Watercolor for Beginners: How to Add Depth & Form through Layering

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Layers they're not just for surviving the winter, they also make your watercolors look awesome. Hi, I'm Shelley. I'm an artist and illustrator living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and I work mainly with watercolors. I like to create other worldly things with a touch of whimsy. One of the things I particularly struggled with in the beginning was understanding how to give depth and form to my pieces, how to make things look 3D. In this class, I'm going to show you how to use the watercolor technique of layering to transform flat floral pieces into pieces of art that pop right out of the page. You're going to learn how to layer with watercolors, what that means for a start and how you do it. What makes things look like they have three-dimensional shape and how you can apply that in a painting. Selecting and breaking down a reference image, how to pick an image that will be satisfying for you to paint and how to simplify it, creating a painting, taking it step-by-step to create your fabulous flowers, and we're going to look at working in ways you find satisfying, make choices based on what you enjoy, rather than focusing on a single right way to do something. You're the boss here. By the end of this class, you will have created three unique watercolor flowers that pop. This class is for everyone. If you're new to watercolors, you can jump right in here. If you've been painting for a little while now but feel like your pieces are flat, this will guide you through a process for consistently creating depth. If you're an experienced artist, this can give you a no pressure space to play and experiment with form. Are you ready? Get your art supplies and let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Hello again. What are we going to do in this class? We are going to create three unique watercolor flowers that pulp using the layering technique. We will dive into this powerful technique and practice layering with different colors to get a hands-on understanding before using it to create our floral paintings. The lessons are arranged to build on one another from a deep understanding of different layering effects through to building floral images with depths and form in a way that works for you. Along the way, I'll share what I've learned about how to paint with watercolors in a way that works for you, as well as offering practical advice on how to get the best out of your materials. [NOISE] You will need the following materials for this class: some watercolor paints including red, yellow, and blue, paper suitable for watercolor, so that's heavier paper, usually around 300 grams per square meter, two round brushes, one biggish and one small, two containers for water, a paper towel or a rag, a pencil, any pencil will do, and an eraser. [NOISE] You'll also need a palette or something like a white dinner plate, just something that you can mix your paints on, something circular to draw around or a compass and a bit of time. You might also want a drawing tool like a hairdryer or a heat gun. The choices you make about the flowers you choose to paint, the colors you use, and the shading method you work with will result in floral images that are uniquely yours. I would love it if you felt willing to share these. You can do this by adding a project to the project gallery. To do this, take a photo of your creations. A smartphone is fine for this, although a digital camera also works well. Send those pictures to your computer. You can email them, share them, upload them with a cable. Create a project by clicking on the big green create project button. You can add a cover image and a title. Then in the project description, if you click, "Add More Content" on the image button, you can add other images and thoughts that you'd like to share. Then when you click, "Publish," your work will be uploaded to the project's gallery. At any point you can go back and add more images to your project, but bear in mind that you can only have one project for each class. If you'd like to share what you've made on Instagram, please feel free to tag me so I can see what you've made there too. I'm @shelleyskail. [NOISE] My aim for this class is to give you the tools to represent the depth and form scene in the natural world in a way that you are comfortable with, as well as the confidence to create your own unique, beautiful watercolor floral paintings. I hope you find this a fun and enlightening class. If you've got any questions, comments, or thoughts along the way, please post them up under the discussion section of this class. Are you ready for your first lesson? Come join me there. [MUSIC] 3. Layering With Watercolor: Hi again. Before we get into things, I want to take some time to explain what layering and glazing with watercolors means, how you do it, and why you do it. You might have heard watercolor described as a transparent or semi-transparent medium. But what does that mean? Well, it means is when you put watercolor on a page, you can still mostly see the paper and anything else on it underneath. This isn't the case with other paints like oils, acrylics, and gouache, they usually cover the paper or canvas completely. You can use this transparency to create cool and interesting effects and also just have a play around because the colors are usually somewhat transparent and I'll say more about that in a minute. If you paint one color on top of another dried color, those colors visually mix and give you a third color. A bit like these semi-transparent cups that I borrowed from my daughter. If I paint blue over yellow, what I will see is green. I've not mixed colors, but they are still mixing because of this layering principle. This technique where you put one color on top of another color which is dried, is called glazing or layering. I'll use these words interchangeably. Word on transparency, though, not all watercolors are equally transparent. Each individual color you have will have different amounts of transparency. I know when I started out, I had a hard time wrapping my head around that. I thought really they should all be the same. It should be standard I think life would probably be a lot easier if it was, but it's not. When you get a set of paints or if you buy them individually, the paints will usually come with information about how transparent they are. On tubes it either says in words or there's a little codes and on the [inaudible] it'll often say that as well on the packaging somewhere. You can look up on the manufacturer's website. Typically, if it's a handmade paint, the maker will usually say if it's a more opaque color. But if you don't have that information or you don't have any way of finding out. You can also just test it yourself by swatching them. If you draw a line with a pen or a pencil and then make your swatch on top of that line. If you can't see the line after your paint is dried, then your paint isn't transparent. It's opaque and if it's a bit hidden, then it's semi-transparent, semi-opaque. That's one way to figure that stuff out for yourself and probably a lot more fun than looking it up on a website. With that out of the way, let's crack on and learn about your paints layer. Come join me in the next lesson. 4. Practice with Layering: [MUSIC] Hello, in this lesson we're going to be learning about your watercolors, and how to layer them. We're going to look at what happens to our colors as we layer them on top of one another, and how we can use this to create shadows in a few different ways. I want to show you different shading styles so you can experiment and so you've got options. I'm not trying to teach you just the way I like to do things, I want to give you choices so that you can paint things in whatever way you find the most fun. First things first, let's go ahead and put a drop of water in our purest yellow, red, and blue to get them activating. While they're activating, let's get a piece of paper and draw 12 boxes in a four by three grid. They don't have to be perfect in any way, shape, or form, it's just a place to put paint so you don't have to spend a lot of time over this. Once you've got your boxes down, I want you to divide every single box in half and then divide one of those halves in half again. We should have three sections for each box, one big and two smaller ones. I'm doing mine diagonally because I think it looks cool but you do it and whatever way works for you. When we've done that, we're going to get our colors ready to paint by mixing up a fairly watered-down version of each color. To avoid wasting paint, I scrape the brush against the side of my palette to get as much paint out of the bristles before I rinse off the brush in the jar of water that I've decided is my dirty water jar. Then I dip my brush into the clean water jar to get fresh water on the brush for the next color. That way our colors don't get mixed or muddy looking. We're mixing up a good amount of each color because we're going to need a lot and life is going to be easier if we don't run out before we're finished. [LAUGHTER] Now, once we've got our colors ready, we're going to paint the boxes in with clear water first. What?!? Yes. We're going to paint them in with water first, this is so we can use a technique called dispersion. I've got a whole class about this if you want to do a deep dive on this technique but for our purposes here, we're just going to fill these boxes, and paint them in with water. We don't want it to look all like a puddle or smooth with water flowing around inside it, we should still be able to see a bit of the texture of the paper. If you tilt the page, you should be able to get it to catch the light in a way that lets you see the water more easily, and if there's too much, you can dry your brush off on a paper towel or a rag and use your brush like a sponge to soak up the excess. Having the squares already wet, dilutes the paint a little bit, in what I think is a super fun way. Once you've got your first row of four boxes painted in with water then paint those four boxes yellow using that watery mix that you've already prepared. When that's done, repeat this process for the next row. So wet all the boxes first, but not too wet, and then add the watery mix of red paint to each box. Don't stress about staying within the lines, it's no big deal. Then I repeat this process for the last row. So wet all the boxes first, but not too wet [LAUGHTER] and then add the watery mix of blue paint. Once they've all been painted, we need to wait until they are completely dry, this could take awhile so you might want to use a tool to speed up the drying process like a hairdryer or heat gun if you have one. But if you don't, no worries, you'll just need to be patient. Go make yourself a cuppa or do something nice while you're waiting. Once your squares are dry, we're ready to move on to the next step. We're going to paint the half that we sub-divided with the same watery mix of color. This means half of each square will have been painted twice, and the other half will have been painted once. This is layering! We're putting a second layer of the same color down. On top of my yellows, I'm going to fill in all of these triangles yellow, for my reds, red, and for my blues, blue. Go ahead and get all of those halves filled in and again, don't stress about staying in the lines. Again, we're going to let those dry, they need to be completely dry before we go on to the next step. Now we're ready to move on to the third layer. We're going to tackle these by columns this time; 1, 2, 3, and 4. We're going to work with one of the quarters that already has two layers of paint. For the first column, we're going to paint that little quarter with the same color that we've used for all the other layers. This is a third layer of the same color for each of those. The second column, for the little quarter, we're going to use the colors straight from the pan, the same color that we've already used in our square, this will give us a stronger version of the same color, so go ahead and do that for those two columns. For the third column, we're going to do something different entirely. We're going to use opposite colors. By opposite colors, I mean opposite on the color wheel. If you haven't seen one before, this is a color wheel. It shows all of the colors of the spectrum, and how they relate to one another. An opposite color is literally the color that's opposite that one on the color wheel if you draw a line right through the diameter of the circle. For yellow, that's purple, for blue, that's orange, and for red, that's green. We're going to use the colors that you've already got on your palette to mix those colors up. To get your purple, take a bit of your red, and mix it with a bit of your blue. To get your orange, take a bit of yellow, and a bit of our red to make up our orange mix up, and to get your green, mix your yellow and your blue. On our third column, paint the purple mix on top of one of the yellow quarters, then the green on top of the red quarter, and finally the orange on top of the blue quarter. With this, we can see how layering can change the appearance of colors; the purple, green, and orange, which are so clear on my palette look nothing like that once they're painted on top of their opposite colors. All right. Now we're onto our last column. For this, we're going to make up a muted color, and what I mean by that is a color that's not so bright and pure. We're going to do that by mixing the opposite colors so the purple that we made, we're going to mix that with some yellow. I'm going to keep mixing this until we've got a very grayish looking yellow. Once we've got that, we're going to paint this color onto the quarter in our final column on the yellow square. For the red square, we're going to mix the green that we've made with the red that we've been using to make a muted gray red, and then paint with that. For the blue square, we're going to mix the orange we made with some of the blue that we have to make a muted gray blue and then paint that in our final section. That sounds finished with the squares. Once they're dry, if we take a look at what we've done in our first column, where we use the same color throughout and the same mix of that color, what we have is a really fairly gradual transition from our lightest shade to our deepest shade. This is really great for a subtle gradient, and it can also be a way to deepen color without risking getting that weird, shiny look that you can get if you put the color on too thickly to start with. In our second column, where we use the thicker or more deeper color mix for that final shade, you can see there's a more dramatic transition, and you might want to use that in some cases where there are sharper shadows or you want a more graphic look. It also works well if you're painting with just one color and monochrome, and you want to show deepening shadows. In our third column, what have we got? We've got more dramatic, I would say bold, shading. By adding the complimentary or the opposite color on top, it's created quite a dark gray that contrast strongly with the colors next to it. So you can create some quite bold dramatic effects with this layering. Remember, this is the column where we painted the opposite color on that final quarter so understand how layering changes how we see colors, and that's quite important. If you want to use different colors on top of one another, you need to take into account that you'll still see some of the underlying color. You can use that to create all kinds of different effects which I think is super fun, and can be a bit unpredictable. I use that exact technique to paint this leaf. I did the first layer in yellow, and then I painted on top with blue, I never used a green or mixed my own green. The layering effect did that for me, and I think that's super cool. In the last set of squares where we layered a grayish color on top, you can see that's created a darker version of the original color and I think this gives a more subtle or natural shadow. This is the shading that I'm going to be working with for the rest of this class but you can feel free to experiment with whichever shading method you find the more interesting or try all four of them. These are four different ways of using layering to create shading effects. When you're ready, come join me in the next lesson where we're going to put this into practice to give a simple object, form, and depth. See you there! [MUSIC] 5. Shading: Giving Shapes Form: [MUSIC] Hey, welcome back. Ready to make something with form? In this lesson we're going to practice creating a sphere. To break this down, we're going to use just three layers to create this effect; a highlight layer, a mid-tone layer, and a shadow layer. With just those three layers, you can make anything look like it has form, volume, dimension, wherever you want to call it, it makes things pop off the page, and that's what we're going to do here. If you have a look at this shot from a cartoon that is called Bluey. It's totally amazing, but that's beside the point. If you check out the Dad's ice cream, you can see there's three different shades of brown that are used to make it look 3D. You can tell from that that it's curved, what its texture is like and where the light's coming from, all from just three shades. That's what we're going to use. We're going to start off by drawing three circles. I'm going to trace around this jar of paint. You can trace around something too, use a compass, do it freehand. Wherever you're feeling like today, just so long as we end up with three circles. Next, I want you to draw a bean shape on the upper left of your first circle and a crescent moon shape on the opposite side of the circle. My crescent is a bit skinny, so I'm going to thicken up a bit. Don't stress if your shapes are wonky, it's totally fine. Spoiler alert; these are going to be our shadow and highlight areas. Now, I want you to pick three colors, whatever three colors are calling to you today. It really doesn't matter. It's just whatever brings you joy. Pick your colors and add a drop of water to them to help the paints activate. Then go ahead and make up a watery mix of your first color. We're going to make quite a lot so that we don't run out. Once that's done, we're going to paint our first circle, the one with the bean, with water. This is just like what we did in the last lesson. We want them to be wet, but where you can still see the texture of the paper. Now I didn't clean my brush properly so the water is a bit greenish, but that's okay because now we're going to drop the colors I just mixed into my bean circle. We're going to repeat this process on our two other beanless circles. For my second one, I'm making a purple mix and for my third one, a light red. [MUSIC] This first layer is our highlight layer. Once that's done, we'll dry our layers or let them dry by themselves. Go get yourself a cup of tea, watch some cat videos, look at some student projects. Once that's dry, we're going to paint our second layer. This is the mid-tone layer. The bean on our first layer is going to be the highlight. The pale is spot on the shape. On our next layer, we're going to avoid that bit, but paint over everything else. That way the bean will be paler than everything else. When you've done that for your first circle, try marking the bean shape on your other two circles with paint using whatever color you started with on that circle. For those circles, you're going to have to make up where the bean is because you haven't drawn it in first. That might be more fun. Or you might find it a bit stressful or challenging, but have a go and see how you feel about the process. Get the second layer done, these are our mid-tones. Once that's all dry, we can move on to our final layer, our shadow layer. I'm going to go for the fourth option from our layering exercise where I create what is sometimes called a tonal gray. This just means a gray that doesn't come from being a pale version of black, it comes from mixing two or more colors together. Here's something that blew my mind. Gray is just a blue-ish version of brown. Who knew. I'm going to make a gray from the colors that I picked for my circles and they're opposite. If you want to do the same thing but you're not sure what the opposite of your colors are, have a look at the color wheel. I've got it onscreen. Just know and you can also find that in the resources section of this class. You can also try any of the other three approaches if you prefer. Get your shadow color ready and paint that crescent moon shape in your first circle. This will be your shadow. For your next two circles, choose your shadow color, prepare it, and then paint a crescent moon shape directly opposite your beans. You might want to experiment and make them fatter moons than your first circle or thinner moons, or one of each since you've got two circles to play with here. When you're done, let it dry and take a moment to look at what you've created. Do they look more 3D to you? Do they have more form, more dimension? Are they more like a sphere than a circle? No. I find this so exciting because it's such a powerful technique that's also so simple once you wrap your head around it. This technique of having lighter bits, the highlights and darker bits, the shadows is what we're going to use to give our flower paintings form and dimension. On these spheres, I've got a really sharp line between the highlights, the mid-tones, and the shadows. That's a stylistic choice. It doesn't look particularly natural and that's fine. I like the look of this. I think it's fun. If I wanted it to look more natural, I could use more layers with a more subtle color change between each layer or blur the line of the highlight and also the shadow to create a gradient. You can make a blurry gradient by running a damp brush over the boundary while the paint is still a bit damp. A bit of if it will seep out and that will make a gradient. Do take a minute to think about how the two different processes of creating highlights and shadows felt for you. The first one was a planned and sketched approach where we drew in those areas first, the second was more spontaneous, where we went straight to painting them in. If you'd like to share a little bit about that when you upload your project, I'd love to hear about it. It's also worth thinking about that because you can choose how you want to approach the main flower paintings. If you want to draw the highlights and the shadows first, or if you'd rather paint them and more spontaneously. Neither is right or wrong. It's just personal preference. Now we've got a handle on how to use layers to create form. We're going to look at how to select and simplify a floral reference image into something that feels manageable for you to paint. Come join me there. [MUSIC] 6. Choosing a Reference: [MUSIC] Hello, Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about how to pick a reference picture and how to break it down into something manageable. Sometimes it can feel super intimidating to even consider painting something from real life. You don't know where to start and whenever I feel like this, and not just about painting, one of the things I find most helpful is to break it down and simplify whatever it is into more manageable chunks. That's what we're going to talk about here. Say I want to paint some flowers. I would always use a reference for this if I want it to be realistic because my brain just make stuff up. All our brains do. It's a normally super useful skill we have of being able to fill in the blanks, so to speak. A lot at the time that's making stuff up skill is really fun and creative. But if you're trying to make something that looks like something else, having a picture of that thing is so helpful because it stops our brain from just making up their own stuff. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, without looking at it, try to draw the home screen of your phone. It doesn't have to be a masterpiece, just a quick sketch showing the main elements and where they are on the screen in relation to one another. I'll wait. You can just pause this and have a go. [NOISE] Now, compare your sketch to the real thing. I'm betting there will be significant differences and that's why reference images are so helpful. First off, when you're picking a reference image, you want to go for something that excites you, that when you look at, you think, oh, that's gorgeous, I really like that. I want to make something like that. It's also important to get an image that has a good amount of contrast, so that's a good variation from the highlights to the shadows. That'll make it much more satisfying to paint. Now, to make things easier on yourself, you might want to go with flowers that are a single color and not different shades or wildly different shades within the one flower. That can be tricky to do when you're also getting to grips with shading. That said, if you want to go for it, feel free. I'm not the boss of you. [LAUGHTER] One caveat to the color thing is, pick a color that's not white. Painting white is a whole other level of complexity that I'm not going to cover in this class, because water color and white needs a whole class to itself. I've created an inspiration board on Pinterest to help you find gorgeous pictures of flowers that are single color and have a nice amount of contrast. These are flowers that I think would be good ones to paint using the techniques in this class. You can find the link to the Pinterest board and the class information below. What's next once you've picked a few non-white single color flowers that you find exciting and inspiring? You're going to blur the picture. The quickest way of doing that is by squinting. When you squint at things, it makes them more blurry. But you might also want to use a picture editing app to make it blurry wherever you find works best for you is totally fine. Now, why are we blurring the picture? When you look at something, particularly things like flowers that have an enormous amount of detail in them, it can get a bit overwhelming and you can get lost in all that detail. By blurring it we smooth out a lot of the detail, and that just lets us see the basic shapes and where the main points of color are; the highlights, the mid tones, and the shadows. From those things we start to figure out how to paint it without being overwhelmed by the detail. Your task for this lesson is to find one or more reference pictures of flowers that inspire you, which are a single color and not white. I'll put up the ones that I'm going to use and you're welcome to use them too particularly on your first run through. But if you do that, you might want to repeat the process but with your own images. Go find some images you love and come join me in the next lesson where I'm going to talk about setting up a rough sketch before you begin painting. [MUSIC] 7. Rough Sketch: [MUSIC] Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at creating the rough sketches we're going to use to guide our painting. The principle for how we do this remains the same whether we want something that looks realistic or whether we want something that looks more stylized. Either way, it all starts with figuring out the shapes that make the object and where they're going to sit on the page. Now, if you feel like you can't draw or the thought of this is stressing you out, take a breath. I'm going to show you how I approach sketching these three images, starting with the most simple shape, the crocus bud to a slightly more complex shape with the peace lily through to the final image a magnolia, and that's the most complex shape. I'll run most of this footage in real-time so you can see just how long it actually takes. I think sometimes with the widespread use of time lapse to show art being made it can make it look much faster, more confident and more first-time than it really is. I have an eraser and I'm not scared to use it. I'm not going to sketch in the highlights and the shadows, but if you would prefer to, you're more than welcome. I've created a version of each photo, simplified to show where I would divide the highlights, mid tones, and shadows which you can use for reference if you're using the same photos as me. Where we draw these lines sometimes it's really clear if there is a sharp boundary, other times it's more fuzzy and you have to make a judgment call unless you're going to make a gradient there. That's just personal style option that'll come with practice. To begin, I think about how big I want this crocus bud to be on the page and then I very roughly mark in its outline. I'm ignoring that little petal that's sticking out to the right there because I want to concentrate on the main shape of the crocus bud, that long narrow shape, and I think having that little bit of petal poking out is messy. I'm making an artistic choice here to ignore that. You can make similar choices about what bits of the plant you want to include and what bits you want to exclude. I'm not entirely happy with the top part so I rub it out and have another go at it. All of the time, I'm referring back to the photo of the crocus and adapting my lines to what I see there. When I'm happy with the outline, I move on to the next flower. For my peace lily, again I have a think about how it's going to sit on the page with some pretend lines before I actually start making marks. This is a bit of a more complex shape with straightish lines in the lower half and a curved upper section. I roughly mark this in and then decide that's not quite how I want it to be so I erase this and try again. You can see me moving my pencil from the top of the page to the straight line and that's me working out scale. What proportion of the whole flower is this curved upper shape? Once I feel like I've got a handle on that, I put my lines down. Once they're done, then I start to refine the rest of the shape. I'm mainly interested in the outline of the shape and the main structure of the folded petal which is where most of the shadows will be concentrated. Once I'm happy with this flower, I move on to the magnolia. [MUSIC] When I'm thinking about how to position this on the page, I have to adapt my sketch a little bit on the right here because I don't have enough space and I don't want to shrink the rest of the flower down. Here I'm definitely representing this magnolia without completely replicating it. I'm marking in the outlines of each petal, much like I did with the peace lily as these are the areas where the shadows will be concentrated and I'm taking a bit of time to refine those lines to get them where I feel happy with them. Marking the outline of this magnolia, I'm choosing to simplify and merge together two of the petals. I think that extra detail back there won't add anything to my finished piece so again I'm making a choice about excluding it in favor of simplifying the overall shape. You are also free to make similar choices with your flowers, you can choose what to ignore, what to simplify, and if you like what to add in. I can see that the petals are somewhat triangular at the top, so I'm making sure that my outline captures these pointy shapes. I'm constantly looking back at my reference photo. Now I've got the outline of the magnolia, the silhouette, I'm going in to get that petal that's on the interior position right. I can see that it crosses over these other petals so once I'm happy with the placement, I draw my line in. With all the petals done, I look at the whole shape I've drawn and go in with my eraser to remove those little bits of line where the petals have crossed over and the line is not needed. I'm also looking to see if there's anything I want to tweak. I'm trying to avoid the temptation to make this flower more symmetrical and perfect than it really is because it's those imperfections that make it look more lifelike, which is the look I'm going for in this piece. If you want to make something more stylized, you could really lean in to making those shapes more regular and you'll get a totally different effect and that can be really cool too. That's it. I don't need anything more than this for the initial sketch. It's really just a guide that I can use to hang my painting off. If you're more comfortable with the highlights and the shadows also drawn in, I encourage you to do that, although maybe be bold and try leaving off for one of the three flowers and see how you find working in that way. That's enough to get started with. Once you've got your sketch is ready, we're ready to move on to the next lesson, where we're going to pick out the colors that we'll use. Come join me when you're ready. [MUSIC] 8. Preparing Your Colors: [MUSIC] Hi folks. Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to look at getting your colors ready. These are the colors that you're going to use in your painting. Before we get into this, I want to say a few words about the colors that you use. You don't have to replicate reality, this is art. You can match the real color if you want and you're very welcomed to, but you can also just paint with colors that you like. Even if you're doing a very recognizable flower, you can still paint it in whatever colors you want because you know what? This is your art and it has to please you and only you, so paint whatever colors make you happy. You want a bright blue puppy, go for it. A turquoise Magnolia. Why not? I'm going to stick fairly close to my reference images, but I'm not going to sweat it if the shades are different. I don't really care that much about it as I'm not trying to recreate reality, I'm representing it and that's a different thing. This is for pleasure, for fun. If I wanted something to be completely exact, I would probably just take a photograph of it. Speaking of colors I'm going to talk a little bit about getting colors to be the way you want them to be when they're dry. Sometimes it can be a bit disappointing because the color will look one way when it's wet on the page and it can look really vibrancy, then when it dries it can lose a lot of that vibrancy. If that's ever happened to you, you're not alone. It's even gotten a name, drying shift. Some colors do it more than others, but basically the color gets paler and sometimes more grayish as it dries. A basic rule to bear in mind is if the color looks exactly the way you want it when it's wet, it won't look how you want it when it's dry. This is one of the things that can make watercolor tricky to navigate. There's no one quick fix for this, part of it involves learning how each of your paints works. Having swatches helps with that. [NOISE] You can also try out your mixes on some spare paper and let them dry to see how they look and take the time to refine things this way. Alternatively, you can also just go for it and make the wet mix look more vibrant and darker than you want it to be when it's dry and then just see how it turns out. It's really up to you. Whichever approach you find the most fun or satisfying, pick that one and do it. Something else to bear in mind when mixing up your colors is that with watercolors, the water is our white. That's how you lighten things. If you need a paler blue than the one you have, make a watery mix of it. It's like adding white into it, it'll make it paler. If you're wanting to paint a pink flower like I'm doing, bear in mind that pink is really just a pale purple [NOISE]. I'll give a moment for that to sink in there. You make pink shades like [inaudible] and things like that by taking a light version of reds and adding a little bit of blue to it. If you're doing pinky flowers and you don't have any pink on your palate, that's how you make it. Whichever colors you want to use; and remember these don't have to match reality, make sure you mix up quite a lot of it because you'll be using it for at least three layers and you're going to need enough paint to cover the area at least three times. Mixed up more than you think you're going to need because you probably will use it. If you don't, you've always got a nice color that you love saved for something else you want to paint. Maybe you'll have another go at this. You can also make your shadow colors in advance or you can do that while one of your layers is drying. Just like we did in the shading lesson, make sure main color with its opposite. Check the color wheel if you're not sure to get a greenish mix; that's what I'm going to be using, or take any of the other three approaches, whichever you prefer. A little word on language here. Colors which are opposite each other on the color wheel are referred to as complimentary. It seems like a really weird use of language, but this comes from the fact that when you place these colors next to each other they really make one another stand out. So they compliment each other. That said, you've got a lot of information there about how to pull together the colors you want to use to paint your flowers. Once you've got your colors ready come join me, and we'll start painting. [MUSIC] 9. First Layer: Highlights: [MUSIC] Are you ready to begin? So you've got your rough sketch done, you've got your palette ready to go. Let's put our first wash down. We're going to use the same technique that we did for our spheres and for our squares, which is called wet on wet, which is what it says. You make the paper wet, and then you paint on that wet paper. Get your shape, that's going to be where your flower is and paint that shape with water. Just like before, we don't want this to be a puddle, we want to be able to see the texture of the paper. I'm painting all of my flowers with water first, and I'm trying to be fairly careful with this layer, which can be tricky because while water is invisible, but wherever the water goes, so will the color. So staying in the lines matters to you, watch where you put the water. You can keep an eye on this literally by either tilting the page to catch the light or moving your head. Usually you need to be fairly close to level with the page to see the water clearly. Now we've got the water down, we drop our colors in. I find it quite fun to make big swoops of color into the water and watch it spread for a moment. I think that's really beautiful. Then I paint around the edges and spread the paint around on the inside to make sure the whole flower is colored in. I'm doing the same thing on my piece lily. For this magnolia, the water is already drying, so I'm re-wetting it before I put the color in. Now I'm happy it's wet enough, I'm starting to draw my color and I'm going around the edges carefully and letting the color disperse into the water. It's so pretty, before starting to fill the inside in. Now the colors really spread around. I can see some little bits around the edge that need touched up. So I'm filling them all in until I'm happy there's a good even coat of color. Then we let them dry or dry them, and now we've got a highlight layer ready to go. Take a moment to take a quick photo of your painting and it's amazing to see the transition. Then come join me in the next lesson, where we'll look at putting our mid tones in with a second wash or layer. See you there. [MUSIC] 10. Second Layer: Midtones: [MUSIC] Welcome back. Now, we're going to do our second layer, our mid-tones. For this, like we've practiced with our squares and our circles, we're going to use the wet on dry technique, which is wet paint on dry paper. Wet your brush again and go back to your first color mix. Give it a swish around to reactivate the paint as it might have dried out a bit, particularly if you've had to wait awhile. I've got my simplified version of each flower showing the highlights up on screen and you're welcome to use that as a guide if you prefer. You can also download this from the resources section. With that said, go ahead and paint in your second layers. Because I prefer to work a bit more spontaneously on this, I didn't draw the highlights in. This means I'm taking time to study my reference picture and squint at it, looking for what bits are the lightest so I know not to paint there. Everything else gets a good coat of our color mix and that's what I'm doing for each of my flowers. Now, if you were thinking of doing the same thing but are suddenly a bit stressed about putting the paint straight down without any guiding pencil lines, you can totally go ahead and draw those in now if you like. As long as your first layer is completely dry, you can draw on top of it and erase those lines too. Just don't push too hard into the paper, otherwise it well indent and leave a mark, even if you do erase it. [NOISE] I want to say a word about the so-called ugly phase or ugly stage in painting. You might be feeling like you're looking at your stuff and you're thinking, I don't really like this or it doesn't look very good and I wanted to say it happens to everyone. Most paintings go through at least one if not several stages where it just doesn't look right to you. It can be a sign that we don't have enough variation from lightness to darkness and it looks a bit flat when we want it to not look flat. If that's happening to you, particularly with the second layer, don't worry, we're going to add in our shadows next, and that gives it a bit more contrast, a bit more variation between the light and the dark. These next couple of steps are the bits where your picture really starts to come together, so if you're feeling like it's not coming together right now, that's okay, it's pretty normal, but it will, have faith. Now, if you haven't mixed up your shadow colors, now might be a good time to do that. Maybe take a moment to take a quick photo of your painting to document the transition and then come join me in the next lesson, where we're going to add the shadows. [MUSIC] 11. Third Layer: Shadows: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to add our shadows. I love this, but for me it's usually where a piece really starts to come together and it's so exciting. If you make sketches of where you are going to place your shadows, it's possible it might be quite hard to see those marks now. If that's the case, you can go ahead and redraw them back in if you want them there or like in the last lesson, if you haven't drawn them in yet, but want to add them in there, go ahead. As long as your paper is dry, it's totally fine. Either way, do have a good look at your reference image. It's always helpful to have that handy throughout our painting because our brains like to make things up, and trick us into thinking we're remembering. I've got my simplified version of each flower showing the highlights and shadows up on screen, but you are welcome to use as a guide if you prefer. Remember, you can download these from the resources section as well. Go ahead and get your shadow colors and start to paint your shadows in. Remember, they don't have to be exactly like your photo. They can be bigger or smaller. It's your picture, so, try not to stress too much about this. Try and have fun with it. I'm breaking out my smaller brush here so I can get into the little details of the shadowy beds. I'm really studying the reference carefully. Take your time with us and allow yourself to be completely absorbed into the process. [MUSIC] When you're done and it's dry, take a step back and look at your paintings. Snap a pic and take a moment to congratulate yourself on making the time to create something. Please do share your creation with me in the projects gallery. I'd love to see what you've made and it'd be really cool to see the transition if you captured that along the way. If you're looking at your work and feeling like maybe it's not quite right, it might be that it's just not finished yet. Come join me in the next lesson and we'll chat about what you can do to help get a feeling finished. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 12. Finishing Your Painting: [MUSIC] Hey, welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to talk about a couple of things you can do to help get a painting to where it feels finished. [MUSIC] Sometimes, even after you've put down your shadow layer, it can still feel a bit flat. If that happens, paint over your shadow layer with another shadow layer. It might even take two more times until it feels like there's enough depth in the painting. Give it a try. Another thing that can happen is a piece might feel too simplistic, particularly if you wanted a more realistic feeling painting. Your help here is detail. Flowers in particular are teeming with detail and sometimes adding a little bit more in can help you feel more comfortable with the finished piece. Maybe a petal needs a bit of a speckled shadow like in one of my other magnolias here, or maybe it needs something like the small edge detailing on my crocus bulb that you can see here. Sometimes, all it needs is a bit of time. Putting it aside for a day or week can help remove the idea you originally had for the painting and free you up to see the beauty in the piece that you actually made. Of all the paints, watercolor is a really spontaneous medium that can do its own thing, and learning to work with that, to be okay with what has ended up on the page as opposed to what was in your head will help tremendously. I like to use this piece that I painted as an example of that. It didn't turn out the way I wanted. But after a bit of time and space, I was able to appreciate what I did make and I actually love this piece. I hope this helps and I'd be really interested to know how you feel about the pieces you've made if you're willing to share that in your class project. Come join me in the next lesson where I'll talk about some other applications for this layering technique. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 13. Other Applications: [MUSIC] Hello, again. In this lesson, I'm going to talk about the other applications that we can use for the layering technique that we've practiced in this class. We saw from the shading lesson that we can use this technique to turn a flat circle into a 3D sphere, and then we use that to give our flower's dimension too. Well, the same goes for literally anything else you want to paint. Mountains? Yeah. Mushrooms? Yeah. Magic forest creatures with crazy long hair that might do you good oral? Yes. I use this approach in just about everything I paint. It's the keys to the kingdom, as far as I'm concerned. Go forth and paint whatever you want. When you do, please come back and update your project here, I would love to see where you take this technique. We're just about finished. Come join me in the last lesson for some final thoughts. [MUSIC] 14. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Hey, you made it. Well done. [MUSIC] Thank you for joining me as we dug into layering and how to use it to create flowers that pop. We've pulled back the curtain on what layering or glazing means, how colors can combine when stacked on top of one another, and how to stack colors in different ways to achieve different effects. We've looked at how to create highlights and shadows by using layers, and how that makes an object look like it has form and depth. We then took that a step further to create flowers that look like they have dimension, building it up bit by bit. Lastly, we explored how to help a piece feel finished. What I would really like for you to take away from this class is that making something look like it has form isn't as hard as it might seem. Once you can shift how you see things and start breaking them down into light, mid and dark areas, you can represent that on a page in whatever way you enjoy best. I think that's really empowering. If you feel like sharing your creations, I'd love to see them. You can post them in the class projects gallery, and if you'd like to stop by there and leave a kind word for other people's projects, that would be really nice. If you enjoy sharing things to Instagram, feel free to tag me there. I'd love to see what you create. If you want to find out about when I release another class, you can follow me here. There should be a little green button up there, and if you click it, on my name, that'll take you to my profile which has my other classes on it. If you could leave this class a review, that would be super-helpful. It can flag to other potential students what a class this is and if it's the thing they might be interested in too. Thank you again for joining me here to learn and practice layering. I hope you've enjoyed this time and that I'll see you in one of my other classes soon. [MUSIC]