Watercolor Four Ways: Flat, Blended, Transparent and Layered Techniques

1. Introduction: This is watercolor, and this is a potato. Potatoes can be made into mash. They can be made into wedges. They can be roasted, or they can be fries. It's the same with watercolor. Watercolor is an incredibly versatile medium, but it's very easy to get stuck into one way of using it and forget to push it to its full potential. In this class, I share four different ways to use watercolor. You can use it as a pop of flat color. You can achieve stunning glens. You can create beautiful magical effects using transparency, and you can be fun and playful through the use of layering. Using an easy subject matter of fresh fruit or vegetables, I will show you how to do each technique, and then we will look at how the four techniques can work together in one painting. I'm Katherine Jennifer. I'm an artist, designer, top teacher, and mother of four boys. This class is aimed at intermediate watercolorists who want to extend their use of watercolor techniques. When you paint, you often get into a state of flow, and you paint intuitively without consciously thinking about what you're doing. If you want to push your painting to the next level, it can be helpful to break down how you use the paint and then build it back up so that your natural visual language includes a broader range of techniques. By the end of the class, you'll be able to paint flat, blended, transparent and layered watercolor, and you'll be able to think more strategically about how you use each technique, thereby broadening your visual language as you move forward in your painting practice. Together, we will save the world from mashed potato watercolor. 2. Project: The project for this class is to paint some fruit or vegetables, making all four watercolor techniques clearly visible in your painting. The techniques are flat color blends, transparency, and layering. Step one is to get some actual fruit or veg. Pears are a great choice, but if you don't have pears, then whatever you've got in your fridge will be fine. Step two is to practice each technique a few times. I suggest that you watch the lesson on that technique and then practice it, then watch the next lesson and practice that one. This will enable you to discover for yourself what works for each technique. Step three is to do some quick compositional sketches in which we will think about the layout of our painting. It's important that we do this on a separate sheet of paper, not on the paper that you're going to paint on. Once we've decided on the composition, we will work out which technique we're going to use for which element in the painting. In step four, we will dive in and do our painting, making sure that each technique is clearly visible. Some things to remember. This is about learning the four techniques, although the techniques themselves are pretty simple, putting them together into one painting can be tricky. Bring your sense of humor, bring plenty of self forgiveness, and don't worry if it doesn't work out well the first time. This is about breaking things down and then building it up again, learning how to shift between different techniques and figuring out what works well together, and what doesn't work. It's about the learning and not about the finished piece. If you just watch the class, you will gain an appreciation of how watercolor can be used. But if you actually do the project, you will learn for yourself how to do each technique, which will build your confidence and you'll start to explore how you can combine the techniques to create something that is uniquely yours. That's where the magic of watercolor lies. Supporting resources. If your kids have eaten everything in your fridge, Then you're welcome to work from my Pintrasboard, which has images of fruit on it. The link is on the screen now. In the class resources, you will also find a downloadable PDF, which is a handy visual reminder of the four different techniques. Your finished project should be a quick photo of your finished painting showing the four techniques. You can also share your compositional sketches and your exercises, learning each technique if you'd like to. I really encourage you to share your project in the project gallery so that I can offer constructive feedback. Please add some notes about how you found during the project, what was easy, what was tricky so that I can tailor my feedback in a more helpful way. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them either in the discussions panel or inside the body of your project. I can't wait to see what you share. 3. Materials: Materials that you will need for this class are some frutal age, a pencil, and some cheap printed paper or notebook or sketchbook for your composition or thumbnails, word coolor paints, a watercolor sketchbook or some mid range wood color paper for practicing each technique, and some good quality d color paper for the actual painting. I'm not going to do a detailed explanation of d coolor paints. If you need this information, please watch my class watercolor techniques for beginners, paint a cactus, which has a detailed lesson on wood coolor paints, brushes, palettes, et cetera. What I will say, though, is that for this class, try to work on good quality water color paper. You can get by with student quality paints, but the quality of the paper really makes a difference to how the paint soaks into the paper and what techniques you can achieve. The best paper is archers. I use coal pressed blocks. This is expensive, but it's beautiful to work on because it's 100% cotton and the paint just behaves differently on archers to any other brand that I've tried. However, if arches is beyond your budget, then choose a mid range paper ones I've used include the Langford and Bockingford, and they would be fine for this class. Also, make sure you have a large enough palette because to get these techniques to work, you need enough space to work the paint properly into the bristles of your brush on your palette. I use the ceramic ******* tray from Jackson's art, but white ceramic plate would also work fine. That's it for materials. In the next section, we will gather some fruit to use as subject matter. See you there. 4. Gather Some Fruit: This next part is really simple. Go and radio fridge or fruit bowl. This just happens to be what's in our fridge at the moment. Broccoli can be great for practicing blends. Mushrooms are good for practicing flat shapes. Spring onions could be good for practicing overlapping transparent layers using broad brush strokes. Satsumas for painting shapes and then putting layered patterns on top and grapes are brilliant for practicing overlapping transparent shapes. It doesn't matter if you don't have these exact items in your fridge. Just gather what you've got, and in the next section, we'll look at how to do flat shapes. See you there. 5. Flat Technique: I'm not going to demonstrate the flat technique. The aim with this is to achieve a completely flat shape. With watercolor because of how it works with the water, this is actually quite difficult to achieve. The trick to achieving a flat shape in watercolor is to have exactly the right amount of paint and water in the bristles of brush. To start with, as you can see, I have sprayed my palette with water and everything is nice and wet. I have also put a very light shen of water onto my palette. And I'm going to get some paint into my bristles. You can achieve a flat shape using thicker paint or thinner paint. It's slightly more difficult with thinner paint, but it is possible. What I'm doing here is I'm working the paint into the bristles of my brush on the palette, and this is something you start to feel. The more you paint, the more you get the feel for how much paint and water is soaked up into your bristles. I can feel that it's not quite fully soaked. I'm working it a little bit more. The first thing is, make sure your bristles are really well soaked with paint and water. The second thing is when you paint your shape, do it very quickly cover as much area as you can as quickly as possible and then leave it alone. It's very hard to not get that little lump of pigment at the end, but if you're quick enough, that pigment will dissolve and flow into the rest of the paint, and that's all there is to it. So I'm soaking the pigment up into the bristles of my brush. I'm feeling for how wet or dry it is nice and wet, and then I'm just going straight in to my shape, covering as much area as possible as quickly as I can. That one had quite thick paint. I'm going to mix two colors. This is a lovely bright lime green. If you mix in colors, try and get your mix to be well mixed so that it flows nicely on the paper. You'll notice that I'm not holding my brush upright, I'm holding it quite horizontal in relation to the page so that the maximum amount of bristles are in contact with the paper that enables me to get a big flat shape much more quickly. It means that the pain can flow quickly onto the paper. The little lumps that were here have flowed out into the liquid and the same here. This one, you can see there's a bit of a lump there and there, but I'm just going to leave it and see what happens. If you feel that your paint brush is too dry, then you can control the amount of water by using a spray bottle better than if you dip your brush in your water jar. If you do this, it's harder to control and you often end up with too much water in your brush, whereas if you spray it, you can control exactly how much water you're putting onto your pelt. So this one had more water and less pigment and is therefore quite transparent. We will wait and see whether that lump flows out. Hopefully, it will. And I'll try with one of my darker blues. I'm taking care not to let my different shapes touch each other. That was close, because if they do, this pigment will run into that one and I will get to blend. Just to recap, to get your flat shape, make sure your color is properly mixed if you mix in two different colors. Make sure your water and pigment have soaked up into the brush really well. Use the brush at a nice flat angle and paint your shape quickly and leave it alone. Now here, I can see a weird thing happening. It's a good idea to practice this with different colors and you'll get to know which colors are easier and which ones are harder to create your flat shapes with. Now, this one is not working. It's going to end up with blooms happening here. If I come in and try and fix it by painting over it while it's still wet, I'm probably going to make it. But let's see. Maybe not. We'll just do that and see what happens. Pause the video now and have it go yourself. Try creating flat shapes in different colors and make some notes as you go about what worked and what didn't work. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will look at blends. 6. Blend Technique: I'm now going to demonstrate the blend technique. This is the most natural technique for water color. It's what it's designed for. But it still takes practice, and you can learn a lot from experimenting with different colors and different paint consistencies. Just to show you quickly, these are the flat shapes now that they are dry. The middle three have turned out really well, nice and flat. This one's got a bit of a bloom over there, and this was the problematic one, which actually didn't turn out too badly, but it's got this dark edge around it. That happens when you have a very wet mix and the result is that you get this hard edge. You can use that to your advantage if that's what you're going for. Just to show you a few other flat shapes that I've been practicing. Some have turned out better than others. This is a really nice watery, thicker paint here. That's a beautiful one. That's a beautiful one. You can see that it is possible. It just takes a bit of practice. Practicing them in different colors, different thicknesses. Once you've got that skill under your belt, you can use that in your paintings in a strategic way. Now we're going to explore blends. There are lots of different ways to create blends. But I'm just going to briefly show you three methods. The first method is edges touching. If I was to paint mushroom as in the last section, and if I bring another color and I allow the edges to touch, I will get a blend. The effect can sometimes be quite subtle and sometimes it can be much more powerful. It all hinges on how much water is in your mix. That yellow is a bit wetter. This blue is and you get a little blend between the two shapes. The second method is dropping or dragging. I I was to paint a mushroom shape a bit like this, and I could come with my second color. You want your second color to be quite wet and either just drop in some color or that nice and wet again. Do another one This is quite wet, go back to my dark and just drag color through. You can get some nice blends that way. Then the third method is the whole stroke method. So if I was to paint a mushroom like this, half a mushroom. I want it to be nice and wet, more wet than you think. I come in with my blue, and I just let the whole stroke touch and let it blend on the page. This creates a really beautiful effect and is one of my favorite ways of creating blends. That's three different methods of creating blends. But how do you get those magical blends, the kind that take your breath away. Let's explore paint to water ratio in a bit more detail. I'm going to do four experiments. I'm going to first explore what happens if I mix a light colored paint with a thicker dark colored paint and see what happens. Then I'm going to do a mix of a thinner light paint with a thin dark paint. Then I'm going to do a thicker light color paint with a thick dark color paint, and then thicker light with thinner dark. I'm using an olive green, which I've chosen because it dilutes nicely into a thin consistency, and it also thickens up very nicely. As you can see, I'm making a very thin paint consistency, and I'm going to roughly use a pair shape, and I'm just going to do a very thin Light wash of paint. I want this to be even wetter. I'm just going to go over it again. What I hope you can see is that it's sitting on top of the paper in a nice wet pool. Now, quite quickly, I'm going to take a dark purple paint straight out the pan. It's got a bit of water in it. I want it to be thick. I hope you can see, it's quite thick almost dry. I'm going to do a whole stroke join. The whole of my brush was connecting with that wet, thin wet paint. I'm just going to leave that. For the next one, I'm going to do a thin light and a thin dark. I've got very thin light colored paint here, going to make my pair shape. As you can see, it's sitting on top of the paper, very wet. I'm going to come in with a very thin dark paint. To create my thin dark paint, I'm going to just put pure water on there and just use what was left in my brush. This is a very runny, dark same thing I'm going to connect all the way along. It's very runny. I'm going to do that again because the connection wasn't great. Try another one. Okay. Get a bit more water and pigment in there. Remember that what we're looking for is how to get breathtakingly beautiful blends. I'm going to change the grip on my brush that I get it as horizontal as I can to the page, and I'm doing a one stroke blend. I'm just going to leave that and see what happens. For the next one, I'm going to explore a thicker light with a thicker. I'm going to take this olive paint, really, really thick. And you see how thick it is in there. Using up a lot of paint, but that's okay. That's quite thick. And I'm going to put that down. Nice, delicious paint. Without wasting any time, I'm going to do the same thing with my straight out the pen. You can see it's really thick on the brush. Do a one stroke blend. And we'll see what happens with that. For the next one, I'm going to do a thicker light and a thinner dark. So make my peers shape. Really sick and delicious. Almost like go. Without wasting any time, really Over here. Change my grip and There's hardly any movement there because the light paint was so thick. Going to see if I can extend that out a bit, so it's got more to play with. Going to repeat that one to see if I can get it a bit more successful. Tick, color there. Maybe if I start here with my thin so that it's got a place to go and then do my join, my one stroke blend, I'll just leave that and see what happens. That was fun. Over here, I've got some experiments I did previously, and you can see how they've dried. This was a thinner light, and thinner light with a thicker dark and it made these beautiful blends. This was a wetter light with a thin dark and it made these beautiful blends, both of which are beautiful and quite breathtaking. I also did these. This was a thicker light color with a thicker dark. And this was a thicker light with the thicker dark. This one, the overlap with the brush was less, and this one, I had more brush overlap, and these are the effects that I got. On this one, thicker light, the yellow was thick paint. The green was thinner and wetter and I got those effects. This orange blend was this method which I was experimenting with, and to get these beautiful blends, the paint underneath was very wet and the paint that I dropped in was also very wet. When I did it the first time, The paint underneath was less wet and the paint that I was dropping in was less wet, so the pain didn't travel quite as far. So all of these experiments are very fun to do, and you learn a lot by actually doing them and getting the feel yourself for what the paint does on the paper. So pause the video now and have it go yourself. Try different color combinations, try different pain and consistencies and try some with light and dark colors together. Make notes as you go about anything you want to remember. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will start working on transparency. 7. Transparent Technique: Now we're going to look at the transparent technique. This is also something that watercolor does quite naturally, but you can get more out of it if you use it with conscious purpose. Before we do transparency, I just want to show you these which have dried the three techniques. You can see some lovely blends in here and in the, beautiful, dry watercolor effects. I really like this. I like the paint to equalities and the way there's a lot of variation within a small space. Now I'm going to move on to transparency. Transparency is actually really easy. The secret is to have a lot of water and very little pigment, and then to put your paint down and leave it alone. I am going to just get my paint ready. I've got some grapes in front of me, and this is just to give me some shapes to look at. I'm not actually going to try and paint a bunch of grapes. I just sometimes find it helpful to have some visual reference as a starting point. All I'm doing is I'm going to paint some nice flat oval shapes. And I'm putting the paint down, letting it do its thing on the paper. I'm leaving some gaps where I will do some transparent overlaps. It's also fun to do this using warm colors, and I'm going to do a few in pinks and reds. So over here, this pigment is too thick. So I've made a little pool of pure water, and I'm just going to put my pigment from there into here. That's much better. It's all about the consistency of the paint to get a good transparent shape. And I'm just putting down some ovals in a range of fun colors. Again, I'm going to make my little pool of water add my pigment. That one is quite dark. With transparency and overlaps, it is easiest to work from light to dark. I'm choosing my lighter pinks to start with. I'm making a very dilute mixture. I'm just putting down some ovals reminiscent of grapes. I found with watercolor that reds are quite a fussy color. You can't easily mix a nice red. So if you're struggling with your palette to find reds that you like, it might be that you just need to invest in some other shades of red rather than trying to mix them. I've got some initial shapes and the trick with transparency. If you're looking for a good overlap is to let it dry completely. If it isn't completely dry, you'll get a blend. In this instance, that's not what I want. My paints has dried completely, and now I'm going to do a second layer where I overlap the shapes. I'm going to choose a slightly darker color just so that the overlap is nice and clear. Again, I don't want it too thick. So I still want quite a watery mix in my brush. I'm just going to very quickly put a shape on top of another shape. Let's darken that slightly. The important thing here is that I don't linger for too long on the underneath shape. Because if I do, it might lift some of the paint. So I'm just doing it as fast as possible. Then sometimes the transparent overlap isn't immediately apparent, but it becomes more apparent as it dries. Go for a different hue. Also, some colors are more naturally transparent than others. This green is beautifully transparent, and you get to know which ones give you the best transparencies as you practice. That's looking great. I'm going to do one with a darker green. This one didn't come out as a flat shape, but that's okay. That was a nice one. Okay. Trying to control that little pool of paint. I'm going to switch to my pinks. Same thing, really. Just quickly getting one shape on top of another shape. That was an ice one. That was beautiful. I love this orange when it's mixed with a lot of water. It creates a really beautiful orange shade. That's one of my favorites. Okay. That was a good one. That one had almost no pigment in it and not a lot of water, less water, and that came out really well. This is the weirdest bunch of grapes ever, but the point is you can see these lovely transparent overlaps happening. That one I had too much water and pigment in my brush, so I'm lifting out, and then I'm trying to smooth it over. If you do too much mushing around on your paper, you lose the definition of the underneath shape, which is why you want to get very quickly to the desired shape. Then I've got a couple of very lovely, quite neon pinks, I want to try. This is Holbein opera quinacridone, this one, and it's a beautiful vibrant pink. Then this one is Holbein bright rose. I'm going to give those a try. So I'm controlling the amount of water that I'm using. Look at that. That's so fun. And space for one here. I try not to have these lamps. Here again. And This is the bright rose. It's not as luminous as the Quinacridone opera. It's quite a cool pink. I'm making sure I'm going only over the first layer of ovals that I created because the second layer, the new ones are not dry yet. Then if you want to you can add some stalks and turn your grapes into actual grapes, like this. You don't have to. It's just might give you a bit of context for what if you've painted, something like that. Obviously, I'm just playing around and that step isn't necessary. But the point of this is just to show you that if you use the paints very dilute, you can overlap your shapes and it adds a beautiful extra dimension to your watercolor paintings. One last thing is that you can also have a very transparent shape and then drop in some blends. I'll just show you that very quickly. Let's say I have a really big shape like this. If I get my timing exactly right, I can drop in some other colors and the blends are very beautiful because the underneath paint is so wet and so transparent that the blends can flow really beautifully. Pause the video now and do some practicing of the transparent technique. Remember that you need hardly any pigment in your water if you're going for something really transparent. And it's important that you let it dry fully before you try any kind of overlap. When you do make an overlap, do it really quickly without scrubbing. Otherwise, you risk reactivating the underneath layer. If you're combining a blend with transparency, then it's a question of getting your timing just right. Have fun with that, and then in the next video, we will look at layering. See you there. 8. Layered Technique: The layer technique is simply a matter of using one color over another color, but you can do this with intent and use it to add a fun and playful element to your work. As with most watercolor paintings, it's best to work from light to dark. If you know you're going to use layering, paint the underneath layer in a lighter color and the layers on top in darker colors. Just like with the transparent technique, make sure your underneath layers are completely dry and work quickly with your top layers, avoiding scrubbing. If you do want to have a light pattern layer over a layer, then you can create the pattern with ink or gouache, which is more opaque than water color. Pause the video now and have a go at some patterned layers. Challenge yourself to try and make fun and different patterns. You might surprise yourself if you want to make some notes as you go along. In the next section, we will turn our attention to composition and planning our main painting. See you there. 9. Composition: We've got all four techniques under our belt. The next step is to work out how we're going to use them together in one painting. I'm going to show you three examples of compositions you could do. The first is a grid composition where you've basically got things in rows. In this one, you can see I've got flat color, I've got blends here, transparency in my grapes and a tiny little bit of layering on my lemon. This is the easiest composition to do when you are trying to use all the techniques in one painting. A second type of composition you could do is a clustered composition. My tip for this would be to have the larger elements at the bottom of the painting or in this case, bottom and side, rather than having large elements at the top and tiny things at the bottom because that would feel unbalanced. Then a third type of composition is a halfway house between the two. Here you can see, I've started with the grid and then I've done a cluster. The thing with this is to think about how your eye is lead around the page. In this instance, the grapes leads the eye in and you go in a circular motion and back to the grapes. You can use the stalks of the fruit to help move the eye around the page. This type of composition can be more tricky and you might need to think about what's in front and what's behind. In this instance, you can see I've got flat color, I've got transparency in my grapes. I've got some blends, and I've got some layered patterns. Another thing to think about with this type of composition is your negative spaces. Just be aware of what sort of shapes you are creating in the gaps between your elements. So have a quick think about which composition you might like to use. You could do a grid, a cluster, or a halfway house. In the next lesson, we will look at how to make compositional thumbnails. See you there. So have a quick think now about which composition you would like to use, either the grid, the clust or the grid and in the next video, we will look at how to do compositional thnails. See you there. Okay. 10. Compositional Thumbnails: Once you've decided which composition you're going to use, think about which techniques you're going to use for which element of your painting. Then do some quick thumbnails on a separate sheet of paper just to think through which fruit you want to use and where you want to place them. I'll take you through my thinking process from when I did this. I started out really not knowing what I wanted to do. I thought some pairs. I tried a few different things and I realized over here was a pretty bad, negative space. But I liked this grouping of these two pairs side by side like that. I took that element and did it again here. In this one, I realized that although a grouping of five elements is good, they were too big on my page. I want more. This is pairs, pairs pears, strawberries, and grapes. So with that information, I thought, let me do a few more elements. So I kept my pear duo. I added a strawberry, I thought I'll add an orange, a couple more strawberries, and then here I would have a pear on its side lying down, and then my grapes. I like this composition because it's basically a grid. But I'm also breaking the grid by having two elements at the bottom, the pair on its side and the grapes. I thought about which ones were where, if I have a pair here, this is a pair, two pairs, then that's balanced in the composition. Then with that composition in mind, I drew it out again, and I thought about where to put each technique. With the techniques, you don't want to end up with all your pattern elements on one side because that would feel unbalanced. The eye is going to go first to the most pattern elements. I've put my pattern in this pair at the bottom. That will contrast nicely with transparency in my grapes over here. Then I just shared out the rest. If I have a flat color here, I'll have a blend here in my orange. If I've got a pattern here, it'll be nicely balanced if I have a pattern there, and then two more blends in there. I hope this just gives you an idea of how to do a compositional thumbnail and then how to plan which technique you're going to use for which element. Okay. Obviously, when I do the actual painting, it can all change depending on how the painting goes. But this is that in between step from I've got fruit, I want to do techniques to actually making the painting. Once you've decided on your painting plan, take a quick photo of your composition of thumbnails and the chosen one and upload them into your project. To do this, click on Create Project. You can upload this as your cover image for the moment if you want to or you can just ignore the cover image and upload this into the body of the project. So we've planned our composition and we know which techniques we're going to use for which elements. In the next lesson, we will have a quick think about a color plan for our painting. I'll see you there. 11. Choosing Your Color Palette: It's useful to plan the colors in the painting so that when we're actually doing the painting, we're not thinking about color, and we can focus on the techniques. With these kind of paintings, I have found that using harmonious colors seems to work best, and you can think about how you key your colors. So for example, this is a very high key piece. Everything is very bright, and this one is more muted and less high key. You can also use color as an element of surprise in your work. For example, this pink grape is very unexpected, but adds just that little extra zinc to a painting. If you want to you can create your colors on your palette, ready to go like this. I've chosen some high key colors, fairly soft colors that are all harmonious. Here I've done a couple of little color plans just using my technique plan and composition plan, and then just thinking about where I might like to place each color. I don't usually do this when I actually just paint intuitively. But if you want to add the step in, you can and sometimes it can help with the flow when you come to do your painting. So now we have a color plan, a composition, and we know which techniques we're going to use where, which means we are ready to dive into our main painting. This is where it gets really interesting, a little bit challenging and a lot of fun. I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Painting Part 1: So now I'm just going to dive in and enjoy some painting. I've got quite a good selection of fruit and veg in front of me, which I'm going to use just as inspiration, and I'm going to keep my plan in mind, but I'm also thinking I might need to add in a few extra shapes as we go along. So I'm going to start with a pair over here and I'm going to make this one just a nice flat color. This one, I'm actually going to paint upside down. I'm going to have orange. As I paint, I'm thinking about all the shapes that are on my page, and I'm very conscious of what my negative spaces are also turning into. I think for this one. Bring in a nice blend. I'm also conscious to try and balance my colors. So I'm going to make this a pretty yellow. This is turning into quite a nice lend on the page, as is that one. You see how I'm letting the shapes hag each other and echo each other. Let's go to you. That's working out beautifully. It's a very funny shape. This here is quite blended in, so I'm just going to. I need to add a bit more depth to this. That's looking good so far. Okay, lovely. And then the last bit will be some grapes for my transparency. Coming off here. There we go. This is looking great. Before it all dries completely, I'm just going to increase the value of some of the darks and to do that, I'm just going to mix up a dark. I'm using a green and a maroon. I just want to darken some of this. Might be too late, really. There we go. That is looking great. So now we need to let the paint dry completely. In the next lesson, we will add the transparent elements and start to work on our layers. See you there. 13. Painting Part 2: So, the painting has dried completely, and now we're going to add the transparent layers as well as start working on patent layers. This is also a good moment to look at what we've got and work out how we can balance the painting. For example, this side has got these two beautiful blends, but it's quite dark on this side. I'm noticing that I'll need to add some dark elements on this side. Perhaps I'll add that through pattern. Color wise, we've got some orange here, some orange here. I might need to bring in some more orange or some of that tone somewhere on this corner so that it's balanced. I might also bring in a little element of surprise. We'll see how it goes. The first thing I'm going to do is add some stalks to my peers, and I'm going to do some of them in dark and some in a fun orange color. I'm fully going to get this one to overlap like that because it's linking these two shapes. I want to be a little bit darker. Lovely. Then this one, I'm going to give just a little stalk in here, just like that, which is, again, making use of that negative space. This one, I'm going to give it a stalk coming out of here going this way. That's fine. That's leading the eye back into the picture. Then for this one, I'm going to do the same thing and just have a little stalk like that. The next thing I'm going to do is add a fun pattern element to this big pair at the bottom. Okay, that's looking great. That pattern there has given it a bit of a retro vibe through the orangey brown colors, which is quite fun. Now I'm feeling like this bit up here could do with some stripes. They are not perfect stripes. That's okay. I've turned it this way so that I get the end of my stripe this side for these ones. So it's a little bit balanced. It's very hard to not get the thicker blob at the end of your stroke, and this is a way to balance that. Now we can come in and do the transparency on top of the grapes. I've found that this works if the hue is slightly different for the overlap. One there. One there. Lovely. This I can feel is too runny. Not enough pigment, too much water. And as I said in the earlier sections, it's all about the feel of it in the bristles. I think we might do one more thing and that is add a little element of surprise. And I'm thinking the element of surprise can go here, and perhaps it could be another pink grape. Lovely. I could go on and do add more detail. But for the purposes of this class, I'm going to stop here. Hopefully, what you've seen is that it's possible to use the four different ways of using water color in one painting. Obviously, the way I've done it here was very considered and controlled. And when you come to do your own painting, hopefully, it becomes more fluid and more automatic. But this is enough just to show that you can have flat color, you can have blends, you can have transparency, and you can have layered patterns all in one painting. This is a really super fun and great way to practice all those four techniques. It's always a good idea to look at your painting and think what parts went well and what parts didn't go quite so well because each painting will have both those things. In this painting, what went well, I liked the kiwi, that went well. I liked the retro pair, and I like the way the variation of the color in the pattern has brought it to life. The flat color on this Satsuma, is very nice and I like the way this blend works and also flows into that. The flat color on that pair worked very well. I think the surprise element of the pink works quite nicely and it bounces off the bright orange stalk that is there and there. Compositionally that's quite nice. What didn't work quite so well. This overlap here wasn't great, but it's still drying, so it might come out a little bit better. The structure of my grapes was a bit of a mess. Next time I do that, I might think more carefully about I structure the grapes. But you can see the overlaps and that's what I was aiming for. Then the stripes on this pair, they're okay, but I didn't really like way the paint was heavy on one side and light on the other. However, I think by changing the direction, I managed to control that. I don't think it's too much of a problem. Look at your own painting and find the bits that are good and take those bits forward to the next painting and learn from the bits that are bad and take that forward, but don't let the bad bits get you down because every painting has good bits and bad bits, and that is how you improve. And the only way you can improve is by keeping on trying. At this point, please also upload your project into the project gallery and add some notes about how you found the process so that I can tailor my feedback in a more constructive and personal way. In the next lesson, we will wrap up what we've learned. See you there. 14. Conclusion: That brings us to the end of the class. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you now feel well equipped to extend how you use watercolor in your own work. Doing it like this, consciously step by step is a bit like learning scales and alpgios on the piano. It's an important building block which then gets used in your pieces without you even noticing it. The harder your pieces get, the more your excellent scales and alpgio technique gets used. With painting by consciously working on the techniques, you are developing and broadening your visual language, which you will start to incorporate into your paintings without even noticing. That's when your work becomes uniquely yours and your paintings take on their own beautiful complexity. We looked at how to use watercolor as a flat element, how to make it blend, the beauty and magic of transparency, and the fun and playful things you can do with layering. We made compositional thumbnails and planned where we would use each technique and our painting. We thought about color and how we can use it strategically to create mood or as an element of surprise. We bravely had a go at combining all these techniques into one painting. That's quite a lot to have done in one class. Take a moment to congratulate yourself for what you've achieved. If your painting didn't work out quite as well as you'd hoped, don't let it get you down. Look for what you do like in that painting and then take that little bit forward into your next painting. Or color takes time to master, and the only way to improve is to try again and again and again. The joy and the magic lies in the trying in the do in the exploring and the discovering. Be gentle with yourself. Please share your project. There's a confidence that comes from being seen and it inspires other people to share that projects. It also means I can offer personalized feedback. If you would like even more personal input, you can now book a one to one session with me either for creative coaching or a personalized painting lesson. If you enjoy this class, I'd be really grateful if you could leave a review on skill share. If you go to the review section and look slightly down on the left, there's a button that says leave a review. It only takes a minute and I'd really appreciate the feedback. And don't forget to follow me on Skill Share so that you receive notifications and updates when I release another or when I run and give away. If you'd like to connect with me on Instagram, I am at Katherine Jennifer Designs. I'd love to see there. If you enjoy this class, take out my other classes in School Share, there are classes on drawing, painting, and overcoming blocks to creativity. Until next time, have the painting, and thanks for watching.