Watercolor Spirit Bear Step by Step | Paul Cheney Artist

1. Intro: Hello everyone. Welcome. My name is Paul. I have been in watercolor painter for over ten years now. And today I hope to share some of that with you while I teach you how to paint the spirit bear. I think this is a suitable painting for all levels for two reasons. One, it's made up of simple brushstrokes that don't require a lot of skill and practice. And number two, you don't need to know how to drop. The course is broken down into sections. Each section contains an easy to follow lesson on different parts of the painting. On top of the video lessons, there's loads of other material. There's a detailed guide on drawing, accompanied with that, there is a drawing guide, a grid that shows you where to place what on the paper. You don't need to go to all that trouble if you don't like, because I've also included an outline, two of them, one is irregular outline for you to sketch or draw from. The second one is a very thick outline that will allow you to see the lines through your watercolor paper so that you can hold it up to a window and trace it off. There's a separate video section on the materials along with a downloadable list of those materials. The glass does not use a lot of materials. A few brushes, a few paints, some cold press paper, and you're good to go. Once you've completed your painting. I hope that you can share and posted in the discussion section On that note in the discussion section, please feel free to post any questions that you may have. A monitor them regularly and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Good luck and happy painting. 2. Materials: Let's talk about the materials that we're going to use today. So we've obviously you've seen, we've got our gut, our drawing, and our paper, which will put down on a board. And we have a pallet with a bunch of colors on it. We're not going to use all of those colors, just pretty much the ones you see here, plus some blue and maybe a bit of green, some yellow. But not. This is just what I use and what I have at hand when I'm doing a painting like this. So here is my green frog tape that I use totally flat. Talk a little bit more about that when we go into the preparing the painting stage. I have a water-soluble pencil. These I love is like one of those greatest invention since sliced bread kind of things. This one is by fabric castle. There are a few different companies that make them. Basically it's a pencil that is diluted with water, so it saves you from having to erase a lot. And in case of an emergency, IN that note, I have a kneadable eraser. You can squeeze them into little shapes and erase little bits. Try not to do this too much. It'll disturb the sizing and the paper and that will affect how the watercolor dries on the paper and essentially make your paper look more muddy. I have a tube of gouache around here somewhere. It's white, sort of opaque watercolor paint. And if I do use that, you'll see later in the video, what I use that for is the highlight areas in the eyes. If I accidentally cover over the little circle that I leave behind or I don't know where I want to put a little circle. Another option which is great is Jelly Roll pen or a jelly pen, basically an opaque white ink pen. They work great too. You can use that. This is my little Mr. spray bottle. I use this when I'm getting my palette ready. So my paints right now, they're dry. They're not been used. So I would have to use a lot of water and I wouldn't get a very I wouldn't pick up a lot of pigment. It'll be very diluted and I want to keep my paints as rich as possible. So I like to let them first I go round my palette here and spray them. No, I don't use all the colors. I just go around a few times and do that. The brushes that I will use today are just grab my brushes here. No, I'm not using all these brushes. I'm just trying to find that we can use that one. So I will use probably because of the size of the painting. I'm doing this as like a number for pen. Or here is, oops, here's the equivalent, equivalent of it in a quill pen or a calligraphy brush. These are not pens, either brushes. So this is a number four brush. You can, basically what I'm looking at is the size of the head here. So when I'm looking at the shapes of my painting in the areas of my painting. This will do nicely for the more detailed areas I have here. This is a number two brush. This is a mixed real hair and synthetic hair. It's called an e-waste is 400. They're very durable. They pick up a nice paint, they put down a good wash. But you can also use them for lifting and pushing and other stuff like that. This is the exact same brush. However, just in a quiz format. This brush here is a actual real hair Kolinsky sable brush. The best of the best. So they say, I mean, it is nice for putting down like even washes, they hold a lot of water or the point comes to a nice point. I think it's still a great way to go. Palette, ceramic palette. This is made by meet and I think it's called, I bought it on Amazon. The reason I use ceramic is you can see here how the paint goes onto the palette, just like he goes on the paper. If you're using a plastic palette like this, e.g. I'll just use the back of it to give you sure you see the paint, how it beads up. It doesn't lay down flat like that. That's important. So you want to have that, you want to have here. You want to be able to see like how the paint goes on the paper, how it mixes. It's easier to mix your colors together. I also like the size. This is a nice, big mixing area here. The wells are nice and deep. I can put loads and loads of painting. Sometimes when I'm painting like a full size, full sky and I suppose I should have paper. I'll use a large, yes. I do use this large calligraphy brushes to paint with. I quite like using those. So all of a sudden now is palate, isn't that big and these wells are not that large. This does when wet come to a fine point so you can pick up a lot of paint with it. I wouldn't use this very often, be honest, I do use this one regularly though. So anyways, back to the palette. You can use a dinner plate, like something ceramic or porcelain. You can use a tile. I would just recommend using something that gives you an area that you're comfortable working with. A place where you can put your paints. You can clip on little. I'm empty pallet or pans if you like. I'm just something where you can see your paints mixing on with any of these materials. Use what you have for now. Don't feel the need to run out and buy this or that. I mean, unless you don't have something, you need a palette and you have nothing, or you need a brush. We don't have any brushes or you need paint. The paints I'm using on this palette or Daniel Smith paints. Again, if you use, excuse me, if you're using Winsor, if you have Winsor Newton or I don't know, one of the other girls, M Graham or something like that. Handmade paints by someone by all means use those, use what you have tried to use the best quality artist grade paint that you can because you're gonna get the most pigment in it and that will make it easier. So by pigment, I mean the pain, the actual pain. So when you're picking up your paints, I get a nice dark color there and my burnt sienna without really a whole lot of effort. So I had pre wedded, I pretty wet my brush, but I still have a nice amount of paint there. And that's a decent artist quality paint. But again, use what you have. The paints that we're using today are the colors are huge. How you want to call them? We're going to use burnt sienna. We're going to use burnt umber. We're going to use a yellow ocher or raw sienna. Or there's a lot of different versions of this color here and don't go by. If you have a raw sienna, use it, don't feel you need to go by yellow ocher. Actually, this is raw sienna will use a yellow, will use a blue. Blue here I have is fallow blue, red shade. If you have ultramarine blue, It's not gonna make any difference whatsoever. Yellow. So you can use any kind of medium yellow and you kinda already kind of light yellow. Really, you can even get away without that. You can mix the greeny color in the paint. I'm using yellow ocher and the blue. Let's keep it down to keep it simple. And then sorry, one last one that's really important is your dark paint or you're gonna get your shadows from. So I have three choices here on my palette that I use. This is neutral tint. This is Payne's gray and indigo. Indigo with being the coolest, Payne's gray being the second coolest and the neutral tint being the most neutral by coolest, I don't mean like Hey cool, like you're cool. I mean, like cool temperature wise. Any of those you can warm up by adding like a brown, I'd like a burnt umber, which is a warmer pink here and I can make some money. I see you look at how dark that is. And I can make it more brownie or warmer, right? If I wanted to make it more cool, I can add in my indigo. You can see the difference in the two colors there on being very cool, dilute them so you can see them better. And one being more brown, okay? So those will either give you nice, nice shadows as far as shadows go, keep them as neutral as possible. That's why I use a neutral tint, because that's what they are. They're a shadow, it's a clean area. Now, once you start to get more into more advanced painting and stuff like that, the color temperature of the shadows when will make a big difference. You're warm and cool shadows. But for the sake of this painting, it doesn't matter where more about what I want to really get through in this painting is taking something that looks complex and turning it into a simple, easy to do painting. And I know you might still think it's complex, but trust me, it's not. We're gonna go through it. It's gonna be very simple. And hopefully you can take this and apply it to other paintings in the future. Oh, sorry, other things that I have here. Just a folded cloth. And of course, water, which needs to be changed already. So try to keep your water clean. That makes a big difference, especially when using lighter colors, whichever the muddier water is the mother your your paint is gonna be. So try to keep that clean. And I think that's it for materials. We will now get started on painting. 3. Preparing the Painting: Okay, so now this is the stage that we'll call preparing the painting, getting it ready, ready to paint. So there's a couple of things that I do to start off first is I like to take my paper and attach it to a board. By doing so, I'm going to use a tape. I prefer this brand here, frog tape. The reason being is it doesn't do a lot of damage, if any, to the edge of the paper. As long as you peel it away. Like a long like don't lift it up but like lifted up but peel it like this, like sort of pull it across like that. It tends to be fine. So I'm going to some tape and I'm going to cover the, all the edges of the painting with tape. This is an optional stage. I do recommend it. Unless you're using a painting block. The reason being is once you wet the paper, it will buckle and warp and keeping it held in place will allow it when it dries too dry flat. It also stops. Help stop. It doesn't prevent it 100%. While it's drying. It helps keep the paper flat and stop it from stopped pigments from peddling and pooling where you don't want them. It gives you a bit more control over that, which, which I think is important. So I recommend this stage again, this is not mandatory, but it will help you keep your painting flat. And to me that's important. I know some people blow it off and don't care about it, but I do. So. Okay. The next thing that we'll do is it's a bit late on here. I tried to keep the pencil drawing part as not. I'm trying to depress it into the paper because then it's near impossible to get out. The other thing I want to avoid is a lot of erasing. Erasing on the paper removes the sizing. And the sizing is sort of like a finish to the watercolor paper. And that is when that helps create those water Blache kinda styles to the painting. If that's all removed or you're using a lower grade paper, then you will not have that same effect. Let's take a look here at a little example, e.g. so this is what I'm talking about here. So you can see these like edges in here without the sizing and the paper, those wouldn't be there. So then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna make a little road map for myself as to where the lightened dark, sorry. This is basically what I've done is I've gone and done exactly what I recommend for you to do is take the digital outline that I created and trace it so that we're working from the same thing. My original, I like to draw. It gives it a more organic feel, like a sketchy feel. But if you feel the need that you're not, you're drawing is not quite there yet. Don't let that be a stumbling block. The next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to go around and I'm going to find, identify where the darker values are. So you might want to call those shadows or whichever in painting we're referring to the pigments and the value of the pigments which create the dark and light areas. So these are woke if you hear me say value, That's what I'm talking about. So here we are in between the legs and I've got some darker areas, like very dark up in here that this particular section up in here. Think about if you want, you can look at it in breaking it into very simple shapes. And that's what this painting is, is a very simple painting made up of very simple shapes. So we can see in there, we've got some more defined the nose a bit so that I can see it more clearly. Our eyeball shape. If you don't have gouache, which is a like an opaque watercolor, like a white gouache that you can plop on the eye or a bit of white acrylic paint, then you might want to leave a tiny little circle here for your eyeball to show up. I'll try and do it that way so that you can leave out the gouache stage and keep it as natural as possible. Underneath our feet here we've got some darker areas. A little bit of texture in there we want to encounter. I don't think really. Again, this is a very simple, sketchy kind of painting. Sketchy as in hand-drawn. Sketchy like it's an untrustworthy polar bear. I'm sorry, not polar bear, spirit bear. Big difference between a polar bear and spirit bear. Spirit bear is essentially a black bear with white fur and a polar bear as well. It's a polar bear. Okay. I'm going to shape out because doesn't matter that this kind of lumping his back, his layers of for that kind of give texture there. I want to be able to see those on over the face is divided here. This part in here, he's got an ANOVA or she I should say, has a section in there I want to include. Okay. Alright. So I'm begging. You can see I'm being very not anything crazy about how I'm putting the pencil on or whatnot. And again, you can leave this step. You don't need to do this. I like to paint a little quick and blend the colors together, make them bleed together. So I like to kind of know what I'm looking at where everything is and it can get kinda confusing. So this is, this is preparing the painting for painting. And so now you can probably see the lines a little bit better. Yeah, so I say now we're ready to put some paint on the paper. Now we'll move on to that next. 4. The FIrst Layers: Okay, Now we are ready to start painting. The first thing that we're gonna do is we're going to start with our light wash here. I'm just going to clean off my palette. A lot of people, you'll see some artists. They say they don't clean your palettes. To me, that's just extra chaos and I don't want to deal with, I like to have a clean start, so we just cleaned off our palette there. Now we're going to look at some of the lighter areas here. So let's take a look at where we have light areas and let's just focus on the bear for now. We'll do the background last, we'll do the rocks last. We're not going to worry about any of that right now. We're just going to focus on the bear. So in the bear, Let's look at our layers here. We've got a lighter area here in the background along the legs. You can see that that's gonna be either, we can use a watered-down yellow ocher. And then over top, this layer here you can see where that hard edges along underneath the head here. And we're looking at this hard edge where the yellow ocher, the lighter yellow ocher and burnt umber is over top of it. So that burnt umber has dried over top of that. So right away, you know that, that's two layers right there. So let's start by putting down this base layer of this light ocher. So where do we see that here? We see it on both of the legs and the background. We see it on the very back of the bear. We see it all along his spine area there or whatever you wanna call it a little humps like that. Okay. And then if you zoom in on this little section in here right on the forehead is underneath there. You don't need to do that because I probably just doubled up that because it didn't look dark enough. Whichever it's around the ear here, whichever. So let's grab our some yellow ocher or raw sienna or whichever you want to call it. And we'll start by diluting that. I'm going to grab a little test piece of paper here. And I'm going to see how that looks. That's a bit light. I'm going to add some more pigment. And I think that looks a bit better. Now in the painting, it's a bit more orangey. So I could add an orangey. Again, I have my own set of technical terms. I could add in some burnt umber or raw sienna to that, but I'm just going to add a doubt. We'll add a drop, a couple of drops. There we go. Now, let's see where that's a bit more like it. So we've mixed in a little tiny bit of burnt sienna. We've got the consistency that we like. We've got it on our palette here, we can see what it looks like. Now. Hold your breath. We have to put it on the paper. Don't this part here, just do it. Try to hold your brush as loose as possible. Try not to be so tight and squeezing and shaking and whatnot. Just get the paint on the paper and then let it dry. Okay, so where do I am looking at my painting and I'm seeing where I have some of this. So that is a bit quite a bit darker there than what I had originally. So I'll just pick a little bit that up. I'm gonna come down here. And again, I'm not being so I'm not worrying about where exactly how it's going down. I'm just getting it on the paper here. Don't be afraid to leave a few little white areas in there. That always looks cool. Like this area right here where I just left that little white area and then dilute it a bit more for this area on the backside here. Okay. So again, just alluded the paint a bit more less water up here. And this shadow area, essentially that's what this is. Spirit bears are like a very off-white color and they have the other side there. Sorry, Spirit bears are a bit off white in color. The sun hits them and kinda look yellowy or orangey or whichever. And they are a black bear with white fur, which I think I mentioned earlier. Okay. So I'm just putting this paint on like so. Okay. We've got our area up here on the forehead. We've got some area here around the under under the chin here. I'm a bit darker fur over here on this side. I think I might even add a little bit more burnt sienna there. Trying to leave a little bit of white along the edge there. I'm not going to worry too much if I don't. Yeah, I could probably be using a smaller brush. These areas here you can see I just made a boo-boo there in the ear, but whatever, it'll be fine. There won't mind. Okay. No, I don't want to push the paint around or do too much dabbling at this point. I just wanted to show you that what's going on here, okay, that is it. That's your first layer. So we've got 123-45-6789 blotches of paint. That is all there are villages of paint and that's again, grab our piece of test paper here and look at this. That's what I did. Or that, or however you want to put it on, make it a larger area. That's a wash. We can make it a wash. We can add in some more pigment to make it darker. But the more we do this, the more we push it around, see those pigments, they're getting pushed around and that's taking away from this look that we want. Okay? So what we've got in here, we want to see those hard edges in this painting that gives it that kind of sketchy look to it. Okay, so we're going to let that dry and then we'll come back to it. 5. Second Layer: Now we're going to focus on the darker sections here, along the legs here. So we've got the leg on the left and we've got little section here in the middle. And so basically that is a mixture of burnt umber. And then in the darker, darker area, that's where we have like our neutral tint. I'm kinda color there. I'm just adding a bit of burnt sienna to my burnt umber to give it a bit more rich color. You don't have to do that, but you kinda feel like. So we're gonna put it on in two parts. So we're gonna put on first, we'll put on the burnt umber, burnt sienna kinda part here. And we will bring that over here. I'm going to add a bit more water just dropped. There. We go. Down in here like so. I'll come back around over here to the edge. I'm going to just press my brush down on my palette. I get flattened it out a bit there. Bring it around. Now inside this area here, 1 s to get that. Now inside this area right here, you can see there's a lighter area in the bear. So that's some water that's been added to that. I just want to bring that up a bit more. Not some like I've put some water in there. That's what pushed those pigments out to the side there. Before I do that, I'm going to grab some of my neutral tint. And I'm just going to bring that down on there. Again, down this here. Again, I could be using a much smaller brush for this. You want to try and do this part when your paint is still wet so that it dries. Nice. And even Stephen like okay, so now I'm just going to took some of the paint off my brush and dry it as much as I can. And I'm going to pull this down in here and I'm just picking up. I'm using a brush almost like a mop. And I'm just taking some of these out here and at the same time lending in that darker area there. Now if I clean my brush write-off on our bear on our bare, this is a lot lighter here. I wouldn't normally push like this with this brush because it's a real hair brush and it's not the greatest thing to do. So now you can see what's happening there is I've taken clean water. I pushed it in there. And I'm going to do the same thing over here just to give this a bit more round kinda look and to mimic what's going on in the original painting. So we'll call that a blossom, protecting the people. Call that. Now, again, this area here I put too much picked up too much pigment, so I'm just lifting some off. And you're going to have variable results as well like this. So don't stress about it and it's more about is getting the lights and darks in whatnot. I mean, did the same thing. I'm going to grab a proper a different brush for lifting. Get it nice and it's water on it. And I'm going to push my pigments. It has already started to dry. I was not really doing what I want, but you'll see, it'll look good in the end. Keep in mind, I want to point out to, don't, don't stress too much if you're painting, starts to look different or change, different papers, different panes, different brushes. It's all going to make a difference in it. In the general result will be the same. It will look like a spirit bear standing on a rock in a sketchy kind of pattern. Well, we've got some of that darker pigment there on I just, you'll notice I change brushes not for any rhyme in particular is because I had already had it in my hand, grabbing some of that area up there. I'm going to put some in the ears of here. These are the inside of the ears there. I'll call it. You could do the eyes now if you wanted to, taking your neutral tint or your dark color, whichever you like. What else we got going on here. We've got up here on this edge right here, we've got some more shadow up there. Kinda spilled in with lots of water. Okay. I'll dab in there again. So adding a bit more, some dabbing in here. I just want that to be a bit more. I'm just trying to match my original painting as much as possible. I probably wouldn't do that. Like I didn't do it in the start. I don't think speaking what I did do and didn't do. There we go. Okay, so now while we've got that neutral tint color again, we're going to dilute it. We're looking over here on the palette a fair bit. And we'll just come back round here and add in this shadow along the back here. If I'm pushing back a bit there, I'll do that a bit more after. So you can see, just to blend in those two colors there, see how loose my brushstrokes are. I'm just getting the paint on and not worrying so much about. What is going on there? Adding in some of these here, grab some of that and blend this a bit more or better there. We didn't do we didn't put any of our lighter colors up here on the top of the head. So let's go ahead and do that now. Bringing our beer ear. Where else are we missing? We're missing around here on the eye. Let's do that now. And we've got some neutral tint tone here on the other side, just a little bit of a shadow there. We can, since we got our paint, again, we can do the nose or the nose. We've got basically a very simple shape here. I'll just paint this whole thing and it's not painted in on the on the original painting there. So what I did is I put down the solid color there. Now I'm just gonna take my brush with not very much water at all. And I'm just pulling back like touching the edges there. And that's allowing that to bleed in. I don't want too much paint. I'm getting I'm just picking it up, back up with my brush, using it like a mop and drying it off, rinsing and repeating until it starts. I had a fair bit of paint there. And see how we can use our brushes and tools like that to correct mistakes or shaped things are changed them. So when you're taking classes like this, it's really important to not so much, you know, it's good to see you exactly what's going on. But instead of trying to copy brushstroke to brushstroke, try to learn all these little bits, these little kinda tips and tricks and stuff, that term that are going to help you a lot in the future. Let's look at this splotch right here that doesn't exist in the original painting. I don t think it's really going to make a big difference, but I wanted to keep it as close to the original one for your sake as possible. So I'm basically doing the same thing again. I'm lifting up. So I will clean water on my brush and I can come back and I can grab some of that out of there. And I could do that pretty much anywhere. I wanted to bring in some more paint or take a sari take away paint or make a soft edge where there was a hard edge. Same thing up here or there's I think that was going on there. No, it wasn't a little too crazy with my paint strokes there. And I've lost my eyeball. I don't know where it is now, somewhere in there. So I'll just draw that in after once this dries. Before we go any further, I think we'll let this dry as it is. Oops, I think I'm going to blend this area in here a bit better because that big shadow came up with a hard edge there, putting some. Now you can imagine if you are using a real hair brush and you're doing all this, like sort of pushing and pulling. Your brush wouldn't last too long. Okay. Alright, we will leave that as it is for now. I'm just going to fix this area in here a little bit. Okay? So I can see right in here, I'm going to probably have to add in some more paint in there. I can might be able to do that now, I will probably regret this, but I will try. It really depends on the stage or how how dry your painting is, whether or not that kind of thing works. Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does. So I picked up some more burnt umber to blend that in. And now I'm going to do my clean water, very, very little water like there's not a lot of water on the brush here. Notice allowing that to pull over there to the edge. The same thing over here while we've gotten it. Essentially where the painting is dry at this stage here. So not to worry. Okay. Worry. It will start to look like a bear soon. Got to have faith. Trust the paint drying magic of drying paint. A watercolor painting is watching paint dry. Okay, on that note, we'll let her painting dry. 6. 3rd Layer: Okay, so a couple of things. We put a bit too much water in here. So you can see here are, there now is a bit more diluted than we want it to be. So we'll have to fix that. This side over here. I think I'm okay with. I might add a bit more dark in there. Right now. Let's focus on some of the smaller areas, like the detail areas. So we've got our eyes here. I've zoomed in a bit so that you can see what I'm doing more will get the ear's done. We'll sort of try to bring in some of the shapes a bit more. I will define this area along in here are very long, here are little bits underneath the eyes. Will do those. Maybe tighten up the nose a little bit just to give it some more to make it starts looking more like a bear, right? And so we've got our nice loose shapes on. Now we're going to tighten things up a little bit. Let's start with the eyes here. Okay? For the sake of simplicity, you can either leave that little circle, like I suggested earlier, or you can just paint over the whole thing. Okay. So there I've left the little circle there. You can see it. Hopefully you can see it. I always say that it's amazing, Nice. Camera technologies today. Of course, you can see it. There we go. Okay. Eyes are done pretty much. Now we can take, so we've got some other colors that are going on around there like all round. Probably use our burnt sienna. Makes it a little bit of burnt umber underneath here. Water. I think that's one problem with using a smaller brushes. They don't hold as much water. So you can kinda tend to lose that watercolor. Look. We know and love. Okay. So in the original painting, it looks like we've got two layers there were probably just use the one on this one. It looks dark enough. We don't want to be just adding paint for the sake of adding paint. So I've just put down some simple brushstrokes there. I don't want super hard edges on these. So I've added some water then I can dilute with now anything down here. Actually. So the proper way to do that, we'll probably just be using the right amount of water. I like to make things more complicated for myself. Too much water there. I think we've got some neutral tint color in here around our nose. Too much. Push some of that back. We need a bit more definition on the back of the head here. But I don't want that big dark line there. I want that to kind of fade away. So I got clean water, adding it in there. We need some more. Darken the ear here. Way too much. Always good to check on the palette first. Try and pick some of that up. There we go. So I'm just scooping up. Actually, I kinda I might have done that the first time to looks like I did. Okay. All right. I'm saying a little bit of light color underneath here at another layer over here to see if it a bit more. Maybe too much. So I'm just trying to build up the shapes and contours of the face there. But I'm pretty happy with that. I don't think I need to muck about with it anymore. Just had a bit more definition to see behind the ear here. So I don't have enough white in that ear. So I'm kinda losing that effect there. So I could do a couple of things here. I can make this area behind the ear bit darker, make kind of a gradual shadow there I'm pointing again. Clean Water Act that we know that that's associated with that and our other beer. So now you can see it's more shaped like and here. We've also got some more shadow along here that we left out. It looks like. So I've since I need more down there, some diluted neutral tint there. I don't want this to be a super hard edge up here. So I'm diluting that. I'm not worried about that. Or maybe they'll take that hard to do a little bit. There we go. Now I've got my little brush here, so I may as well fix what's going on down here. In the ground, so more brownie color. Not enough water. So starting in some water there, too much, too much, too much. Go. Pull some of this, this way. Push some that way. I think that's probably good. Head here, could use a bit more definition around here. So I can take some of this, was pulling, just going to grab some of this pigment from down here and gradually bringing it up around there to give a bit more definition. Where else do we need paint? Looks like guy over here. So around our eye here we've got yeah. So this is Yeah, Sometimes it's hard to tell what's going on. So they have this little round shape inside their external shape there. So I'm just accenting that a bit more. And I'll get some clean water. Again. Pull this down. If you watched my video on how to paint the Cardinal is basically a lot of the same techniques, different paper we're using here. And we're trying to get a bit more hard edges versus more soft edges. Now. We need a bit more shadowy area up here. And the reason we have those different edges like that is so that it gives you that, that's what gives it that kind of sketchy kinda look. A bit more definition to this I here showing he's got some shadow light gives it more depth in there and gets more, um, what would you call that more character? I guess a more yeah. A little bit collarbone here, so it's not all white. Now, on that note you could add like lots of colors in here. You could add some pink because it is, in reality there is a lot of color in these bears that's being reflected off of the environment around them and different things like that. There's also more subtle, like in, you know, e.g. in here they're probably more muscle, it'd be more different shapes like that. We're keeping this pretty simple, but if you wanted to, if you want to add more by all means, you can make this sum. You can take this shape that I've given you, the outline and you could go to town on it. I would love to have saw them in real life when I was there this summer, up there this summer. But I didn't I'm just going around. I'm just adding in some more definition separating some of these areas. And a lot of what I've got on here is just kinda leftover paint like that. I'm scrubbing on a bit in a bit more scraggly bits in here. Now you'll notice on our nose, there are no highlights in here. I think it's dry enough. We're not still a bit damp. We can do that after the next bit there. And I think we're probably will go out at the over at the end a bit more, but I think we're probably pretty close to being finished with. The bear will go out at the end and we'll do some touch ups and some things to sort of bring out a bit more character. I think this area over here, this white dot is a bit too pronounced, so I'm just basically very lightly gone over and scrubs and paint around it. Okay. Alright, so now starting to look like a bear, I don't know about that. I in there, I might just paint over it and add a dot later on, but we'll leave that to the n. So for now I think we're okay. We're going to let this dry and then we're going to paint some background around our beer. 7. Background top half: One of the reasons why put it background on this in the first place. So it's okay to leave a little bit of space around. Don't leave a giant space, or it's going to look funny. There's probably a bit too much of my original painting along this side here. If you want it to. Now, you can lightly erase your pencil line here. The reason why I say that is that if once you get the pencil wet and you let it dry, well then it's no longer water-soluble. So if you've got any really dark areas, they're just very I'm not pressing hard on the paper. I'm just very lightly going over top. I'm just too. Make sure that I don't have a whole bunch of early pencil lines. Not that I actually kinda like pencil lines left in the painting, but I've had customers asked me, Aren't you going to erase the pencil? That's customer voice by the way. If you're a customer, that's how you talk. Or if you're a woman customer or two going to erase the pencil. That's how my mom That's my mom voice actually, that's how my mom talks. Okay. Okay. So I would lightly erase it. I'm not worried so much about this one here because that is a darker area in there. So why don't we start with that. That is burnt sienna or dirt or land, kind of out-of-focus land in the background. I prefer it to be out of focus because then I don't have to put details. So I mixed together a little bit of burnt. I'm Daniel Smith. Burnt sienna is a little bit ready. It doesn't really look all that like burnt sienna or like how I like burns Hannah look. So I've mixed a little bit of burnt umber, so it just looks a little bit more brown. That is why. Forgive me for that. I mean, a bit quicker because I don't want a big hard line on this. So I've wet my brush and I've gone in and diluted it. One of the more important things to do is you want to keep this as straight as possible. The earth doesn't curve. Well, it does. It is round and not the bidding that, okay, So anyway, what was I saying? Yeah, So now I'm diluting some of my blue here. And really light wash is when a mix that in, pick up some of the brown. And I'm just using now pretty much clean water because I'm going to allow that pigment to bleed up in there. These, this is my sky. We'll call this our sky blue. Now, this is a lot darker than our original painting, so I'm adding in some or water there. Okay, so we'll do the same thing on this side. Now we've got our paint, will take our darker color paint and we'll add it in there. Now we've got just clean water and we're picking it up. And we're bringing it over as close to but not exactly on top of our bear. We can get, depending on your mixture, your sky might look a little bit different. We want to kinda diluted. We don't want it to be all about the sky. We want to focus on the bear, whoops, wrong color, ground sky Brown's guy. Okay. So I'm just going around here. You didn't see I'll lose some hold on, barely holding onto the brush at all. Is this a very loose part of the process? You can now add in some other colors if you want. So I'm grabbing some. But it is pinky color. Just give the sky a little bit more texture. You don't have to do this. I just thought it would be fun. Fun. And what other colors can be added in there? Have you been a yellow? So just because our bears yellow, it's good to keep like to tie in. Sometimes. Like you'll notice that here in the water there are some yellow there. There's actually not yellow water. That's more just to tie it in with the colors of the bear. Keep the painting harmonious. Like to call it. Remembering that in a little closer, little bit closer. There we go. Okay. Alright, so there's our sky. I actually kind of like this guy a little bit better. 8. Background bottom: Alright, now let's get onto the water. So for the water, lots of did not want to go. So I'll clean off this part of my palette here. Give me some new. Grabbed the wrong blue. We don't want that. We don't want this bright blue. We want a nice light. We're going to start with lots and lots of water here. And I just lit, I'm picking up the water and I'm going along. I want to touch that edge so that it bleeds in a bit there. That comes down that was a little on the dry side, but it's still bleeding in so that's a reflection in the water there. Water. It's not going to look like in our painting anyways. It doesn't look overly. Oops, I went a little bit on the bear there. I mean, actually trying to have that up above I can because I want to keep the leg white. We don't want to keep it like, you know, we're not painting individual waves or anything like that. Were more focusing on just colors and an abstract he kinda background. Once we get this all on and nice, big, even wash. And you'll notice I'm using a larger brush for this too, because it holds more water, more more paint and allows you to carry it through more and it will look a lot less streaky if you can if you have one of those and do that, leave the rocks for now. We're not going to bother so much with the rocks were just focusing on this because we want to do this all in one go. So this, we want this to be nice and wet so that we can add in some of the other colors that we had. Where's our we had in our group? We did not have that much ochre. There we go. I accidentally had too much yellow ocher on my brush there. And I just grabbed a bunch of water to fix it. I get a bit more darker blue there. A few darker spots and crazy. This is a ton of water. Very loose and not something you definitely don't want to be overthinking. I have some green in there. I don't know why. So I'm just going to mix in some yellow cadmium yellow medium with my blue. And just for the sake of making the painting look as close to the other one as possible. Probably because the water is actually especially in the Pacific, it's very grainy. So this area here where the Spirit bears live is way up. I can't remember the name of the island. I probably shouldn't tell you anyways because they do try to keep these bears safe. But it's very as far up past Vancouver Island in British Columbia, in an area that has become known as the Great Bear Rainforest. I just picked up some of these colors and I'm just bringing them into current or hormone naught and Harmonia lies. Thanks. Oh, we can't forget. In here underneath our beer big triangular spot there where we've got some water showing through in the background. Oops. We don't want it on his leg. Get out wrong way, wrong way. Boop, boop. Okay. It's very important that you make all those noises to all your painting. It really helps bring things together. Okay. So you might want to watch that a few times more. So just because it's all done kind of in one big chunk, right? So it's really a not that stressful or difficult. Doesn't try and get some of this bears leg there too late. I'll scrub it out later. Yeah. It's not that it's difficult. It's just that it's done kind of in wet on wet. And while the paint is wet, if you're in a really warm area, warm place, it might dry, it might, it might not work that well for you. So next we're going to focus on the rocks. Then we're going to come back to our bear. I think I've got a few areas here sorry before let me just correct that. Well, it's still wet. It will blend together. Yeah. They're going to come back to our bear. We're going to look at, okay, what can we touch up on the bear? We need a bit more detail in here. This area here, this is just a big, solid white area that I don't like. I like a little bit more color variation in the back here. It's gonna blend. It's a bit too much gray and not enough warmth to tie it all in. And yeah, I think that's pretty much it. And then I think we sign our name and we're done. We'll do probably two layers on the rocks, but that'll be quick, kinda like the background. We don't want to get too detailed in there, but we do want to make sure we've got some shadows and stuff in there. His feet are kinda behind these rocks here are her feet. So just to be aware of that. Okay. 9. Rocks: While to dry if you used as much water as I did see in here, there's blossoming area here that's from a lot of water. My water backgrounds a little bit paler, but I think it looks fine. I'm happy enough with it when I would maybe do, but I'm not going to bother is put a little bit more separation in here. Maybe we can, we'll see how it goes. Maybe we could use some indigo or something like that and put it in some separation here and then just draw that down to make more of a reflection on the water if we wanted to. Now we're going to focus on the rock. So for the rocks, the rocks are kind of a bluey gray color. But again, use what you have job. Don't worry about it so much. Just very simply. Very light washes on the rocks. Don't worry so much about what they are. You know, whichever we just more about using them as a separation tool from the background. And you can add in some colors there. Remember, we're keeping it harmonious. What else can you tell me about the rocks? Rocks. They'll have light areas, dark areas where they meet the water. In particular, it will be darker underneath, like where our bear paws are not. There's gonna be some shadow areas in there that we want to pay a fair bit of attention to will do that. Now I'm grabbing my smaller brush and I'm just painting these claws. I want to be careful here not to let these hard lines draw too much and see, you know, in the shot shadows or not. You know, unless it's bright sun, It's not only, it's not really a hard line. I will have a shadow from that other rock down here. There's pause there. And then of course we're going to have different, you know, different rocks, different shapes. And then where there are rocks meet the water again. We're going to have different icon. I like how this one is. Quite often you do a painting and then the second time, you know, it turns out better than the first time. So I'm just adding some, not a lot of water on this. I want to keep this, you know, indefinite edge here where the line is. Having lots of paint. It's kinda sketchy. Um, so yeah, it looks fair bit different than the first ones, but I kind of like this one better. I'm looks a bit more like rocks are mirror here has a bit more detail, so that's okay. We want to paint that in the PAR bit rounder. Get some clean water, soften that edge up. Again, just some clean water down here. Soften this up. I'm going to just add in a bit too much blue there. A bit of blue. Okay, so that's already dried of that hard edge there. Now I'm trying to add some painting, not crazy about that, but it is what it is. We just rub it a little bit. It should pick up, bleed down. There we go. Okay. We've got some rocks, rock on. While we're here, we can add in a little bit of color to the paws here. Like we said, we were gonna do earlier. Warmer a little there a little bit. Just trying to fill in a few of those white areas with some warmer, very, very light colors. Once this is dry, or we could probably do it now we could really come in and tighten up these claws here a bit. Make them a bit more detailed and defined. Make a bit more shape to it, gives it a bit more sort of a blend of like abstract and reality. If it's too abstract, it doesn't look right. If it's too real, it doesn't look right either. So we don't need to worry too much about it. I just want a nice, easy. Now I use different colors in my rocks the first time, but you can by all means go ahead. It doesn't matter. I more or less just want them to look like rocks or ground of some kind that he's standing on. You could put some green in there if you wanted to add like, you know, some kind of impression of vegetation. But again, no. Not overly necessary. We didn't go over top of that hard line with new paint and make it blend a bit more. What's underneath? We don't need to. Okay. Alright. We're going to let that dry. I'm going to come back and we're going to review our painting. Go over, make a few touch ups. 10. Finishing Touches: Hey, welcome back. So our rocks have dried. I'm pretty happy with the rocks. I'm not too worried about them. I do think I have too many claws on my bear. I just noticed that now so we could fix that by pushing some of that up. I really wouldn't worry about it too much. But if we want to be sticklers, will be sticklers. One thing I noticed in the original painting and I like, is I like the warmer color of the burnt sienna. And so I'm gonna just make some diluted burnt sienna and hopefully I don't do anything terrible here. And I'm just going over some of these areas in here. With that. I think I need now to put some open up that can of worms and now, Yeah, So as I promised this section here, we're just going through and we are going over some of the details in the painting and even some final touches. So as I said, I just warm that painting up with a little bit of burnt sienna there. I don't want, I don't want to be a big solid thing. So I added in some water there. Okay, now to tie that in a bit, I'm going to bring a bit of that paint back here somewhere again, warming up painting and tie in some of the colors there. One other thing that I noticed was we just did this, didn't seem to find enough. This section up here, you know, separating that kinda round big ball of fur apart. The lumbering shapes there. And a little bit of warmth over here. And that's somewhat pencil in there, that doesn't come out. Then I'm going to try and lift it out with water. It's not coming out. So I mean, I just got some clean water and I'm just here we go. Watered OK. Background. Came forward a little bit there too. So I left that out if I can. That's okay. It kind of gives a bit of shape to the bear. I'm going to put a little bit of a light wash over top here, like right at the water's edge. Here. Again, I'm just grabbing some paint and very lightly gone just to make our and this is almost like a not what I want to keep that hard edge. It gives like a little bit of reflection. Didn't do that in the first one. But I kinda like it in this one. I will do the same down here. So I'm kinda like it's dry ish, right? It gives a little bit the impression of some waves maybe, you know. Okay. And we'll separation or oil or sugar and water. So again, I'm taking this is just some and neutral tint there. That ended just divide that little section up a bit there. I'm Mike. Little bit in there. Okay. And I say we are done. So couple of things. Hopefully you've watched the video. And a couple of times before he started painting, you will probably find that, um, you know, you'll, you'll, it'll be a lot easier going through after you've seen it already. If you haven't and you're frustrated with it or if something didn't work out, I will be monitoring this class quite regularly. I've already started on my next video. So please by all means, reach out and ask me, I am more than happy to answer any of your questions. I don't I have no problem doing that. I'd rather see you succeeded this, succeed at this, and enjoy it. I'm talking as I'm still painting here, I am probably like I always tell people leave alone, stop painting, but I am just as guilty of that as everybody else. I keep seeing things that I want to change. I need some more shadow here. Again, right here, see there's war anymore shadow, like this area under here. It needs to be defined a bit more. You can. It's always good to stop. And step back and look and say, Hey, what's going on here was what bugging me about this? What kind of what don't I like about this pain or something in there that just doesn't look right and just step back and take a look at it or walk away from it and come back. But usually just stepping back and looking, you'll see all I needed more shadow. There wasn't enough separation from the head. There is a problem right there. Okay. I'm going to add a bit more, so I should really stop. But it's funny when you like doing something, it's easy to keep doing it. I'm just adding some more, maybe a bit more muscles in there and whatnot. Okay. So hopefully you're bear. It looks like a bear. And if at first, you know, don't feel like, you know, okay, I tried and it didn't work. This is, watercolor is not, not the easiest thing to learn. I've been doing it for over a decade now and I still struggle with certain things and I still, you know, someone gives me a painting or they asked me to do a painting. I still get nervous about it. I still get worried about it. It's a practicing, anyone can learn how to do. That's the most important thing to remember is that this is something that you will definitely get better at them already practicing. So by all means, keep practicing. Keep monk and about. And you'll get there. Oh, the eyes, my eyes worked out fine with leaving the little what you might call it, the little circle there. I had gone around and added a bit more dark paint there. But here's the gel pen on a dark spot and you can see how that comes up. I'll make it a little bit larger there. So if I wanted to have an eyeball reflection or something or a highlight, It's just sort of, it's almost 100, say about 80% of pay. It actually works quite well. So this is a Jelly Roll pen by them in any craft store, you could also use white gouache, which I know I have a tube around here somewhere. It is in my other video that I posted the same tube that I've had forever. Just any white gouache will do as long as it's opaque. You can use, basically you can use white acrylic paint if you want. And that's probably even easier. And it's probably more opaque. Just use a dab, a tiny dab of white acrylic paint if you have it, or white house paint, drywall or anything like that will work for those kind of things. So yeah. This stage you can go through, you can take it any pencil lines that you don't like. And if you're using a water-soluble pencil and they don't come out, you can wash them out with water. Again. Let me know what you think. Please post your copy your videos online. I'd love to see what you paint. This one. In particular, I quite like this painting and having just gone on a little adventure of Nordstroms to see what other interpret them.