Watercolor Mountains and Negative Space

1. Intro: Hi. My name is Kolbie and I love to paint with watercolor, but more than I love to paint with watercolor, I love sharing that love with people like you. I'm so excited to introduce the topic for today's class, Using Negative Space to Create Stunning Mountain Scapes just like this one. If you've taken any of my other classes, you know that wilderness watercolor painting is my jam, and I definitely embrace a more loose style of painting. But, this negative space style is even more abstract and illustration cartooney than any of my other classes. It has been so fun to create this class, and to develop these techniques to share with you today. So if you are interested in using negative space to practice color blending and to create these cool illustrated scenes like these ones, then this is the class for you. I hope that you'll join me, as we embark on this beautiful abstract journey through negative space mountains. See you soon. 2. Materials: Before we get started painting, let's go over the materials that you will need for this class. A lot of my materials videos look pretty similar. If you've taken one of my classes before, you can probably skip this one. But I am using a few different materials that I've used, brands of materials that I've used in most of my classes. That said, let's talk about what we have here. First, let's talk about paper. I always like to have both practice paper when I'm practicing these techniques and then professional paper that I use for my final project. The professional paper that I'm going to be using today is Legion Paper. It's cold press paper but it's Heavy, which means that instead of the normal 140 pound paper, this is 300 pound paper. I'm using this paper today because negative space painting requires a lot of water, a lot of washes. That always damages any kind of paper that you're going to use. I thought that this class would be a great space to introduce a heavier paper than what I normally use because this will stand up just a little bit better than normal a 140 pound paper. That said, if you only have a 140 pound paper, that's totally fine. That should also be okay. But for my final project, I'm going to be using this Legion Stonehenge Aqua Coldpress Heavy paper, which is 300 pounds instead of 140 pounds. If you're wondering what that means, that just means when you have a whole ream which is 500 sheets, it weighs 300 pounds. That's my professional paper. Then my practice paper, I'm going to be using both this little watercolor pad from Prima Marketing. It is a pretty decent practice pads. If you'll notice this is an intro to some negative space painting that I was doodling with a little bit prior to this class. I'm also going to be using this Fabriano Studio Watercolor paper. All of these brands of paper are watercolor paper. I believe these two are both 140 pounds. The biggest difference is that these two are student grade, which means that they're made of cheaper materials, versus this Legion paper is made of 100 percent cotton. The professional paper is usually a bit more expensive, which is why I like to use student grade paper when I'm practicing. Next, let's talk about brushes. For negative space painting, I like to have three different sizes of brushes on hand. These are the typical sizes that I usually have on hand regardless but I like to have a big wash size 10. Then I like to have a more medium size six and a small detail size zero. Just in case I need to make some pretty fine lines, which we will talk about as we go further on the class. The brands of these three paint brushes, as you can see, they're all different colors. They're all different lines. These two are Princeton brands. Princeton brand is a pretty well known and trusted brand of paint brushes. The first one, this round number ten brush, is from the Princeton Velvet Touch series. It is synthetic sable hair, which means that no animals were harmed in the process of making this brush as that's true for all of these brushes. The biggest difference between this Princeton brush and this Princeton brush, which is my number six is from the Heritage Series from Princeton, is I would say these bristles are just a little bit stiffer than these ones. But both are good for watercolor and both I enjoy using a lot. Finally, I have this Utrecht brand Series 228 synthetic sable hair brush, which you can recognize from the black handle. These are probably some of my favorite affordable brushes, budget friendly brushes. Princeton brand is a little bit more expensive than these Utrechts but these Utrechts are fairly comparable. Princeton this a little bit higher quality but I would say that this Utrecht brand is pretty comfortable. Those are the brushes that we're going to be using today. Now let's talk about paint. Normally, I whip out some of my tubed paint from my really high quality professional brands like Daniel Smith or Winsor and Newton. But I wanted to talk today about this more budget friendly brand, Prima Marketing. I believe they also rebranded, so that they are called Art Philosophy Co also if you look for them on Amazon. But these paints are not quite to the level to the caliber of say, Daniel Smith or Winsor and Newton. Let's see if I can pull some of these tubes. These are some typical of the high end professional watercolor paint that I use in a lot of my classes and a lot of my final projects. But they can be pretty pricey. Today I wanted to show you what it looks like when I'm using more budget friendly paints. When it comes to that category, Prima is probably one of my favorites. They aren't as high quality again, as the tubed watercolor paint. But they're not quite as low quality as some of the other student grade paints out there like Artist's Loft or Arteza or some of those other lower quality but very cheap paints. I would say Prima is right in the middle where the biggest difference between this brands of paint and the higher quality Winsor and Newton or Daniel Smith, is probably the transparency and vibrancy of the paint. Some people have said that this paint comes out just a little bit chalky. A little more chalky then the really dazzling transparency of the professional grade paint but I also compared to lower student grade. I have found that the texture of this paint is preferable for me for painting layers and they hold well in pens. Just in general, this is probably my very favorite brand of student grade paint. I would recommend, if you're looking for a cheaper, just some cheaper paints to practice out watercolor, these are usually the brand I recommend. The fun part about Prima is that they come in these tins with 12 different colors that all go together. These really cool color palettes. Today I'm going to be using this Essence color palette. It's going to be super fun. That's the paint. I also like to have some white gouache on hand in case you want to do some stars for our negative space mountain scene. Then I like to have a palette, a mixing palette. Which will be good for when we do color values and blending. Then finally, some painters tape for our final project because we're going to be using a lot of washes. I'm going to tape down my final paper to the desk. I'll show you that when we get there. A pencil with a kneaded eraser. Sometimes I like to use a kneaded eraser when I'm sketching out paintings because the way that you use a kneaded eraser is basically instead of like rubbing it like this, you just kind of put it over the pencil and it makes it a little bit lighter. Doesn't erase it all the way. It just picks up some of the lead so that you can still see the outline but then you don't have leftover pencil marks. I'll be using this sometimes. But that sums it up, I think for our materials. Also I always have two cups of water. One that I like to keep clean. I always have a paper towel or some kind of sponge, or something to wash off water. Then I always have some Q-tips handy as well, to mop up excess water. Now it's time for you to gather all your materials. Don't have to use exactly the ones that I'm using. Any of the materials you have on hand, I'm sure you'll be able to create beautiful paintings with. But this is what I'm using today. Once you gather your materials, I will see you in the next video. 3. Warm Up: Wet-on-wet blending: Welcome back. Before we start painting, our negative space painting. I have just a couple of warm-up exercises to go over some basic techniques that are going to be very useful as we begin our learning negative space painting. The first one is I want us to warm up a little bit using the wet-on-wet technique and blending with the wet-on-wet technique. If you've taken any watercolor classes before, then you might know there are two basic techniques in watercolor. The first is called the wet-on-dry technique, where I start painting on a piece of paper that's dry, but the paint is wet because, obviously, watercolor is activated via water. Whenever I'm painting with watercolor, the paint is always wet. But if the paper is dry when I'm painting, then that means I'm using the wet-on-dry technique. Some characteristics of the wet-on-dry technique are very defined and creates blends, and basically, because the surrounding areas are dry, my paint is only going to go where my brush goes. Which is a very useful definition term member when working with the wet on dry technique. On the other hand, the wet-on-wet technique is when your paper is already wet. I'm just getting this wet with water, it can be wet with water or with paint, which is something we'll talk about, but your paper is already wet before you start painting and when you start painting that way, notice how my colors bleed all over. They just bloom outward and go wherever there's water to go or gravity. Sometimes if you're holding your paper this way, then the paint will move down. But because the paper is already wet, the paint has more places to go and does not want to stay in whatever defined line or shape that you are painting with your paintbrush. That's the biggest difference between the wet-on-wet and the wet-on-dry techniques. These techniques are important for negative space painting mostly because, in order to give negative space paintings the really deep and stunning, swirly watercolor texture, we are going to be using combinations of the wet-on-wet and the wet-on-dry techniques, and paying attention to keeping our paint wet as long as possible to avoid dried lines. I think that's probably the most important thing that we're going to be talking about. Let me show you what I mean. When we paint with negative space, it's basically painting the shape around whatever space we want to be showing. If I'm going to paint a negative space circle, it means I want the circle to be white, and then I want the space around it to be green, and so that's a negative space circle. If I just wanted to have my paint stay there, have my green paint not move anywhere and stay in that circle, then that would be fine. But with negative space painting, the kind that we're going to do, especially for mountains. We're going to be building the shapes. But then we're also going to be filling out the rest of the painting and to lay the foundation for the next layer that we're going to do. That requires creating one wash of paint, basically the effect that the whole paper is this color. I don't know if I'm making sense, but I'm hoping as I'm painting, it's starting to make more sense. Say I wanted to fill a paper like it was this giant square. I would need to paint very quickly after I've painted that circle in order to move the paint so that it fills the whole square and so that it doesn't leave any dried lines. By dried lines, I mean, if I lift this up and show you if you can see carefully on this painting, there are some lines that you can see even after I've moved the pigment. You can still see the line where I initially painted that green around the circle. This is what we want to avoid. We don't want to see the dried lines. We want to move the paint quickly enough after we've put it down so that it can be one smooth, seamless blend on the rest of our painting. That's how we're going to get the layers and the texture that really makes negative space painting pop. If you're ever painting, and we're going to be practicing this a lot, definitely don't worry if you're still iffy about what this means or if you're still iffy on your skills in painting fast enough to eliminate the possibility of those paint lines. We're going to practice it a lot. But if you do as you're practicing, you cannot paint fast enough in order to move the paint, so it doesn't dry. The way to get rid of them is just to put darker paint on top. That basically just covers up the dried lines. We want to be careful as we do that with negative space painting, though, because as we're going to talk about negative space painting is all about utilizing color values and utilizing light and dark layers in order to make the previous layers really stand out. When you make one layer too dark, it makes it a little bit tricky. But generally, this is how you would get rid of a dried paint line. Before we move on, I'm going to demonstrate again why it's important that we need to move quickly while we're painting and why it's important for this wet-on-wet technique. This time I'm going to do a triangle. It's important for negative space paintings and using this wet on wet blending technique to move quickly while the paint is still wet and fill it around the spaces that we want to fill. Now when we're just having one shape, it's a lot easier than if you're trying to deal with multiple shapes. But the way to get a page to look very seamless like it's just one giant wash with this negative space cut out is to move the paint fast enough so that it never has a chance to dry, and that's really what we're going for. That's what I mean by wet-on-wet blending. In this case, sometimes it means something different for different classes. But by wet-on-wet blending, I mean putting down your paint probably using the wet-on-dry technique first, because we need to maintain this shape. This crisp shape. But then using water, a lot of water, to move the paint as fast as possible to fill the rest of the areas that we want to fill in our painting. To practice this wet-on-wet blending, I encourage you to make shapes like what I'm doing right now and have a designated area that you are trying to fill and see if you can make the shapes using the outline of whatever color that you want, but probably using the wet-on-dry technique first to make the outline of the shape and then using water, and/or very watery paint to paint around it and fill the designated space you already decided on without creating any paint lines. That's what we're practicing right now. We're going to be practicing a similar technique later when we talk more about negative space shapes. But for now, just try practicing these very simple shapes and moving the paint around fast enough so that it doesn't have a chance to dry. If it does dry before you get a chance to move it, then practice making the layers darker or putting darker paint on top of it. Essentially so that we have this negative space cut-out and a very smooth background so that it can emphasize our negative space shape. That's warm-up number one, so practice that. Then when you're ready, let's move on to warm-up number two. See you soon. 4. Warm Up: Color theory: Welcome to warm up number 2, where we are focusing all on color value and a little bit about color theory before we embark on our negative space, mountains practice round. The reason that we talk about color value is because in negative space painting, this is just like a little doodle with the color palette that is this prima set. Negative space painting is all about value. It's all about the lightness and darkness of shapes and how we can build off of them to showcase specific shapes. What I mean by that is, negative space is about coloring in the space around whatever object you're using. The way negative space layering, which is what we're doing when we're creating mountains, is all about utilizing color and knowing about color values to get darker and darker with the background, so that we're creating these layers of light and dark shapes, starting with light obviously because the very first shape that we create is going to be the lightest of them all. Then our paint gradually is going to get darker and darker as we continue building out more of the background and creating more of these negative space shapes. Color value is important. Obviously after that description is very important for the practice of these negative space painting. I'm doing just a brief overview. If you don't know what a value of a color is, basically it's lightness or darkness in its purest form. Which means I'm not adding white or black in order to make a color lighter or darker. When it comes to watercolor, I'm just adding or taking away water. To demonstrate in this palette, I'm adding lots of water to some of this dried blue violet paint over here and as you can see when I paint with it, this is very watery I've added a lot of water to it. I get this really light wash of this blue violet. Now, when I go ahead and I add more pigment to that, this little wall of water, it gets darker. The higher pigment to water ratio, the darker the paint is going to be versus the higher water to pigment ratio, the lighter the paint is going to be. In negative space painting, we are going to start light and then get dark. Generally, in watercolor painting, in the first place, you start with the lighter washes and then you get darker. But instead of actually painting in like filling in the shape of a mountain, negative space painting is going from light to dark painting in the background, so that the background is what showcases the shapes were trying to make. Okay, so that's color value. I think that if you've never done negative space painting before, starting with only one color is probably going to be the easiest for you. You can create really stunning pieces using just a monochromatic color scheme, like how I started with this little triangle doodle. This is all this blue violet color. Just going from lighter to darker and you can get some really beautiful pieces that way. That said, if you decide you want to mix it up and try blending different colors together as you are doing negative space painting, then my recommendation is to pick colors that are close together on the color wheel. If you don't know what that means, look up on Google, the color wheel and see which colors you need to blend together to create other colors. I have a few different tutorials on the color wheel. They are mostly in my galaxy classes. But I will give you a basic rundown right now. On the color wheel our primary colors are red, yellow, and blue and then our secondary colors are orange, green, and violet. These primary and secondary colors in addition to a multitude of other variations of colors all in between make up the rainbow. You might recognize this acronym, ROYGBV, is a very common acronym for the rainbow, especially if you're using it for like scientific purposes, but for our art purposes also. The order of the rainbow goes red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and then it starts over with red again. When I recommend that you blend colors that are next to each other on the color wheel, I also mean that are next to each other as if this ROYGBV was in a circle like that. Red, oranges and yellows go really well together. Yellows, greens, and blues go really well together. Violets, reds and oranges go really well together. Green, blues and violets go really well together. Just in general, picking colors that are next to each other, those colors are called analogous colors and you are always going to get a beautiful blend versus if you accidentally mix complimentary colors, which means colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel, off the top of my head, those colors right now are red and green are opposite or a blue and orange, or yellow and violet. If you mix those colors together, you'd get brown and not very pretty brown. I like a brown muddy, not cool blend. If you decide that you want to up to challenge a little bit. For example, I'll show you on this prima watercolor essence palette. I would look at my options. That's why I painted this little color swatch right here. If I wanted to do more than just this monochromatic blue violet then I'd probably choose this blue violet. Generally blue violet and green are next to each other, so they'll probably go pretty well together. I would do this blue violet, then this turquoise green color, and maybe this even more of a green color and if I wanted a fourth, either the light blue or the light green. I think that because these colors are varying toward green, I'm going to go for this light green here. These are the colors that I would choose to blend together. Now to test, to make sure that they would all blend together. Let's see to make sure that if I start to blend them, each of them would go well. I'm trying this light green and this blue violet to begin with. What happens when I blend the two together? Well, the violet definitely overtakes the green, but it doesn't turn brown or muddy. It mostly just turns this like darker greenish color, which is pretty pleasing to look at. I'm good with that. I know that all the greens would look good together because they're all with green. I think my next biggest concern is maybe this turquoise green color with the blue violet and when I put them together, similar thing, it creates this blue navyish color which is pretty beautiful. These all look pretty good together. If I decided to go not the monochromatic route then these colors in this essence palette are probably what I would go for. Before we move on to the next video, I would encourage you A, to practice color values, practice creating different values of colors using water and your palette and your watercolor to paint really light swatches of these colors and to paint really dark ones and to get really comfortable with finding those different shades. Then if you decide that you want to, for your final project, mix and match colors then I would pick two to four colors that you want to use in your project and I would recommend that they be close to each other on the color wheel, just so you know, you can get a great blend. That sums up this warm-up and overview of color theory. Let's now move on to practicing our negative space shapes. See you soon. 5. Practice: Part 1: Welcome to our practice session before moving on to our final project of painting these negative space mountains. Before we restart on the final project, I really wanted to have you practice for a few minutes so that you can get the hang of it because it can be a little tricky. Some things to look out for as you are painting mountains and painting negative space shapes in general is the amount of repainting I guess. The amount of repainting crisp lines you're going to have to do to maintain a really dark background and to maintain the whole effect that you're going for. Unless all of your negative space drawings are within each other, like say this triangle instead of being to the side of the white triangle was just completely covering it, then you're going to have to repaint some of these lines and that requires a very fine hand. Before we start painting our mountains, I think it's a good idea similar to in this doodle that I did, to practice painting a different shape. I'm going to do triangles specifically because triangles are what we're going to be painting for our mountains. First, I'm going to take my pencil and lightly sketch out three triangles, similar to this sketch that I did over here that are building off of each other and getting bigger and bigger. Then I'm going to tell myself that I want this square or this rectangle to be where I want to keep my background. I want to keep my background within this rectangle and my goal here is to use negative space to showcase all of these triangles. This is just a basic exercise for when we move on to our more complicated final project so keep that in mind. This is also a place after you've sketched where you could take out your kneaded eraser and if you want to erase some of these pencil marks and just lightly roll over it. The pencil is just a little not quite as popping out as it was before. I can still see the lines, but they are definitely more faded. I've picked up some of the lead. First things first, I want to choose which triangle I want to be my white triangle that I'm going to keep the same color as the paper. Now, one disclaimer, you can choose instead of having the first shape be white, you can have the whole thing be a very light color value blend. That's probably what I'm going to do for our final project mountain but for this warm up, I'm just going to keep the practice paper white but you should do whatever you want. But if you decide you want your very lightest shape to still have some color to it, then what you would do is paint the whole rectangle of very light color value or color blend. But for me, I want the middle one, I think, to stay white. One technique you can do is instead of painting with paint right away, you can paint with water. That might help the paint stay the color that you wanted to stay. It might not but you're still going to need to paint quickly is what I'm saying. But sometimes painting water before you put the paint down is a good way to eliminate those pink lines. I'm going to do monochromatic again but this time I'm going to do this turquoise color and I'm going to get some pretty light values out of it by putting on a palette and putting water in it. Now, I'm going to fill in the outline in water that I did with this paint. I'm trying to move quickly. I can still maintain mostly the shape that I want with this triangle. It looks like I went outside the pencil lines, but that's okay. Now that I've drawn the triangle, I want to move as quickly as possible to fill in the shape of the rectangle. As you can see, this marker that I use to label is not archival, which means it's not waterproof so it's blending in a little bit, which is fine. Now that I have this very first layer with my very first negative space shape shown, I'm going to wait for this to dry and then come back and paint my other shapes. This will be momentary because of the wonders of video editing. Just a momentary pause while we wait for this layer to dry. 6. Practice: Part 2: My layer's dry. For the record, I did use this embossing heat tool, which I use in a lot of my paintings. I get a lot of questions about this. I picked it up off Amazon. Basically, I used it to dry my painting because I don't have the patience to wait for it to dry. But if you don't have one, totally fine, you can just wait for it to dry or use a hairdryer or something. But that's what I did. Now for our second layer, I'm going to pick my next triangle, and I think I'm going to have the little triangle be the next negative space that I use, and the trick is to maintain the shape. I want this triangle always to be in front. At some point I'm going to erase these lines that are in the middle, but this whitespace triangle is going to be at the very front always. I'm going to very carefully trace around this triangle that's next to it and create negative space around it while still maintaining the structure of this white triangle. But first, I'm going to add more pigment to my palette over here, just moving it so you can see a little better, to make it just a little darker. It's very watery, so I don't have to add like tons, but I do want to add enough so that it stays darker. The first thing that I'm going to do, I want this to be really watery, that's one trick. If you're not putting water down first, is if your paint is really watery then it doesn't drive as fast and especially as we're trying to avoid having our paint dry too quickly, that's going to be pretty key. I'm painting around this triangle, but I also need to paint around this triangle, because this white triangle is a shape that I want to maintain. The only triangle I don't need to worry about on this layer is the really big one over here. As we are trying to practice not leaving any dried paint lines, I would just practice getting in the habit of not painting in the same place for too long. If you start painting in the same place for too long, then that place could dry. See like over here. I was painting down here for a while and over here, it's already started to dry a little bit, but I'm catching it in time so that it's not quite drying. I want to maintain some crisp lines. Around this triangle that I've already painted in a different layer, but I'm painting again, around it again because I want this whole white triangle to stay the way that it is. That's definitely one of the techniques that I want you to practice. Not only moving this paint around, but also having a steady hand so that you can maintain the lines as you're repainting negative space shapes basically to get the darker background that we want with all of these layers. I'm almost done. Again, just really quickly to recap, my goal was to paint this whole background layer, including this now triangle that's behind, so that there were no dried paint lines and so that I maintain the structure of my layer beforehand. I feel like I did a pretty decent job. Now we're going to wait for this layer to dry and move on to our final shape. See you in just a few seconds. 7. Practice: Part 3: That layer's dry and now for our final layer, we're going to use even darker color value to paint around this big triangle that I can still faintly see with the pencil. I am using some pretty wet, it's dense, but I'm using a little bit of water with this paint so that it is dark but that I can also use it without worrying that it's going to immediately dry. That's my trick that we talked about before for painting lines. Crisp lines like this with water and still needing them to blend in with a wash so that you have just one solid layer of watercolor. On this layer, if there are any dried paint lines, then it's more okay than in other layers because we know this is our last one. It's okay for it to be darker. But just in general, we want to avoid paint lines at all. It's hard, it's tricky, I can't always do it. But the faster you get at painting, like training your mind to not just paint in the same place and to try focusing on all of the painting at once instead of just one part of it, the better you are going to get at avoiding dried paint lines, so I painted this triangle, which is behind the white ones still. But I am still painting very carefully around the other triangles because I still want this whole background to be one shape and to be one wash. I'm putting varying amounts of pigment and valued pigment in here because, while it's all one wash, I don't want any dried lines to break up my wash. I also like that watercolor texture that's irregular and watery. I am leaning into that and some places in the painting are a little more valued, have a little more color value than other places in the painting and that is by design. I'm just finishing up. I have some dried lines over here and that's okay because it's pretty light over here and I want it to be a little darker anyway. I'm just going to blend in some of this darker paint. Just being very careful. This is a place where you might use those size brush instead of the six in case you have a hard time controlling your hands, which is totally fine, or you just need to practice that more. The benefit of using professional paint brushes is that typically professional paint brushes maintain their point of their brush even if there are big. That's one reason why I'd recommend investing in those, but that doesn't mean you can't also create smooth lines with cheaper brushes. That's my practice version of negative space painting is very low stakes. But as you can see, I have this outer triangle that's white and the lightest color, and then the shapes get darker and darker. One thing that I would note is perhaps in my third layer, if my first layer was white, my second layer was this very, very light color value of this turquoise, and my third layer was this slightly darker one. I think I would probably make my third layer and even darker value just so it would have a higher contrast against this second layer. That's something that I would change in the future and good to know for when I, before I start painting my watercolor mountains because its always good to think ahead and think about what you would do differently, and that's something that I would do differently. Before we move on, you should practice these shapes. You don't have to do triangles necessarily, although I would recommend doing triangles because mountains are triangles and those are mostly what we're going to be practicing but just practice painting like a simple three shape or three or four layer with only one element per layer, negative space painting before we move on, because our final project is going to be a little more complicated than that and it's good to get a hang of water control and painting this very seamless background of water while still maintaining the crisp lines and hand controls so that you can maintain the crisp lines and just general special control of where your shapes are and how you want them to look. Doing in a low-stakes environment like this before our final project is always a good thing. That concludes our practice round and if you're ready, let's move on to the sketch of our final project. 8. Final Project: Sketch: we are starting our final project, and to prep the scene before we start painting our layers, first, I am going to take down my piece of paper. Again, this my legion Stonehenge cold press aqua paper. it's heavy press, which means that it is 300 pounds instead of 140, so it can take a lot, but I'm still going to tape it down with some painters tape. This is just like generic painter's tape I picked up from Amazon you can pick up at home depot or any other place where you find, home supplies or hardware supplies. Painter's tape is about as adhesive as I would recommend going as far as tape goes, for taping down your paper because if you have two adhesive tape, then it will rip up your paper, it will tear your paper. We want to be nice to our paper, but we still want to tape it down so that we can minimize the warping with all the washes that we're doing. Bear in mind, that when we're taping down paper, we are creating our own negative space. When we lift up the tape again, there's going to be this white space that's like a frame around it. As much as possible, I would try to keep the edges the same. I'm just eyeballing it. It might not be exactly the same or exactly straight, but I'm going to do what I can. You want to firmly press down the tape so that on the paper and then also around the paper. I'm doing it top, bottom and then side, side so that when time comes to tape off the tape, my tape isn't all stuck together. That's my trick because if you did it like the top and then the side and then the bottom and then the side. If you want all on a row like that, then the adhesive edges of the tape would all be stuck together and it would be harder to take it off. This is just my little trick to avoid that dilemma. Because I'm taping it down also, I'm just going to paint on the whole surface, so I don't have to worry about sometimes if I do free-hand paintings like this, I don't tape it down and I just have freehand edges, then you have to worry about where your paint is going so that it doesn't go too far off the edge of the paper. But with tape, you don't have to worry about that, which is nice. I've taped down my smaller piece of paper. This is about five by seven inches, which is good enough to frame in the United States. Now, I am going to sketch my layers of mountains, using my trusty pencils. My first layer, my mountains are going to be craggy, they are not going to be, sometimes when you look at mountains, they're not exactly shapes like triangles. They're a little more smooth than that. But I'm going for more like illustrated triangle look. My mountains are going to be craggy and I'm going to do the layers a little bit uneven, so not all of them are going to go across the whole page. At the end of my last layer, I want to keep, one light layer of light that's like a half circle and I'm going to call that the moon, so we'll see how that goes. I'll show you how I'm going to do that when I sketch it out. I'm going to sketch out very lightly. Just some layers of triangles here, varying heights and widths. Then I'm going to peter off here, so that's my first layer. This layer is going to either be a very light wash, or it's going to stay white, probably a very light wash. Now I'm going to do my second layer and I'm going to start that second layer, going down like that. One thing to note, if you decide you want your mountains, like one layer mountain to jut into another layer just remember that this is going to be background probably, and so I'm going to have to repaint over that, which will be fine. I'm going to do that to show you how to do it when we get there. This is my second layer. I'm going to make this mountain range I think go more all the way across than the other one did, like that. Then I am going to do one last layer of mountains but it's not going to turn this side. I didn't plan this beforehand so playing this right there. That's good. We're going to call that, my last layer of mountains. Then over here, let's say right here, I'm going to have a little moon rise. That is going to be the moon right there. I want the moon, that's right there, to be the same color as this layer. That's important to note when we paint our first layer, that we are keeping, not only are we keeping this mountain range a light color, we're also keeping this mountain range of light color as we paint around it, and I will show you what that means as we continue on. This is me sketching. Just to wrap up, I painted three layers of these mountains using this basic triangle shape and I didn't really have a plan. I just started going for it and started putting down triangles if you want to have more of a plan or a composition you should go for it, but this is my style of how I do things. Let's move on to the next layer where we start painting. 9. Final Project: Part 1: We've sketched out our mountain range, and now we're going to start painting. For this specific scene, I'm going to do monochromatic. I know I talked about I couldn't decide if I was going to do monochromatic or if I was going to do multiple colors. I think for this big final project, I'm going to do monochromatic. But I am going to have a bonus lesson after this final project showing you how I would do something similar with multiple colors, not as intricate as our final project, but just something bonus if you want to see multiple color thing too. First, I just mixed the light color value of this blue violet, which is the color that I'm going to be using. Now I'm going to paint the whole thing. I'm going to do a big wash, and so because I'm doing a big wash, I'm going to use my bigger brush. A big wash of this light color value, and I'm doing a mix of water/ and paint here. 10. Final Project: Part 2: Next up we are going to be leaving this layer of mountains, the same color that is, and painting in the background up from that layer, and so that means we're going to need a darker color values, and a really wet brush, like I talked about in the other layers, and then I'm just going to go for it. I know that it starts right here is where I want this layer to start. One thing I did is because I've wanted some of the mountains to jump in front of each other. I still had this very light mountain still be present in that layer, and so I'm very carefully painting around it because I want to maintain the color of that and now I'm still just painting within the lines that I drew in my sketch, with this second layer of mountains maintaining the moon, because this moon I don't want to be a different color ever. I will always want it to be this white color, and paying attention to the tip of this mountain, which is still part of that second mountain range, the one that I'm painting right now. Just moving the paint. I periodically grab water and move the paint, and now when I'm starting back on this mountain range again, I'm picking it more pigment, being very careful and then quickly filling it in so that I don't get any paint lines. One of the biggest places that incorporates for paint lines, is when you're drawing careful lines around shapes. This line, if you leave it for too long or if it's not watery enough, it can dry very quickly, especially if you're using student grade paper. It's a lot easier on professional grade paper, but that doesn't mean it's going to stay dry the whole time. But now we've moved past the moon, and so we just have this little bit of the mountain range left, and you do not have to move as quickly as I am. I have painted lots of these. You can move slower if you need to. That's totally fine. I went ahead and finished off that layer and I added a little bit more dark textures to it, this is similar to what we did the layer before, and now we are just painting the sky. We're on our last layer because the final mountain range is the color that we want it to be. Now we just want to make the sky very dark, while keeping the moon very light. I'm not even going to use my palette. I'm going to scoop that over here, my mixing palette, I'm just going to use some water that I have left in this little pen here and to make sure that it still watery, while I first start painting and remember it doesn't have to be as dark as it needs to be. At first, I can always make it darker if I need. I just want to avoid the paint lines as much as possible, but I am outlining the final layer of mountains here and I want the sky ultimately to be the darkest layer of background that we have, and it's a lot easier to make something darker ones it's light then to make it lighter, slash to get rid of paint lines. That's why I'm adding water. But I fully intend to go back and I still want to keep some of this cool texture, but I fully intend to go back and make a lot of these things darker than they are. But I'm still maintaining the mountain shapes that I've had in past layers, and that's where a lot of the hand control comes in, and I'm just moving right along over here, and then next I'm going to do this moon, very carefully paint around the moon like we've done in the other layers, maintain the tip of that mountain right there. My pencil lines are pretty faint, so I want to be careful not to paint over the mountains that I'm trying to showcase with this negative space just about there. All of my sky is now wet the way that I want it, but now it's not quite as dark as I want it yet. But you see the places where I did put lots of pigment, those have already dried because they still had less pigment to water ratio. I'm just picking up a lot of pigment now, and especially around the edges here and around the edges of the moon. I want some of this like nice contrasting pigment here. We can leave some of it light because having that texture in the sky is pretty cool. In general, I'm going to repaint this so it's even darker. Just making sure to keep the shape of the mountain. That looks pretty good to me. This tip of this mountain not quite sharp enough. I'm just going to angle a little bit more so I can get a little bit more of a tip right there. That's something to look for and something I was explaining earlier in an earlier video that we want our mountains to have that nice sharp point to them. Because that's the illustrated look I'm going for in this painting, and so in some places I've left some white and in other places I'm using this really dark pigmented to just blend it in and add even more texture over here. Then I might even go in just with some water and create even more contrast or a Q tip. If you go in and just create some more white spaces, that contrast can look really, really cool. But I'm noticing down by the moon, words trying down here. I want the edge of the moon to be pretty dark like that, and maybe over here I'll add some water just to put some shape and movement to the sky. That looks pretty good to me, and the last step is going to be adding some stars once this is dried. You can, if you want, choose to add stars right now while it's still wet and let's see if I can do that. If I take some of this white paint. I have some white Gouache dried on my palette over here. The trick with white stars and stars in general is that you really need to have clean water because you're using white paint. If you use any water that [inaudible] , then it will probably turn it a color you don't want it to be, and that's not great. I'm going to just take some of the squash and then splatter it a little bit while this is still wet on my painting so that I can get some of that blurred star effect before I finish, and the next, once it's dry. I like to splatter stars a, so it looks random, and b, because it doesn't take as long as drawing them in all the way, and I like to do a layer while the sky is still wet so that you can get some of these gleaming stars and it add some depth. Now the next step is to wait for this to dry and to add in the stars and we will do that momentarily. 11. Final Project: Part 3: We have painted all of our layers officially and now we're just adding in the stars and finishing up. First, because I know i'm splattering, i'm just going to put some pieces of scrap paper over the top of my mountain here because I don't necessarily want the stars to be on my mountains. That said, it doesn't really matter that much, but just to cover the bulk of the mountain is probably not a bad idea. I left some spaces open because honestly, it's a painting, it's okay if there are some stars I got elsewhere. Now, i'm taking my gouache that somebody took some of my Doctor Ph Martin's leak-proof White. I'm just going to go ahead and do a few little splatters on top of the sky. Aiming for the top. But it's also hard to aim when you splatter. Keep that in mind. I do this and pretty in-depth splatter tutorial techniques for a few of my classes, my galaxy classes, my night sky class. If you're interested in that, I would recommend doing that, but that looks pretty good to me. The final thing is I think i'm just going to put a little shooting star right here by just painting in and flicking that a little bit, flicking my hand, i'm barely touching my paintbrush to the paper. There you go. There is my negative space mountain night sky scene. If you paint it along with me, I hope that you had a great time learning all about negative space. If you want to see about how I would do something similar, a little less layers, a little less complicated, but something similar with multiple colors. Then stay tuned for the bonus video that I have coming up. But if you feel this monochrome conversion is good enough for you. Thank you so much for painting along with me. I had such a great time filming this class and I cannot wait to see all of your night skies. I think that this illustrated look is super cool and using negative space to create wilderness scenes is a really cool and fun, more loose technique. I can't wait to explore more for more topics in the future. Thank you. If you really loved your piece, feel free to post it to Instagram and tag me. My handle is this writing desk. If you do post your piece and tag me, there's a decent chance that you'll be featured on my Instagram stories. But also please do post this to the project gallery so that me and the other students in this class can give you some well-deserved praise. If you have any questions or requests for feedback. Posting to the product gallery is always a good place to put it because I check that. It also is just the more projects are in the project Gallery, the more that other students may see my SkillShare class if you really liked it. Post to Instagram posts to the project gallery and please, if you really loved this class, the best thing that you can do for me is to leave a review. I would love to hear all of your thoughts. The more reviews that this class have, the more likely again, other students are likely to see it. Thank you so much once more and I will see you next time. You're looking for a satisfying tape peeling. I thought I might do this in real-time for you as another just bonus video. I'm going to take the tape at an angle and we're going to see as our messy edges and see how some of the papers coming off a little bit. That's okay. That happens. But we're going to see is our messy edges turn into crisp lines. I always think watching people peel tape from their painting is really fun and satisfying. In case you're interested, leave this in a different video for those who might think this is not worth watching. But I thought I'd do it anyway. Notice how I saw the tape, started pulling up them, the paper over here. I stopped and started on the other side and the hopes that it was going to be less on this side. And it looks like it is. So this is a good example of how as pulling with paper again, this is a good example of how even painters tape. It can be to adhesive and can rip up the paper a little bit. It really depends on the paper I've found that legion paper, the kind that i'm using right now, doesn't always hold up as well when using tape. It's good than that most legion paper comes in blocks so that you don't need tape. But just for reference, it really depends on the paper it depends on the tape, it could depend on a variety of different things. If you could just pull up more paper than you were intending. But either way it's still looks pretty freaking, cool, I think. Last one you going to stop and see if it's better over here. Not really. That's all the tape. There's a quick little satisfying tape video for you as we unveil our moonlit mountains seem. See you in the next video. 12. Bonus Project: Part 1: Welcome to our bonus lesson of this negative space mountain water color class. This lesson is coming after our final project where we created this beautiful monochrome negative space mountain scene. Now, really quickly in a shorter version, I'm going to demonstrate what it would be like if instead of monochrome colors with this negative space painting, we decided to use multiple colors and blend them together. In our warm up class, where we talked about color value, I talked about blending colors and what colors would go well together. In this Prima art philosophy called Essence pallets, we decided or I decided and you watched, that this blue violet, the turquoise green, the dark green and the light green would all blend pretty well together in a really cool way. Knowing that these are the colors that I'm going to use to create this more simple version of the mountain landscape, it's a little bit more simple because none of the layers overlap as you can see. We're not having to retrace things really quickly and there's no moon, there are less mountains. This class that is in the effort to make this video a little shorter just because it's a bonus. First things first, we're going to do our layers in essentially the same way as we did for the monochrome mountain scape. First, we're going to do the first layer, at the very least, that fills this first layer of mountains. As you can see, I'm not using professional grade paper quite. I'm using this Prima marketing watercolor paper pad instead. These little pads they sell on Amazon, they sell on their website. They're really nice because they're like a watercolor block where they're glued on the top and the bottom. A full water color block technically, I think, should be glued on all four sides, but these Prima pads are still nice being glued on the top and on the bottom because it holds the paper pretty taut. So I don't have to use tape to get the paper taut. Also I can just paint right on the pad and I don't have to worry about my edges hitting the table or making the table dirty really. That's what I'm doing here. First I'm painting this first layer. You can choose to go all the way up. I think that in the final project version, for all of the layers we went all the way up, but it's also important to note that you don't necessarily have to go all the way up with each layer. You really only need to make sure you're painting the layer that's going to become the negative space in the next layer. For this one, that's this first layer of mountains, so let's go. In general for negative space and color value, we go light to dark. That should be the same when we're doing our color blends. If that is the philosophy that we are holding to, then the lightest color here is this light green. Now, you can do negative space where one layer is one color and do it that way, or you can do it the way that I'm doing it, which is having multiple colors on each layer. I'm not painting the whole thing, this green color and I'm not doing it in a very solid wash. I'm diluting this very light green color with some water so that it has a lighter value and also some cooler water color texture going on. I'm letting some of this bleed into the next layer of mountains. I have down some of this green and I know that this light green will go pretty well with this darker green. I don't want it completely dark because this is my first layer, so I'm going to take some of this dark green and put it on a pallet and dilute it with water so that it's a lighter value of that darker green and just put it in some places on the mountain. This is basically a practice on wet blending. If you'll remember when we talked about wet on wet. Wet on wet blending is when the paper is already wet. That can be with water or with paint as you can see, and I am using water to blend these two colors together in this really cool, abstract, splashy way. That's the look that I'm going for when I do negative space painting and multiple color blends. This is the look that I mean. I'm just adding some more paint on this layer making sure not to get too dark, but when I'm adding this light green, I know I'm okay because it's a light-colored already. Then I feel pretty good about that layer. I'm making sure all the edges are done, which I can do because I'm using this block. Now, we are going to move on to the next layer. Our first layer is dry and now we're going to, it's mostly dry. It's still a little damp, but mostly it's dry. Now we're going to move on to painting our next layer. For this layer, instead of darker versions of these two greens, I'm now going to also add in this dark turquoise. I'm probably going to add in a little bit of light green, but predominantly it'll be this darker green and then this darker turquoise for this second layer of mountains. To start I am going to pick up some of the screen. I don't want that very dark as they can be. I still want it pretty dark, but I'm going to dilute it with a little bit of water first and then very carefully, I had a lot of paint on there, so I decided to put it elsewhere on the paper before I needed to paint these really careful lines. I am going to create our negative space first layer by outlining the layer of these mountains with this dark green. Knowing that I am at once creating this first layer of mountains, but also painting in my second layer of mountains. This color that I'm painting with right now is what partially at least my second layer of mountains is going to look like. We're thinking about those two main things here when we do negative space painting. How you are shaping. By allowing the negative space to come through, you are simultaneously shaping one layer and preparing the other one. Just cool when you think about it also trippy when do you think about it, but still cool. Okay, so we've shaped this first layer of mountains and now I'm going to keep adding while my paper is wet, I'm going to keep adding color and contrast to this layer. By coloring contrast, I mean, I'm going to add some colors to do some wet on wet blending here. I'm going to make sure that at the very least, the edges around this mountain, our first layer of mountain has some dark contrasting colors to separate one layer from the next, because light against dark looks very cool. Now I'm going back and forth between adding water to further blend these colors together and adding paint to add more color. I'm just going to add a little bit of this turquoise here, that dark turquoise that we talked about. The dark turquoise is probably going to mostly be the next layer, but I'm still adding a little bit here and more of this dark green. Then just so we can avoid some dried paint lines up here, I'm going to continue moving this layer up, but getting lighter and lighter just so we don't get more water on the paper than we necessarily need to and so that we can have smooth blends for this layer of mountains, which we know is this outline right here that we have in pencil. Okay, so that mostly looks good to me. I really just want this layer to be darker than the previous one and it looks like it is. When you're adding color blends, you just go until you feel comfortable stopping. Sometimes you have to force yourself to stop because you might be going a little too much and that's okay. That looks good enough to me and I just dilute that tiny bit. Okay. Now, let's move on to our next layer and our next blend of colors. 13. Bonus Project: Part 2: Okay, our second layer is dry, and so now we're going to do the same thing with the third layer, but we're going to get a little bit even darker with our blends. Instead of these three colors here, instead of the light green, that dark green and the turquoise green. We're going to transition more into using the dark green, the turquoise green, and then this blue violet right here, let's hop to it. I'm going to start with, where last time I started with a darker green. This time I'm going to start with the turquoise green. First and foremost focusing on getting the layers of this mountain range the way that I want it. Then making sure to dilute some of this with water and move it up so I don't have paint lines, I can avoid those as much as possible. We've talked about that a lot in this class, where the key to avoiding dried paint lines is to never allowing the paint to dry if you can help it. That's maintaining a keen eye on every part of the painting. That's easier to do as you have one practice. I'm being very careful to only paint the outline of the mountainside that I want, or we talked about the layer we did last time is going to make up the colors of this second mountain range. The same goes true for this layer where the colors we put down here. Now that I've finished, mostly finished, that's a little bit of a curvy mountain and they want to be a little straight so I'm just going to push it down. The color blends we have on this layer are going to make up. Just pushing this all the way up here, are going to make up the blends for this final mountain layer. Now that we've outlined this, our second mountain range, I'm going to add in more color, especially along the edges of these mountains, to add more contrast because as this paint is drying a little bit, I can see it's not quite as dark as I wanted to be. I'm just going to make sure to add some very heavily pigmented drops of paint right here. When heavily pigmented means the ratio of water to paint is a lot more paint than water when you pick it up with your paint brush. Just so that I can have even more of a contrast between the two layers. I want my two dark colors to be this turquoise, but also some of this blue violet over here. Because I think that is just a really nice and unexpected color blend. But because the green is more blue and because the purple is more blue then these two colors actually blend pretty well together, because where red and green. If the purple where more red, violet and the turquoise was more green, it might have a little bit different of an effects that we wanted, it might look a little more muddy. Because as the two complimentary colors that are major in it, like the red and the green are complementary colors. Because mostly these two colors are leaning, blew. It creates an unexpectedly beautiful smoky blue blend, I think when the two come together. That's going to make up the majority of the blending for this layer, this dark turquoise and the blue violet. Then the whole thing doesn't have to all be dark. I like it if it gets slightly lighter at the top of the mountain peak, mostly because I know the very last layer is going to be the sky. The sky is only going to be this dark blue violet with maybe a little bit of other blending colors and with it. If the top of the mountain is just a little bit lighter then, that will create a really nice contrasting color blends. Let's move on to the final layer of the sky. I think that this blend looks really cool and really smoky and once we paint the sky fully is going to look awesome, so see you soon. Last but not least, we are going to paint our final layer where we are painting the sky and outlining our final layer of mountains. We've done these two layers and we've painted three layers total and now for our fourth layer of paint, third layer of mountains, we are going to use the darkest color to paint the sky and leave a nice outline of this big mountain range that is our final layer of mountains. I didn't do too many peaks for this one, just to make it even as simple as possible. I am using first the blue violet, I might add in a couple of different blends. But since this is the sky, since this is supposed to be like a night sky. Also might just leave it this blue violet and let the water blends. When I add some water, adds some swirling as to the sky like in our final project monochrome version. But first I want to get the layer down all the way, almost there. Now I'm just going to add some dark contrasting spots to add some texture to the sky. I can do that by adding highly pigmented drops of paint onto the sky so that it's not all just like one wash, or I can tap some water on here if I fill my brush just with water and use it to push around the paint that can create some texture. We practice that with our other night sky, with our monochrome version and this is the same idea, so there you go. There's our night sky. That is how I would do multi-color blending when you do negative space painting. The key is to find colors that go really well together when you blend them together and to also maintain the light to dark order when you are putting the colors down. That can mean actually doing pigments that are lighter in color than other pigments, or just still maintaining color value like we did in our final project painting. But either way, the basic concepts are the same. You just do a little bit more blending and color theory when dealing with multiple colors. If you want to try out this version too, please feel free and feel free to post it to the project gallery as well. If you just thought this was a fun overview or a fun little bonus lesson. That's what it was also intended for. Either way, thank you so much for joining me for this class and I will see you in the recap. 14. Recap: Thank you so much for joining me for this class all on using negative space to create mountain scapes. If you painted along with me in our final project, we used a monochrome color scheme to create this stunning moonlit mountain range. I am in love with this piece, and I hope that you are too. If you watched our bonus lesson, I also did this little bonus project using multiple color blends and the same negative space techniques that we learned. Either way, no matter which one you painted or if you've painted something else, I hope that you came out of this class with something that you're really proud of. I hope that you learned something new about negative space and about wet on wet painting and color blends. Honestly more important than any of that, I hope that you will have the confidence to continue painting and continue exploring with watercolor because it is one of my very favorite things and that's honestly is all they want in the world for you. So if you really liked this class and you really enjoyed the techniques, one of the best things that you can do is to leave a review and talk about your experience. One, so that other students can get your firsthand perspective on the class in case they're a little nervous about taking it or unsure if it's going to be worth their time. Hearing a firsthand account of what your experience is like is really helpful for them. Two, if you want to leave a review because you think that I have some areas to improve upon, please I would love to hear any of your thoughts and I would also love to hear all of the ways that you felt like this class excelled so that I can continue with my future classes focusing on the things that really hit home for you. So leaving a review is by far one of the best things you can do if you want to continue supporting me and continue supporting my classes. Also posting your project to the project gallery would mean the world to me. A, because I really want to see your projects and I really want to see what you came up with and I want to be your biggest cheerleader. But B, also posting to the project gallery helps other people to see the class as well. So if you loved the class, leave a review, post your project to the gallery. If you decide that you want to post your project to Instagram, make sure to tag me. My handle is This writing desk. I typically do features of all of my Skillshare classes once or twice a month. I might just choose yours to feature on my Instagram stories. So to recap, if you love this class, ways to spread the word are to, leave a review, post your project to the gallery or post your project to Instagram. But if you just decided to keep this class for you, that's totally cool too. Most important I hope that you had a great time. If you liked this class, you might enjoy any of my other classes and I would love to see you there too. So thank you again and see you next time.