Watercolor or Procreate: Paint Successfully Using Shape

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] [NOISE] Would you believe that painting is simply a matter of thinking about shapes? If only I'd known all those years ago, that if I can see a rectangle, I can paint a rectangle. And if I can paint four more rectangles and a tail, I've almost got a cheater. If only somewhere along the way in my four years of art school, line drawing, life drawing, grappling with the art of painting, someone had whispered these three little words, deconstruct using shape. Three simple words that describe a way of seeing that opened the door to painting freedom. But fellow creative soul who longs to paint but is scared, take this class at your peril because it will forever change how you see the world. You'll become a shape spotter, deconstructer, analyzer, reconstructer, visual builder, fluid painter, subject crushing, free creator. Learn this technique, practice, practice, practice, and you'll be able to paint anything. 2. Project: The project for this class is to paint some animals using the shapes method. If you want to, you can also paint or write a word underneath your animal. This could be your word of the year or any word that has meaning for year and that you want to remember. I'll take you through a step-by-step process within each video. If you're completely new to drawing or painting, then you might want to start using felt-tip pens or tumble markers. But as soon as you feel confident enough, I recommend that you change over to using paint. I'll be demonstrating using watercolor paint. I love working in watercolor paint for three reasons. Firstly, the paint dries really fast, which means you haven't got time to get scared and freeze up. You just got to start. Secondly, watercolor paint is very easy to push and pull around. If you do make a mistake and you're quick, you can get rid of it. Thirdly, when watercolor paint dries, it creates these unexpected blends and textures, which adds a level of interest to your painting. Make sure you've got a lot of scrap watercolor paper available. This could be the back of other paintings that haven't worked or an old watercolor sketch book that you don't care about because you're going to make a lot of bad paintings. I call them blobs of doom. This is completely normal. You are not a bad artist if you don't immediately make perfect shapes. You are learning a skill. This takes practice. If you can laugh to mistakes, share them with other people, and have another go, then you have smashed the project. What will you gain from doing the project? Well, you should take this class with caution because it's going to change how you look at everything. Everywhere you go, you are going to start to see things as shapes. Then you're going to start analyzing the shapes and thinking about how you would put them together and paint them. You've been warned. It's like learning to read. This class is the phonics. Once the phonics comes automatically to you, then you start to focus on the meaning in your reading. It's the same with painting. Once you've mastered this way of seeing, deconstructing, and reconstructing, then you'll realize that you can paint anything. This is especially useful if you're a surface pattern designer because once you can master and paint any routine, then you can shift your focus onto other elements of patent design, especially color. If you're an illustrator, then you can use this technique to create whimsical illustrations in your own style. In the project gallery, please share all the steps that you take as you go along. Don't be scared to share your blobs of doom. It will encourage others to have a go and not be scared to try. Then share your shape as your final project, either on its own or made up into a fully-fledged illustration or with a weird added underneath if you want to. I can't wait to see what you come up with. In the next video, we'll look quickly at what materials you'll need. 3. Materials: You can do this class using any paint. I would recommend water-based paint like watercolor, gouache, or acrylic. You may want to do the first steps using felt-tip pen. Any felt tip or marker will be fine. Something that gives you a big area of color quickly is what you need. You can also really easily practice this using an iPad. Procreate would be perfect. If you are working not digitally, then paint is perfect because you can push and pull it around and easily get rid of areas of color that you don't want. This is what you can't do with a felt tip pen. I'll be using Kuretake Gensai Tambi wood colors. I like them because I've got all the colors right in front of me, and they are very nice, creamy and opaque, which I like. But any brand of watercolor is fine. For paper, I love to work on Arches cold press. If you've never done painting in this way, then I would suggest working on a cheap watercolor paper, something like this Goldlines studio pad. I'll put a link to it in the class resources. Paper that you're not precious about is quite important because you are going to need to practice and you're going to paint a lot of blobs. It's totally up to you whether you prefer to paint on a hot press or cold press, watercolor paper. I use both, but on balance, I think I prefer cold press, which means it has a slight texture. I use this ceramic butcher's block as my pallet, but you can use whatever you have to hand, even just a white ceramic plate will be perfect. You'll need a paintbrush. I use this paintbrush. It's a scepter gold, size 14 and it's a round brush, so it holds a lot of water and it comes to a very nice, fine tip at the end. A top tip is to use the biggest brush that you can. This might seem counter-intuitive, but so long as it has a sharp point, it means that you can cover a large area with fewer brush strokes, so you don't end up scrubbing. Then you'll also need two water jars. I have a dirty jar and a clean jar. First you wash your brush in the dirty jar and then again in the clean jar, and this helps to keep your colors pure. You'll need some toilet roll or kitchen towel to use as a soak pad and some toilet roll to use to erase any mistakes. Pause the video now, get your paints and paper ready, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we'll start deconstructing our shapes. I promise it's fun, and as soon as you've done one, you won't feel scared. See you there. [MUSIC] 4. Deconstruction: The first step is to stop seeing your subject as a big cat and instead see it as a group of shapes joined together. Normally, you would do this in your mind, but I will draw out the separate shapes to show you what I mean. For the body, I can see it as basically a rectangle, something like that. Then there's a leg coming down with a little bit coming off it, another rectangle. There's another leg, which is basically another rectangle. The head is basically a square. You can think of it as a square with a couple of ears coming off, and the leg down the bottom here is basically another rectangle, more or less like that. Then the foot coming off is basically another rectangle. Then the tail, guess what? A rectangle with a curve. There you have a deconstructed cheetah. The second step is to take the shapes that you've identified and join them together. Again, starting with the body, I'm going to draw the rectangle. Then I'm going to join the head on and the head was basically a square and it joins on roughly there. Then the legs are rectangles coming down with a little bit coming off. Two of those. The back leg we decided was another rectangle and then the foot coming off there and the tail. There you have your stylized cheetah. Now as a really easy starting point, I suggest that you pause the video and then choose an image of a big cat. You can download some images from the class resources or use this Pinterest link and spend two minutes drawing out the separate shapes like I've done in step 1. This may feel silly, but it's a really good muscle and eye warm up and you can't get it wrong. It's a great way to get your hands going and sidestep any fear that might be creeping in. As I said before, you can do this in paint or in marker pens. Once you've drawn the separate shapes, draw them again, this time, join together like I did in step 2. Then in the next video, I'll show you step 3, which is adjusting your shapes by adding or subtracting bulges and curves. See you there. [MUSIC] 5. Bulges and Curves: Have you done that? Great. Now the third step is to take the shapes that you've drawn and draw them again, this time, adding or subtracting bulges and curves. I'll show you what I mean. The body was a rectangle, but I can see that there's a bulge at the back and it comes down, and the head was a square. But it comes out a bit at the side. Instead of being completely square across the top, it's got a curve. My rectangle outward, The back down the bag. It's not straight down like here. It comes in a bit here and output there. Then it comes down. Then the legs are slightly wider at the top than they are at the bottom. I'm going to press a little harder with my brush and then I'm going to ease up on the pressure as I come towards the bottom and I'm just adding the foot. It's still a rectangle. It's just slightly adjusted to match the shape more closely. The other leg is the same. Comes down and a foot. Then the back leg down here, which we started out deciding was a rectangle, is basically a rectangle but it's at an angle. I'm going to bring it down like that. I'm noticing that the back comes out and curves in. There's my rectangle. I can see that at the bottom here. The foot sticks down a little bit further. I'm just going to make that happen. Then the foot is just a rectangle. The tail, it's pretty easy just pulling the paint out. That's your third step. Your first step was noticing what the shapes are. The second step was joining the shapes together. The third step was adjusting your shapes to add or subtract the bulges and curves. Pause the video now and do this third step. If you did the first two steps using marker pen, then switch over to paint now. Don't think of it as a cheetah. Just think of it as a bunch of shapes that you've already drawn, but with a few bulges or curves added or taken away. Do this now and see what you get it. [MUSIC] Have you done that? Brilliant. Were you surprised by how easy it is? Oh, did you get your first blob of doom? I have a Boolean blobs of doom in my studio. Do you know what? I don't care. Like my wrinkles, which reminds me that I'm not 16 anymore. My blobs of doom are markers that show me how far I've come and that I'm working towards my goals. Be proud of your blobs. Now, obviously, you're not always going to paint your shapes separately and then join them together and then add your bulges and curves. All of this is going to happen in your head automatically. But I've broken it down into these three steps because it makes it really easy. Instead of looking at it and thinking, that's a cheetah, I don't know how to draw cheetah. You just look at it and think that's a rectangle. That's another rectangle. That's a square for the head with a few bulges and curves, and there's a tail. As soon as you just see it as shapes, it becomes that much more easy to paint it. You can apply this technique to any subject matter, whether it's buildings or people or animals, it's the same principle. In the next video, we'll move on to the additional tools that you can use to get your shapes right. These are position and proportion. I'll see you there. [MUSIC]. 6. Position and Proportion: There are two more thinking tools that you can use to get your shapes right, these are position and proportion. Position means thinking about how your shapes are positioned next to each other, where and how they join. Proportion means how big each shape is compared to the others. I'll show you how to use these tools now. To keep things interesting, I'm going to have a go at doing this cheetah. As per the first step, I'm going to mentally analyze the shapes so I can see a rectangle for the body, a square for the head, a rectangle for the back leg, and two rectangles for the front legs. Before I start painting with real paint, I'm going to take my analysis one step further and look at the shapes in terms of position and proportion. I've put my cheetah into Procreate and I've drawn some guides. The first thing I'm noticing for when I draw the cheetah is that the back leg is pretty much on the same level as the bottom of the body. So that's a useful bit of information. Then the top of the back leg doesn't join on at the end of the body rectangle, it actually joins on a third of the way along over here. Then if we look at the front triangle, I'm noticing that with this guide that the bottom of the head is pretty much in line with the top of the back on that line. For the legs, what I've noticed is that this front leg ends roughly two-thirds of the way along this front leg. So if that's the full length of this front leg, then this front leg is ending roughly two-thirds of the way down. These are all just quick and useful observations to do with the position and the proportion of the shapes that I will then bring into my mental process while I paint the cheetah. For those of you who work on an iPad, I'll just very quickly show you how you can use the same technique to draw your animal. So I'm going to start with the body, and I'm going to start by pretty much drawing a rectangle like that. The top of it goes up slightly and the bottom comes like that. I'm going to change color just so you can clearly see the shape technique. The front bit was a triangle, so let's draw the triangle like that. As I said, in my analysis, the head is actually almost at the same level as the back of the body. If I erase a little bit there and draw a square for the head, a little ear, a little ear there. Then the front leg is a rectangle coming this way, and this leg, other front leg comes down like that, and that way and then it's a rectangle coming out, pretty much like that. This rectangle sticks out a bit there but like that. When we did our analysis, we discovered that this leg is two-thirds the length of that leg, so I'll just bring that forward a bit and take that one back a bit. Then the back leg we noticed, actually joins on up there and it has a bulge. It looks as if it should be coming lower, but when you actually draw that line, you see the foot is pretty much on the same line as the body, so something like that. The other back leg is a rectangle for the leg part, and I square for the foot. There's also a tail, which you can't actually see, but I'm going to just, for fun, pop a tail in there. This is obviously a very clunky and unfinished and inelegant drawing, but the point is for those of you who work on iPads, you can still use this method of thinking about shapes when you want to draw digitally. I'm now going to paint this cheetah using real paint. I'm going to start with the body, which is a rectangle that has an angled top, like that, and a bit of a curve at the back there. Then I'm going to think about this back leg, which is also a rectangle with a bit of a curve and a bit of a bulge coming down and a foot coming out. The next foot is a square coming down and joins on with the leg, more or less like that. Then if I come back to the body, the rectangle actually widens this side, and that brings me to the front part. Now the front part is basically a triangle, so if I draw a triangle coming up here, it's got a bit of a bulge there, something like that. Then the leg coming down, it's just a rectangle with a bit sticking out. This leg here comes down, and it's basically just a rectangle coming out, ending in a slightly wider rectangle. Then the head is just a square with a bit of a bulge on the side, a little ear sticking out a chopped off corner, more or less straight across the top, a little indent there, a little bulge for the ear, and finish the square. Here we have a more complex set of shapes, and I've particularly paid attention to how they've connected and where they've connected. The front leg is slightly longer than the second leg. Now I'm looking at it and while the paint is wet working quickly, I'm just checking whether anything is wrong. I'm looking at this back leg, that's fine, the foot here, that's fine. Coming along maybe that angle could be a little bit across more, and I might just do that. But basically, I'm happy with that as a shape. Now it's your turn. Take some pieces of paper and paint the same animal again, but this time, pay particular attention to how each shape fits together, the position and the relative size of each shape, the proportion. You might want to do, three or four different animals so that you can try out different shapes. Some top tips, start in the middle of your animal. Usually the body is a good place to start. You can then add the legs and the head and measure the size and position of these in relation to the size of the body. Consider the negative spaces as you think about the angles of your shape. With this cheetah, there's a negative space in there, which is a diamond shape, so my angle is a little bit wrong there. Work fast to push and pull your paint around. If you make a mistake, just quickly add loads of water and then wipe it off with a tissue, let it dry, and then try again. Try to have just the right amount of paint on your brush. Avoid too much water. This is the key to the next tip, which is try to make the least possible number of brushstrokes. That's a lot of tips to keep in mind, but don't worry, it will all start to come naturally once you practice. Once again, be prepared to paint a lot of blobs, but remember that each blob of doom gets you closer to ab blob of glory. Pause the class, paint three or four animals now, and then in the next video, I'll show you how to elevate your painting through the use of color. See you then. [MUSIC]. 7. Elevate with Color: There are a few very easy things you can do with color to elevate your motifs. You could change color halfway or use a different color for the head, body, and the tail, or you could use color to indicate where the weight and the shadows might be. With this one, making the foot purple, and the head a lighter orange, and the tail a darker plum, was a very simple but effective way to make this into a more interesting motif. With watercolor, once your paint is dry, you can add more detail on top like stripes on the tail, or you can use Posca pen for the whites of the eyes and black fine liners for extra details. The possibilities are up to you and you can have fun just playing around. If you're enjoying this, then pause the video and try adding some more detail to your motifs, maybe some stripes on the tail, [MUSIC] or paint a few new ones, practicing getting some color blends. In the next video, I will quickly show you a useful website if you want to add hand-lettering to your painting, and then we'll wrap up what we've learned. See you there. [MUSIC] 8. Conclusion: This is just a little bonus. There is a website called myfonts.com. It allows you to type in a particular word and then see it in different fonts. I use this when I want to see how letters are formed, which parts are thick and which are thin. You can mix and match different font styles to truly make your letter in your own. If you want to add hand letter into your project, go for it. I'd love to see what you come up with. That's it for this class. In Stage 1, we looked at how to take any subject matter and see it as shapes. Then how to combine the shapes and then add or subtract bulges and curves. In Stage 2, we looked at how to use position and proportion to make your shapes more accurate. I gave you some tips on how to do this more easily in paint. In Stage 3, I shared how to elevate your motifs using color and by adding detail. You should now have an easy starting point to draw any subject matter. As you practice the skill, the way of thinking about shapes will start to happen automatically. You can now take this skill you've learned and tackle something that you previously thought would be hard to draw. If you're working on an iPad, practice and see how it goes. You can build up a library of motifs and shapes that you can use and reuse in your illustrations and patterns. When you've got the skill firmly under your belt, you can then shift your focus onto other aspects of your work such as color and pattern design. Please share your project. I'd really love to see what you do, all of it from your deconstructed shapes right through your blobs of doom to your blobs of glory. Being prepared to try and fail and try again is what being an artist is all about. The sooner you can get used to that idea, the less painful your artistic journey is going to be. Speaking of which, if you enjoyed this class and you want some more about dealing with fear, then my very first-class drawing without fear is waiting for you. It takes you through the stages of the creative process, looks at where fear resides and ways to overcome it. If you try this method and you're struggling with the watercolor aspects of painting, then my class, principles of watercolor, learn to paint a torch ginger flower will take you through the seven principles of watercolor paint. If you've mastered painting watercolor shapes, and you want to have a guide painting a pattern in watercolor, then my class, watercolor without fear, painting for pattern design will take you through every step of the process from concept to a finished half-drop repeat, hand painted pattern. If you enjoyed this class, I'd be really grateful if you could leave a review on Skillshare. It helps me to know what you thought of the class, and it helps other students to know whether they want to take the class. Once you've watched a certain amount of the class, a button should pop up asking if you want to do a review. If this doesn't happen or you need some help, just message me and I'll do my best. If you want to connect with me on Instagram. I am @catherinejenniferdesigns. I'd love to see you there. If you'd like to see more behind the scenes stuff and process videos, then my YouTube channel is also @catherinejenniferdesigns. Of course, don't forget to follow me on Skillshare, so you'll be notified when my next class comes out. Until then, happy painting and thank you for watching. [MUSIC]