Transcripts
1. Introduction: Paint a LadyBug with watercolors.: Well, hello my friends. It's Kelly here. Are you guys ready to paint? I am super excited about this one. I love ladybugs. The shells are just so vibrant and fun. So for this one, no, we are going to really make this lady bug pop off the page. So if you are a beginner, no worries. You can do this one. I have the PDF sketch for you. We're leaving GO can print that out. You can either trace it or feel free to sketch it yourself. And this one is actually really easy to do. It's all about glazing and adding layers upon layers. Color, reds especially, and oranges to make that ladybug really pop off the page. So we'll be using a blow dryer for this one to dry in between. So make sure you grab that along with the materials we're going to cover in the next lecture. And so you may want to just pause in between. You can go back and re-watch any of these, any two. So we're going to really dive into glazes and washes and this one. And I'm looking forward to sharing those tips with you. So I do have many other classes here on Skillshare. Make sure to click the follow button so you can see any requests coming up and I cannot wait to see your beautiful lady bugs will have a project at the end and feel free to share those on Instagram. Here are just a few that we've had already. Some of the students have been sharing and I am super excited for yeah, so let's get started.
2. Let's discuss Materials before we begin painting.: I will have a PDF printable for you that you can print out, and that way you don't have to sketch it or feel free to free hand your own. So I will be using a couple of different brushes for this one, I will be using the squirrel hair brush, which I have here. That is a number to the Gatto. I'll also be using the little detail brush that comes in my little Cotman kits. And I will be using a number 0 for some fine details as a really small point on it. Feel free to use whatever you're comfortable with. And then for the background, I actually used a three-quarter inch oval wash just like a cover. A little bit more area than some of these smaller brushes that I have. And I will also be using for paints are Winsor Newton watercolour kit. If you've taken my classes before, you know, it. This is one of my favorite student kits. And it has just about every color that you need to get started with painting. For paper, I would recommend at least a 140 pound cold press paper, any kind you have. I'm actually using the watercolor cards, cut in half, weight guage or black wash for some extra details. And then I use a little bit of masking fluid for the background of the little flower or the piece of wheat that we're going to be doing. So these are just some of the materials I'm using. They don't have to be exact. So use whatever you have to get the job done. Some basic paints, some brushes. You don't even need to use masking fluid or the white gouache. You could use even acrylic paints. You could use white gel pens for the white, you could use even a CRAN. So cram will leave your paper white, just a regular white crayon will work kind like masking fluid. You can't take it off. So it will do more of a resist. So again, just use what you have. I hope you enjoy the class. So let's begin.
3. A little color mixing.: So we'll go to the ladybug course. I want to show you how you can take a ladybug from a very dull and boring, add some layers to it. And how to add layers in the correct way to make something that's going to really pop off your page. So let's start out with just basically sketching in that little lady bug shape. We're going to start with just a very circular, almost an egg shape. And it create the body of the lady bug. Now when you're drawing these in, we'll start with that shape and then I don't erase it and do a lot of erasing. You can see I've just made that egg-shaped. I circled it around a couple of times, taking my number two pencil and just lightly sketching it in with watercolors. It's really important not to go too dark or else you're going to see a lot of those lines in there. Sometimes if I'm not doing this for demo purposes, I'll actually go back and erase those lines as much as I can so that I don't see them through the transparent watercolors. Now I'm adding tons of layers in glazes on it. It's usually not an issue. A lot of times you can't see those, especially with some of those darker colors. I added a little head, add a little bit of the dots there and a couple of little legs. And that is pretty much the base, The lady bug that we're gonna do today. I do have the PDF for you if you want to just go ahead and trace that and sketch it out. All right, so now I want to talk about are colors that we'll be using. I'm using the Cotman Winsor Newton kit. Again, use any reds or any any oranges that you have. It's not going to matter. I will say though, that the more transparent that your paints are, the higher-quality sometimes you'll have that less of a chocking is to them, less opaqueness. The translucent ones are the ones that you really, really want that give it that beautiful layering effect for my colors. I'm starting out with the cad red pale hue and it looks more of an orangey shade. And you'll notice I just spritz my paints before I started to get them nice and juicy. So it's a little bit easier to mix the colors, starting out with a very light wash with more water and less pigment, and then gradually adding some more pigment to my tray or my little bit of water that I have in my tray, right? And the other color I'm going to be using is the alizarin crimson, which is this light red shade that I'm doing. Again, lots of water, not very dark, It's more of a pinky shade and then as I add more pigment to that, it's getting a lot darker. So what I want you to do is go ahead and just go ahead and practice this on a separate piece of paper or, you know, practice on on the side of your painting and just work on your colors. Because that is one of the biggest things when people first start out with watercolor is color mixing. How do I get those colors? You want to start out with your lighter shades as we build these darker values in your painting. So do your very light wash like that, very light orange. And we'll be adding some values to that, some darker values on top drying in-betweens going to be very important to dry your project in between each color wash. And it, we're going to make this look a little bit more realistic.
4. Glazing and layer practice.: So my test colors are all dry. Now you can see the lovely little shades that we have. Now we're going to just start to do a little lady bug with some color. So I'm just gonna do this circular part to start out with. And I'm going to use that a little bit of medium tone for my first wash. This is with my cad red pale hue color. So I just want you to practice making that little oval shape, most of the shape of the egg. And then let's mix up a little bit of the Alizarin crimson and add that right on top of it while that is wet. And let's see how that blends and bleeds into the orange shade that we have down here. This is where you can get nice darker value on one side than the other. You can see as I over mix this now, if I just tap it in here and let the water do what it wants to do. It gives it a much more organic look at as I work this and go back into it over and over again and do most of the mixing with my brush. You'll see that it just kinda turned into one solid color. So that's not what we want to do. Let's go ahead and blow dry this and just see what the outcome looks like. Now you can see on the right-hand side and let it do a little bit of it's own thing. So I have some nice shades of orange and some reds in there. On the left. It's a little bit more blended. You can see this is drying fairly light, it looks fairly flat at this point. Go ahead and dry that. Again, it's pretty this is a nice start, but if you were to leave it like this and let's just go ahead and grab a black sharpie. I'm just gonna do a little bit of details here. Little dots that are on the back of the ladybug. Don't see it. Let's go ahead and we'll mix up a little bit of the black. And again, it's not a very dark wash, this is going to be a light wash. So I just want you to see what the difference is between adding lots of layers and lots of darker values, rather than just having the one tone are very flat looking washes. That's how we build upon those layers to make those colors pop out. So I'm going to mix up a little bit of the ultramarine blue and a little bit of the Romberg. And we're going to make our own a little bit of black. The more blue it has, the lighter it looks very pretty color, so it's almost grayish. And you can see that I went ahead and went over all of this area. Those colors are black as somewhat muted at somewhat muddied. Let's go ahead and do a second one here, over here on the side, and we'll add a few more layers to this one. So I'm going to start out again with that same color, that orange shade, tapping it and making my wet circle, adding a little bit of a darker paints. And I'm just going to dry this as is just that one color. I'm back, it's all dry and it looks a little flat. Let's go ahead and add a little bit Alizarin crimson on top of that. That was pretty I dried it again, I'm doing another wash. Now the problem here is I am not allowing those layers to dry completely before I go back. And so some of this is still wet and I am going over and over and a little bit too much, I go outside the lines, you can see some events lighter on the outside. And it's starting to look more one color with the exception of a few areas. So what I want you to do is not overwork it and it's really hard to do when you're first starting out with watercolor because he, I put the time I dried it again and I'm going in with another layer or another wash and went outside the lines. Remember this is always going to get bigger, not smaller. So if you're a person that tends to go outside the lines in your ladybugs starts to grow on you. That's okay. But you can see the difference between that one wash. Now with the orange and what I had started with from the original shape gives it a nice highlight on that side. That's okay. I mean, it's better than the one on the right-hand side. But again, it's a little bit too much overwork. I can fix this though. Once I completely dry it. If I add another wash on top of that, it's going to look okay, and you can see that this brightens it right up. Okay? And once that's dry again, it looks a little bit more flat but better than the other one. So let's go ahead and add a little bit of the black again, we're going to mix it up with a little bit of the ultramarine blue and the number. And because you have red underneath, you're adding the black on top again, it's going to look a little bit more muted, not as crisp and clean. So those are two great tries. Let's do a third one. And this time I'm going to go in with a small brush. Now if you find that working with a smaller detail brush, it's easier for you. Go ahead and do that. I use the larger brush than they did on the original project that we're going to be doing. But smaller ones sometimes are a little bit easier for people, especially when your brand name. This time I'm gonna go in with that same orange, but this time I am going around those little areas that are going to be black. I added the next darker layer. I'm going to use the bigger brush that we'll be using in the project. And you can see I'm just tapping it in there. And what that does is it makes me not just paint the entire thing in because I'm going around some of those areas. So again, it looks really pretty maybe a third wash over here again, leaving some of those areas drying in-between thoroughly. And now I have a little bit more organic next to the color of this shell. It's not all solid here. I've got a few other shapes in here, a little bit more depth. Now I can go back and with that black and you can see it just looks so much more natural looking because you've got a little bit of highlight in there. Some of that white is shining through. It's not as dull this way. So if you're ready, we're going to start our project next.
5. Let's begin our project with the first light wash of color.: So the first thing we're gonna do is wet this area and we're going to put a very light wash of the cad red pale hue, which looks more like an orangey red. And this is going to be our underpainting or under, under color, undertone. And we're going to create a couple of different layers with this one. So I always like to start off with some of the lighter shades and then build those up. So when I fill this in and I'm going to go around those areas, those will be painted black, so don't worry if you accidentally cover those up, you just wanna make sure that you can still see them slightly. And if you are sketching this in, make sure your pencil lines are fairly light. I've gone in with a little bit darker shade, which means I just added a little bit less water for this one. And when you look at the painting or the picture of the photograph from unsplash. This one is very dark on the right-hand side, a little bit lighter on the left-hand side. And for paper, I'm actually using the Strathmore cards where I cut them in half. I buy the package of a 100 and just kinda half. So it gives me 200. It basically test sheets to work on. It's a great way to practice on if you don't want to spend a whole lot of money on watercolor paper, but you want something that's halfway decent and that's a pretty good paper. Imsa, I've worked on this one quite a bit. Some other ones that folks like the Canson paper, which I personally don't care for as much. I do like the legion paper and I like Arches paper, but paper is one of those things that everybody has their favorites with. So feel free to use whatever type of paper that you're happy with. Usually cotton paper or some of the heavier dense papers. You don't get as much of that wood pulp coming up through those fibers. So if you're using a wet and wet technique, which I'm doing here, it's sometimes a little bit more challenging. You also may want to go ahead and tapers down all the way around since this is going to be wet. But I will show you a trick near the end that will take away some of that buckling for you. So you can see I'm adding a little bit more of the alizarin crimson this time making a little bit darker. I do have a little bit of shine on here. I'm doing this in the evening so you can see my light up above, so I apologize for that. So when it's dry you can tell a little bit better, but as it's wet, I got a little bit of a shine on this. So now I'm going to lift out that highlight. And to do that I'm using the squirrel brush and you can see the venting. So this might not be the best type of brush to be able to pull paint out. It's still working. But if you want something with maybe a little bit more of a snap, it helps to pull out that paint a little bit more. So I can obviously still see a little tinge of color in here, which is what I want. If you wanted to leave something stark white, you can either paint around it like I did here, or you can use masking fluid, which I do for that background piece of wheat or flower that's behind there. So we'll be pulling out the masking fluid for the second half to so you can see how that's used. So I am taking my brushing and using the very tip of that. One of the nice things about the squirrel hair brushes, as you can see, they do have a very fine tip when these are dry, they're really fluffy brushes, but when you wet them, they come to a really nice point. So a lot of people will use these for calligraphy and lettering as well. I'm just going to go around or I see some of those darker areas rate down and the backward the lady bug has that division in the wings. So you can see a nice little line down the back of this. And it actually is a little highlight which will probably pop in here with some white gouache wash for some of the final details. So I'm going to dry this now and come back with another wash or another glaze on top to give it a little bit darker.
6. Glazing and layering a second coat of paint. : Alright, I'm back, it's all dry and I do want to show you here what we talked about earlier about the paper starting to buckle or warp a little bit. This happens if you have not researched your paper and very new artists. I even, I don't stretch my paper very often. But you can see where some of that law rippling is happening on the backside. Really easy to do for a fixed is once you're done, you're painting, flip it over, do some clear water on the back, and then lay that down flat underneath some books or something. And wait a couple of hours, left that out and that will be flat again. So I don't do that usually until the end. That way I've done it running I needed to do was as far as getting it wet. And then at the very end is when I flip it over and do that, took a little tip for you. Alright, so I'm going to add another layer. You can see I have a little bit darker shade mix up a little bit of the Alizarin crimson along with that pale red hue. And this is what I'm against, a little bit darker. So you get that real vibrancy. You can see that the lady bug itself is pretty vibrant, has a nice little sheen to it. And once again, I went over that same area. Sorry, I need to lift out that paint again across the back where that little highlight is. And it has a look at that picture that has a little bit of a purple hue to that reflection. And it's also, it's on the back and it's also a little bit on the top near the head. So I'm going to try to put a little purple in there. Little bit tough to do. Sometimes you'll see if you've got some orangey shades, it wants to go brown. So be really careful with that. And I'm going to have a little bit on this side too, I see a little bit of a highlight over here, just a tinge. And again, if you find it, it's just a little bit too muddy looking, you just pull it out. You will have those undertones under there because you're not dealing with bright white paper. So that's the reason why I like to do the pulling the paint out is because you usually have a little bit of color still on the underneath. Whereas if you leave that stark white, it's going to be totally different and you're going to have really hard edges on there. This is a nice way to make some very soft edges. And now I'm going to add it and even darker and a little bit more of that red and even maybe a little bit of the burnt sienna or burnt umber brown shades to go in there. Go a little bit darker. You can again see that I tried that before each layer, dry and build your layers. That's a real key to getting a really nice watery effect with lots of different shades and lots of different colors in your building upon those. If you just were to go ahead and with a red and try to add some of these colors. It's a little bit trickier and they tend to want to bleed into one another so you don't get as much of that dimension.
7. Creating your own black with watercolors.: All right, I've dried that layer again and now I'm mixing up my own black using the ultramarine blue and the burnt umber. And you can get a pretty nice dark black using this. Now the more blue when I actually see a little bit of bluish tones undertones in the black of a ladybug. So the more blue you have any gum, they'll get closer to the original photograph and they go around again, those areas that are white. And just go ahead and fill this in using this fine detail brush that comes with the Cotman kit. If you can do this with one of those larger ones and you're comfortable, you can definitely do that. But in a small detail brush if you have one, just makes it a little easier to control some of those areas, especially as you're working around some of those whitespaces. So it comes down to like a little bit of a B on the back and the head. And saying pillar, we're going to have a little bit of highlight on the back of that part too, but we're going to lift that up. And I can do is quick enough so it's not going to dry too much. So I should be able to lift to this while it's still wet. And working around those little areas that I see are white on the backside of him. Then we also have that little head that we needed to do, and it also has a little, little whitespace in between that a really fine line in between there. And well, we have that black on our brush. Let's just go ahead and fill in some of those markings that we see on the back of the ladybug.
8. Adding darker values for a realistic look.: Now we're going to clean that brush off. And let's pull out a little bit of a highlight at the top here. And so I'm just wet my brush and clean up most of the black, hitting a little watery here. And then I'm going to wipe and lift. And because I'm not using black wash, this is going to be even easier to lift out if you're using black wash. This might be a little bit more challenging to lift, but it still works. He's had to be very patient with it. And we don't want to completely lifted out back to white. We just want it just softened a little bit. I do see a little bit of a blue highlight. Once again, the bluish purple, the mix a little bit of red and the blue together and get a nice little shade of purple. Purple in here. You can see a little bit of that hits over this back center dot as well. Okay, so we've dry that and now I'm going to just define this little line across the back of the lady bug where those two wings meet. And I have a little bit of whitewash and my trace, I'm just going to give it a little highlight across the back and also touch up any little areas that you meant to keep white and that you may have gone over by accident and making sure that your brushes very clean and that your washes clean. The gosh, I have actually has a little tinge of blue in it because it's not completely clean. I'm mixing up in my tray here, so it's more grade a little bit, but fresh whitewash or really pop if you need that bright white. All right, Once again, I'm driving and I'm going to go back in with a little bit of a darker shade just to give us some more dimension on the edges here. And a couple areas where I see it a little bit richer. More of a brownish red that I'm seeing with my eyes here. So yet again, another layer. And then there might be a little bit over here. So you've crossed on the left-hand side across the top wing up here. And then almost like leaps down in around here. I'm going to actually put another layer on the top of this. So if you get very streaky on this portion of it, especially using that little brush, sometimes you can get more streaks rather than a big wash. Dry it, and then we'll go back in with one more coat over the top of this area. So you can see it's very defined lines here because it's a lot darker and that undertone is already completely dry. It's not as soft looking. So when we add that next wash on the top, it just going to soften everything rate out. Alright, so switch back to that. The Gatto squirrel hair brush again, lots of water and just putting another little coat of our cad red right over the top of all of that. And you can see how that just softens everything is blends it all in nicely.
9. Background using masking fluid.: All right, and we're going to dry that and now I have my masking fluid. I am being very careful. I'm not shaking this. I don't want lots of bubbles in here, so just the slow back and forth rocking motion will work. All right, we're ready to apply some masking fluid and now I have an old brush. This is more of a square shape brush, so I can get a nice, a wide wheat looking brushstroke on this. So this is again just turning it sideways using a little masking fluid and just shaping up some of those green leaves. Now, this is going to keep our paper nice and white. When we go to do our background, you're gonna wanna make sure that you're using a brush that is not your favorite brush because brushes can get damaged this way. I think this was like a 1 brush and one of those packaged winds. I can't remember where there was tons of amount of package, really inexpensive. So they also have a little tools that you can use that have rubber tips on the bottom of them. Those are great. Again, this isn't a good shape for what I'm looking for, for that wiseness with the wheat. Make sure you rinse your brush off a really well once you're finished. And sometimes you can save them, especially if you put a little bit of soap on it before you start. And just make sure you wash that out really fast, really quickly. Get as much of that off as you can and just check your brush, your brushes and make sure that you've got all of it down near where your brush starts to come out, way down in here because that's where it really tends to get stuck.
10. Now for some finishing touches and small details.: All right. You knew that about 15 minutes for that to dry and then we're going to start the background. So I'm going to be using a little bit of sap, green and yellow ocher to see if we can get a nice green shade. You can see that it's got some really pretty stripes the way that the light is hitting this. So that is how we're going to attempt to do this. So I'm going to go a little bit at an angle. And nice thing is and go right over that masking fluid. And I think I'm gonna do a little bit more yellow ocher. This is almost like a more of a creamy color, but again, it doesn't have to be exact of the painting. That's a little darker. Turn it sideways because little easier. Let's add a little bit of green to it. For the next layer, it's actually green on this side, and a little bit more of the gray green color tones on the other side. Let's see what happens here. I don't want to have this dries, I want that to blend. So I have to work quickly with this and just leave the green. The green looks pretty just trying to get some different values, different shades that you can see that it has some type of change in color. Add a little blue to this one. Again, a little bit darker. And a little bit of the yellow ocher for the top. And it's a little bit darker, but it's still a different, a different color. So you can definitely see that there are different shades as we go down the painting. And just being careful around the ladybug, you don't want to touch that area, especially with a black, so you don't want any of that to get into the rest of your background. Even though it's dry, if you go back and forth alike and pick up some of those colors At a little bit of brown to that, a little burnt umber that, that gives you a nice little dark shade. And I think that's good. So we're going to try that again, comeback. Remove that masking fluid. You can see that nice bright white that we have here. And they do have some tools for this called the pickup, which is great. But a lot of times if I saw a little bit in here, I'll just use my finger. Just being careful again, I don't go over some of those areas are really roughly and don't start to pick up the paper and make sure that it's dry because if it's not dry, you will smudge, smear those other colors throughout your painting. And then if you need to just pick up some of that little gum eraser stuff and it can pick up the rest of that that's on your paper. Right now we're going to go in and just add just a few details into that white we looking flower or I guess would it be a flower and Office considered a flower, what is wheat and grain, I guess. Yeah. So again, adding a little bit of the yellow ocher, just kinda putting in a few of those colors that I see in there that wouldn't actually is pretty dark green, but that's our eye. It's actually more of a tan color. What we're going to make it a little bit more vibrant. Again, the great thing about paintings is it's an interpretation of what you're seeing. So there's really no right or wrong. It's just how you feel. Go with the colors that you like. If you wanted this background blue, make it blue. You know, there's no, there's no rules with this. Again, just getting some little wispy shapes in here so that it's not just all white. And you don't need a whole lot. Another thing you could do is take a nice little fine detail brush if you want to put in a little bit of those wisps of the grain, you can see a little some final hair-like details. You could add those to it if you wanted to. And you can do that before you add in the little antennas here. Again, I'm using black, make sure that, making sure that that's dry before I go in and put a little antennas in there. And here's where you can take that fine detail brushes is the number 0 and just really shaped things up. Get your fine lines in there and add legs. Maybe add a few more touches of black if you need to go around some of those areas that maybe got muted while you're doing the background. And if you accidentally hit it, you can adjust those. So there's a little feet. Again, just a couple of little marks doesn't take much. And I realize I have that one. I realized how that leg shape was. It kinda comes out around kind of like a little curve. And then we have one more leg down on the bottom to read it back. Here. Again, it's just like a little line, a little black line, you barely can even see it. And then another one down here, those are creeping around that, that week. Now you can just go ahead and just do your touch ups, fill in a little bit more of that dark rich black shade that you've made and make any adjustments that you need to make. And we are done.
11. Outro and advice on starting.: And I hope you enjoyed the mini-course. I have more coming out for those of you that are members in the meantime, feel free to try this one over and over again. Try a few different ladybugs if it doesn't have to look just like this one. Now that you have the skills and you know how to do your layers and your glazes and your washes. And you know that you need to dry them in between. You can put this towards any type of painting can really make things pop off the page. They're just not flat. And having all of those colors and layers is really what makes them pop almost makes him like 3D off the page. Add a shadow to it as well. It really makes it look more realistic. Definitely could add to your painting. And again, you don't have to add the wheat, you can just do a regular background. It could be a leaf. You'd have just lady bug by itself. These courses are all about just giving you the tools and just letting you play, because that is really the key. That's what I want to get across to two painters to craft people. Pillars so hard on themselves. And especially if you're new to watercolor, There's a lot of frustration. You just want to jump in and be able to pay something beautifully, real fat. And it takes time, it takes practice. And it's not about getting from a to Z. It's about that journey and the middle is about enjoying the process. Don't let this be something that's going to frustrate. You. Just keep practicing it, doing it over and over again. Just play with your washes. Just work on one piece of this at a time and just have fun with it. You enjoyed this class, please leave a review and it means the world to me and also lead to other students know that this might be a class that they would enjoy. Buy you have any issues or if you have questions or concerns, I'm always here for you. You can always send me an email at Kelly chassis at gmail.com. And I do have a private Facebook group. I love to have you join where I do live videos over there and you can share your projects on there. And please make sure to click that follow button that lets you know, uh, when I release new courses, I love to also have you follow me on Instagram. I'm posting, they're usually daily and you can see different projects that I'm working on. I give you some tips and ideas. Plus I have a YouTube channel where I share lots of information over there. Thank you again for taking the time to learn with me today. I can't wait to see your projects and we'll see you in the next class. Bye.