the clouds I'm making, but if they are a little bit soft, it's also okay. I really liked such grayish natural colors. It's also very nice for the eye after painting many pink, orange sunset. I tend to begin with small fine clouds in the bottom part. But actually you can start directly with the bigger one in the top of the painting. For them, I will mix a darker color based on the same colors I used before as usual. Here in the central part, I will have bigger cloud, which is wider than the bottom ones, but it's still not that round. It has still very horizontal direction. For this one, I will take more blue in my color to create some variety of different things. Here I'm working with the soft squirrel imitation brush. Now it's not too dry yet. You see that the color in my clouds is running, so it's quite wet, but still controllable. But in the beginning, I really like to have some soft clouds and then I will precise them with some shadows in the second third step when I add such darker spots and shadows on top of them. I'm blending the darker color. Let's add those shadows right away. I don't paint the same size, watercolor spots. I add some shadows into the spots, but normally the shadow part is smaller than the entire clouds you see. Here in this area it's still wet so I can continue commonly making some soft clouds on it. I will do it right away with such dark color. At first, I paint bigger shapes. We can connect our clouds with each other. I'm taking again blue and gray. At this stage, if you want you can even take bigger brush if you feel that it will be helpful. If you're like me you'll keep working with small brush. I remind you that you can work with the side of the brush to get bigger brush strokes. Let's add again a drop-of naples yellow here to create some dense gray color. Not too dark, not too light. I'll paint a gray cloud here in the corner. So this project is supposed to be a little bit more difficult for you. Such a level up comparing to the previous ones because the shape of the clouds and their colors are a little bit more complicated. But still we do it with the same principle with the same stages of work. While my paper is still wet so it's shining. I can still add a few details here and there to make it look a little bit more like in the photograph. These clouds already looked nice, but I'd like to add a little bit more contrast to them because I know also that my paper will be dry and the color will become much lighter. Especially here on the upper part, I really see that much darker. Let's add some more pigments to this place with such round circular movements. I only can make it in the areas that are still shiny. I think that's it for clouds [MUSIC] 28. Projects #6 : Landscape: [MUSIC] I like how the sky looks at the moment. I also see that in the bottom part, the paper is almost dry, so it's time to do the landscape now. I quickly take the blue color, and like we did before, I'm going to add a very simple landscape. Of course, if you feel so, you can paint the city here, or you can imagine some trees or the sea. Really feel free to invent your own landscape here, but to make it simple, you always can keep it this way. Your choice for the landscape will depend as well on how much space you have left in the bottom part. If you feel that you have some space, you can paint some mountains or hills. Here, I don't really have much space. I think that just painting in simple horizon line is also very nice. Once again, I'm taking very dark and dense Payne's gray and put it here over the blue. Of course, we could try to make some a hill, for example, here, but it's really such a small detail. Don't forget to make the foreground dark enough to create the perspective effect. Here with almost dry brush, I'm removing some color from the very edge of my line of the horizon to make it a little bit lighter. It's finished. Let's make it dry and remove masking tape. This is our final project in this class. [MUSIC] 29. Conclusion: [MUSIC] Here we are, at the end of this class. We practice together very basic, but also very important techniques that are needed for painting simple realistic watercolor skies. That will be your essential skills for exploring later more complex composition. There is color palettes and cloud shapes that skies and clouds offer us to paint. I'm looking forward to seeing your paintings, so don't forget to share them in the project section of this class. You also can share them on your Instagram page tagging me and using this hashtag so I could see them. I remind you that in the class resources you can not only find the PDF guide and references for the project, but also additional photo references of the skies that you can use for your independent practice. Please don't go too quickly to more difficult ones. Do a few similar plots on your own, this will help you to reach better results quicker. Anyway, I hope that you enjoyed this class and that you have found some new information that will help you to feel more confident while painting simple, realistic watercolor skies. Appreciate your reviews here on the platform and your commentaries and questions in the class discussions. Thank you so much for joining me. See you in the next class. Bye-bye.