Watercolor Technique - Pulling the Puddle Part Three: Changing Colors

1. Introduction: Welcome to part three of pulling the puddle. I'm Chris Carter. I'm very excited about getting to this point in the pulling the puddle series. In this lesson, I'll be showing you how to charge the puddle with different pigments, different colors. I'll be charging the pair puddle with yellow, yellow orange and yellow green. And I'll be charging the table color with oranges, a red orange to an orange into a yellow orange and the background will be a blue violet into a red violet. While filming this lesson. The first time I did the demo for the background. I made the wash too dark and it was a beautiful wash, if it weren't for the fact that I wanted to put a shadow on it in putting the shadow on it, I had to apply far more pigment and the pigment I was using was a pigment that had a lot of binder in it, which meant that when I apply a little bit too much pigment, in a wash when it dries, it dries a little shiny. Instead of cutting that out, I'm going to show you that part too so that you can see when it happens to you. Now I've done hundreds of these washes before and it still happens, and that's just reality. Things go awry. I still like the painting, but it does it's not something I would put on my wall, not because of the darkness but because of the way that the pigment tried. I will show you that and I did do a second version of it so that I could show you what I had intended on showing you in the first version. That's just the way I am as a teacher because I think you learn more from your mistakes and you learn a lot from my mistakes. They're really not mistakes because I learned something. That's my attitude. Now, the other thing that I'm going to include in this class is a very special bonus lesson, which is going to show you how I combine these different pull the puddle techniques in my real painting in the painting of larger pieces. I'm not going to go into an explanation of it. You'll see that I'm using bigger brushes, you'll see that I'm using a different palette. You'll see how I overlay a straight pull the puddle with a graduated pull the puddle and then charging it with color. I'm going to show you how I apply that in skies and in a variety of things. It's going to be very quick because I'm going to speed it up and goes, what's the point of learning these techniques. If you don't have an idea of what you're going to do with them. I mean you're simply not going to be making hundreds of pair paintings. I hope you enjoy pulling the puddle part three. Let's 2. Materials: Here are the materials that I'm going to have available for me for this class, but they are not all necessary. To begin with, you'll need paper. I have watercolor paper. I'm going to use the Reeves BFK printmaking paper, and this is my folder that I use as a template to make my border. You saw me do that in part two. You can also use the compass or the strip of paper that you saw in part one. Not a problem. Brushes, you really are only going to need these two, which is a ten, and this is an eight or a six, probably an eight. I like to use the biggest brushes possible, so I may also use these and I always have my little D vinci travel brushes handy, but you really won't need those. These are the only two you really need. You'll need a pencil. You'll need paints, pigments. Now, these are two paints that are squeezed out into pans and half pans. That's just the way that I like to use them. A scrap of paper to test colors on. You'll need a water container. I like to use a water container that has three separate sections or I use three containers. One to keep clean, one to washing my brushes out and the other one is for ink, even if I'm not using ink, I'm so used to that that I do it anyway. A pipe which I use to moisten my paints. If you don't have one of these, this is a laboratory pipe, then you can use an eye dropper. Not a problem. Palette, I have wells here. And for this, because we're going to be charging the puddles with other pigments, you want to have several mixing areas so that you can keep some of the pigments you're adding clean and you'll just be more in control of how you're changing your puddle color. I have these. I'm not sure what I'm going to use yet, but I'll just grab whatever it is when I need it. I use the color wheel. This is for my color scheme game. This is color scheme number seven, which is the extended analogous with three complements. This also is optional. You can use any color wheel. You don't even have to use a color wheel. This is not a color class. This is about mixing different pigments, whatever color you choose in a single puddle. Play with whatever colors you wish to. I'm going to be using this color scheme. Because again, I'm going back to the pair. The project will be a pair painting that will easily hang with your other pair paintings. The table will be orange, the pair will be yellows and yellow greens going into a little bit of orange, and the background and the shadows will be the red violet violet and blue violet. Of course, paper towels so that you can wake up nicely. That's it for materials. Let's get started. 3. Drawing the Pears: First, I draw my border. I'm going to draw two pairs this time. I like the tall, thin pair. More like bosque pair, I guess, and then a little bit of a bartlet. I've done an ink tracing over the top of the sketch that I drew because I don't think that you can see the pencil very clearly in the demo. So this is the drawing in ink. This is just on a piece of tracing paper. I will be painting on the paper that just has the pencil drawing on it. 4. Basic Technique: This video, I'm going to use one of the sketches that I decided not to follow through with. I'm going to show you step by step, the technique of charging a puddle with different pigments so that you can change from one hue to another within a puddle as you're pulling it. Have clean water. I have dampened my pigments so that they're nice and juicy and I can get good rich color with them. I will begin by making a couple of puddles that once I get going, I can just keep moving along, charging my puddle with different colors from the puddles I've created in my mixing palette. I want to mix these to be a relatively close consistency to one another. So that I don't have a one that's more dilute than another. If that happens, then I end up running the risk of creating what we call blooms in my puddle, which is that the water will wash back into the area that I've already painted. Now, with the pair, I'm going to be using the different hues to change value rather than diluting the puddle to make a more dilute puddle. In other words, I'm changing the value by changing the hue, not by changing the consistency of the puddle. You'll see that I use my paper towel not only for wicking up but also for cleaning my bh between dipping into the different puddles. I don't want to pollute the puddles because I want as clean a color as I can possibly get within the transitions. I'm going to prop this up on a slant so that I'm working with gravity and the puddle is moving down. Notice that this is starting to dry a bit. I want to make sure that I keep it a puddle. I have a very big puddle at the bottom that I will wake up, but slowly. I'd like for the color to have as much time to sink into the fibers as possible. There we have one wash with all those beautiful transitions of color. That's the basic technique of charging a puddle with different pigments. 5. Painting the First Pear: I'm going to mix the yellow, yellow, green, yellow orange for my pair. I still want to mix a lot of my wash, but I have a little bit more flexibility because I'm going to be changing it along the way. I want to make sure that it's mixed enough so that I don't have any pigment particles in it. Then I'm going to a little bit of orange lister. That's a little orange here. Then over here, I'm going to have some green. I have some very subtle green, and then I'll have more intense green. And I'm mixing my greens. I'm not using a dian. I'm using athaloblue and I'll tone it with ultramarine blue. By to I'm neutralizing it actually. Here go my stretchers again. Cardboard. Okay. If I were upstairs in my drafting table, I have my drafting table at the right slant. But here I'm just setting this up just like you can set it up on the slant. I'm not wetting my paper first. My wash is how I'm controlling it. And if I wet the paper, then I don't have as much control over the pigment. My light's going to be coming from this direction because it's casting the shadows there, so it's really coming this way. I'm just going to play with that. Using a large brush for this shape. Now, right away, I want to add some change into it. That's more charge it with more orange. Now I want to get some green in there. Can you see I'm still pulling the puddle? Now, I'm waking up. The puddle is continuing to come down, so I'm going to wick up. Now, the color is a little thinner very transparent, which I like. And the color is pretty subtle. I'm going to see at this pair in the back if I can add a little more pigment, less water and more pigment. Well, that's drying, make up some more puddles. When I see more accumulating on the bottom, I just wick it up carefully so that it doesn't lead back up. I have to let this dry completely. 6. Painting Second Pear: Okay. This is totally dry now so I can put the h on the next pair. I want to keep it a little drier this time. It's a little thick. I needed to add a little bit of water. I want to get the translucency back into it, which you can do as long as you do it while it's still wet. Keep that puddle a puddle. When I get to the touching the other pair, I want to be very careful that I don't overlap it. Okay. It's important to wait until it gets to the very bottom edge where you can wake up without actually touching the paper. All right. Now we're going to let that dry. Okay. 7. Painting the Table: This is now dry and I'm going to do the table. I'll start with it dark over here and go to light. But in addition to going from dark to light, I'm going to be going from orange such as this to a yellow, more like this. I'm going to be doing two things. I'm going to transition in value, but I'm not transitioning in value by diluting my wash as I did in part two of pulling the puddle. I'm going to do it by changing my hue or my color because full intensity orange is a darker value than full intensity yellow. I'm going to take advantage of that by going from oranges into yellows. Okay. All right. And I'm also going to use a smaller brush to start with because I want to be careful here not to overlap my pair. So I will move to a smaller brush, and then I'll shift back again. Okay. I'm going to use this. This is a travel brush, this part, this end, falls off all the time. So I just leave it off. That does, though, protect the tip when I'm traveling. Okay. This is squirrel hair, which really holds a lot of pain. You have to be careful that this is not too wet. It should work just fine. I want to start with plenty of puddle. Notice too that I'm when I'm this close to the edge of another object that I don't want to overlap. I approach it from the bottom up. Sure, you keep the puddle going. I hardly have a puddle here. I'm running into dangerous zone by not having enough of a puddle. G quite as slide as I had hoped to, but I think it will be okay. 8. Painting the background: Now for the background. I'm starting with clean water, I'm going to mix up new paints in clean palettes because I'm going to go from blue violet over to red violet. We'll see how it turns out. I'm excited about it. I'm liking what's going on so far. I'm going to mix up red violets and blue violets and have some extra things to charge it with along the way. We'll see what magic happens. I'm using an ultramarine blue and an zar and crimson. Okay. And I'm experimenting a little bit because this blue was actually from a tube, a very old tube that had broken apart at the end, and I had it in a ziplock bag. So it was very stiff and I wasn't sure if I could use it. I was about to throw it out when I thought, why not give it a try and it's looking beautiful. It is reconstituted well because I squirted it with water and let it sit there for quite some time. Don't be too quick to throw out good paint. The lizerm crimson I'm using is American journey, which I use for my large abstract paintings when I use the mouth atomizer. I usually do not use it for paintings like this, smaller paintings because there's a lot more binder in it. Find that it doesn't work as well for washes with a brush. It works beautifully for atomizing and it's less expensive than the paint that I normally use on paintings like this, but we'll see how it goes. Both of these are ultramarine blue. This is my thalo blue over there. I use a lot of ultramarine blue and that's why I have two pans of it. Then over here, I'm just going to have red that I can dip into because I don't want to be dipping into my palette of red or I'm going to be getting purple into there and I waste a lot of paint that way. I'm going to have a puddle over here of the sin crimson and I'm going to have a puddle of the pure blue. Because once I get going, I'm just playing and I'm working intuitively. I'm trying to do it as simply as possible for this class to illustrate it, but it's very hard after so many years to not just go with the flow and dip into this and do that. So I'm going to try my best to make it simple for you. Starting over here and I'll work this way. Now, the shadow is not going to be too noticeable when I put it in because this is so dark. Sure, the puddle keeps going all the way across. This gets tricky here because I have to go all the way down and then back and keep the puddle wet on the edges on both sides. I'm going to really drench that puddle. Adding to the puddle all the time, they've got to keep the entire line puddly. You see, I'm pulling from one side and meeting up another side. It's a matter of working with gravity and making sure that it's working with you. Okay. Looking good. No matter how many times I do this. It's a little anxiety provoked. And it's so dark that I'm just not sure how the shadow part is going to come across. But we'll see, I can barely even see the lines. I can't really see the lines, so I'm just going to have to fake it. When you do yours, I suggest you don't make it quite as dark as this. I'm going to let this strike 9. Painting the Shadow: The final step is to paint in the shadow. I'm going to use a red violet. I've added a little bit more of the zn crimson to this. Good. I'm going to make it a little bit thinner because I really want it to be transparent. This is a shadow. It's not a real thing. You have to be very careful not to lift any paint because the paint underneath is so dense, almost opaque, that it will have a tendency to lift pretty easily. You have to be very careful not to drag along the paper too hard because it will pick up the heavy pigment underneath. So when this is drying, the shadow up there is pretty much disappearing. It's too bad that I made that quite so dark. We'll see how that dries. In the original demo for this class. I painted in the background, going from blue violet to red violet and playing around. It was very dark. It was so dark that we couldn't really see the shadows. I decided to do a second version of it. I quickly painted these up and now I'm going to paint in the background again without going quite so dark. Once again, I will go from a blue violet to a red violet, will be a much more dilute mix. So when we cast the shadow, we can actually see the shadow. This is going to be a lot lighter. Much better. I want to make sure to go back to blue violet over here because it's just on the other side of this same pair. To make sure that my puddle off top is still a puddle. I'm going back and forth between the blue violet and the red violet. All right. That's so much better in terms of being able to show you what the shadow does when I cast it. I'm going to let this dry and then we'll put the shadow on. Here goes the second attempt at the shadow. However, a much lighter background. 10. Comparing the Paintings: There's quite a difference between the two of these in terms of values. Colors are basically the same, but certainly the values and the contrast between the values makes a big difference in the design. When you squint at these, they're really quite different. Some people will like this one better. Some people will like this one better. My preference is this one. This got too opaque for me. I mean, this is what I prefer, but I like the contrast and the design of this one better than I do that one. It does not mean this is better than that one. It just means it right now. The way I feel looking at them. There are parts that I like. I definitely like the shadow better here. I like what's going on with the pairs better. I actually like the table better here, but the complete the overall impact of the piece, I feel that this is stronger. I would hang this one on my wall before I would hang this one on my wall. 11. Conclusion: This concludes Part three of pulling the puddle. Just a little bit of a review. In part one, we learned how to lay down a wash by pulling the puddle so that we had streaklis seamless flow of color. In part two, we learned how to pull the puddle and create a graduated wash, which went from a darker value to a lighter value. Okay. In part three, we learned how to charge our puddle with different pigments and different colors so that there was a nice transition between color and some nice color mixing along the way. This is our pair painting from this part of pulling the puddle. Now, now that you've made three different pair paintings, we're going to move on to part four. In part four of pulling the puddle. We're going to be using the technique in smaller areas, smaller shapes, and we're going to do something very fun with our pairs. You'll see all kinds of variations that you can come up with by changing your pigments using this technique. Thank you for watching. This is Chris Carter.