Watercolor for Beginners: Embracing The Bloom

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Elizabeth and welcome to watercolor for beginners embracing the balloon. In this class, we explore how to control water to paint ratio to create different kinds of Bloom's, our watercolor paintings. Whether you are just beginning to explore the intricacies of watercolor or you've been using the medium for awhile. This class is great for all levels and really see what we can do with those watercolor blooms and how we can manipulate them a little bit to achieve the different effects that are possible as we explore the intricacies and sometimes frustrations of those watercolor blooms. Oftentimes watercolor blooms, there's something that you don't want in your paintings, especially if you're going for a smooth background or you're just trying to have a really controlled watercolor application. But I personally love watercolor blooms and I think they make a wonderful addition to my art practice. Whether that be watercolor itself or incorporating watercolor with paint or other drawing mediums or collage, or even scanning them in or photographing them into my digital artworks. The ultimate goal in this class is just to have fun to see what happens when watercolor and water dance across the paper and how you can manipulate it and let those happy accidents Come on their own. But also how you can work with those happy accidents to push the blooms and the watercolor application even further. It's gonna be a ton of fun around your brushes, grab your paints. Let's create some blooms. 2. Project Description: Your project in this class, you're going to be experimenting with water to paint ratios and trying out three different watercolor bloom techniques. They're each different ways to approach, controlling and managing how the watercolor blooms out both on dry paper, wet paper, and painted wet paper. After you're taking some time to watch the three techniques videos, try the techniques for yourself and play around with watercolor and water and different color combinations to see what kind of blooms you can create and how you can manage watercolor and water to control the bloom so that you can use them in your artworks in a variety of ways. After you've tried the three techniques, be sure to take pictures of your experiments and upload them to the project section of our class. It's so fun to see what color combinations everyone comes up with and how we manage our watercolor and water ratios differently. And to see the watercolor blooms you create in this class, be sure to check out the projects that your classmates created as well. A check back often to see what other balloons are popping up and be sure to give each other feedback because we all continue to grow as artists. And then if you happen to try any of the bonus video techniques, be sure to add those to your project by clicking Edit Project. You can add it and change and alter your project. Post as many times as you like. If you really fun to see how far you take this in your artwork beyond experimenting with watercolor blooms, I can't wait to see what you create in this class. 3. Materials: You will need watercolor paper. Any thickness is fine, but I'll be cutting mine down to about five by 7 ". You will also need watercolor paints. I work with a tube such, but you are welcome to use pans if that's what you have on hand. And the brushes that I like to use, our size 10.12. But really any brush size will work because we'll be working rather small. We'll also need a container to hold water and some paper towel. 4. Technique #1 Loose Color on Color Blooms: Watercolor as a medium that can often be intimidating and frustrating. I really like to break down that stigma and help my students explore it and really see all of its amazing potential. In this class, we're going to break down watercolor blooms and really find out what causes those blooms to happen and how can I manipulate them so that I intentionally get them in my artworks? And then how can I use those blooms to enhance other artworks that I'm creating? So this class is all about embracing watercolor blooms, which are essentially happy accidents. Sometimes when they pop up in your paintings and you're not expecting them or trying to achieve them. But this time we're going to really, really push the watercolor to see what we can get it to jail and really focus on those blooms. So I've used a spray bottle, water just to wet down my palette and get my chat open. I like to paint really loosely and just kinda latch the watercolor. Have fun and dance across the paper. I'm just going to see what happens. So normally when I'm doing blooms, I kinda like to work bigger. But I think for today I'm gonna do it on the smallest paper and do some smaller experiments. And really just play and push the boundaries of the watercolor. So this method of watercolor painting really focuses on wet, on wet technique. So the first thing we're gonna do is wet our paper. You can do that a couple of ways. You can do that with a spray bottle. You can spray the paper and then kind of move it around with a clean brush or you can do it from a water container and brush it on that way. I'm going to brush it on with water, what my watercolors. And today I'm gonna be painting with size ten and a size 12 brush. Work really well for really many sides papers, but they work well for this small, for what we're gonna do. But I could also do a much bigger surface two. So I'm going to use my number 12 brush to wet the paper. Loaded up with water, really saturate the surface of the watercolor paper. Then I'm gonna kinda decide what colors I want to work with. I really like to use analogous color schemes. So colors that are next to each other on the color wheel. I really like to do a lot of intuitive color, fun and blending. So sticking to an analogous color family helps me kind of ensure that I'm not going to end up with muddy color. I think I'm going to go with more of a warm color scheme. So first, I'm going to load up my brush with the yellow. Some really, really loaded up. Get some yellow down. And I had a little bit of green in that trade section, but that is okay. Then I'm going to get some water. Go back. Really move the yellow more. I'm already going to have some cool bleeds happening, but I want to push it even further so you can really see the balloon that's going to come out of this. I didn't take this paper down, so it's going to get a little crazy. That's okay. For this experiment. It's gonna be just fine. You can already see how it's starting to bleed and move out. The more water that's on the paper, the more movement you're going to have butter that water is in the water I applied the paper initially or the water that's mixed with color that was put on with the brush that was loaded. Then obviously you'll have the texture show through two. And this is a pretty textured paper. So that makes it adds another fun layer. It's kinda starting to look a little bit like scales. Then I'm gonna get a couple of other colors here to try to really push, push the interests of the piece, but also kind of push those plumes. Water. You really get a juicy brush. Lettering with color. So this would be painting it on, enhancing on the color with a wet on wet technique. And then letting the water dance and bleed kinda where it wants to. For some semi controlled accidental blooms. You can make the color as bold as you want to if there's a lot of water on this paper. So I'm going to go back into my cadmium, put even more color in those areas. I think I'm gonna do the same thing with the yellow. It's really fun just to kind of go back and forth and see, see what happens. You revisit areas. A little more color and more pigment. I can always pull it back with a paper towel if I want to. Just kinda let it do its thing. It doesn't take a long time. So that one is super wet paper, super wet paint. Analogous color scheme. So now let's do more of a controlled. And our next one. 5. Technique #2 Controlled Blooms on Dry Paper: For this one, I'm not going to wet the whole paper. I'm just going to work on more of a focus to section and control it. So I'm going to use my size ten brush for this one. Sky. And I'm going to go in with a color first on dry paper. It'll still be wet on wet because I'm still going to have wet paint dropped into wet paint. Makes sense. I promise. I'm going to load up my brush and then I'm actually going to dip it in the water. So I can really get that color down. This violet is pretty, is already saturated color. It's pretty saturated. So I'm going to wash my brush. Then I'm going to load it up with another color, turquoise blue. For this bloom, I want to control it. So I've got my brush loaded up with paint addictive back in the water because I really want movements that I'm just going to touch it down on the edges. A little hard to see the bloom on this guy, just because both colors are so saturated, such, such bold hues. So let's do another one that shows this a little better. And we don't, you don't have to use really, really loaded bold, bold color. So let's do the same thing. But let's do it with a lot, a lot of water, much less purple. So we're going to do more, more of a muted violet over here. And that's a great thing about this. You just, just play, just test it and see what happens. There'll be a little bit of bloom where there's some more pigment in some areas. But then we're going to pick up a little bit lighter amount. Let's make that a little bolder so you can really see the balloon do its thing, bloom on the edges. So the same thing that's happening here is happening here. You just can't see it because the colors are so bold. So much pigment there. We can push this even further. I can load my brush even more. I can drop in even more of that blue and have the blue blend into itself. It's really, really fun. You could just keep building on this. So it started as kind of an experimental page. So let's see what happens. Let's go a step further. I'm going to pick up, pick up another color, that guy down and kinda connect these two. Then this is really fun because there was, the only plan was to play with blooms, which we're doing what we're letting, the experiments of the balloon and that dictate what happens on the page. So the blooms are happening, but then you've also got like an image is coming out of. This may not be a representational image, but an image nonetheless. It's building, which is really fun. And that's what I love about watercolor. Like it's really flexible medium. But I know it can be intimidating. So fun. It's so fun to just play and change your ratios of paint to water and experiment and see different ways to apply it, different ways to manipulate it. So fun. So in the experimentation phase, well, for the whole class, what I really want you to focus on in this class is just having fun and kind of seeing what kind of blooms you can get as you manipulate the water and as you manipulate the paint and pigment. And just have fun. Then when these are try you can kind of check out how your blooms turned out and find fun new ways to incorporate those into other pieces. There's some bonus videos and how you can take this a step further. And then if you have too much paint, what you can do is just take some paper towel, things get really out of hand in some areas or you just want to pull it back. You just want to bring back some stuff. I can put the paper towel down. They'll soak it up. Pretty much. Grace, or at least make it pretty ghost-like, which is another cool effect. So even now before this dries, we can already see some fun blooms happening. There. Even hear some blooms happening here. It's really fun. 6. Technique #3 Water Blooms: I really enjoy color and color blooms, but you can also do it with water. So the first thing you're gonna do for this practice is to the surface of your paper. Whatever color or colors you want. I'm going to go on some fairly saturated colors. Kind of lay down some color so you can kind of play around with this a bit. What I'm going to smooth this out, there's quite a bit of variance between pigment and water in different areas. Sometimes blooms happen when we don't want them to happen. For drawing a large area. You're trying to blend your colors or you're trying to just get a nice even wash. But we want those blooms. So we're just going to enter paper fairly even evenly coated in pigment water. And then we're gonna go in with a clean wet brush. And the water is going to create the flume. Because the water is gonna do, it's gonna push the pigment out of the area where the water comes down, which is exactly what happens when we do color on color the new pigment that comes in, but that's water pushes the pigment of the other color hours. This time. We're gonna kinda drop in some water. And you can do lines of it. You can do dads with it. You can just have some fun with it and kinda see what happens. So I'm just continuing to re-wet wash and then re-wet my brush. And then going back in. And then the more more water I put down, the more movement we're going to have, it's going to push the continued to push the pigment out. That first two pigment. That was all, that's all the pigment that the water is washing away. The other thing you can do is with a clean dry brush and soak up some of the pigment that's on the paper. My lighter areas, and it'll create more drama to your piece. Just keep trying it off. This is a pretty dramatic example. But if you controlled it and you kinda played with it a little bit, this could be really cool in the background to another piece or just for fun. We'll have some time to create and you're like, I just don't want to do. And you didn't just sit down and make blooms and play with watercolor and watch it dance across the page and have some fun with it. I can also go in with a clean, wet brush and kind of push play with pushing the color back into where I pushed it out. Which is pretty fun. I just create some really poor address areas. I really like this texture a lot. These things really appeal to me. And I'm really, really into texture in general and my pieces, whether it's real or implied. So the idea that I can create this many cool texture with watercolor and water is something that I get really excited about. Then I can also do both techniques together and drop in some color and have the color push back. Now, this section dried quite a bit. So it's not going to react as much too that I put down. But I can keep dropping water into it. And kind of reactivating what's already there and creating that push and pull little bit. But these areas were still wet. Now I've got the cadmium blending into my orange for the oranges also like bleeding out from the wet. The water ear areas break and I sucked up the paint is pretty fun. Then I drag this through that shoots out that way, which is super cool. Getting into scatter. And that looks really awesome. So now I'm going to push that even further. Oh my gosh. So fun. And then I just suck up the extra water because I got a little crazy. I got the effect of the paint that I wanted, but there was a little bit of a cost. There. We go. Last wet brush dropping in some more cadmium. I'm going to wash it off. I'm going to dry it off a little bit. Really push just like a sponge. Go back in with my paper towel. Kinda go ahead and set that up. I'm going to go in, I'm gonna go back in with some other colors I originally put down. So pretty, I love, I love bloom so much. Like, kinda drop some more of that orange back in over here. I'm going to push that with the yellow. Let me get my yellow and then put that down in the middle. This is where you have to get care. You have to be careful because it's really easy to get caught up in the Bloom's. And how things get a little out of hand. For our class. We're just playing, we're just, we're just having fun with blooms and paint and water. I'm seeing what we can get it to do. I'm dropping in some water line, this edge curves this guy to come out a little bit. Now I can push that paint. You get these wisps that it looks like, it looks like like, like, whoa, like wisps of Waller or wisp of cotton yarn. So pretty. So you can get this one by pushing it, this kind of soft haziness to it. Or you can, Kennedy's harsher ones. And it's really easy to look at this paper and it's not one. I'm going to save it. There's potential for this, there's potential for this to become something really cool. Just depends on what, you know, looking at it in some different lights. And then the more you play, the more you experiment, the more you'll see different ways you can incorporate crazy funky blooms into your artwork. I can kinda start the water to run. It's going to be too harsh or too dry. Paper underneath this guy is too dry. But I can get to the other way. Create a really nice ombre effect. So taking the bloom a step further, using gravity to pull it down. So have fun play with this technique. Remember, we started with a painted surface while it was still wet. We went in with a clean wet brush and kind of started marking and some areas where we were going to intentionally push the pigment out. And then we went in with a clean dry brush and have added more drama by kind of sucking up some of the excess water and pigment that was left behind. And then we started dropping in some other colors and kind of letting them play together, reintroducing the colors from the initial background, and then playing with dabbing the brush, jabbing a wet brush so that the paint could really disperse and move a little bit more controlled blooms aspect to grade this softer passage. And then using gravity to really let the paint bloom and then run. Also. Have some fun with this. And I can't wait to see how your blames turnout. 7. Final Thoughts: I hope you had fun with watercolor and paint and creating your watercolor blooms in this class, I can't wait to check out your projects, so be sure to post them to the project section as we all get to see the beautiful blooms that we each create, what I would really appreciate it if you took the time to leave a review. I love feedback, but how I can continue to grow as a teacher, as well as finding out what my students enjoyed about a class. If you'd like to stay up-to-date on my newest classes, be sure to click the follow button above. That way you'll be notified anytime that I post a new class or when I have some exciting updates to share with my students and followers. Thank you for joining me for watercolor, for beginners embracing the bloom until next time. 8. Bonus: Ink and Watercolor Blooms: I'm going to go into it with ink. Just add a really nice graphic element to it. I probably do a couple of different ink options, but I'm going to start out with my signal. Black pen. And inking into artworks is something that I love to do. I really enjoy kind of bringing out details in them and highlighting some of the textures that happened with the balloons, with ageing of watercolor. There's really no wrong way to do it. It's essentially just a giant Doodle, which is really great. You can do some outlining, you can do hatching, crosshatching, scribbling. You didn't do it over the color, even do it along the edges of the color. You can do it within the whitespaces if you left some on your paper. And it's a really great one to just kinda keep coming back to. Because he's can easily take a long time to work on. He's going to start with some outlining. If you're new to add an ink to your watercolors, definitely check out my intuitive art-making watercolor and ink class. That one is about understanding the basics of watercolor. But at the end of it, we get into adding different thinking techniques to our artworks. Can I demonstrate a lot of different ways that ink can be applied to a piece. I think watercolor and ink is one of my favorite combinations of all time. Any kind of pen will work pretty well with this as long as it has a good flowing ink. Test, the info, the signal works great. Another favorite of mine on Micron pens. My go-to for I discovered how nice the signal falls onto the painted surface. The nice thing about microns is they come in different widths for the tips. So you think it's a really fine lines and some bolder ones and everywhere in-between. So if you really enjoy engaging, you might want to get a couple of different size micron tips and kind of experiment with combining those in your work. They're also great for adjusting sketching too. If you're going to add ink to your work, It's important to take pauses. I'm kinda step back and assess the whole work. Before you continue on x. It's very easy to overwork. A piece with ink. Just kinda get caught up in the mark-making. You can kind of figure out what to do next. So we've had a couple of artworks lately where I went in. And I didn't love them. I'm a little bit nervous about ruining it, but at the same time, I made this for fun. I made this for class. I made this to grow as an artist. You know, there's whatever it's going to be and I can't let the fear of ruining it stopped me from growing and creating and experimenting and trying. Just going to go for it. Look for some other areas that I want to bring out. There's some really nice texture that's happening in here. I'm not sure if it's some interesting fiber texture mixed media paper. And I don't want to lose. I'm gonna be careful. Be careful. It's not the right word. I'm gonna be mindful. And really consider where I want to add the marks. The other thing you can do as if you can always cut this up, like you could decide that you like certain sections of it better than others and you can always cut your piece and it gets smaller. I'm really loving this now. Like I'm very happy with the direction that it's taking. So I'm just going to keep going. They also vary your line weight. So if you're just doing a basic outline, you and just kinda desk your pen across and let the ink show up in some spots and not in others versus like a hard edge. That's another cool effect. The pieces can have dictating where once marks to go. So you can keep going as much as you want to. I'm going to actually switch pens. So that was my black signal. I also have a white signal haven't used in a bit, so I want to make sure the ink is flying by testing it on a scrap paper. And I'm just going to kind of add in a couple little details with the white. Why not? Some nice contrast? It's fine. Alright. Now I'm certainly get started, get sloppy with it. I'm going to stop. This wise watercolor blooms, let it dry and then you can go in with ink. I used black and white. I just highlight some of the edges of the watercolor. And you want to take away anything from the blooms themselves, but just add some more contrast and some graphic elements. So if you give this a try, I really hope you do because I love watercolor and ink. Please make sure you add it to your project section so that we can all see me amazing adventures that you take your bloom or arc sine. 9. Bonus: Masking Fluid and Watercolor Blooms: In this bonus video, I wanted to explore first applying masking fluid, letting that dry, and then going in with the watercolor to create the balloons. So I used a frisk fine liner masking fluid and just drew in some organic intuitive shapes that kind of alluded to a floral design. And then I began working from the inside out, building up my essence of a flower. So I kept things pretty minimal as far as colors in areas of the piece. So the middle section just has the pink and the purple or violet. And then I was with contrast also. I made sure that I had areas where I was dropping in a really loaded brush with lots of paint on it. Then also the wetter areas, the more watered-down areas so that I could have that contrast. And then I was going in with the greens to create some dynamic leaf like shapes, kind of building off of the lines that I had done in the middle. I was very careful to not put down colors that we're going to bleed together in a way that I wasn't gonna be excited about. There's a little bit of nervousness it, regarding violet and yellow. I was very careful when I started putting down the yellow in areas where it was going to plead with the violet to make sure that I let the water do the movement and not the brush. So I didn't get a brown and didn't go back in with the brush, I just let the paint do what it wanted to do. I didn't end up with any muddled browns in there. So you can see me dropping in some value to add definition. And really playing with a range of colors to create texture in the watercolor, also creating the blooms, and then also playing off of the masking fluid lines. Then I decided I wanted to add a background. I wanted to keep it very loose as far as the background versus the painted flower. And I also didn't want to wait for anything to dry. I really wanted to let this piece evolve quickly. So knowing that there were areas where I let my brush get right up to that green, knowing the green was going to bleed into the blue and create some blooms there and blur the foreground background definition. But then I wanted to also keep a little bit of a hard edge in some spots for variation. So you can see me getting pretty close, went that blue there, but I'm still letting the line exists. If you give this one a try, please be sure to add it to your project section of class.