Watercolor Strawberries: Easy and Fun Watercolor Project

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone. My name is Irina Trzaskos. I am a watercolor artist and illustrator. Also, I teach intermediate classes here at Skillshare. We are continuing with series of fun and short summer classes. In today class, we'll be painting strawberries. Strawberries is a fun subject to paint. You can use them as label for your jars of jam, or just as illustration, as stationary, or aspiring design. Anyway you want. Let's get started. 2. Supplies & Colors: What we'll be using today are our usual supplies we use in most of my classes, but because there are so many of new faces here, I will name them of course and you can find L civilized and with description and of a project of the class. We have watercolor paint, watercolor paper. This is called press a 100th [inaudible] I cut just a piece, paper towel, water, of course, paint pallet, pencil, eraser, we'll be using a medium water carbon brush, this is [inaudible] number 4, a small watercolor brush for details, this is [inaudible] number 2. For the stem, if you have, you can use a liner brush. This is like a brush with long synthetic hair. Also, we may use a Sharpie fine liner or any fine liner which is waterproof. Also we'll use white ink or white pen gel. If you have a leaf from the strawberry, you can get it too. Next I want to show you the colors we'll be using. We won't be using a lot of colors today, which will be using is cadmium yellow, cadmium red, green and ultramarine blue. That's it. Next we do is drawing our strawberries. 3. Drawing Strawberries: Now let's draw our strawberries. We'll have two strawberries and a leaf. I have a really light sketch here but I'm going to do it thicker so you can see it. This is our main strawberry. It has some leaves on top. When you are drawing just make sure your lines are so soft, not as dark as mine. I'm giving mine dark only so you can see it on camera. We have a strawberry shape, very simple, and some leaves on top. Here we have the stem. On the top we'll have another little strawberry almost round like this. On strawberry set little these leaves are looking up. At this stage we are not drawing the seeds, we'll be entering them later, and here we'll have a leaf, so we have stem for the leaf and then we'll do another one and crossing it and two small diagonals. Here we'll have the main leaf, throb shaped and two smaller leaves. As you can see here, strawberry leaf has these little teeth, so we'll be edging them too. Head straight here and then restart. We won't be edging the lines on the leaves now we'll be edging them right with the paint and here the same. This is all the drawing, erase the extra lines and we can start painting. 4. Painting the First Layer: After I erase extra lines we can start painting our first layer. It's going to be wet on wet. I'm covering the strawberry with water first. The light will be coming from this part. After taking some cadmium yellow, diluting it with some water and dropping it on the strawberry. Cadmium yellow is going to be our undertone for all the colors. It will unify all the colors we have. We're starting with cadmium yellow. Then I'll take some cadmium red, dilute it in water and I'll add it to yellow. On this side of the strawberry, it's going to be in shades, so we'll add a little bit of green to our red and we'll get a darker shade of red. That's what we'll add in here. I feel like we need a little moderate on this part too. While it's drying, we'll paint other strawberry. Again we'll color it with water and some yellow too. Let's add a drop of green to the strawberry and to the rest, we'll add some red. While the strawberries are drying, let's paint the leaf. Again, we'll start with yellow, very watery. Then we'll add some green to it. Our first layer is always very light unless you painting in all prima technique. Using this motor brush for this side, edge of the leaf. Try to work fast and don't let it dry. This is good. The last leaf, cadmium yellow with a lot of water and green again. Try not to interfere edges point in the wash. Just let it dry. Meanwhile, let's paint any little leaves. Again, we start with yellow and we'll add some green to it. It doesn't have to be perfect now. I'll make it perfect with details. Also, we can drag some of this paint into our stem and to these leaves. I'm working with a small brush. Now let's let it dry and add the details which we'll finish our painting. 5. Painting the Second Layer and Details: Now, when the first layer is totally dry, we'll start adding the details and at the same time, try not to overwork your strawberries. What we'll do first is mix some cadmium red with some green. I'll get this shade here, brownish red. I will be using it to paint the seeds. Seeds are an important part of the strawberry so it's important to paint them, and on the big one too. That's where our strawberry starts looking like a strawberry. You don't have to be too precise. But then somehow, I can adjust the water. Now, while they are dry, well mix some green with ultramarine blue. We'll get a darker and a colder shade of green. We'll start adding some shadows on all the leaves. Again, I'm trying not to overwork it. I'll just a few lines here and there. Not too many. On the stem, on the one side, we'll also have a shadow. The stems are really tricky, they require a really steady hand. Not like mine. What you can do, you can make interrupted lines. I also will the paint the green into, dilute our green with more water. It will mean, add some contrasting, before we paint all these lines on the leaf. If you feel your lines are too contrasting you can, after it dries, color it with a wash to stay a little watery, light green. I don't want to make it too delicate, I still want to keep this feel of water color, unpredictable green. We need some shadow right on this edge, and down here. This little leaves need a shadow too. They added this much, I'll fix it later. Which with the next, we'll take more cadmium red, with a little of this dark red. Mix them together. On this edge, we'll add some shadow. Not too much, just a little bit. Then we're going around the seeds at this point. Because that's how the shadow will go, and on this part too. Add more water on the little one. The same thing, we're adding the shadow, but we're trying to leave some larger space around the seeds. When the leaves that have dried, we add a few more shadows on the bottom part, like this. You can work more on the edge if you want to. Last touch, I added some highlights with the white gel pen on the seeds. Not all of them, just a few of them, and this is our strawberry. 6. Thank you!: Thank you for watching my class. I hope you've had a chance to paint with me. If you like this class, please leave a review and upload the project to a project section of the class. I can't wait to see a beautiful strawberries. See you in my next class.