Watercolor Techniques for Beginners: Paint a Cactus

1. Introduction: It is well documented that a small amount of time spent on a creative activity each day can radically alter your well being. But what I've noticed is that for a lot of people, there's a desire, a longing to be creative, and then there's a gap. Some of you may have bought some paints and then left them in the cupboard because you're not quite sure what to do with them. Others might have had a go, but then stopped because the results you got fell short of your aspirations. So I've made this class to try to bridge that gap. I'm Captain Jennifer. I'm an artist designer and mother of four boys. In this class, I will show you how to get set up with watercolors. I'll show you five common mistakes that begins make with water color. And then we'll do a quick for up and then dive into a super easy, fun and satisfying painting of a actor. Water color is one of the most difficult mediums. And I think it's really important to have paintings that you can do that give you a good result. This class is about water color for well being. And the subjects that I've chosen are purposefully designed to be easy to paint and to give you a feeling of satisfaction at the end. What colorful well being is about, nurturing yourself, having a bit of me time and enjoying the creative process. So I hope you will join me in this class. 2. Project: The project for this class is to do a quick warm up painting, some circles and then to paint a cactus. The purpose of the war map is to get you to relax, get your colors mixed up on your palette, the ones that you're going to use in your painting. And get your brush nice and wet so that when you start your actual painting, you can get straight into a relaxed wood color flow. All you need to do is watch the video lesson and then have a go at that section. Then watch the next lesson, and then do that part yourself. It's really easy, and I promise you'll have fun. You don't have to do the exact same painting that I've done. If you look at my pints board, you'll find a range of cactus flowers and also a fun collection of Vas jars and antique vintage teapots that you can draw from. If you want to create your own cactus painting with a vase, of course if you want to, you can also do the same painting as me. That's absolutely fine as well. You might find that you're having so much fun. You want to do more than one. Your finished project should be a quick photo of your cactus painting. Or if there was one section of the process that you really like, maybe your vases brainstorm and you want to share a photo of that, then share that. Any part of what you've done would be great. Just upload it into the glass project gallery so that I can have a look. To upload a project, click on the Projects and Resources tab. From there, click Submit Project, and then upload a cover image from your computer. You can crop the image to fit the screen. Click Submit, then you give your project a title in the project descriptions panel. You can upload the same image again, as well as any other images of the project that you want to share. You can also write any notes or thoughts you have about the project in the descriptions panel. Then when you're ready, simply click on Publish, and your project will be shared to the class project gallery. And of course, let me know what you thought of the process. If you get into difficulty at any stage, you can use the discussion section in the class to ask any questions you might have. In the next lesson, I'm going to give you a quick rundown on the different types of water colors. See a 3. Materials: Let's talk about watercolors. Watercolors come in either tubes or pans. With the tubes, you can get tiny ones like this. This is whole bine. These are really expensive, artist quality ones. If you're just starting out, don't buy these. You get medium sized tubes, these are white nights, and then you can get enormous tubes like this. This is the Cotman student range. If you are just starting, don't buy these enormous tubes. Water colors last for ages and ages and you only need a really tiny amount. If I was starting out, I would buy Windsor and Newton Cotman in a five mill. I've got these enormous tubes because I was teaching an in person series of watercolor workshops, and I needed an affordable paint in quite a large quantity. For the workshops, I chose a range of colors that would enable us to mix up pretty much all the colors we wanted, a basic palette. If you want to go the tube root for a basic palette, then the following colors work really well. These are Chinese white, lemon yellow hue, sap green, permanent rose, This is a beautiful pink, cadmium red, deep hue, erlian blue hue, light blue, ultramarine dark blue, then indigo, which is a really beautiful dark, almost navy blue. When I do the cactus painting, these are the paints that I'll be using. Other ranges are Daniel Smith is a very good quality range, watch out for super cheap paints like this. This is artist's loft watch color. This was so cheap, it was horrible to work with quite grainy. You do get what you pay for with wa color. But a good starting point, a good brand to start with is the Windsor and Newton Cotton range. Watercolors also come in pans. This is actually a half pan set from Windsor and Newton, and it's got your basic range of colors. This would be a good one to start with as well. If you are looking to buy something, what you see here are large pans. These are my urtkiganztamb, which is Japanese watercolor. This brand I really like using. They are quite opaque, quite creamy. And I just love having all my colors laid out before me. You don't have to buy 48, you just beginning. You can buy them in 16 2024, right up to 48. Then this is a small set of high pigment watercolors from art Way, I was looking for a student set and I decided to try this. They also have a set that's not high pigment, but this is the one I tried. I was very pleasantly surprised by how good these are. The only thing I didn't like about it was that it doesn't have a nice pink. The red, often with watercolors, is the case that the red doesn't tint down nicely to form a nice pink, you actually need to buy a nice pink. Which is why with this set, I bought a permanent rose, which is a very beautiful pink. When I first started painting in water, I was really frustrated because I couldn't get a nice pink just from mixing red and white. But this is a really good inexpensive set and it comes from art way in the UK. If you decide to buy tubes, then you're going to need a palette to squeeze them out on. Now what I've got here is a travel palette from Jackson's art. And I've squeezed the colors into the pans and I've let them dry. The important thing to do if you do this is write down in a corresponding layout what each color is. Because you will forget and you can't tell from just looking at the color, what it is. That's quite a useful thing. These are supposed to seal completely shut for traveling open. Again, hopefully I put my warm colors in there and then I've got my cool colors in here. And as you can see, it's a bit messy. But it works. And that's how you do it if you want to squeeze from a tube. This is another set that I've I was given this, it's an Italian make. I'm just showing you this because a lot of the sets you buy might come with the trays for mixing. In my opinion, these trays are not enough space for mixing. If you've got a set like this, even if you've got this lovely tray, you will still need a palette. For my art workshops, what I bought was this. It's a plastic inking tray. I bought it because it was cheap. It was large, it was flat and easy to clean. It gave enough space. What I normally work with is this. It's a porcelain butcher's tray. This is from Jackson's art, and I absolutely love this as a palette. It's very nice to work with. And it cleans up really easily and stays white. However, if you're just beginning you don't need that. You can get a plastic thing like this. You can also just use a plate, porcelain, white plate. You just need something that has enough space for mixing and then brushes this. Here is a quill mop brush. This came from art way. This is what I bought for my workshops. It's a size five. As you can see, it comes to a very fine point and it's nice and fat. It holds a lot of water and pigment. And that's what you want to look for. In a watercolor brush, I think the bristles were synthetic. You can pay anything for a brush from four pounds. This was 4-5 pounds, right through to 100 pounds. My most favorite brush of all at the moment is this one. This is a number two quill mop brush from Jackson's Art from the series 777 series. Again, it comes to a nice point. Nice and fat holds a lot of pigment and it's just the right firmness for painting with. If you're going to buy one brush, then I recommend this one. This brush here is what I used before I found the Jackson's one. This is about 37 pounds. It's an expensive brush, but you don't need this if you're just beginning out. You just need a fairly cheap brush that comes to fine point and holds lots of water. Then you might want a smaller round brush like this. This is a size six round. Any brush like this will do fine if you really want to treat yourself. This is a rigger brush, It's very thin and it's for making fine lines. But if you are getting set up for the first time, don't buy all of that. Just buy this one brush from Jackson's and you'll be fine. Then the last thing you need is paper. This is the one tricky point with watercolor because paper does make a huge difference to your painting experience. The best paper is this here, this is arches. I a love this paper. It's coal pressed. It's 100% pure cotton. But it's really expensive. If you're starting out, that's not going to be what you want to buy. You're going to look for a cheaper paper, something you're not too worried about. Ideally, you want something that is 300 grams or 140 pounds in thickness. But apart from that, it doesn't really matter which brand you go for. This is Bockingford. This is cold pressed water color paper, comes in hot pressed or cold pressed. Cold pressed means it's got a bit of a texture. Hot pressed is like ironing. It's super smooth. You imagine it was iron with a really hot iron, so it's really smooth. Hot pressed is more difficult to work with than cold pressed. In my opinion, if I were you, I would buy cold pressed paper. This is the Langton, just another brand. Cold pressed, very nice paper to work with. You can get other cheaper paper that's great for practicing on, but it does affect the quality of your results. As soon as you are ready to upgrade something in your materials, let it be the paper, Let paper be the thing that you upgrade first. And you will see an amazing difference in both the result that you get and also in the painting experience. If you're going to paint along with me and do the same painting I'm doing, then there's two other materials you'll need. The first is some white gouache. I'm using it's Turner acrylic gouache, and it's just a nice cheap white paint comes in a nice big bag. You can use any type of white gouache. It doesn't matter what brand you get, but get a reasonably big amount. And then the background that I do is pink. And I'm using Designers Guache by Dalla Rowe and the color is rose. Pink. Obviously you don't have to do a pink background, but if you want to follow along, you'll need those two items as well. In the next section, I will show you how to swatch out your paint. See you there. 4. Swatching Your Paint: If you've got a brand new box of paints, the good news is that the first thing you need to do is really simple and really fun, that is swatching out your paints. If you buy a set of paints, it might come with a chart like this. Obviously, this was blank to start with. Then all you do is wet your paints with a spray bottle, and then you paint in a swatch for each color. It's as simple as that, and it allows you to have a permanent reference of what your colors are On this cura, tachy set, all of them are laid out and as you can see, all these dark lamps are very hard to tell what they are. And in fact, they're all extremely different in color. This is a really important thing to do the first time you get your paints. If you are working with two paints, then I'll show you how to switch them out. Now I'm first going to squeeze out a little bit of each color. It's good practice if you are using two paints to have a set layout for your palette and to always place your paints in the same order on your pet. Normally, the order goes from white through your light yellows, oranges, pinks, reds, and then down through to your greens and blues. But the order that you choose to use is entirely up to you. Just go with what feels comfortable to you. You don't need a lot of paint. You need actually the smallest little dots that you can get out, because they do last a long time. I've got my paints laid out, obviously, I don't need to switch out my white. But I'm going to take some of my yellow and I'm going to start from the right and I'm just going to paint a really intense little block of yellow there, pretty much pure pigment. Then I'm going to water it down and just pull the paint along each time I'm washing out the pigment. The aim is that I get this end almost transparent and have a nice equal gradation all the way along to the most intense color that we can get. I'll do the green next. I should have put the green further down, but it doesn't matter. I put a really intense screen there. Now, I'm just going to drag it this way with the water, washing it off each time and pulling it along. It's quite fun to watch it traveling along the water. It's a really good way to start getting used to the colors that you've got. This is a beautiful is going to drag it down a bit. Drag it down a bit more. This one is such a strong pigment that I really need quite a lot of water and very little pigment to get my gradation nice bright red. You might need to come back into this initial blob with more pigment because you want to get it as strong as you can, then you just pull it down. You'll notice that each time I want to change color, I wash first in a dirty jar and then in a clean jar. That helps to keep my colors nice and pure, keep my brush clean. In between, if I've got too much water on my brush, I just dab it on my soak pad, which is just a piece of kitchen towel. You can use toilet roll as well. It just allows you to control the amount of water and pigment that you've got on your brush. I want to just come back into my red and control it a little more. I'm going to do my ultramarine blue, That's a beautiful blue. Going to start bringing it down. Try to keep your colors separate for this exercise. It doesn't matter if they start running into each other, but you want to be able to see the full range of intensity going along as a pure color. Ideally then indigo, which is one of my absolute favorite blues. If you end up with too much pigment on this side, just clean your brush, dry it on your soak pad, and then lift out some of the additional pigment to get your transparent paint there. Once you've finished swatching your materials, then the last thing to do is just to write down what the paints were because you will forget. So just make a note and then you've got that sheet to refer to. Any time you need to remember what paint you bought. So that's the first thing to do. If you've got some new tube paints, swatch them out. It's really fun, easy exercise. Great way to get to know your paints. So go ahead and do that now if you haven't already done it. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you a few common mistakes that beginners make with watercolor. I'll see you there. 5. Common Mistakes Beginners Make: I'm going to show you a few common mistakes that beginners make when working with water color. The first mistake is that beginners often hold the brush upright, like this, and paint only with the tip of the brush. It's much better if you just angle your brush to about a 45 degree angle. And then you can use all of the bristles on the paper and you get a much more flowing fluid result on the paper. When you're holding the brush, try to keep your hand relaxed and try to relax right down through your arm. And remember that you can hold the brush like this. You can also hold it like this. And if you want to be super relaxed, you can hold it right at the end and you will get a more relaxed mark. That's the first mistake. The second mistake that I've seen beginners making is outlining their shapes. What I've seen a lot of beginners doing is if they wanted to paint this lemon, then they would quite often start by drawing the shape of the lemon like this. Then they would start painting in quite often around the edges like this. I think that's probably a throwback to primary school where you are taught to draw a shape and then you color it in. But this is painting, this is not drawing. It's far better if you're going to draw this lemon to get your pigment on your brush, then don't outline at all. Try to capture the shape using the paint in broad brush strokes like that. Now the reason why that is better than that is that when you're working with water color, it's all about the fluidity of the paint and how it behaves on the paper and how it blends with other colors. If you can get to your form more quickly with broader brush strokes, you're going to end up with more beautiful blooms and blends happening on your page. The second common mistake to avoid is don't create outlines. What also happens with the outlines is that people quite often draw the outline. And then because they are nervous and unsure what to do next, the outline dries and then you've got this hard edge and the whole thing struggles to flow. So go for your broad shapes as fast as you can. The third common mistake that beginners make with watercolor is not having the right amount of water on the paints. So if you are working with watercolor pans, it's a common mistake that people let the pans get too dry. And the way to get around that is to have a spray bottle and keep wetting the paints to start with, you have to do this quite often. And then once they're properly soaked through, you do it slightly less often, but you want to keep them all nice and moist throughout the painting process. If you're working with a palette that has wells like this, then it's also very common that you end up with too much water in the wells. And if you are working with two paints like this, then what usually happens is either they're too dry and you need to spray them down, or they're too wet and they all start wishing into each other. It is a bit of a minefield, but I'll show you a really good way to get around the problem of the amount of water, and that is to work the water and pigment into your brush on the palette. I'll show you what I mean, once you've sprayed your palette with water or wetted to paints so that everything is moist, but not too moist, then the thing to do is to take the pigment and use the space on your palette to work the pigment into the bristles of your brush. Doing a warmup is a great way to get the right amount of paint and water in your brush. You'll see when we do the actual painting that I do quite a lot of pressing down and lifting and pushing the paint about on the palette. That is because I'm feeling how much paint is in those bristles. Then when I'm ready to paint, it's all in there and ready to go use your palette for mixing your colors. But it's also for working out your consistency of paint and getting it into those bristles in exactly the right quantity. If you end up with too much pigment in there, then use your spray bottle, weight it a bit more, work it around a bit more. Over time, you'll get the feel for how much water and pigment you want on your brush. It needs to hold a beautiful amount so that you can make quite a lot of painting marks without having to come back for more pigment. The fourth common mistake that beginners make is not having enough pigment in their mix. A lot of beginners will use the watercolor paint, but not put enough of the pigment in. The result they get on the page is very wishy washy. Don't be afraid to use the pigment almost neat. Sometimes you'll be delighted and astonished and thrilled by the vibrancy you can get if you use it at its full strength. Don't be scared of doing that. It's really fun leading on from that. The fifth common mistake is that beginners often don't work fast enough. They work too slowly, and that is because they might be a little bit nervous, unsure what to do next. And what happens is the paint dries on the page before they have time to create beautiful water color blends. You actually have to work really quickly if you want to get lovely wood color blends. And if you work fast enough, you can drop paint in mix colors on the paper and that is what gives you your beautiful wood color results. Then the last thing I just have to tell you because it breaks my heart, is don't ever leave your paint brush in your jar. Okay. Within a few minutes, the bristles will be permanently bent and very fine brush will be damaged and you can't undamaged them. Once it happens, when you want to put down your brush, wash it, and then place it on your soak pad. So those are the five common mistakes that beginners make. Hopefully, that's helpful to you. In the next video, we will go straight into our war map, which is painting beautiful, wet in wet circles through there. 6. Warm Up: For the first war map. We're going to paint some circles. I'm taking a glass jar and I'm just going to draw a series of circles on my page. Here are my circles. The next thing I'm going to do is mix up some of the greens and gray colors that I'm going to be using in my painting. First of all, I'm going to wet my palette. I'm using this Jackson's Series 777 brush. It's a number two and it's a quill mop brush. I'm going to take a yellow, a little bit of blue, a little bit of green. I'm just mixing up a nice green as my starting point. I can feel that this pigment is quite weak. I'm going to do that again, a bit more yellow. That's better. This here is a soak pad, which is basically just kitchen towel. I've put it on a coaster so that if it gets very wet, it doesn't affect my table. It's useful to have your soak pad so you can dab out any excess water. I'm just going to paint into this circle, nice broad brush strokes like that. I'm going to make another pile of pigment here and get a bit more green. A little bit more blue. I'm going to add a touch of red to this one. That's a nice green. I'm going to paint the next circle. This is a lovely thing to do as a wall map because it's no pressure. Everybody can paint a circle. It's just about getting your brush wet and well saturated. And getting used to feeling the pet, feeling the bush, feeling the paper, as well as getting your color pellet ready for your main painting. I just need to top up my colors a little bit. This is my sap green. Need a little bit more lemon yellow. I've included white in my palette now with wood color painting, if you want white, you get that by leaving the page blank, not covering the page with paint. The white tube is there so that you can adjust the tint of your colors. If I wanted a light pink, I'll use my white and my pink, and I'll create the light pink I want. That's what the white pigment is for. I'm going to add one more pigment, which is this indigo. Indigo is a gorgeous blue which gives you lovely deep greens. I really should have this pile of paint there, and that there, and that one there in a straight line. But it doesn't matter, things are not perfect. The important thing is just getting on with it and having got the painting not adhering to strict perfection. This is a nice deep green, I'm going to use it for this one. I'm just getting used to the feel of the brush on the paper, feeling how to do that curve and letting it sit in among the paint. I'm going to do some here. I'm just going to come back to this green here. I'm going to drop in a little bit more over here and a little bit more here. Because you can already see something nice happening here where the two paints have touched. And that's what we are after. We want to be quite quick because we want to get these paints flowing into each other. That's beautiful, that's what we're after. I'm going to mix up a gray green. I'm taking a bit of white and a bit of blue. That's nice. I'm going to take a bit of indigo. I'm just trying to mix up different shades of blues and greens that I know I'm going to want to use in my main painting. I want to get one that's slightly bluer. I'm going for my ultramarine blue and I'm going to take a bit of green. I'm going to put in a touch of pink just to alter the color a bit, and it starts moving towards a gray green, which is what I want I. Come in here, This one has a lot of water and less pigment. That's fine. It's good to have a range on your page. Some will be denser and some will be less dense, and that is beautiful. As you do these circles, think about how much weight you're putting on your brush. I'm not holding it with my brush stem upright and only using the tip. I'm actually holding it at an angle and I'm putting quite a lot of weight on the brush so that I'm getting the most of the bristles on the paper, while this one is still nice and wet, I'm going to come into this one because I want some lovely merging of colors. This is a very soothing exercise. It's just a stress free way to warm up. Don't overthink. It doesn't matter if it's not perfectly aligned on your page or if your circles are a bit wonky. It really doesn't matter. It's just warming up your brush and your paper and getting yourself into the zone. If you can get some beautiful blends happening while the paint is still wet, then that's what we are after experiment with different thicknesses of paint on your brush As you do this, this is a beautiful gray green, and if we had that in our painting, that will look stunning. Let's go for something a bit darker here. I'm going to pop a bit more red in with my blue. That's giving me a beautiful purple, which we want to emphasize for contrast lovely. Then I think for here I want it to be a bit more vibrant. I'm going to come back to my yellow and a bit of green. Let's see what happens. Ward color for well being is about letting go of perfection. The perfectionist in me wanted to start again and draw them exactly in the middle of the page, but I resisted that urge. That is not the point of this exercise. Just letting it even start from imperfection frees you up to play a little bit more and explore and discover. The main thing is just having a go. This warm up should take about five to 10 minutes, and by the time you've done it, you'll have some circles on your page. But more importantly, your brush will be beautifully wet. Your palette will have some colors ready to go. And hopefully you'll be relaxed and ready for the next stage. Pause the video and go and do your circle warm up now. And then in the next video, we will start on painting our cactus flower. See you there. 7. Cactus: I'm going to paint this beautiful cactus flower. I'm going to start by mixing up some of these beautiful light greens. And I want to have my greens edging towards blue rather than green. I'm taking some white and I'm going to take some of this cerulean blue hue. And I'm just mixing up a lovely gentle green that can be one of the highlights in my painting. I'm pressing down on my pet, really getting the paint to be absorbed by the bristles. I'm going to start about here and I'm just going to make some vertical strokes and let the paint sit beautifully on the paper. I can really feel that I've started too high on the page. If this happens to you, all you do is take a lot of water very quickly, wet it all down, and dab it with a toilet roll. I could have edited this out and started again, but this is real life. This is what happens when you paint. You start too high or you do something and then you realize, oh, that was a mistake. So as you can see, you can completely erase. So long as you're quick, let me start that again. I want to have my flower here, the body of the plant here. And then the pink flowers will be there. And there. I need to start about there. And then I will do something at the bottom. Some kind of jar, inspired by some of these images. Okay, round about here. Going to make my first mark. That's it, that's better. The yellow in this cotton range is very strong. When I'm adding yellow, I'm consciously adding just a small amount. As you can see, I'm putting my marks down, I'm just leaving them alone. I'm not fiddling with them because I want the pigment to pull very beautifully on the page. The more I fiddle with it, with my brush, the less that will happen. I'm going to come in here, then this side going to have a thin line there. Thinh line here. That great, so far, so good. I want a little bit more in here there now. I'm going to let that dry just a little while it dries. I'm going to do these white bits. Now, white on a white page is tricky. I'm going to cheat and use a very dilute blue gray. And I'm just going to lightly put in some suggestions of whatever those white things are. Just like that. It doesn't need a perfect. Now watch what's happening here. I'm going to mix up some of my darker greens. I've got a few already on my pet, from my war map. I'm going to come in with some long, smooth strokes, picking up the really bits that are in there. Like this, I'm letting my brush be one movement on my page and coming down beautiful. It's quite transparent still. I'd like a little bit more pigment in there. I'm going to take a bit of yellow, bit of green, a bit of blue. Mix it all up. Take a deep breath. Don't forget to take deep breaths. While you're painting, it's very easy to hold your breath. That's not what you want. You want to be relaxed, deep breath in, and exhale. Be conscious of also relaxing your shoulders right from your neck down because that helps with more relaxed marks on the page. I'm just coming in with my dark pigment. Something like I'm letting it touch the light green in some places, In other places I'm fully leaving a white space where the white of the page is showing with wood color. Using the white of the page is really important because that's what gives your wood color its vibrancy and energy. It's going to drop a bit more pigment in there, a little bit in here, a little bit around there. Just adjust my green to add in a few different blue tones. Make it a bit more interesting, lovely at this stage. Less is more. I don't want to overdo it, I just want to get some nice washes going. And then I want to wait and see what happens on the paper. Okay, that's looking very nice. I'm going to start working on the pink flowers for this, I'm actually going to swap over to another pellet where I've got more space. I'm taking some of the pink I need to get my brush nice and wet with that, add a bit more pigment. Might just do it like this. Perhaps if I move these out the way it like that, you don't need two pellets. One pellet will be fine. I'm just saving time by using two pellets. Now for the flowers, I'm just going to drop in beautiful pink lines starting from the bottom and working up. I'm varying how much pressure I put through my brush. Strokes are thin, some are thicker, this pink is beautiful. I love it like that. Beautiful. Then for this flower on the side, I'm just going to do the same thing. You might notice that I'm using my brush at quite an angle. I'm not holding it up right, I'm allowing the length of the bristles to be touching the paper. Get a bit more. I'm trying to create a variation of intensity of pigment. As I put this down, I want to leave some white perfect. I'm going to let that dry a little bit. While it's drying, I'm coming back to my green cactus. I'm just going to have a little look at how it's doing. I would like the light light green to be a stronger. I'm going to come back to that and just mix up a little more of a beautiful green. I'm just going to come in with this slightly more intense or in some places I don't want to overdo it. Just want to drop it in a bit like that. Lovely. Okay, there we go. I'm going to stop because I definitely don't want to do too much. I think what this now needs is for some of the darks to be darkened a little bit. I'm going to go back to my dark. I'm going to mix up something quite intense that I'm just going to drop in and try and get a broader range of contrast into my picture. You can see some delicious things starting to happen where I've dropped in a more intense pigment over here that was maybe too match that brush stroke. I felt it as I did it. Never mind, it's done. Just drop in some bits and pieces. If you make a mistake like I just did, you can do what is called lifting you clean your brush and dry it. Make a stroke where you want to take out some of the pigment. As you can see, it's lifted out some of that excess. I'm going to just do another one over here. Okay. Now I'm going to go back to the pink flowers and I'm going to drop in some darker color. To add contrast, I want to mix up some purply red. That's nice. I want it to be a, I want the same thing, but a little bit more maroon. I'm using my red and my ultramarine blue. There we go. There's a little bit too much water in this pile, so I'm going to come to a new pile and do it again with less water. This time that's better. A bit more red beautiful. Now I can feel that it's more of the consistency that I need before this dries completely. I'm just dropping in some of these darks to add interest that this is almost dry at the bottom. So we need to be quite quick. I want to join it on. It looks like they belong together. Beautiful. Isn't that lovely the way it just flows and does its own thing on the page? It's so therapeutic. I'm just cleaning off my brush and I'm going back to the first bluey purple I made. If I want that one, I think I might want more of a red mix up. A pink and a bit of red. Yes, and I'm just trying to get some variation of color into my painting because it adds interest. Lovely. I'm not trying to slavishly reproduce the inspiration. I'm trying to create an essence of it at some kind of representation of it. I'm going to just dilute what I've got on my brush a bit and do one more thing over here like that. Now to bring together with this, I'm going to actually drop in some of these colors into the bottom in a very subtle way like that. It just makes things hang together a little bit more. Okay. For the blues. I'm just going to emphasize them a little bit more lovely. There we go. I think that's enough for now. Pause the video now and go ahead and paint your cactus. Don't get too worried about it, just get stuck in and enjoy the process. In the next video, we're going to brainstorm some ideas for what we want for our vase or jar or teapot underneath the cactus. I'll see you there. 8. Vases Brainstorm: Before I go on to paint the jar or vase that the cactus is going to sit in, I'm going to do a little brainstorm about what possible shapes and marks I might make. While I do that, I'm working on a sheet of ordinary printer paper, because this is just about generating ideas. I'm looking at this sheet and I've got a range of different shapes, different textures. I just want to play around with ideas for how I might paint the jar. I've got an example here of painting I did earlier where I've just suggested the jar using bold wood color stripes. I've allowed the paper to show through to create the rest of the jug. That's the thing I want to do again. I'm just going to take this plum. I'm think through a few ideas for what I might do. Looking at this one here, I could do simple stripes coming up like this. I don't want this jar to take very long. I'm fully going to go for something quite quirky and different. This one here has a really nice shape. I don't think there'll be enough space on my painting to have a whole teapot, unless I make it very squish. This one could work because it's lower. I'm going to look at this teapot really enjoying this plum color. I think it will be nice to bring in some of the pinks and purples that are the flower, bring that into the jar at the bottom. I think that will balance the picture nicely. If I was to do this teapot here, the spout could be just a couple of marks like this. The base could be a broad thing like that, then the next, but could be just outlined. There's no right or wrong with this, it's just about having a play and seeing what ideas come to mind. I could have dots in the top like that, That could be quite fun. Unfortunately, the handle wouldn't show, but I could take this handle and do something like that. Now the option is this, which is quite interesting. You could either do it as broad brush marks like this, which might be quite tricky. I think that will be quite tricky to carry off unless you add some definition. If I do that and allow the colors to blend on the page, that could work quite nicely. Maybe put a few little bits of color here and there. Or maybe wait till it's dry before I do that. What else is there? There's this, that's just a plain shape, a bit like this. But it's got these diamonds. I could either just paint diamond shapes like this, or I could have solid diamond shapes or both. Then I could also vary the color as it comes down. To make it more interesting, I quite like that idea. Just something simple doesn't want to take too long. What else could I do? I could take a teapot shape. I do like a teapot shape, but just do it in stripes like I did before. Maybe vertical stripes might be too much of a push for the imagination. Let's see. Yeah, I think that could work actually. It would need something underneath here, I think to show that it's a teapot and probably some thing at the top that that's pretty abstract and maybe a little spout. Is there anything else I can think of? I don't think I want to do this one because it's got a bulbous shape and the flower we've done, the cactus, is also bulbous. I think a contrast of shape would be quite good. Hopefully, that has given you an idea of how to do a visual brainstorm. Go ahead and have a go at that. Now you can put together any of your own ideas, draw from my pints board and just have fun with it. In the next video, we will go ahead and paint the vase onto our actual painting. See you there. 9. Vase: I've got my brainstorm images here and I'm having a look, just thinking about which of these I want to use. I quite like the spout of this one and I like the handle and I like the shape of it, but I also really like these diamonds. I think I'm going to use a combination of both. I'm going to start with the body of the teapot. I'm going to do that in the purple plum color, or maybe actually the pink will be better. Let me get some of the pink. Everything has dried a little bit, so I'm just going to wet it. That's a nice pink. I do like the spout in the plum color. Let me get my plum purple. Ready for which I needed pink and a bit of red and blue, Ultramarine blue. Isn't that beautiful? What a beautiful color? I'm going to use the top from here to define the area. Would like that. It's going to be wonky. That's fine. That's what we're going for now. I'm looking at this spout and I'm just going to one line like that and leave it. Take a bit more paint. Another line. The gap in the middle and that lovely. I'm going to have the body of it coming down and up and round. That's beautifully. One key, I love it. And then the handle was this handle just coming off and round, isn't that beautiful? The way the paint has been pulled along. I'm going to put in a few of these diamond shapes. I'm going to start with my pink and just have a nice little lay like this. I'm just putting in some of the solid diamonds. I'm going to gradually move the color around towards pink as we go along. Just like that. The spout, I might just indicate a tiny little spout just to finish it off. There we go. Job done. Go ahead and do your own vase. Now remember, there's no right or wrong. You can do whatever you want. And then in the next video, we'll do the last stage, which is the really fun, relaxing part of just adding a flat colorful background. See you there. 10. Background: I hope you've had loads of fun so far, painting your cactus flower and some quirky bars or jar. I'm now going to do the final stage which is painting a beautiful flat background. For this, I'm going to use Gage Gouache is a paint that is halfway between water color and acrylic. And it's useful because you can get beautiful, flat areas of color and it's opaque. So it creates a lovely contrast to the transparent and washy qualities of water color. The two types of paint play beautifully together. This is a acrylic titanium white that I got from Jackson's art. Not expensive at all. You can use any white gouache and this is rose pink from drown gouache. And I'm just going to squeeze a little bit out. Then for the brush, I'm changing over to a synthetic flat brush size six. This is a very cheap brush. I'm just mixing up a lovely pink. I want it to be quite a punchy pink and I know I'm going to need quite a lot of it. My aim here is to get the right intensity of color. I'm going to add a little bit of water with gouache. The consistency is quite important. You don't want it to be too runny, but you also don't want it to be too dry after a toothpaste consistency. You'll feel it when it's right. This is now a little bit too runny. I think I want the pink a little bit more punchy. That's better then. I'm just going to come in, okay, when I see it on the paper, it's a lot darker than it looked on the palette. I'm going to come back in with my white. I'm going to make a new pile here and then take a bit of that existing color and just try and get a tint test. Yes. Can you see the difference? That's much lighter. It's going to need a little bit more of that. There are two types of gage. There's acrylic gage, which doesn't reactivate with water. So if you use acrylic gouache and you leave it on your palate, it will dry hard and you won't be able to reactivate it. But traditional guage, you can reactivate with water. And for that reason, I prefer working with traditional guage. I can't stand it when I waste paint. That's one of the things I love about watercolor, is that you can leave it on your palette and next time you come back, you just wet it, spray it down, and keep going, and you never waste any paint. This part of the process is sort of like your reward for all the hard work you've put in. This is like the breathing part of yoga, The chavin, where you just relax into it and enjoy the feel of the brush on the page and the use of color. I'm leaving a white edge around my teapot vase because I want that little energy, little spark of energy that comes from leaving the paper showing. Just in case I can't mix the exact color. Again, I'm just painting out a few areas of the painting. This is where you can just put some music on or listen to a podcast and just relax into it. This is the well being part of Ward color. It's allowing yourself time away from all the pressures of your life and it's time when you don't have to worry about anything else. Then when you've done your painting, whether it's 20 minutes or half an hour, you can go back into your real life feeling really refreshed as if you've had little holiday. You can paint your background any color. It doesn't have to be pink. A good tip though, is to try to pick out one of the colors that is in your painting and work with that so that the whole thing sits together harmoniously. When you work with pink, just be aware that you can get warm pinks and cold pinks. This pink is a little colder than I was intending, but it's not too cold. Pink is just one of those colors that has a range of temperature. I want to try and keep my gage nice and flat, so I'm getting rid of any brush marks by just smoothing them out. One thing I've found with gouache is that it usually dries darker on the page. It looks when it's wet, that's a useful thing to know. One of the lovely things about gouache is that you can cover up mistakes by painting over it. And in that way, Ga is more similar to acrylic than water color. There we go. It's much better to use a spray bottle to wet your paints than it is to take water from your jar to wet them. It's just a good discipline to get into. The reason is you can control the amount of water more easily if you spray it on. And you then are getting pure water without any color. Whereas if you take it from your paint jar, you might have dirty water on there. There we go. I think we're done. So I hope you enjoyed watching that. It's a very soothing process and I hope you'll enjoy doing it yourself now. In the next video, there's just one more tiny step which is adding finishing touches. They are really small things, but they make a huge difference. So I'll see you there. 11. Finishing Touches: There's one more thing to do that is to add in little dots of white on our green cactus plant to show these little highlights that are on our plant. For that, I'm going to take my round brush. It's nice and firm and it comes to a sharp point. And I'm just going to use my acrylic white, not my water color white. First I'm going to check where they sit and they sit exactly on the ridge of each thing that comes down. I'm just going to drop in some white dots. You can see on this one the effect that the white dots make, they really lift the painting and add a sparkle. That's what we are after. I'm taking quite a lot of paint. I'm dropping little dots down the side of dark ridge. Nothing complicated. Just tiny dots of white paint. We don't need to do every single one. In fact, we don't want to do every single one. It's just to give the idea that these things are on our painting. I'm trying not to pick up the pink. I don't want my dots to be too evenly spaced, I want them to be a bit random. You can also do this with white ink, but I'm just using my acrylic gouache. The randomness is really nice here. It's just little sparks of energy that we're adding. The paint is mixed beautifully over here. One of the lovely things about watercolor is that once it's dried, it looks totally different to how it looked when it was wet. You should never judge your watercolor painting until it's dried because you're going to come back and find lots of surprises that you weren't expecting. I might add a little highlights to this just to finish it off. Just add a tiny drop or two here. Not much. The photograph has these straight bits coming off each white dart. But I'm just going to ignore that because I think it will be too much if I do that. There we have our finished painting. I hope you enjoyed watching it and more importantly, I hope you enjoyed doing it yourself. Those finishing touches, it's tiny though they are really do make all the difference. So don't underestimate the power of white. In the next video, we will wrap up everything we've learned and celebrate how far we've come. See you there. 12. Conclusion: So that's it, I hope you have enjoyed the Klaus. We've come a long way from buying our first set of water color paints, right through to painting a cactus painting, brainstorming vases that we put a lot of different creative techniques and thinking into it. So take a moment to congratulate yourself for going on this journey. It takes courage to make. If you've had a go and got this far, you really should congratulate yourself. Feel proud of what you've done. We looked at what watercolor paints to buy and the differences between pans and tubes. I shared five common mistakes that beginner wood colorists make. So I hope you'll be able to keep those in mind as you do your own work. We did a quick and fun wet and wet war map, which got us used to using the paints. It also mixed the colors on the palette and got our paint brush ready. And then we dived in and did a beautiful cactus painting. If you enjoyed it, don't stop here. Paint another one. Choose another cactus, choose another flower. Do some vases. You've got the method now. Just have another go. Always remember to be gentle on yourself. Water color is one of the most difficult painting mediums and there is quite a lot of technique involved. If you enjoyed this class and you'd like more about it, I've got a class called Principles of Water Color, which takes you through all the different watercolor techniques and explains more about watercolor in a pretty weird way. Please share your project. I would love to see what you've made. If you have any questions, you can use the discussion section in Skillshare to ask questions. And I'll do my best to answer them. But I really would love to see any aspect of your project, whether it's the brainstorm or a section of your painting, whole painting or everything you've done, just upload it into the class project gallery so that we can all see and encourage each other. If you enjoy the class, I'd be really grateful if you could leave review on skill share if you want to connect with me on Instagram. I am at Katherine Jennifer Designs, on Youtube. I am at Katherine Jennifer Designs and my website is Katherine Jennifer.com There's some links on there to art materials if you are based in the UK. The last thing is just to keep in mind that this is water, colorful, well being. It's about time for yourself, It's about nurturing yourself. So enjoy the process. Be gentle on yourself, be kind, and until next time. Thanks for watching.