Watercolor Workout; Basics and Beyond

1. Introduction: Introducing watercolor workout basics and beyond the ultimate course to elevate your watercolor paintings to new heights. Whether you're a beginner looking to master the fundamentals, or someone with a bit of experience seeking to level up your skills. This course is designed to guide you step by step toward creating vibrant and captivating watercolor art. In this course, I've carefully crafted three main sections to ensure a comprehensive and bridging learning experience. In the first section, you'll delve into the basics. Understanding the transparent qualities of watercolor, mastering layering techniques, and learning how to use mixtures effectively to bring depth and richness to your art. You'll also gain valuable insight into the inherent value of hues and complete an assignment that will reveal how well you see their values. Moving on to section two, you'll explore the fascinating world of light on form. Discovering how to paint three dimensional objects on a two dimensional surface. Starting with the impact of values on basic objects, you'll gradually advance to more complex subjects, honing your skills every step of the way, But that's not all. The final section is where the real magic happens. Get ready for a series of exciting projects that will challenge and inspire you from simple beginnings to more complex paintings. These projects will push you to use specific watercolor techniques to achieve stunning effects, ultimately helping you paint stronger, more expressive artwork. When you enroll in this class, you get access to hours of self guided instruction videos, access to all of the demonstration examples, and answers to any questions you may have along the way. Hi, my name is Robert Joyner. I've been painting full time for over 15 years. I absolutely love watercolor, but more importantly, I love sharing that passion with you. I've been very fortunate along my artistic journey to work with popular brands such as Carnival Cruz, the Kentucky Derby, National Pastime Museum, CBS sitcoms, and a whole lot more. So what are you waiting for? Sign up now and start flexing your watercolor muscles. Let's embark on this artistic journey together and unlock the full potential of your watercolor artistry. See you on the inside. 2. Getting Started: Hey there. Welcome to the course again. I'm Robert Joyner. I want to thank you for being here and taking an interest in what I love to do for a living, and that is paint and of course teach you guys everything I've learned along the way. Now, before we get into materials in the first series of lessons, I just want to let you know that the first module is for beginners. I'm going to cover some of the watercolor characteristics, some of the basic skills that we will be using throughout this course. For those of you that are brand new, don't be intimidated. Just simply watch the videos, take them in, and then do these demos on your own. Each lesson really is a project. I encourage you to watch it and then break out your paint paper and brushes. And then do the same thing I do and then post your project. Get that thing going as soon as possible. That way you're up to speed. And as we move to more intermediate and advanced ideas, you're not left behind. You don't feel like you're in the dark. So again, a workout to me is about building those core foundational principles and skills. But also it's about learning new things, taking on ideas, styles, subjects, et cetera, that we've never tried before. So I hope in this class I can present those to you. I don't know any of your backgrounds or what you have done with watercolor painting, but I am just simply going to really do a lot of research and take on subjects and ideas that maybe perhaps, and hopefully you haven't tried. I know some of the styles and subjects I'm doing this course are brand new to me. So not only are you getting a workout, but I'm getting one as well. Thank you for making me learn and get outside my comfort zone once in a while too. Hopefully, you know, this is a 30 day course. I'm going to release lessons Monday through Friday. I take the weekends off, That's family time, but you can bank on two to three lessons every day until the end of February. Now, if we are a few weeks into the course and you're curious, if you can get started, of course, you can. You can join this class and start learning at your own convenience. So I'm not expecting you to be up to speed with everything. All the lessons are basically there for you to take in and to absorb. And they will always be here on skill share for you to go back and watch. So long as you're a member again, I look forward to sharing these ideas with you. I can't wait to get started. And let's do that with materials, see there. 3. Materials: Welcome to materials. Before we dive into all of the fun, I just wanted to cover the supplies I will be using. If you do not have all of these brushes or paints, no worries. If you have questions, just leave a comment in the discussions. And I will try to respond to you as soon as possible. So I will cover recommended paint, my favorite brushes, paper quality drawing materials, and then my basic paint set up, which is how I'm painting in the studio. For brushes, I have a pointed round, this is a golden natural by a silver, A number ten. I will have a mop brush of Princeton, Neptune number eight. I will also be using a sword brush. This is a three eighths Princeton Neptune sword. I also have a needle brush. Now you don't have to have a needle brush. If you only have a sword brush or something that can put down some thin lines in detail, that should be just fine. Again, those are my brushes. Let's dive into the next fun thing. And that is paint I use Hole bine. I've always used the brand, I've always had good results with it. Here is another tube of cobalt blue, but I do recommend artists gray paint that is a John Pyke palette. On there I have neutral tint, cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, burnt sienna, new gamboge, Cad, yellow, lemon, alizarin, crimson, pyrol red, and then cadmium orange. So those are the colors I will be using in this course. A couple of water reservoirs is recommended near my reservoirs. I have a couple of towels rolled up that will help me dry off my brush and remove excess water. Some masking tape will help for paper. I recommend artist grade paper. This is 140 pound cold press. It is a Blick premium brand, But good paper is going to have a huge impact on your artwork. Of course, this is a larger sheet which I will cut down to smaller sizes later on when I get into some of my demos. So you can fold it in half and then fold those in half and then quarters. There's an example of one of my demos. You can see I use that paper and just folded it in half. Also, I recommend having some drawing paper handy. I use 24 x 18 drawing paper, but print paper, any sort of paper you had, the drawing is fine. I recommend having a couple of 4b2b graphite pencils. Either one will do. Maybe I needed eraser. I have a piece of foam core there that I use for my artwork. I will just put a piece of tape on the back corners and then adhere that to the foam core. Underneath the foam core, I have a towel. You can use a block or whatever you have handy so you can see I will just roll this up several times. I will put my foam core, which is in my watercolor backboard, then put that at the top of the board, and that's going to give me a downhill run for all of my washes. Again, I do recommend having that board elevated. Lastly is some paper towels because, you know, painting is messy and they're pretty good to have around now. As far as my set up, I am right handed, so I keep my palette On the right hand side, I have my water reservoirs, most of the time sitting on some paper towel or napkins. And then I have another series of towels there. Again, this is two of them. I will take that and then roll them up, and then once I have that, I will put it right there. The water reservoirs that way, whenever I need to remove excess water from my brush paint, whatever, it's pretty handy to have it there versus trying to figure out where I put it last time I used it. That's pretty much my set up. I will go ahead and put my foam core board down with my towel underneath it and then a little demo there. Just so you can see my set up, whenever I'm painting, I will have this set up for all of my demos and that way you know what to expect. Again, this video cover, my preferred watercolor supplies. Whether or not you use any of these is totally up to you. But just an FYI thing, I thought it would be good to let you know what I'm using for my watercolor painting. Then lastly, I showed you my set up and how I like to paint watercolors. 4. Transparency and Layers: This lesson I will talk about transparency, a common and very important watercolor characteristic. I will do a transparency demo. I will discuss mixtures, avoid too many passes and make sure it's cool. So I will start this one using my number ten golden natural pointed round brush by silver. And I will add a bunch of water to my well on the top left hand side of my palette. So you can see here, I'm dipping in some fresh, clean water. I need plenty of paint to do this demo. I will be using burnt sienna. Feel free to use any hue of your choice. What I am mixing up is a T mixture. A T mixture has a lot more water than pigment. So whenever you mix yours up, just make sure you have plenty of water and then use just a little bit of hue to mix. Now the paper is 140 pound, cold pressed paper. It is cut down to about 11 by 15. I am putting in a kidney shape. As I paint the kidney shape, I want to be sure I don't do too many passes into the paint I've already put down. If you're unsure what I'm talking about, the goal here is to put the paint down and leave it alone. The more you fudge with it, the more chances are that you're going to create some watermark or you'll end up with an uneven wash. What I just did right there was bad. I went back into it too many times and I actually remove too much pigment and you're better off just to leave it alone. If you go in and try to fix it even more, then chances are you will disturb the paint which is already starting to stay in the paper, and you will end up with a very uneven wash. So again, try to put the paint down with as few strokes as possible and avoid going back into it too much. Now I've put a hair dryer to work and I've dried the paper. Very, very important if you use a hair dryer to allow it to cool before you paint onto the surface. And that's because the paper will actually be warm, so it's going to retain some of that heat. And that's going to cause whatever layer you're painting to dry quicker and sometimes even create some unwanted marks. Now you can see I'm only using the same T mixture I mixed up in the beginning. I'm not adding any more pigment to these layers. So I painted the first shape. I used the hair dryer to dry it and I let it cool. I came back over it using the same T mixture, and I painted another one. Again, very, very few passes. It's so easy to even take your brush and rub into the paint, Dry paint a little bit too hard, and what you're going to do is disturb the paint underneath so you will actually reactivate it. The goal here is to use just the right amount of pressure and don't rub into the paper too much. And again, avoid too many passes. Even burning your brush back and forth over. The wash will again cause some unnecessary results that you may not want in your artwork. You'll see here as I add another layer, Again, everything underneath is dry. I'm using light pressure, just enough to get the pigment on the surface. And then once I put it down, I leave it alone. Again, I'll take a hair dryer to it dry it. I will let it cool, and then here we are. Everything is 100% dry once again. And now I will paint my final layer again using the same technique and the same paint, Very little pressure into the surface again. Don't fudge with it too much so that you end up with a nice even series of washes. Note that I was able to do about five series of washes. Perhaps you can even do six. The key here is to end up with even washes for each layer, and then to be able to see that transparent quality. So one layer stacking on top of the other. In this lesson, I introduced you to transparency, a common watercolor characteristic. I did a transparency demo using a mixture. Again, avoid too many passes for best results, Put it down and leave it alone. Again, if you use a hair dryer, make sure the paper has cooled before you add the next layer. See you in the next one. 5. Transparency with Multiple Hues: Welcome to a three color transparency demo, very similar to the previous demo, but this time we will use three colors. We will again use that mixture avoiding too many passes. And then note how we will make the secondary hues by layering one color over another. So let's get started for this one. I will use my golden natural silver number ten pointed round. And I will use a little bit of water on the palette. So we will use the same sort of mixture as we did in the previous demo. So be sure you have a lot more water than pigment. The hue is cadmium yellow, lemon. I opted to use the lightest yellow on my palette. The key, again, is to put the hue down and don't make too many passes, cover the paper and then let it dry. I will be using a hair dryer off camera to dry it. And once it's dry, which it is now, I let it cool. Now without adding any more pigment to the mixture, still the same T mixture, I will add a second circle. I will leave a little bit of the initial circle showing. I will basically have two circles, or one ring around the one I just painted. All right, so you can see it there. I've allowed that to dry 100% and of course, cool down a little bit of pigment on the palette And now a lot of water into this. I am going to be using my a lizard crimson for my red. I will add a second circle beside the yellow. Obviously I'm overlapping them as well. When I overlap them, I'm overlapping both circles of the yellow. Again, put it down, leave it alone. Then I will let that cool and then dry. Before we add the next one here, I'm just adding a little note there to say, hey, avoid too many passes. Because as soon as I start to paint, paint the red over, the yellow is so easy to disturb the yellow underneath. Even though that's dry, you can certainly reactivate it with water and some vigorous brush marks. Again, 100% dry here and cool. Now, I'll add my second mixture of red to the circle. Again a light pressure. We don't want to press too hard into the paper. And then just a few passes there to spread it around. Now you can see a little bit of orange peak through where the red and yellow are starting to overlap. Now I am going to use ultramarine blue, again using the same technique that we've already discussed, light pressure, and avoiding too many passes over the previous layers. Let that dry 100% Now you're starting to see a little bit of violet and also a little bit of green. Where the blue is mixing with the yellow. And of course where the blue is overlapping the red, the Alizarin crimson. You're starting to see some magenta and purple here we will have a look at the finished art is dry and you're going to notice all of the secondary colors. Transparency, again, is a common watercolor characteristic. To achieve them, we have to make sure we apply the paint evenly, avoid too many passes, and of course, rubbing into the surface too much. In this lesson, we again talked about transparency. I did a three color transparency demo using mixtures, avoiding too many passes. And the result is you get those secondary hues where one color is layered on top of or underneath another. 6. Fusion and Gravity: In this lesson, we'll talk about water again. This is a common watercolor characteristics. We will look at water as fusion, and then also how gravity can do the same. We will also do a demo where I will pre wet the paper. So we'll do a test on how water works there as well. And then a conclusion so that we can wrap our head around all this wonderful stuff. Now I will begin this demo with my silver brush there, still using my point it around, mix up a little mixture there, nice and thin, and then do a little swatch. I'm putting this down on dry paper, there's my little swatch of blue. No big deal. But now as I mix up the next one in which will be orange, my orange, if you've forgotten, is over there in the corner. Again, a mixture there. And I'm going to add a swatch below the blue. Now water is fusing these hues together. Water is very much an important component in the water color medium. Remember, my board is at an angle. We're also dealing with gravity. The water will fuse the hues together. Then of course, gravity, things running down hill will also move the pigment and blend them. Here I'm adding another swatch of yellow, again, noticing how the orange will flow into the yellow, and that is happening by water. Then of gravity, I'll go in and now mix a green just using some of the Coba, blue and yellow, lemon. I'll make that a little more green just so this can be nice and pretty when I'm done. And there you go again, water fusing these hues together. Understanding how wet beside wet works when you put down a wet wash and then you put down another one that's a different hue. When they're both wet, they're going to fuse. Unlike what we did before, just above it where we layered colors. But when we layered them, we let them dry and then we added another one. You're getting the fusion, but it's more of a transparency. The colors aren't necessarily merging together as much as they are in the demo I just completed. Now I will do another demo and I'm going to pre wet the paper. I will put a really good amount of water down. Hopefully you can see that it's starting to puddle up. Now I will take a little bit of a lizard and crimson. I will mix up, let's say, a milk mixture. So quite a bit of pigment. Maybe a little more pigment than the T mixture because the paper was pre wet. As soon as I drop the pigment into it, again, the pigment will disperse into the wetness of the paper. Anywhere where there is water like that, you put pigment into it. Then obviously the water becomes a conduit and it's going to move that pigment around here. I will do another swatch. Again, just pre wetting the paper, but not as much as the first time I did this example. I will use the same amount of a lizard and crimson. Now notice because it's less wet, I'll put less water then the first time. It's going to bleed or run into the water, but not as much. All right. Depending on how wet your paper is, will oftentimes have a direct impact on how much the water color of the pigment is blending into the wetness of the paper. In the second example where the paper wasn't as wet, it didn't quite bleed and run as much. Now in this one it's going to be even drier. I use less water than the previous two examples. I'm going to add the same lizard crimson mixture into it. Notice again, because there's not as much wetness into the paper, then it's not going to bleed as much into the water itself. Very important thing to understand about water color. Water is a key component, obviously to the medium, but whenever you're dealing with a wet surface and you add pigment to it, then it's going to run into that water. Anywhere the paper is wet, that's where it's going to go to a certain degree. It just depends on how much paint you put down and how thick the paint is. That's just a really good lesson, I think to understand. I'm going to talk about this a little bit more down the road. But before we wrap this up, I have one more demo to show you here. I'm going to pre wet the paper as I did before, and I'm going to put a good amount down Before I get paint, I'm going to remove the excess water from my brush. Now I'm going to dab directly into the Alizarin crimson and then touch that into the wet area. I just did notice how the paint doesn't disperse as much when you use thicker paint like that into a wet surface, know that the water isn't going to dissolve it. It can't penetrate it as easily as thinned out paint. Just really good stuff to know. And again, a very important characteristic of watercolor painting as a recap here, water can fuse colors together. It can easily blend one color into the other. Gravity is an important thing to note. When your board is at an angle, know that it's going to run in that direction. Also know that if you are working with paper that is wet, the water color is going to disperse into the wetness of the paper. And remember two, that when you're dealing with a wet surface but you are also applying much thicker paint, it's not going to dissolve into the water as much. Understanding how paint responds on a dry surface, and of course how paint responds when painting over a dry layer is important, as is understanding how to deal with a wet surface. Knowing that water is going to continue to dissolve and move your color around, then also the thickness of your paint is going to determine how much that pigment moves. 7. Stroke Speed: Welcome to stroke speed. So we will look at slow strokes, we will look at fast strokes, We will look at the effects or impact that has on the paper texture and then why wet paper cancels all fast strokes. So I will start here with some ultramarine blue and mix up maybe like a milk mixture, so slightly thicker than tea. Once I get my mixture right, I will do a swatch. The first swatch I will do, I will use a slow stroke. I'm going to cross the paper very slow as you can see. Taking my time, notice that it pretty much covers everything. Perhaps towards the edges of the rectangle, you can see a little bit of that paper texture, but in the middle of the triangle, everything is covered. Basically, when you use a very slow stroke, you get a very even wash. You will not get any texture of the paper. Of course, if you're painting on hot press paper, you're not going to have any texture anyway. This exercise wouldn't even apply to you. Now note that fast stroke as I whip the brush across the paper like that. Notice how we're seeing a lot of that texture and it doesn't matter if you go left to right or if you do circles, vertical strokes. If you're using a very fast stroke like that, very aggressive, then it's going to reveal the texture of the paper. So long as you're using cold press or rough press paper, you're getting a lot of that noise from the paper texture when you do that. If you're looking to get that reflection or that vibration of the texture there, then know that your stroke speed has a lot to do with it. Okay. Now what I'm writing there is this doesn't work on a hot press paper. As I mentioned before, hot press is always going to give you a smooth stroke. The last example I give you here is a pre wet paper. Now this could be yellow paint, it could be blue paint, it could be red. Doesn't matter. The deal is we're dealing with a wet surface. Now, watch the fast stroke. It doesn't work, does it? And that's because what we learned before is that water is going to dissolve it. Water is going to penetrate pigment and disperse it. You're not going to get any of the texturing that you had before with the dry paper. If you're again looking for that texture look, you have to do it on a dry surface. Any wet surface like that, especially if it's really wet, is simply going to dissolve it. You're not going to get the results after just some FYI here about stroke speed. Very important stuff to think about because these are all tools and resources we need for good watercolor painting. In this lesson, we looked at stroke speed, slow strokes, fast strokes, and how to get the paper texture to reveal itself. And then we looked at how wet paper will pretty much cancel any sort of texturing that you may want. 8. Water and Hues: In this lesson, we'll talk about water and hues. So we will use water to thinner our hue. As we thin the hues, notice that they will get lighter in value and we are looking for gradual shifts in value. And I will do a eight swatch test. There we go. Let's get started. So I have a small piece of 140 pound, cold pressed paper. I am not skimping on quality. I am using the same paper I showed you in the material section. I am going to mix up a rather thick amount of Alizarin Crimson. You can think of this as like a honey mixture. So it's got a lot more paint and very little water. Now for each swatch, I'm going to dip my brush in the water. And then then the paint again. Clean the brush, dip it in water, and then add a little bit of water to the mixture. That's going to be a little bit thinner. I will do my swatch, clean the brush, dip in water, add the water to the pigment. As I do this, note how each time I create a swatch, it's lighter in value. The color is going to shift a little bit as well, but obviously I'm not mixing any other color with it. It's still going to remain a lizard and crimson. But again, the transparency is starting to show up as I add more water. And then of course we're getting a much lighter value. We have gone from a very rich, deep burgundy red to what will ultimately be a pink. Good to know, these are great resources to have for your watercolor painting. As I get to my last swatch there, I was actually able to do nine. If you do it right, you should be able to get at least eight. But if you can get 910, even 12 swatches without one swatch looking too much like the next one, then you've done a great job with adding the right amount of water and not too much or not too less. Notice as I write here too, the colors on the left hand side are darker and more opaque. And when I say darker, I mean darker in value. You could also think about it darker in tone. As we get to the right, they become more transparent and lighter in value or tone. That was so much fun. I will do it again, but this time I will use ultramarine blue. Again, very little water and a lot of pigment to start. If you start too weak, then you're going to run out of room. Make sure that first Swatch is nice and thick. I wasn't quite thick enough. I added a little more paint and that should do it. That mixture right there should be a little bit sticky like honey. Now, I will add a little bit of water to it and then make sure you clean your brush. So I'm going to get that paint off, dip it in water, and then go into the paint, Do my swatch, clean it, dip it in water, and then back into the paint. Rinse and repeat, really? I didn't mix up enough paint there. I got myself in a little bit of bind. Even though this is a very simple exercise, it's more challenging than you think to come up with eight to ten swatches where you have a gradual shift from one hue to the other. It takes some skill. You have to know how to manage your water, of course. How to manage the pigment as well. Not too bad. I'm going to have to go into these swatches a little bit and paint over it, because then there wasn't quite a good enough shift from one hue to the other. There you go. Just because you've been painting with water color for a while doesn't mean you're going to master this exercise. Here we are again. You can see the swatches, so a little bit clearer now, A little more up close Again, water and hues. Using water to thin hues, more water equals lighter values. And also I didn't note here more transparency. We want to do gradual shifts in value and or hues. And if you can do a eight Swatch test, then congratulations, I think you have passed this part of the course and it's time to move on. 9. Random Painting: Welcome to the lesson. And this one I will do some random painting. This is a great exercise to do. It really just helps you gel with the characteristics of watercolor. The goal here is to do three small studies. I will demonstrate how to scratch into the wet surface, a technique we haven't really looked at yet. We will explore in many ways and just become more familiar with water color and how it responds in certain conditions. This will help you gain experience. As I mentioned, we will look at thin and thick paint and then a conclusion. At the end of this video, I'll start out just by adding three random shapes For my studies, this is a half sheet. It's roughly, I think 11 by 7.5, something like that. I'm working fairly small. I'll start with a little bit of orange. And again, this is random painting. I'm not trying to paint anything literal. I just want to fill these three shapes with some random colors, some random marks. The purpose of this is, especially if you're new to watercolor painting or even if you've been painting water color for a while. And you find yourself just being real rigid and not being able to let the water color do its thing. This is a good way to do it. You just basically fill each shape with random strokes and colors and you let everything mingle in that way. When you get to a painting where you're trying to do something more refined, you're not surprised, you're not in shock by the way watercolor behaves. And you really have to get over the fear of water color. It's really when you accept the medium for what it does good and what it does naturally, that's the point where you start to embrace it and you say, okay, well clearly we can control a little bit of water color Sure. But there's a lot of it, especially this wet into wet technique, which is you're going to do a lot of these washes where they're one color touches, the other things are wet and they're going to mingle. But for the most part, it's not really a medium to be controlled 100% If you wanted to do that, you will get into oils, acrylics, mediums that don't work and have the same characteristic as watercolor. Again, when I'm doing these strokes, I'm just putting strokes down in different directions. I'm leaving a little bit of the sparkle of the paper, if you're not sure what I'm talking about. That's the white of the paper. Cold pressed paper has a texture to it when you run your brush across. If you do it really slow like we did before when we did the speed lesson, the brush speed, if you do a super slow, then yeah, it's going to fill all the cracks. But if you start to put a little bit of speed behind it, maybe you're just aware of the white of the paper. You leave some of that texture in the paper. It gives the painting a little bit of a sparkle. Once that white is gone, you can't get it back. That's another one of the challenges of water color painting, is understanding how to deal with white. Some subjects may have white objects in the composition or design. You have to understand, where's that coming from. There's a Chinese white water color. But for the most part, we don't really use white in this particular medium. But there is white in the paper. There has to be some planning for that in advance. Planning is something we're going to talk about quite a bit once we get past this beginner module. Again, this is just working with very thick paint. Now I've got my sword brush. I basically just dipped right into the yellow. Basically, you can think of this yellow as right out of the tube and just dropped it into some of the red dots that were on the page here. Working with some cobalt blue wet into wet. Just letting those colors mingle but I'm going thicker now. I'm putting thicker paint over thin paint, adding a few marks, but at the same time trying to adhere to what we've talked about, which is, hey, don't try to go into it too much, don't make too many passes. And I'm trying to let the bulk of that wash do its thing. And I'm just going back and fiddling with some of the white area, adding a little thin line, adding some thick paint into it, and letting it dissolve and run a little bit. These exercises are so valuable. I remember when I was learning watercolor, I guess not trying to be weird here, but we're always learning the medium. You never really know it so well that you had the luxury of taking things for granted. It's a challenging medium. It will always be challenging. It will always give you and do things that you didn't expect. How you deal with it is important. If you go in and you try to correct it too much and you try to force it to do something that you just simply have to have, then that's when I think the medium will start to become even more challenging for you. The good watercolor artists know how to deal with mistakes, and they know how to deal with those accidents, I should say. And say okay, well if it wants to do that, then let it do it. And then I'm going to go with it. I'll put a tree there, I'll put a car there, I'll put a person there, and I'll go with it. I'm not going to try to mess with it. That's the key. Now, right here, what you saw me do was scratch into the paint. As long as the paint is still wet, you can scratch into it to reveal the white of the paper. Here, I'm using an Exacto knife, but you can use your fingernail. You can use like a Swiss army knife. Now you can see where I'm scratching now into the top part of that painting that was still very wet. If it's too wet, then what's going to happen is the paint is going to back run into the scratch and that's going to just leave this little scar on the artwork, which is fine. You may like that for texture, or it could be a twig or a branch or something. But you'll find that if you start to experiment with different wetnesses of the paper and paint, you'll find that right point where you can scratch into it. And it'll hold the line a little bit. It'll hold the white of the paper just enough. It's going to backfill a little bit because it's still wet, but it's not going to do it as much as if it were to wet. That's it. This is just all about random mark making, not trying to do anything acute or finished here. This is just getting real familiar with the medium and letting it do its thing. Again, this is familiarity. This will help you when you get to a painting and you won't be startled by what the medium is going to do on its own. Pretty much do it for this demo. Let's have a look at the finished artwork, if you want to call it that, but you can see all the techniques and different things on the page. In this lesson, we talked about just doing some random painting studies, how to scratch into a wet surface. Just explore and become more familiar with the medium. The more you can do this without putting a lot of pressure on yourself to create finished art, especially if you're new, the better off you are. This will give you a lot of experience. We've talked a little bit about that thin and thick paint. Remember thin paint is going to dilute more and water where thick paint isn't going to dissolve as much. Okay, So that's that. I will see you guys in the next series of lessons, which will be some easy landscape demos. 10. Hue Transitions: Welcome to huge transitions. We will learn to mix hues gradually. This is a great way to discover color variations. We're looking for subtle shifts in hue and we'll basically go from one hue to another. I will begin by pre mixing a little bit of ultramarine blue. We can pretty much use maybe a milk like mixture, slightly thicker. Then T I will put a swatch down, maybe that's a little bit too weak, but we're going to go with it for now. Again, we've got a little bit of ultramarine blue to start now. I'm just going to dab a little bit of a lizard and crimson into that mixture. I'll add a little bit more, just a little bit at a time. Notice how even on this third swatch that the hue is starting to shift. I will add that now we're leaning more towards a violet. Now, obviously it's important to mix the two correct hues if you want violet. I talked a lot about this in my easy watercolor paintings course. We've talked a lot about mixing colors and how to get the good violets and things like that. I am using ultramarine blue because it has a red bias, and I'm using a lizard and crimson because it has a blue bias. The two of those mix really well together. My paint is getting a little bit dry. I'll just add a little bit of water to it. As I'm getting into these final swatches, I am basically getting into pure Alizarin crimson. And look at all those lovely variations in between those lovely blue violets. Then we get into those pure violets, and then we get into those magentas. And then finally, a cool red. Again, you can mix any two colors together. And do this, you will be amazed at some of the hues you can come up with. Now I'm doing hues that are more obvious. Like I mix the ultramarine blue and the zarin crimson to get the violets in the middle here I will start with yellow, lemon and then mix in a little bit of coba blue. As you know. The blue plus the yellow will give us a green. Then ultimately we're going to end up with a blue. I will completely mix these spotches until I get to the point where there's just simply no yellow left in the mixtures. Those subtle variations is what we're looking for. Of course. We're looking to control the amount of paint we put in. Paying a little bit closer attention to gradual shifts and I guess more detail oriented in how we approach this idea here. We're getting into some lovely teals, those lovely greenish blues, and now we're finally getting into some more pure blues. As I get into these last two swatches, ran out of room there. I'm going to do one more swatch below. Even this swatch here has a little bit of yellow on it. I could have probably pushed that even more with one more. But anyway, there is the demo. So you can see those changes. But again, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue. Try Umber with bread. I just try a bunch of different colors and see what you can come up with. A very interesting exercise to do, and you will discover a lot about your palette for our recap. This was hue transitions. Mixing hues gradually. This is a great way to discover color variations when you're mixing two hues. Subtle shifts in hues are what we're looking for and we're basically will end up with going from one hue to another. Hope you enjoy the lesson. I'll see you in the next one. 11. Value and Color Test: There are many challenging things about art, but understanding value and color is one of them. Basically, how well do you see color and value When you see color, can you see the actual value of the color? If you were to gray scale it, what value would that be if you can get your values right? Believe me, painting becomes a lot easier. We will talk a lot more about value as we move forward, But in this lesson, we're going to do a test. We will start with a gray scale chart. And we will test one hue at a time, whichever colors you use on your palette. And the goal is we want to match the gray scale values. This will tell you or reveal how well you see the value of a color. Now at the end, I will show you how well I did. We will take my test that I'm going to show you right now. And I will gray scale it. So that will reveal how well I understand value and color. Now if you remember, we did these simple sphere and cube demos. I started with a gray scale, so the black and white version at the top. We're going to use a similar gray scale for this exercise. I will start with a piece of 11 by 15 paper and I will add my gray scale. Now I'm not pre mixing my grays. I am using neutral tint. It has a fairly cool bias to it, so slightly blue. If you do not have a gray, you can just simply pre mix it using the technique I showed you earlier in this course that was mixing your three primaries, blue, red, and yellow. That should give you a decent gray. If you want it to be cooler or warmer, you can just always add blue or red accordingly. Once I get my gray scale in, and I want to be pretty particular about it, I want to make sure that the gray scale gives me at least six values from dark to light on the right hand side. Once I have that down, I'll go ahead and draw some columns. What I will do is take one color at a time. You can see my palette there. I've got 123456 thing eight colors and I'm going to start with my cat orange. Sorry, that is not in the picture here. I wanted to bring it in a little bit closer. You could see the spotches versus the mixing. I'm mixing it the same way we've talked about before. I started with a very weak mixture, so lots of water. Then as I move left towards the darker values, I'm simply just cleaning my brush and adding a little more pigment to the mixture. Again, what I'm trying to do is look at the value scale, the gray and white or I'm the gray scale. I'm trying to mix an orange that would match the gray above it. And we'll see now. I determined that the orange wouldn't get as dark as the swatch on the left. Some hues just simply don't go that dark. That was my thinking. I left out a Swatch for that end. I'm not mixing colors now. I can mix orange or red with another color and get a darker value. What I'm trying to do is just work more with pure color. For now, then that will give me a good idea of where my weak areas are. Typically, people will either see blue or red incorrectly. When we get to the end of this video, we'll see if that holds true for me. You can see on this red swatch that I'm doing now, This is pyro red. I started with the dark value. I went far left as I thought I could go and then work my way to lighter values. You don't always have to start with the light value. You can simply start with the dark and work backwards. But I encourage you to mix it up. Maybe start one at the light value and work dark. And then on the next one, maybe try starting dark and then heading light. That way you don't get into a rut and you're constantly bouncing back and forth between these. This is Alizarin Crimson. Alizarin Crimson is a very dark color. I'm going to see if straight out of the tube there will be as dark as that neutral tint straight out of the tube. I felt like that color I could get a little bit darker than the pyrol red. Now, I'm dealing with a cadmium yellow light, or lemon. And I will start with the second Swatch there. That's going to be about as dark as I think I can go again. Am I correct? I don't know. We'll see. I'll get my light swatch in there. Then maybe lift a little bit of that there. Then let's see. Well, yeah, I just went with the two swatches. Now I've got three more colors, or actually four more colors. This is my new gamboge. For those of you that don't have new gamboge, you can just use yellow ochre. Yellow ochre is very similar, or you can a little bit of red into your yellow. Yellow ochre is just a yellow with a little bit of red in it. Now, I started with the darkest value that I thought I could go. That's pretty much out of the tube with a little bit of water. Now I'm working towards my lighter values. Those are my yellows. And now we can move into a brown, which will be burnt Sienna. Making a few adjustments there. With this one, I will start with my lighter value. You can see that burnt sienna is really yellow with quite a bit of red in it. That's all it is. It's just a warmer yellow, obviously. You can think of it as a brown to starting pale obviously. And now working towards my darker values that's not quite dark enough. You'll see me add a little bit of pigment to that. That's okay. You don't think he quite nailed it. Add a little more pigment or add a little more water. Whatever you have to do to match your values constantly. What I'm doing is I'm looking back up at that gray scale. I'm trying to look at my colors and say, yeah, I think that's at this value, and so on. So it's a very interesting challenge again, I think, to see gray scale and to say, okay, well that's a light value, that's a dark value, that's pretty easy for us to do. But once you start adding color to the mix, then it becomes more challenging. You'll, when you get to your swatches, gray scale, desaturate, It probably find some flaws in your color theory and how well you see the value of color. You may find a pattern where you see darker values better than lighter values or the opposite. You may find that your reds are throwing you off like consistently, too light or too dark on your reds and blues. Maybe your yellows are too dark, you'll see those patterns reveal itself. And then when you get to painting an actual piece of art, this is going to come in handy because value is very important for the artist. Really probably one of the most important things right up there with good drawing skills and just understanding your medium, which is a lot of what we have covered at this point. The characteristics of watercolor painting. Understanding what the medium does well and how to use it to your advantage, and how to control it to some degree, and then of course, when to let it do its own thing. That's the beauty of water color is that you have to balance the two. You have to know that you're going to be able to control it a little bit, but oftentimes it's going to have a mind of its own and you really have to let it do its thing once you start dealing with wet and wet washes and certain conditions as we've talked about so far. All right, finishing up, my cobalt blue, the blue above that was ultramarine. I'll just make an adjustment. There it is. There's my swatches. And now let's look at them side by side. What you're looking at there is the color version I did on the right, the one you just saw me, Don on the left hand side. It's the same exact one, but I took it and I desaturated it. That's going to remove all the color and show me how well I see values. If we start at the top, remember I had orange, red, and then a lizard and crimson. As I look at those top three rows, my reds, I can tell my light values are probably a little bit too dark. The mid tones aren't too bad, and then the dark tones are probably a little bit too light. That's just something I need to work on. When I look at my yellows, I had Cad, yellow, lemon. And then I had my yellow ochre or my new gamboge. I think the light was good. I think Swatch was okay. It looks like Cad yellow lemon is just not going to be able to get dark enough to match that second swatch. But all in all, not too bad on the yellows. My burnt sienna swatches actually look pretty good. I was happy with what I did. Perhaps the first swatch, the lightest value could have been a little bit lighter, but not too shabby. I thought the ultramarine blue turned out really well. I was happy with that. I like the cobalt blue. I think with the cobalt blue, I probably could have pushed that to the darkest value and been okay. I probably could have gotten maybe one more out of that. But anyway, there is your value and color test again, the characteristics of watercolor painting. Starting with the gray scale chart, testing one hue at a time, the goal is to match the gray scale values, and it will reveal how well you see color values. Good luck and have fun. 12. Project Silverware: Now that we've talked about all those wonderful watercolor characteristics, here is a wonderful project we can do. I will use good technique. Hopefully, I will combine slow and fast strokes. I will use thin and thick paint, and I will share a few tips on how to remove unwanted paint. I will start, of course, with my silver pointed around and I will put down a little bit of water and I'm going to pre mix a little bit of gray. I will do that using ultramarine blue and of course the other primary, so I can use a little bit of my gamboge nova and then my pyro red. As you mix your gray, you can shift the overall hue. If it has a biased that's leaning towards a red, you can just add blue. If it's leaning blue, you can just add a little bit of red or perhaps a little bit of yellow. Mixing grays is pretty easy, I think the key here is to have it either a cool gray or a warm gray. If it's just in the middle where it's not warm or cool, sometimes it may come across a little bit muddy. All right, so there you go. I'm adding my basic wash there. Notice when I put it down, I left it alone. Just like in the very first lessons we talked about. We don't want to go over it with too many passes. What I'm doing now is I'm using just water and I'm going to take a stroke all the way down for the handle. Remember water is a conduit. It's going to pull that pigment that I have in the top of the spoon down into the handle. That's a good way to create variation and interest in a wash like this. Now I'm going to remove a little bit of that paint. Just use water and let that drop into the wash. Now notice I just put the brush to the wash, the tip of the spoon, and I left it alone. I pressed it into it, which is going to remove some of the paint. It'll leave some of the water as well that I had. Now, I'm going to drop a little bit of more saturated color into the left bottom hand quadrant of that spoon, and then drop a little bit into the handle. Once that dries, it should give it the illusion of a reflection and a little bit of a shadow as well. Notice what I'm doing on the fork. So I started with a darker wash there for the base of the fork. As I paint the points and the times I'm just using water. Some strokes will start at the base where I added the dark and pull upwards. And other strokes, I'll just start at the tip of the fork or the point and come back down into that dark area of the base. And the water is going to pull it in both directions even though we're dealing with gravity and the water is going to flow downhill. And remember, my border is at an angle. That color is still going to move upwards as well. Maybe not at the same degree as it's moving downwards because of gravity, but it's still going to pull that pigment upwards. Again, that's just using water as a way to spread pigment. That's the characteristic of water color painting. These are the things, the very basic skills, that you need to understand about the medium. Here with a knife, I started with a thin like mixture of hue, then I'm using a slightly darker hue for the handle. And now I'll use a little bit of that darker hue that's still on my brush and just drop that into the blade. And then I'll just give it a little sense of reflection or shadow. But notice how I didn't force it. I put it down and I left it alone. Because I want that watercolor feeling. I wanted to look very transparent. I wanted to look very watery. At the end of this, I don't want to look like a piece of silverware that I copied out of the magazine. I wanted to look like a silverware that was painted with water color and really showcase the beauty of the medium. Now, that stroke I just did for that spoon was very quick. When you do a very quick stroke like that, it's going to leave. Yes. Right. Some of the texture of the paper. I'm showcasing some speed there as well. Now, I'm lifting and removing a little bit of that paint. When you do that, make sure you don't have too much water, but you need enough that's going to dissolve some of that paint. The key here is to get in and get out. Don't try to fudge with it too much. Again, if you do too many passes and you start to try to push it. Too much, farther than it should go, then it's going to start to ruin that fresh watercolor field. Now for this fork, I'm trying it differently. I started with the times, now I'm using a very weak mixture for the base of that fork. I know because we understand the characteristics of watercolor, that the hue that is in the points of the fork are going to run down into the base of that fork. Again, just really trying to showcase the effects of water and how it really impacts your art. How you can use it to move your pigment around. How you can use it to fuse colors and things like that. Even though we're doing a very simple gray scale painting here, it's still fusing the different values of gray. Another light value blade and a nice dark handle. And I dropped a little bit of that darkness into the tip of the blade. That's it. I'll drop a few little dots there of dark and then leave it alone. That's the key. When that dries, that's going to reveal that nice, transparent look and it's not going to look too muddy. Now for that spoon I'm doing there, I use a very quick stroke around the outside edges of the spoon. Also use a very quick stroke for the handle of the spoon. And that's going to reveal texture, right? We've talked about that and now I'm using that in this little study. Again, hopefully you can see that I'm trying to really push the idea of using those basic skills in this study. And it's so important to understand and master these basic skills. Just removing a little bit of paint here and there, and now you can have a close up of the piece. Simple, easy, but again, the goal here was to show you how we can use water, those quick and slow strokes to reveal texture and so on. For our recap, this was the silverware project. Again, the beginner module where we are learning the watercolor characteristics. Hopefully, I was able to demonstrate good technique, a combination of slow and fast strokes using thin and thicker paint, and then tips for removing paint as well. Not mentioned here is water, The impact water has on your artwork and how you can use water to manipulate your washes. All right, another project here in silverware, but this time I will use good technique. We'll again use those slow and fast strokes. We'll use thin and thick paint, but the difference is we're going to blend hues using water and of course, gravity. So instead of working with just a gray or one hue, we're going to work with two. All right, so we'll kind of get that feeling of that silverware that has that little bit of a gold look to it. 13. Project Abstract Squares: All right, this one we can let the hair down and loosen up a little bit. Here, have some fun. We will still be exploiting the same idea, using water and gravity for fusion, using multiple hues. This time instead of just one or two, avoid too many passes. Again, we want that clean, crisp watercolor look. And of course, we're going to have a ton of fun exploring color. The paper is 11 15, starting with my silver watercolor brush, Again, my pointed round. Now I'm going to pre wet some squares. They're not going to be perfect squares, some are tilted, some are big, some are wide, some are skinny, and so on. But again, this is just exploiting and getting familiar with the idea of water as a way to move and spread the pigments around. I'll mix up a little bit of cadmium yellow, lemon, then onward into the first square. That yellow had a little bit of red in it, that's already on the palette. I'll continue to put a little bit of that red down. Notice I'm not painting every single edge of the square. I'm getting close to the edges, but I know the water is going to disperse and pull pigment from where I have put it down. Over time, that water is going to spread the paint for me. All I have to do is just put down enough and get it in the general area and the medium and water will do the rest of it for me. All right. Just using different hues. A little bit of Alizarin crimson, a little pyrole red for that red swatch. Now moving back to yellow, which has a little more red in it than the previous two I put down, you can use any colors you want. Obviously, there's really no formula here. I encourage you to explore colors, mix it up a little bit. This one I'm thinking I'm going to start with the lighter values at the top, and then as I get towards the bottom, I'm going to use more blues and violets and a little bit darker hues. Now notice on the second set of squares here, I'm not pre wetting the paper, I'm just putting the paint down on a dry surface. Again, just mixing it up and just having fun exploring the two different ways. It's good to just push paint around sometimes without a lot of stress on yourself to do something magnificent or really, really tight. I find these projects are great for that because pretty much anything goes so long as you stick within the comfort of putting watercolor paint down. We've talked about those things. I've mentioned it several times, many times. Actually, you get the idea. Now while the paint is still wet, we can drop other hues into it. Now, again, notice I'm just dropping it into it. Every once in a while I'll do a stroke, but you won't see me blend too much. I'll just put it down and then again, let water and gravity do its thing. Now as I'm holding the board, my foam core up in a little more of an angle there, that's going to encourage a downward run of the water. That's just something I'm doing. Move the water down a little bit more into those wet washes. Now I'm using thick yellow paint in that red square. Notice that thick yellow paint isn't going to break up as easy as the thinner washes. Again, we talked about that in the very beginner lessons. And how thicker paint doesn't dissolve as easily as thinner paint. The water can't penetrate that thick paint that well. It can penetrate the edges a little bit, but not the entire thing. At this point, I'm going to start to think about changing hues a little bit. I want the colors to be crisp. Oftentimes, if your palette started to look like mine, it'll just start to get muddy and all the colors will start to run together. And then next thing you know, all your colors look the same because they're all blending with each other. I'm looking at how the water is puddling up in the squares I've already painted. As I paint these squares here, I'm going to touch a few of those places and notice how gravity and water is going to fuse that previous square. The colors are going to basically drip down into. The square below. As I paint these squares, again, I'm just trying to make as few passes as possible. Sometimes I'll go back and correct things. Maybe move one corner like I did there, so it's touching the other one. But I'm trying not to disrupt the washes that are in there. If I do, I'll just drop color into it and try to avoid making too many passes or rubbing into it too much. Because again, I want this to be nice and crisp. When I'm done moving into some magentas here, a lizard and crimson, a touch of ultramarine blue. More red than blue for this. And again, continuing the same theme and letting that water beat up. And then touching a little bit of a new color into it, a new square, and letting that those colors just merge and run together. That's the beauty of water color. And any time you can incorporate this idea in your painting, it's great because it really showcases the beauty of the medium. When it dries, it has that nice, transparent look to it. And it's just you get some really good color combinations, some good transitions from one color to the other. Water and pigment and gravity are doing all the work for you. In order to think, harness the power of watercolor, you have to be able to showcase a little bit of this stuff in your paintings. If not, then you may as well be doing acrylics or oils, right? These are the things that are unique about watercolor painting. And oftentimes artists, especially even I'm guilty of it, I'm not just going to pick them on beginners here and experienced artists, we just fudge with it too much. We don't get the result we're after or we just don't do a good job of planning a painting. Therefore, we had this vision of what we want the painting to look like when we're done. And then along the way, watercolor is going to do its thing because we don't really plant it that well. And really look at our subject and understand where the light values will be, where the darker values will be, And get a good plan for how we're going to start this painting and bring these ideas forward through the process. Then we start to get in trouble, and we're going to touch on that a lot. As we move into the intermediate and advanced sections of this workout. I'm going to go quite a bit into planning. We'll go into some landscapes, maybe some still life, where we have to put more thought into how we're going to layer things. But for now, we're just having fun, enjoying the characteristics of watercolor, Letting this medium shine and do its thing. We're understanding gravity, we're understanding the effects of water. All of those things that I've talked about. All right. All of the washes are still wet. Every square I've painted is still fairly wet. Obviously, the ones I did in the beginning are wetter at this point. It's a good time to drop color into it. Sometimes they call that charging, where you have a wet wash and then you come back with another color and you drop that into it. Now, I can also lift paint. I'm using a clean brush there and just going through some of those and lifting it when I lift it again. You want a clean brush? You just want to put your brush to the surface a little bit of pressure and maybe create a stroke and then get out of there. Don't try to go back into it too many times, okay? Now I'm using gravity to push the water in a different direction. I'll flip the painting upside down, and now I'm going to use some darker hues. Again, lightly charge it or drop it into some of these wet washes. Again, don't try to create a lot of brush strokes here, you're just think about dropping into the pigment as opposed to using your brush and creating too many strokes. If you do that, you're going to lose that organic blending that the water and gravity are creating for you. But I do want to stress that as I charge or drop paint into these wet washes, I'm using very light pressure with the brush. I'm putting it in a few places but trying to agitate all of the washes too much. We don't want to put them in a dryer and blend them all up and tussle them around. You just want to drop in a few places and then let it go. Let it blend and bleed into the wash that was already there. Again, you'll find that if you end up with squares that are too muddy and they just look really flat, then probably chances are you just rubbed it too much and you just did a little try to work it more than it probably should have A little bit of lifting here, a very clean brush, a good one sweep in there and then get out. There you go. Here's my piece. Hopefully you enjoy the project. These are a lot of fun. You can do these on a really large scale and use them for art for your house. And again, you can use different shapes or whatever your heart desires, but. And this one we did some abstract squares, again, using water and gravity for fusion. We're using multiple hues. We want to avoid too many passes as we've stressed quite a bit so far. And then just have fun exploring color. This is a great time, as I mentioned before, just to push paint around without any pressure to do anything exciting. We're going to do much more complex subjects later on, but now is the time to just get familiar and have fun with it. And that way later on when we start to do more advanced projects, you're less intimidated. 14. Project Silverware Variegated: All right, I will just do this below the previous demo. I've got my gray still mixed up. I'm going to start the same idea. I will again try to use as few passes as possible and paint with as few strokes as possible. The tip of my fort now run my handle downwards. A nice fast stroke there. Hopefully when I'm done and maybe it will reveal some of that texture of the paper. Now I'm using new gamboge, a little bit of Cad, yellow, lemon, and some water. I'll just thin that out a little bit. Now I'm just dropping into the paint. I'm not really brushing it on the paper so much as I'm just dropping it. Just enough to let some of that drip down and run into the gray paint there. I started with yellow and then I did a stroke of gray. Now I'll just run a little bit of gray into the yellow. Again, the key here, and I think the theme you're hopefully very aware of now is put it down and leave it alone. We're trying to avoid too many passes. All right, In the end you will have something that's got that crisp look to it. It won't look for, it'll be very transparent. The water and gravity will do its thing, leave you with that unforced free watercolor look that I think hopefully you would want and desire in your watercolor art. All right. Started with a dark spoon there and then a light colored handle. Again, mixing up my golden yellow here. And I'll drop that into the spoon a little bit into the handle, and hopefully not fudge with it too much. I've got that yellow. Now I'll just start with yellow. And just running some paint for the base of the fork and then into the ties and the points, and then down into the handle. And now I'll reverse it and then drop a little bit of gray into that. I'm not putting it everywhere, I'm only dropping the gray in certain places. It's more random. I'm not trying to force it or trying to come up with an exact replica of what silver. I'm not even using a reference image, I'm just doing this out of imagination. I've seen things like this on Pinterest and other places. I thought it would be a great project to use for this demo and these characteristics that we're trying to learn. All right, that's moving along pretty good. We've got five down, maybe one more to go here. I'll start or end with my spoon. I'll paint part of the spoon and then finish with the yellow. Now I'll probably have a little bit of gray and yellow in my brush, so they're starting to mingle again. Trying to do as few passes as possible. You really, at the end, when this dries, it has that watery look that I'm after. Very transparent. Again, I want this to be crisp and clean. The goal here isn't to paint award winning stuff we're going to present in the next art show. It's just really to hone in on those watercolor characteristics and the skills we've been working on so diligently. Let's have a look at the finished art. This is dry and you can see how that water color and those hues blended on their own. We'll have a little stroll down Memory Lane here and look at the first demo. Then we're getting into the second one here. But notice those fast strokes reveal some of the texture of the paper. We have a nice soft look. Hopefully, I was able to use good technique in this project. Showcase some slow and fast strokes using thin and thick paint. And then of course, blending hues using water and gravity. That's it. I hope you enjoyed the projects. I will see you in the next lesson. 15. Project Simple Landscape: Welcome to the landscape demo. This will help you test your basic skill. So all the things we've covered so far is a simple landscape. We will use the characteristics of watercolor to the best of our ability. We're going to keep it loose and keep it transparent. We're going to try to reveal and save some of those white sparkles of the paper. We will use wet and wet, and of course, wet and dry layering. And a conclusion, at the end of this video, the paper is roughly ten by 8 ". I will use two or four B and just draw out my edges. And then begin right in with the sky dry surface so I haven't pre wet the paper at all. Notice when I did that first mark revealed a lot of the white sparkle of the paper because of that stroke speed. The fact that it's 140 pounds coal press press paper is going to do that now. Just using water to dissolve it in other places. Just running a little bit of Cadielo lemon and a little bit of the yoker mixed in with it or the new gamboge. Just let it do its thing. All right, so that's the key, we want to put it down then let it rest here. I'll start to work with the land. I'm leaving a little bit of a gap there where the land will meet the sky, but not much. Some places are bleeding into each other. But I've got a little bit of the white paper there as well here. I'll add a little gradation. I'm adding a little bit of a darker blue to that sky and letting it run. Notice I'm not trying to control the water, control where everything bleeds and that's the key. That's the things that we've talked about many times so far. Here I'm using a hair dryer and I just want to dry it off. As I dry it, how much lighter the painting becomes, it's going to lose about 20% of the value in that first wash. That's what I'm left with. This is 100% dry. Now I'm stacking layers. I'm putting one layer over top of the other. We did that first when we started to learn about transparency. We did the three colors, we did the yellow, the red, and then the blue. We stack those circles on top of each other. That was basically painting wet over dry and then using layer stacking them one over the other as I'm painting. This magenta purple is going over that yellow. That yellow is going to give that purple a glow. Had I put the purple into the yellow when it was already wet, obviously the lines would be much looser because they would be bleeding into the sky. You wouldn't get the same glowing effect. That's again, the beauty of the medium that makes, I think what our color so charming is that lovely glow, that sketchy look. You can really get to this when you're working quick, confidently, and just letting things, letting the medium do its work for you. But you can see in three or 4 minutes time, this painting came together really quick. But really the medium did a lot of the work for me. Here I'm mixing up a little bit thicker paint, adding some thicker hue to the mountain area distance a few places and that's it, just a few dots here and there just to give it some detail and it's just not so flat and boring is all I'm after now. We will have a look at it here. I took this image which is coming up if I can ever finish drawing my little square around the piece. I took that in natural light so you can get a feel for it. But it's simple, but I think it really shows off a lot of what the medium is intended to do. And that's to be transparent, loose, and that had that carefree look about it. In this demo, we did a simple landscape using the characteristics that we've worked on hard and diligently to this point. I was able to keep it loose and transparent. I kept the white sparkle of the paper here and there. We did some wet and dry layer, allowing the painting to dry 100% and then we came and layer over top of that. Then I'll do it. I included a template for this demo. If you want to do something similar, you can feel free to use the template or you can just simply look at my artwork and just draw a few lines. And it should be pretty quick and easy to do. Good luck with this one, and I'll see you guys in the next landscape demo. 16. Project Intermediate Landscape: Welcome to landscape demo two. Again, we are testing your basic skills, your basic knowledge of using the watercolor characteristics. This one we will look at a simple gradated sky wash, a layered foreground, a layered middle ground, a dark vertical, and how to lift pigment. And then a conclusion. At the end, you can see the set up there. The paper is the same size, working fairly small there. I've got my pointed around, that's still my silver pointed around. I'm going to pre wet the paper. When I pre wet it, I'm going to leave a few places of the white of the paper. You can see I've got places in the sky, I've got a little area in the middle ground on the left, a triangle. And a little bit in the foreground as well. Now I'm using some co ball blue, starting a little bit darker at the top of the sky. Now just the water to dilute it, again, the water is going to fuse these colors together. We've got a bunch of different shades, tones of blue. Even though it's just one color, it's going to dry and then have a, a nice random look to it. And it's going to be gradated, meaning it's going to be darker in some areas and lighter in others. I use a little bit of ochre and a touch of the cad, yellow lemon for the foreground. And now I'm tilting the paper in various directions to allow that wash to run. It doesn't run all downhill. You can tip your page sometimes and let the water run the opposite way. Of course, you can tip it to the side as well, that I'll keep the wash from looking too predictable. There you go, look at that simple sky and gravity did everything. I just splashed down some hue I made. I controlled how dark it was at the top. I wanted it a little bit D, I let the medium do the rest of the lifting. For me, this is just a little bit of the magenta and purples I had on my palette. Mixing that with some blues and yellows and just graying that out a little bit. Again, this is 100% dry. Now everything I do is working over the dry first layer, we're getting that transparent quality. So we're getting the glow of the yellow from underneath coming through the layer I just put down. All right, now using a little bit of ultramarine blue, a little bit of a lizard, and crimson, I will mix up a little bit of purple, eggplant purple. A little more blue is probably a little bit too red. I'm going to do a little swatch. I have a piece of scrap paper there just below my art that helps me test the color. Before I put it down, I put a little bit of yellow into that. A little more water, just to thin it out a little bit. Now using the side of my brush, the point of my brush. And it's dragging it along the surface with a little bit of pressure and that's going to reveal some of that white sparkle now. Because a lot of this area I'm working on now, that top left hand side is dry. I'm going to negative space paint like a feeling of some grass maybe coming up and meeting these purple bushes. Negative space painting is a great painting technique. We're going to have a whole section on negative space painting because I think it's really, really important for your art skills. A painting technique that I think you'll like and you can use in many different ways. Now, a little bit of neutral tent, a little bit of burnt sienna. I'm going to borrow some of the purple as well and come up with a nice dark here. I'm looking for a good dark vertical, it's going to be a tree. Just dragging that brush along the surface and there. I just did a quick flick to reveal that the rough texture of the paper. I'm sorry, my hand is in the way, but I'm using the tip of my brush. This is the point to draw out some branches. Just make sure the branches aren't all in one direction. Make sure they're different sizes. Some long, some short, some going out sideways, some going sideways and down, some going more angled upwards, just so you have good variety. There's really no image I'm using here. This is just random painting in terms of a subject. And Playing with the medium and just coming up with some simple demos and ideas you can do fairly easily with your watercolor. That will help you test a lot of the skills. Put those things to work for you in a real painting versus just doing swatches and studies and different things like that. Now using my paper towel, I'm going to lift some of that paint. So you can just press it into the paint and then just lift it. Then that's going to remove some of the wet paint. Now I've got my sword brush, which is more for details and doing a little splattering there. And then adding just a few small stems and twigs to the tree here. Again, using the sword, the tip of it just to indicate some grass. That little bit of texture. Moving down into the foreground, just really connecting the foreground into the middle ground is all that's really doing. Just something to pull your eye up into the painting. My camera is certainly blowing that out in terms of the light. I'm not sure what's going on there, but I'll look into it. But now I want maybe one more small tree back off here just to give it some distance. Having a large trunk there in the foreground, contrasting against a lighter and smaller tree in the background gives that illusion of distance. That's a little trick you can do with painting. We'll talk a little bit about composition, things like that too, in this class. But for the most part it's just, again, a quick easy demo. I'm going to lift a little bit of that there, a little bit too dark. But again, another quick easy landscape demo you can do and test your basic skills. There's a finished piece, nice and dry. Hopefully you can see some of that loose quality, some of those care free strokes, and not trying to control the medium a whole lot, letting the gravity water in the colors do the work for you. Again, a simple graded wash in the sky. A layered foreground stacking, one wet layer over a dry. Same thing for the middle ground. A nice strong vertical. Just to add some interest to the composition, I showed you quickly how to lift pigment, which I've done a few times and so far in this course. So you should be pretty familiar with it. As long as the paint is wet, you can easily do that. And then I'll wrap it up so we got one more easy landscape to go. And I'll see you in that demo next. 17. Project Challenging Landscape: All right, welcome to easy landscape demo number three. Again, testing those basic skills. We'll create another simple landscape using the same characteristics we've talked about, keeping it loose and transparent. Timing is important. Wet and dry layers and all that fun stuff. Same size paper, and nothing has changed. So these are fairly small demos using my silver pointed round, starting with a little bit of coba blue and a little bit of neutral tint mixed in with that, I'll go right into the sky that is dry. I haven't pre wet the paper, I'm working wet into dry paper here. Just quickly dragging that brush along the surface again, trying not to go back into it too much. Letting that color remain as fresh as possible is the key. Like I've mentioned before, you start going into this a lot and it's going to start to flatten out and become real boring looking. We don't want that. We want to keep those colors fresh, keep the strokes fresh, and so on. Again, basically the same colors but just a little bit darker here. Just adding a little feeling of some hill or something in the distance. That's a fairly easy beginning. I will take a paper towel and lift a little bit of that water and pigment that was running towards the hill. I want to keep that separate. I don't mind a little bit of dark in the top part of the sky, but I didn't want to mingle too much with those grayish blue hills I put in. Again, those hills are real soft, feathery, wispy edges because I let that run into the wet of the sky. I did that on purpose because I wanted that to be fairly weak edge quality wise. Now I've got a pale grayish green and letting that mingle and spread across the foreground. Again, it is using my brush in different ways. So running it right to left, flicking it up. Just so I get a variety of brush strokes, Not everything is worked horizontally. Some strokes are horizontal, other strokes are flicked up at an angle and so on. That's going to help give the brush the art a little bit of character to it versus being real stiff and flat. Also put a little bit of burnt sienna into that mixture right at the end. And just splash that across the foreground. Obviously using a hair dryer here to dry it off. Notice that when I'm using the hair dryer, it's nice and smooth across the paper. I'm not trying to wiggle it back and forth too fast. Sometimes that will push the water in the wash in ways that you may not like too much. All right. Again, as you know, everything dry. Notice the white sparkle of the paper. I left a lot of that in there. The horizon, the mountain line didn't exactly meet the foreground and middle ground perfectly. I left some little sparkles and little gaps in there of that white. Here is just a brownish red gray. It's a much darker value than I've used so far. But notice those brush strokes were nice and loose. I didn't try to control that. I wasn't painting individual trees or bushes. I had an idea of what I wanted. I attacked it in a way that I wanted it to be spontaneous and free looking here I'm mixing up a thicker mixture. Burnt sienna, ultra marine neutral tent. Perhaps even a touch of a lizard and crimson in there. I've got my pointed around and I'm going to do that quick flick, the brush stroke speed up and notice that sparkle of the paper on the tree trunks. We've got that texture exposed which is good. Now I'm going to switch to my, my sword brush and do some small branches, but notice like almost calligraphic loose strokes happening there. Just working back and forth, having fun with it. And then there's an alarm that goes off and says, all right, all right, that's enough. Let it go. We don't want to do too much, you just have to have that alarm clock that goes off. That reminds you that you don't want to go too far with it and they're just splashing a little bit of water into the wash. That water, as you know, is going to fuse things. It's going to dissolve and dilute paint. It's going to do some work for, it's going to bring a little bit of variation to that heavy wash. Again, working with some sienna grays here, adding a little more body and hue value to this foreground. Some of those strokes are still wet, so we're getting a little bit of bleeding. I'll just use that same color for the foliage in those trees in the middle ground. Notice how quick I put that in. I wasn't painting individual leaves or trees, I just ran that across and did almost all of them at the same time. That's the key. That's when, you know, you're in that zone for watercolor where you're not trying to control everything, you're just getting the gist of it down. You know, the medium is going to do a lot of work for you. It's going to come back in there and fuse things together and start to make it look a little more interesting. A little bit thicker paint here towards the end. Just a few more little sticks and branches and some nice loose brush work there that should pretty much do it for that part. Now I'll go back into the foreground here. A few verticals maybe poking up here. Maybe some grass or little sticks or something there in that pathway here. My brush is fairly dry, but it has a little bit of pigment on it. But I'm working those quick strokes across the paper just to indicate some foliage on the big tree now, mixing up a yellow green and adding a little bit of a green foliage to that tree as well. Just so we have some brown leaves in the middle ground on the trees on the right. The trees that are closer to us here has a little bit of that green leaf to it. We get some variety in there here. I'm using my exacto knife to scratch into that wet paint, you're familiar with that maybe a few twigs in the middle ground as well. Pretty easy. Again, just relying on the medium to do a lot of the work for me, hopefully, when you look at this piece, it's not about trying to create an award winning landscape that's going to be in the next show. It's about really embracing and harnessing the beauty of watercolor. And letting things mix and mingle, and bleed, and gravity and all those wonderful things. Okay, again, this will be the last landscape in this section. Hopefully you are excited about giving this a shot. I have the template which is included in the resources, so feel free to check it out or you can use my painting as a template as well that I'll do it for this one. I'll see you guys in the next lesson. 18. Intermediate Strategies: All right, well, congratulations on finishing the beginner module. Those are just some of the watercolor techniques and characteristics that we have covered so far, but very important for us to at least get those things on the table. There are a lot more basics we could talk about and perhaps we will as we move forward. But for now, we're going to simply build upon those ideas. We're not going to forget or abandon anything that we have learned and we're going to add to it, and we're going to use those ideas in other subjects. Of course, we're going to talk a lot more about how we can manipulate and strengthen some of those techniques as well. In this next section, the intermediate strategies, we're going to begin with light on form. Basically trying to understand how we can maximize our subjects and make them look more three dimensional. They're going to be very simple objects at first, and then we'll make them a little more complex as we dive a little bit deeper without any further ado. Let's get started with those intermediate strategies and look forward to sharing the stuff with you. Thanks. 19. Value and Form: Getting back to the basics. Here we're going to look at value and form. Capturing light and shadow. We will look at a five value scale, light and shadow facts, softening cast shadows. Timing is very important using, or should I have said, stacking layers. And then the conclusion in this demo, I'm going to use neutral tint for my gray. But as I've mentioned before, you can always pre mix your grays if you wish. Again, I'll go do that one more time. Ultramarine blue, a yellow, and then a red. Then depending on if it's warm or cool, you can add blue or red. To shift the temperature right here, I'll do a Swatch. I'll add a little bit of water to it, which will reveal it, it's temperature. Then I want to add a little bit of blue. So I'll make that a little bit cooler. And then a little bit of water to that as well. You can see that's just a touch cooler and a little bit cooler even still. I'll do my Swatch, add a little water. There you go. That is a good, an easy way to mix your neutrals if you don't have a neutral tint or any gray. But again, for me, I'm just going to use my neutral tent. Now, I'm going to create a simple scale, starting with a dark and then adding a bit of water to each swatch. What that's going to do is give me a scale that starts dark on the left, obviously, and then lighter as it moves to the right. I'm going to use that scale for this demo. A little touch up there on my swatches, maybe those were a little bit too light and we should be good to go using my four B graphite. I will draw my sphere, then my cube, where obviously for a layout drawing like this, try to use light marks if you don't want the pencil marks to show. Sometimes I don't really care about pencil marks and I'll let them show in my artwork. But for this demo, I'll try to keep it somewhat clean. I'm using that underhand grip which will allow me to use lighter strokes, Just some clean water to wet the sphere. Okay, so I'm painting on too. All right. A wet surface. I will add my light source, which is coming from the top left hand side. Now when you have a light source, it's bouncing in all directions, but it's also coming down, hitting the surface and bouncing up underneath the sphere there. If you squint at the image on the right, you're going to see some reflected light that is nothing more than the light coming down, bouncing and then hitting underneath that sphere. Also the light is hitting our subject, which is on the top of the ball, the sphere right there, where it goes from light to shadow. That is called the core shadow. You'll have a little bit of a light value there, but then it'll get really dark. Typically, the core shadow is the darkest of the shadows. Again, if you squint your eyes a little bit at the sphere on the video here, you can see that I'll include this sphere in the resources as well. You can have a look for yourself, and of course, I know you want to try this project on your own. You'll have that resource using a very light value. Pretty much the first value on my scale. I have a five value scale there. I'm going to paint the ball and the shadow, and also the sides. I can do this because I'm looking at my subject. I can see there's a top of the cube there that is fairly white. And then there's a little section on the ball that's white too. But everything else, I can paint this light shade of gray from there. I can just use darker layers to add the shadows there. I'm softening the shadow. A cast shadow will have soft or diffused edges on the outside. As a shadow moves away from its subject, it's going to get softer and softer. And typically it'll be somewhat soft or blended on the edges. I just use some clean water to diffuse that. Now, I'm going to remove a little bit of that paint for the top of that sphere now. Everything is good to go, but I want to start to add the next value to this. Now this is still wet. Again, you have to remember, water is a conduit for the pigment. As I paint this, I'm going to allow a little bit of spreading of that water. I want the top left hand side of that ball to be somewhat light in value, but I know that pigment is going to run into it because it's wet. But I'm going to come back enough to allow for that extra movement. Okay, Again, this is just where we're trying to understand and respect the fact that there's water there. The value is going to move. The pigment is going to move. Now, timing is important. As I get to this next layer, I'm going to start to add the core shadows. I don't want it to be dry if I wait until it's completely dry. And then I'm going to have to blend everything I'm trying to do, this sphere wet into wet. I'm going to wait until that sphere and which I've done is almost to that point where it's dry. But I know I can still paint into it. Now as you paint into a surface like this, again, timing is important. If you wait too long, then sometimes you'll get watermarks. You'll get those cauliflowers. Other tim, if you don't wait long enough, then of course all this dark pigment is going to run into the white of the sphere where we have our light. I want to, again, keep that fairly light at that point. At this point I should say. I'm going to let it rest. I'm actually going to remove a little bit of pigment there for that reflected light. Again, this is still wet. Okay. So I have to allow for that movement. I know the water is going to dissolve that. Now, I've let this completely dry. It's 100% dry. And you can see where an object contacts another one. There's typically a very, very dark shadow. I'm going to put that shadow in and then blend it. Now I'm adding the dark side of the cube here. Again, that side of the cube is 100% dry. And I'm just adding a slightly darker layer over top of it. Again, trying to get those clean strokes and trying not to fudge with it too much. Now where things contact on the ground like that, I'm going to soften that edge that way it doesn't look too stiff. Let's have a look at the demo here. Truth of the matter, the shadow on the sphere is probably a touch too dark. The core shadow could be a little bit lighter in value, but all in all, I think it gets that feeling of form. So it has a three dimensional look to it. Hopefully, we have learned a little bit from this lesson. In it, we covered a simple five value scale light and shadow facts. Softening cast shadows so that outer edge of a cache shadow timing is important. Really, understanding the wetness of the paper is a valuable, valuable stuff for watercolor painting using layers. So how I use two layers to capture the darker side of the cube? And now you should have, hopefully, a little more information on how value impacts form. So getting your value placements correct is the key to capturing a three dimensional object. 20. Value and Form with Color: All right, this cover another ball and cube here. By this time it's a red ball. We have two different colors we have to contend with. We're going to discuss some reflected light. Same thing, softening cast shadows. Timing using layers. And then a little recap here at the end. Let's get started. I will use my same four B pencil there to put the layout drawing in, This time using a standard tripod. Hold on the pencil but still trying to get some fairly light layout lines. There you go, got the shadow. Now we're ready to roll. Now I will do a Swatch test. It's always good to test your colors. I just want to understand where I will use for my darkest red. I will add some water to that to get that middle value. And then maybe one more for those lovely pinks that should do it. I'm not really trying to match the red ball exactly, I just want to get the idea. The goal of this lesson is to understand all the techniques we've talked about, working wet into wet. Understanding how water is a conduit for the painting, dealing with gravity and so on. I did add a little bit of magenta or ultramarine blue to that for my shadow that I'll use that shadow for the red ball. Here is just a simple gray scale I will use for the cube. I'm going to use water and pre wet the sphere again. If it's too wet you're going to lose control. As you can see, the red ball has a little highlight right in there. So I'm going to remove the majority of that water. And I will do that again, depending on how wet your paper is, how much water you use will determine how much this water color moves and invades that space. Whenever I paint around it, I try to leave maybe a little more space than I think I need. I tend to come up short most of the time. So I look at my tendencies, you may come up, your tendencies may be a little different, but again, we have to allow for that water to diffuse and move the pigment. And now I will go in with a slightly darker color there and start to paint some of the main shadows around that highlight. We still have the bounce light effect. If we squint down on the ball, you can see it's just a little area there where the light will come up and hit the bottom of that red ball. Then also, we're still dealing with a core shadow. When we squint down, we can see where that light disappears and the shadow begins. That's going to be that core shadow area and that's going to be the darkest. I haven't put that on the sphere yet. Now I'm going to use my grays for my shadow. I know those reds are going to bleed into it, which is great. Anytime you have two objects near each other and there are different hues, you're going to have color that bleeds into the next object. If you look at the shadow of the red ball on top of the white cube, you can see a little bit of that red on top of that cube. The red is reflecting into the white. Now, I'm not trying to get it perfect, I just need to know before I begin and acknowledge that. Okay, well, there is red in the shadow. There's a red ball, there's a white object. The ball is sitting on top. Therefore, I can almost guarantee there's going to be some red in that shadow. That's light works is how color works. Any time again, you have two objects like that that are touching each other. Look for that reflected light. It may not be a big deal, honestly. That's not anything that I incorporate in my artwork. I don't really allow for reflected light. But for this demo, I thought it would be good to just acknowledge it. It exists. Again, I'm trying to use this workout as a way to do things that I don't ordinarily do either. It's not only for you, but it's for me too. There's my Swatch where I'm using my core shadow. A little bit. Just a clean brush there. A little bit of water on it, and I'll just move that pigment around just a little bit. Again, I'm not using harsh strokes. Here is very light pressure into the surface. That way it doesn't disturb that wash too much. I didn't really mention it in the introduction, but we're still trying to obey the not too many passes. Anytime you do that, it's going to certainly do things that you probably don't want to do. Less is best. Now where the ball contacts the top of the cube, there's a little bit of a hard shadow there. I'll just allow for that. This is dry, this is 100% dry. I can go back into that just a little bit and put that shadow in. Then here I'm adding a layer to the back side of that cube, which is slightly darker now. I don't know what happened there, but a little bit of a mistake there. I forgot to paint the cache shadow. It would have been good to have that cache shadow painted with that first layer. But hey, no big deal. I can still go back in now and paint that cache shadow. But again, if I were on top of my game here, I would have put that in before I allowed that drive to dry. Now where the cube meets the surface, the table surface, look how dark it is right there. What I'm doing now, I'm actually going back into the white on white study. I'm also doing my cube study. I'm adding a little bit of a dark line there. If it diffuses a little bit, that's fine. If you really look at that shadow, it's fairly soft anyway. But typically where the objects will make contact with a surface like that, you'll get a hard shadow, especially on the side that's in full shadow. Anyway, that's that, I'll soften that shadow and we'll have a look at the demo there. You can see a little bit of that. You can see that red of the ball bouncing into the surface of the cube. We'll look at the first demo I did. Now we've got the second demo, but notice how we still had that little bit of a reflection on the ball there. I was able to get that even though I was working wet into wet. There you go. Value and form demo two using two hues. We talked about that reflected light, so the red bouncing into the white softening cast shadows, which I did okay there. I didn't really do my shadow great in this demo. I apologize for that. Timing is important. As always, using layers. You saw me add the shadow on the back side of that cube. I allowed that first layer to dry and I came back and stacked a layer over top of that. And then hopefully what you've learned is that value is very important again to capturing form. Getting those value placements correct or at least somewhat correctly placed is key. If you're off a shade or two, that's okay. But the main thing we have to acknowledge there is that value is important for capturing form and a three dimensional feel for our subjects. 21. Form & Edges: Form and edges. These are intermediate watercolor painting strategies. In this lesson, we'll talk about, or we will paint, a simple object. We will apply the hard and soft edges we have discussed. We will look at value placements. We will also look at light on form in order to create a three dimensional object, which we have looked at also in the cube and the sphere. We will apply fusion and gravity, which you're familiar with, and transparent layers which you're familiar with as well. Then at the end of the lesson, we'll have a little conclusion, then it will be your turn to give these ideas a shot. As a reminder, I will show you the lesson we had the very first one about transparency in our little kidney shape up there. We applied one layer, very thin layer, and stacked them, and then values got darker and darker. We did a similar object with the circles using dry layers one over the other, and to create different hues. Then we did gravity, where these colors blend, merge, and mingle. And then we had an important lesson here about water. Depending on how wet the paper is, will determine how much the water color disperses. And of course, how thick your paint is. So thicker paint doesn't disperse as much. You also remember the sphere in the cube, how we looked at value. And this was an introduction to understanding value. Placement is important. We have to not only use the watercolor techniques that are characteristic of the medium, we also have to get our value placements in our hierarchy correct. In order to create form, there's a shape, which is a square, and then there's a cube, which is a form. A form has multiple sides, It's not a flat shape. I've got a simple object here which is a chair. I pick this chair because it has both hard and soft edges. I will apply a very light value for the cushion, the back cushion. And then the seat cushion will be a lighter value obviously, than the legs. But also I'm going to use a different technique to create form. Even though we're looking at this as a chair, we want to break it down into shapes. The back of the chair is basically a square or rectangle. The seat of a chair is also square or rectangle. In this case, we can't see the entire seat because it's in perspective. But we can certainly create form by applying value correctly. I've got my basic shape there for the cushions At this point, if I try to work directly into that really wet paint, then what's going to happen is it's going to disperse too quickly. Just as you have a guide here, my light source will be coming from the top right hand side. The side of the cushions both up the back and the set itself are going to be in shadow. But I don't want that shadow to have a hard edge like the legs. The legs are very square, they're very geometric. What I have to do is get my timing right. If I work into that too soon, then what's going to happen is that shadow is going to bleed too much into the rest of the cushion. And it's not going to really give it that good form. Again, we're going to talk about timing because we have to time that wetness of the paper in order to control how much that paint flows. We don't need a really thick layer, we don't need to be too dark. So we're going to use a very thin, transparent layer in order to get our hues somewhat correct. Now in the meantime, I've used some burnt sienna and yellow ochre to paint the legs. Now I just use the idea of a one stroke and one hue because I know, as we did in the little kidney shaped action, that I can layer over top of that. Once that dries, I can come back with another thin layer, probably the same exact mixture, and create a darker side. Now I'm going to do a little sketch here in the upper right hand corner. Reminds you that spheres have blended values. When you have a round object, the transition from light to shadow is very soft. Unlike something that is square or has geometric manmade, usually those things are hard edges. For the most part, where one side is hitting light and the other side is in shadow, you're going to have a very distinct hard edge, or it's going to be very noticeable when you compare it to a round object that tends to have a much softer transition. This chair is a good example of having to apply to painting styles to get or techniques to get what the look we're after. Now, at this point, the cushion in the back of the chair have started to dry. I can consider starting to mix up a hue that's going to be just dark enough to indicate that shadow. I will apply that and then you know the drill now. We're going to leave it alone. And then remember that the less passes we have, the better. I've got my cushions in and it's not a perfect drawing or anything and that's okay. It still looks like a chair. And that's all we're after. Now, here's the deal. The front of that seat cushion that I'm pointing to right there, It's going to be lighter than the left hand side that's in the shadow. That's because it's closer to the light source Planes are important. You have the shadow plane of the seat cushion and then the upright back of the seat cushion that are in shadow. Those values are roughly the same. But the shadow I'm putting in now on the front, should be a little bit lighter. Because again, that's going to get a little more light because of the angle is closer to the light source and it's catching a little more light. Then the left hand side of that cushion here. I'm just going to remove a little bit of that bleeding, but I wanted that brown of the legs to bleed into those cushions a little bit. Just so we have that watery watercolor fusion going on in the end. Now I'm taking a hair dryer to it. I'm getting the legs nice and dry. Now that the legs are dry, I can mix up a darker value which will be burnt sienna, a little bit of ultramarine, a touch of neutral tent. And I'm doing a little swatch there at the top just to check my colors. On the left hand side of those legs, I'm going to create a darker shadow that's going to give the illusion of that light source hitting the legs. Now that back leg, it looks like it has two light sources on it. But I'm not going to worry about it. I'm going to keep the light source coming from one direction. Just so at the end, I've got a chair that looks like it's getting one light source. And we can see the form of it. We can see the squareness of the legs. And we can feel the softness of those cushions because they have much softer edges. This is a really good exercise to capture how hard or soft something is. Also it's a good exercise on understanding and learning when and how to apply these basic watercolor characteristics and techniques. Again, here is the image that was taken in natural light, so you get a good feel for the colors, and hopefully you get something good out of this lesson. And I look forward to, of course, seeing what you guys do as well. Again, for this one, we did a simple object. We apply both hard and soft edges accordingly. It was very important to understand value placements. Then we looked at light on form. So we want to use light and shadow to create form. We used our fusion and gravity. We also use transparent layer. So we stacked one thin layer over another. And that's going to do it again. I hope you enjoyed it. And I'll see you guys and the next one. 22. Form and Edges Continued: All right, and this lesson will again continue this form and edges. We will paint another simple object, a chair. We're going to use all the techniques and ideas we used in the previous chair lesson, but this time we're going to add a little bit of texture easily. We will again look at value hierarchy. And then we'll look at this idea of cross contour lines in order to add form to our subject. Let's get started here. It's a white chair, so not much to it. I'll just mix up a very, very pale gray. And I'll start with just getting the basic frame, the bamboo. I'm not sure if that's fake or artificial, but it doesn't really matter. The goal with this one is to really utilize that bamboo. And we're dealing with this white subject that has a darker background or a darker back to the chair. But for the most part, the, the chair itself, the frame is very pale when we're dealing with something like this where you're not going to get a tremendous range in value. We can easily use some other tricks if they're there to help us show the shape and form of something, really. Again, a very pale gray to lay in the legs. Once I get that, then we can start to just give that sense of as much light and shadow as we can. I'm going to use the same light source as before. I think these chairs are, as I mentioned before, have two lights on them. But I'm going to put my light source coming from the top right hand side as I did before. I will keep it that way for this one. And that's going to help me imagine the light and shadow. And again, I'm not trying to draw a perfect chair. This is really more about capturing the form and then capturing the characteristics of the techniques we've talked about with watercolor painting. Now everything is pretty dry. I have added a little touch of darker gray to the left hand side of those round forms. Because these legs and pretty much all the frame, it's round. I got a little bit too much dark and some of that color spread towards the front of that, those shapes. I'm having to lift some of that hue with just a dry brush. It's not dry, it's damp, but it doesn't have any pigment on it. Very important if you have pigment on it, obviously it's going to bleed into the color. It was good to use that just to, again, lift some of it so you get that subtle feeling. The left hand side is a little bit darker than the right hand side. Now that cushion needs to be a little bit drier. The cushion is soft. I don't want a hard edge. There really aren't any hard edges at all in this chair. I'm going to mix up a very pale, bluish gray, but the cushion is slightly wet. Okay. Whenever you're working with water color that's still slightly wet like this, you have to be very careful not to have too much water on your brush. If you have a lot of water on your brush, it's going to bleed into that wet paint. So that paper is going to sponge and extract all that moisture off your brush, and the next thing you know, it is going to be running into your cushion. Now also notice I used a damp brush just to soften those edges, but I didn't press hard into the surface and I kept it a very light pressure. The chair is a light value. When we look at the frame of the chair and the cushion, it's a light value which I just indicated in that swatch. Now let's just forget the color for a second of the backing, like a weave going on with the backing. That value is about here. It's about a mid range gray. I want to make sure whenever I mix up my brown, which I'm using yellow, ochre, burnt sienna, a touch of blue, I want to make sure that it matches that value. So I don't want that brown to be too pale. And it will be easy to go in with a very pale yellow and it ends up being almost the same value as the chair itself. Again, this is all like value hierarchy trying to find your lights and darks, and in this case, again, that backing. Is going to be the darkest. I will add all of that. I know there's a lot of texture, there's a lot of detail happening on that chair, but I'm going to simplify it. I will add my first layer of brown. I have to be patient. I have to be patient to take it to the next step. The next step is going to be to add that texture to it. Now, I forgot to add these little crossbars. I'm going to go back in it now with that pale gray and just lightly indicate those. I'll get a little bit darker shadow here to indicate underneath the shadow. And then the left hand side, again, I'm going to rely on a cross contour to help me indicate form on those legs. We'll do that in just a moment here. I'm just adding a cast shadow, a very subtle blue, so a little bit of cerulean, a little bit of my grays and yellows. We'll just accentuate that color a little bit there. I totally forgot the shadow on the little brace there on the right, but that's all right. This is more about understanding light on form, trying to capture hard and soft edges. In this case, we're going to do a little bit of texture, taking a hair dryer to the back of that chair. Now, I'm not going to get it fully dry, but I would say it's about 90% dry. And I will use a darker value. So I want something darker than what I had before. And I'm going to also switch to my sword brush because it has a really fine tip on it. You would want to use a smaller brush. In this case, I want to add a feeling of those textures and that weaving of going on in that chair. But I'm not going to study the chair and count how many holes there are. I'm just going to look at it and then just give the impression that it's there. I'm only trying to indicate texture. I'm not trying to paint it exactly there. I'm using a paper towel just to lift some of those marks. I will take a hair dryer to it now and get it nice and dry, and then we'll start to look at cross contours. Notice the chair, I have it enlarged there, but it has these joints where the bamboo sections meet each other. And they're not straight lines, they're actually curves that go around the legs, the braces, and the back of that chair. Those are good. We can easily add a feeling of those and that's going to help represent the roundness of the leg. We have a little shadow there going on, a soft shadow in most places. But anytime you can use these cross contours as a way to indicate form, there are a lot of fun to add into your subject. In this case, I'll add all of them, but you could easily just add one or two and people would know, okay, that's probably a bamboo chair or oh, that definitely shows the curve and the roundness of that object. I'm going to add a little more shadow to the left hand side and underneath some of these, the frame, now I've got my liner brush because it can create some fine lines. I'm going to work how I create those curves. A smiley face almost, but it curves a little bit more than that around the legs in a few places. But notice how that immediately tells the viewer that there's something around there. That that object has a roundness to it and is no longer even an option to be square. The left hand side of that back, those tubes are running up and then this tube is running away from us. But notice how the direction I create those curves, again, cross contours are a great way to indicate form and a little bit of subtle detail on your subject. Any time it's there, use a little bit of it and see how that helps your painting. That's that. Let's have a look at the finished art. Hopefully you can see those soft edges and the roundness of the legs and how those cross contours help the backing of the chair has that feeling of texture like some basket weave going on there. And that's that in this lesson. Again, it was a simple object using all the wonderful techniques we've talked about. We added a little bit of texture easily and we looked at value hierarchy and then we also looked at crafts contour lines. That's that. I hope you enjoy the demo. And then the next lesson we're going to start getting a little bit looser and a little bit sketchy with these chairs and having a little bit more fun slinging our brush and seeing what we can come up with. 23. Form and Edges Loosely Painted: Welcome to the lesson Form and Edges. Four intermediate strategies. Again, painting a simple object so that we can really understand and harness this idea of light and shadow. But then we need to infuse that lovely water color feel that the medium has to offer. We're going to begin the painting with dribbling water on the paper. I will allow water and gravity to mix. Hughes, as we've discussed before, we're going to loosely capture light and shadow. We're going to look at the lost and found edges and then a conclusion at the end, which we will take a look at the artwork and hopefully wrap it up and give you a nice solid lesson here. First thing I need to notice is I'm going to dip my brush and water and I'm going to dribble the water on the paper. I'm splashing it and hit and miss. I'm not covering every single square inch with water. Some areas are dry, some areas are wet. And that's going to create this lovely, hard and soft edge feel to the piece. There's my inspiration. I pick this one because I really like the lines of the fabric and I think they give a really good shape of the form of the cushion, I should say. Now I'm going to use a little bit of yellow ochre, burnt sienna, a touch of blue draw with my brush. As we've talked about before, I'm thinking more along the lines of drawing here and not painting. Looking at the wood forms, how they're coming down into the legs. Then the seat comes out and then we had this perspective going on. That front corner is closest to us. The back corner of the front is further away. That's going to give us our basic perspective. Notice though, the bleeding going on. Some areas of those strokes are bleeding into the wet surface. Other areas are holding a little bit firmer. That's going to give you this lovely, again, lost and found, or hard and soft edge quality from your brush strokes. It's just an interesting way I should say to approach your painting sometimes if you're struggling with just painting loose in general, you know now that water is going to make that pigment move around the page. If you have some areas that are hard or dry, then of course that pigment isn't going to move as much. It's a nice way to do it because you get these random results. I think as we've talked about before, watercolor is conducive to random painting. Yeah, you can get in there and paint tight and do these illustrations type of artwork. But I think the medium is best used, and I think represented through these lost and found edges, hard and soft edges and this drifty, carefree look to me, if you can use water color that way, it takes some skill. It takes some experience and some knowledge. But I think it's really worth the investment of time to learn it this way. When you start to tighten up, then you're going to lose out on all these lovely watercolor characteristics there. I'm dropping a little bit of blue into those warm washes, and that's going to cool it off a little bit. Here I've got a little bit of a mix of blue and red, ultramarine, a little touch of my red in there. And painting some shadows on the right hand side of the chair. Notice that's all wet. So of course that paints going to bleed a little bit into the yellow I painted before. I've got a little bit of this gray leftover paint on the brush and I think that's going to work well just for adding a pale value cushion here. I'm going to use a little bit of my Cad Red. Just a very weak T mixture there. And just drop it into the, the study. I don't really care where it landed. It could have landed on the leg. It could've landed on the cushion like it did. And it just so happened to land on some dry parts of the paper. It also landed on some areas that were wet. Then of course, that water is going to start to eat into it and spread it around my boards at an angle. Gravity is going to do its thing as well. But I just love how those colors really start to mesh and mingle. Here I'm painting the shadow, but notice how I went right over that leg on the lower right hand side and it almost dissolved that leg. So you're getting this lost and found action going on with the back right corner of the leg of the chair. All right. Now I'm going to take a hair dryer to it and dry it off. That's going to put the control back in my hands. Okay. Because now that everything is dry, I've got control. But let's look at those quality look how everything is bleeding and running into each other and we're getting watermarks and all these hard and soft edges. That to me, is watercolor painting at its best. I think that's again, how I like to teach it and how I like to paint with it. Whether or not you like that loose idea is up to you. You may prefer to rein it in a little bit and painting a little bit tighter and that's fine, but the goal of this lesson was to just teach you how you can use a slightly different technique and then combine it with this idea of light and form here. Notice how the pin striping as it goes over the chair. The cushion of the chair. Look how it gives it volume. Look how that arc and curve of lines make it feel like a nice soft cushion. It gives it that padding. Look, I'm sorry for all the moving here. I'm not sure what happened, but I thought it was an interesting piece to share with you. Again, you can't really copy anything here, but you can use the technique. That's what I want you to try the most is to think about that technique and dribble the paper so you get these hard and soft edges there. I'm just drawing with my brush. Very light value there to indicate corners and different parts of the chair that were lost. But there you go. There is the finished piece again. Image taken in natural light, hopefully you can really see that loose watercolor feel. Again, I've worked a lot, wet and wet. We dribbled water on the paper. We had some wet, dry. We allowed water and gravity to mix the hues and do its thing, which we've talked about quite a bit. The idea was to loosely capture light and shadow form. And then of course, had those lovely lost and found edges when we're done, I hope you enjoyed it. I look forward to seeing what you do with this idea. Thanks for watching. 24. Form and Edges Painterly Style: Welcome to the lesson. Again, we're talking about form and edges light on form. Again, these are intermediate strategies. We will paint another simple object, which will be a chair. We will learn how to draw with the brush. We will use caligraphic strokes. We will also combine that with fast strokes, which we have talked about earlier. The goal here is to paint with a little more freedom to really harness the qualities of watercolor. Let it be loose, let it mingle, let it do its own thing. Okay, I will begin with my sword brush. The sword brush is more conducive to drawing. It has a little bit finer point. That's what I want to go with. I want to use my brush to draw now, I could have easily grabbed the pencil to lay in the chair. But sometimes it's good to learn how to draw with the brush, because again, this one has a really fine point to it. It works really well. Drawing with the brush is a good way to add the calligraphic strokes to your artwork. Now you don't have to draw every single edge you can see. I'm just going around drawing a few details. But you know, I'm not trying to capture every single nook and cranny on the chair. I'm just, I'm pretending, you know, I had this sort of pencil in my hand and I'm trying to just understand the perspective of the chair. Now notice the strokes I just put on there. They were the dry stroke like I just showed you. So that's creating a fast stroke down the surface of the paper. And again, this only works if you have hot press or cold press paper. It does not work on hot press. Now I'll go in and add these little crossbars that support the structure of the chair. And you can see this has a nice loose feeling by changing your mentality of like, okay, I'm going to paint this chair. Just thinking in terms of more of just drawing it. Then you get a really care free look about it and all the colors. As I'm mixing the paints, I'm using different shades. You can see I've got the yellows and they're bleeding into the grays. Here, I'm looking at this webbing detail work on the backing of the chair. But I simplified it, I just simplify it into diagonal lines, vertical and horizontals. And now I'll go in and touch some of the joints and some of those aren't even placed correctly. But the goal here is to get the essence of the chair. But more importantly, to try to embrace the medium I'm painting with. I try to work with those wet and wet techniques, allow the colors to bleed, use the texture of the paper by using those fast strokes. Of course, I'm mixing in a little bit of that drawing. Now I'm going back in and adding a, I don't want to dry too flat. I'm adding just a few dark hues to where I feel like the shadows would be here. I'll just add something there for the cushion. Again, you can't even see, it's a cushion. No one would know that there was a cushion on that chair. But it doesn't really matter. At the end of it all, I'm painting a chair and I'm practicing these calligraphic strokes. And more importantly, like I mentioned before, this is about harnessing the lovely characteristics of water color and letting the medium do its thing. We're not trying to control it as much as we did in the previous chair demonstrations. Here is a piece, the image was taken a natural light, so you get a better feel for the colors, but you can see nice and loose and very water color ish. Okay, in this lesson, we painted another simple object. Introduce the idea of drawing with a brush. I also, you can think about calligraphy and making these long, wispy lines across the page. We use some fast strokes to accentuate the texture of the paper. The goal here was to paint with more freedom. And that is really all about letting water color, gravity fusion, all that wonderful stuff we learned in the first section of this course. Do its thing. 25. Form and Edges Quick Strokes: All right, welcome to the demo, I promise This is the last chair we're going to paint. This is number five. We're going to, again, look at how to loosen up the idea and of painting a simple object and really embrace some of these expressive watercolor techniques. So we're going to splash some hues. We will use a variegated wash, which we've used before, I just haven't mentioned it. Some fast strokes, some hit and miss on the details, and then a conclusion at the end, which we will look at the finished artwork as we always do. And then give you a little recap on what we learned. Starting with a little bit of neutral tint here and a little bit of yellow ochre. I'm mixing that, a very thin like mixture. Water color is thin to thick, so we start pale and we go a little bit darker as we get into the painting. A little bit of cerulean blue there. With that, just looking for a neutral gray, slightly on the warm side. It's going to change it up a little bit. I painted that in the wrong spot on the paper, so I'm going to have to bump that over to the right, so I'll just wipe that off and I'll get right back to business here. Starting with the warmish neutral here, Warm gray painting, the back braces of the chair. And now I've got the yellow ochre I use for the seat. From there I'm just going to use a wet brush and whatever's on the brush and just drag that down into the legs. And now I'm putting some pigment there. I'll just clean up that little bleed. I've got a wet leg there. I'll put a little bit of a shadow on it just by splashing a little bit in there. Building on the confidence I've had so far. I've used quite a few of these techniques so far. I'm getting familiar with the chair and very comfortable with it. So what I'm going to do now is splash some cerulean blue around. I don't care where it lands, so long as it's on the paper and anywhere else and a little bit of red there. Just drag that into the wash. While it's wet, I know those colors don't belong there. If you look at the inspiration image on the upper right hand corner, obviously none of these colors really exists. But if you try to match color, you're going to lose that battle every time. This technique, the approach I'm using is letting the colors having more freedom with it, Letting a little bit of that cool blue mix with the yellows in the seat area. Letting those reds and blues mix in with some of the lighter washes I have for the base of the chair, the back, and the legs. Now I'll let you just see those colors for a while and see how random those colors are mingling and how they're just doing their own thing. I'm not trying to force it or control it. The goal here is to really harness that, those exercises we did early on where we did the abstract squares and letting the water and the colors just run back and forth to a degree and, and just try to bring that feeling, that freedom into an actual subject. That's hard to do, but I think you have to go there first. Like we did in the beginning of this course, this class, now we're going to see if our brain will let us get away with it. When we actually paint a subject using a dryer here, I'm just getting the majority of the moisture off the paper. I want this to be nice and dry before I start adding the next layer. I mentioned in the preview of the lesson that we're painting the light to dark. I'm going to start to come back with some darker hues now, but I'm also going to start to capture just some of the details. I'm not trying to paint the chair as it is obviously, but I want to capture maybe some of the woodwork and some of the interesting edges that are on it. But I'm not going to get all of it. I just want bits and pieces. If I get bits and pieces, then the viewer can fill in the blanks. What I have left out or didn't really capture. I've got this leg on the far left here and it's got like a little bit of a reflection on it. I'll paint that leg and then run it up into the top, which has this detail to it, this nice woodwork. I'm a farmhouse style chair. Now, I've got a nice dark color to work with for the black of the chair. But I'm not going to go too black yet. I'm going to still work in those mid tones. You can see I'm using water to lift some of these reflections that are on the chair. There's a little bit of a shine to that paint here. I'm moving a little bit thicker now I'm going to go with some ochre, some crimsons, ultramarine blue, some neutral tint. And come up with something watery, but more pigment than water. I want a little more control over what's going on, so I want to drop some darker colors into this. I want to capture some of the details of the chair, but also just a few more darks where I start to see them. Now I'll just some water and I'll drag that water right into that dark pigment. And over time that's going to slowly bleed into that side of the chair. Maybe at the end of it, I'll have a feeling of a reflection hitting the back of the chair, the wood. But if not, then it's okay. Then I still have something interesting to look at here. I'll just go back and shape some of those features in the back of the chair. Again, not trying to get fussy with everything, but just a little bit here and there. A nice quick stroke there. Look at that, how it left some of the color underneath those lovely washes I used. Now, I'll do the same thing on the front. It's nice to see those yellows and Alizarin crimson, those pinks and blues and different things underneath that dark wash that I'm putting in for the base of the chair. There's a little reflection here and there on the wood. And I'll just leave a little bit and I'm just using a wet brush and blending that in a little bit, all techniques you're familiar with. The thing I'm doing here is just looking at the chair for inspiration. A few details, but really I'm just trying to harness the magic of watercolor and let some of these washes and gravity and things like that do its thing for me and be the art, let that be the thing and not try to impress people with an award winning depiction of the subject. I'm not trying to create an illustration that the company may want to showcase all the lovely detail of the chair. This is more about using the chair as a way to show off the medium. That's what it's all about. Something is we all have to pick our own lane when we start to paint and decide we're going to go loose tight, where we're going to go with our style. But for this one, obviously I picked the lane that was nice and free. But again, my thought with water color is that's at its best. And you can see now just splashing some blues in there into the shadow. And just trying to let the color live and all that stuff. Just let it really be spontaneous, energetic, but not over painted, quick, loose, random, fresh. Okay. We don't want to push it too far, that's a hard thing to do. But it's something over time we can get used to. There it is, there's a finished piece. Again, if you were to put the inspiration image beside it, it would certainly not look exactly like it. But as far as a nice loose watercolor sketch of a chair, I think it works really well. Painting a simple object, we splash some hues. Just slinging the hues on the paper and let it mingle into the wet paint and water. We use that variegated wash, so you can see the blues in the yellows of the seat, all that's variegated. So it's not just one hue. You got multiple hues in those washes. You can even see some of those pinks and reds and things like that. Living inside that chair, we use some fast strokes, hit and miss on some of the details. In the end, we get a nice loose expressive piece of art. That's it. I will see you guys and the next one. 26. Project Comples Barn Wet in Dry: All right, we've painted a simple object, let's call this one a more complex object. We're dealing with things with more details, more angles, and so on. But the goal here is to use some wet and dry layers, which you're already familiar with. Some variegated washes which we've tapped into. But we'll elaborate on a little bit more in this lesson. I avoid details in the shadows, suggest other details, then a conclusion at the end, which of course, you will have a good pick of the demo. And then I'll probably just go over a few things to wrap up the lesson as I always do. All right, so I've got some pre mixed colors here, reds and grays on the palette. I'm going to use a touch of orange, a little bit of Cad, red light, a little bit of blizzard and crimson, throwing the kitchen sink worth of reds at this, but very thin. If you remember our lesson where we worked with using water and hues. And basically starting with a dark, opaque almost layer. And then adding water until we get to an almost a transparent layer. We're dealing with a thin mixture there of that red. Now ditto that for the roof, we have a gray roof on this thing. Metal roof, again, very weak. Letting these things mix and mingle a little bit is fine. Adding a little gray into the red, a little red into the gray is going to be fine. It's just going to create a little bit of harmony. And you're going to avoid stiff edges. If you remember our lovely exercise we did with the abstract squares where we're letting those colors run and mingle a little bit. That's what we're after, but with a little more control now. I'm going to take a hair dryer to it here, try to, speaking of control, get it back in my corner. As you know, when water color is wet, you're going to have less control. But once it dries, you regain that control. Now you have a better chance in creating some hard edges, right? Because, you know, when you're painting wet into wet, you're not going to get hard edges. I mean, that's more conducive to painting round and smooth objects, blending and so on. But when we're painting over dry paint or a dry wash like I'm going to do now, everything's nice and dry. We're going to have the option to create some nice hard edges. Going back into my Cad red light and a little bit of ultramarine blue, I should get a decent color to work with here. I'm not trying to color match the image at all, that's not what I do, but I am paying attention to value. Value is how we're going to create form is how we're going to suggest shadows is how we're going to suggest a three dimensional object. If you start getting into color matching, you're going to lose the battle number one, because you're not ever going to be able to match nature. But if you think more about value and just get it in the ballpark, you'll be fine there. I'm just splashing a little bit of water into that wash here. I'm just adding some nice rich blues into it and just blending that around but not too much. Remember I just hit it and got out of it maybe a little bit darker under the eve there of that roof. That should be pretty close to getting us where we need to be. Again, variegated wash is when you have more than one color in it. I felt just using the one red shadow color would have been a little bit too boring. I think it would have dried flat by adding a touch of that blue and even dropping a little bit of water into it is going to give me some variation. So it's going to take that dark wash and make it more interesting. The dark color I put under the eve on the right, the side that's in the light that was more of an ultramarine blue, but it's going to blend and bleed into that red shadow that again, is a variegated wash. You're getting more than just one color in the wash. Anytime you do that, again, you're going to have a more exciting wash if you don't do it, I should say. Then a lot of times the wash just becomes real flat and dull when it dries. There's no contrast in it. There's no warm, there's no cool or anything. I wanted the wash to be this warmish blue color or red color, but I also wanted to break that up a little bit with a cool. While that's still wet, but not completely saturated. I added some rich grayish blues there to suggest a door and maybe a little window or something up top where they toss out the bales of hay and all that stuff. I'll just suggest a little bit of grass in there. And I did the same thing in the background. But notice how I'm letting everything mingle and mix. I'm not trying to control, I'm just paying attention to values is all I'm doing. And paying attention to some of the things I've learned over time. Like don't paint too many details in the shadows. When things are in shadow, you're better off to leave it quiet. Don't try to obsess and put every single window, every single little nuance in shadows because then it's going to ruin the light. It's going to become very distracting when really things are in shadow. You just want to tone them down and let them be quiet in the image. Okay, now I'm using my sword brush and I'm dropping a little bit darker pigments into the windows. I'm using it to draw some lines. I'm pretending they're texture on the roof. That also helps with the contour. It helps with the shape of the roof. But notice how I'm real loose with the colors. I don't ever put something down and just leave it flat. I try to drop a little bit of dark hue in it, a little bit of, a little bit of cool. And just mix it up a little bit. Again, that's how you create these happy accidents and that's how you get that nice loose care free feel that we like so much about water color. Very quick demo, but at the same time, I was paying close attention to values and trying to manipulate the medium and allow it to do what it does best. And that's to create lovely fusion and a transparent quality. Hopefully, when you look at this image right here, you can see a lot of the things we've talked about so far. Plus we have nice three dimensional shape. Now we're turning this cube idea into a rectangle. Now we're turning it into a barn, but we're still maintaining that free spirit of watercolor and encouraging it and allowing it to do its own thing. We're not trying to control every little bit When you really look at this piece, the magic and the feeling and any sort of quality you may like is probably in the accidents and how the medium is allowed to do its thing. And it's not controlled on every single square inch of the paper. In this lesson, we used a more complex subject or object. We did wet and dry, so we did a layer and then, or wash. And then we allowed it to dry. We came back over it to get those nice, crisp hard edges that we need for those sort of manmade square objects. We talked a little bit more about a variegated wash. Remember to avoid too many details in the shadows, and we only suggested details everywhere else. Okay, so hopefully you enjoy the lesson and I will see you in the next one. 27. Project Complex Barn with Layers: We will look at forming edges. And we're going to use a barn as our muse as well. And then we're going to look at the values. Planning values is important. We'll look at layered washes, avoiding too many details in the shadows again. And then a little wrap up. At the end of this video, I will start with my pointed round and the goal here is to just prewt the paper. But again, I'm not going to do too much water. It's just a matter of getting it wet so that can get a nice a loose wash to this. Now, when we look at value, when we look at our subject, we always want to take a moment and look at value structure. Where is our light, light, where the dark, dark, where is the light coming from? And that's going to help us plan our water color. Water color, as we've talked about before, it's probably best use painting light to dark. Now, I don't want to put rules down, but in this demo, that's how I'm going to focus on it. I'm going to think, okay, the barn is relatively one color, this cool yellow or red rather. Whenever I'm thinking about approaching the subject and painting it, I'm like, okay, well, how come I can't just use a whole wash of the faded red on the entire barn and that can come back over that and add darker values accordingly. Just like our very first exercise where we did the kidney shape, where we just layered very thin mixtures one over top of each other to get a darker value. That's the same idea, we get back to those very simple basics, understanding how layers work and how we can stack one layer over another dry layer and it's going to give us a darker value. That's what I'm after here. You can see I put down a very thin mixture of Alizarin Crimson water down. Alizarin Crimson is going to give you a very cool red, a pinkish color. That's what I opted to go with. I'm going to make the barn a little bit smaller now so we don't have, it doesn't obscure or hide the palette. I'm going to add a little bit of yellow ochre into that. Now I'm going to paint the entire barn. And I can do that because I know the front of that barn is in shadow. Taking that wash all the way through the barn is fine, and I can start to dry that off as I do. I'm going to pre mix a little bit of yellow ochre and a little bit of burnt sienna. And I'm going to water that down quite a bit because that roof is a very light value as well. I don't want that roof to come across too dark. Whenever I'm painting, I may look at my subject. In this case, I am for colors, maybe some guidance on the hues I should use. But I'm letting value run the show, I guess I'm alluding to is I don't want to try to color match so much as I want to make sure I get the right value in place. Because if the values are off, it's simply going to ruin the light. Now I'm going to take a little bit of a lizard and crimson and some ultramarine blue and mix up a pinkish, magenta color. And everything is dry too. I was using the hair dryer there to dry everything off. I'm stacking layers. I'm going back to more of a tight way of painting water colors. When you work wet into wet, you get that lovely fusion and the random mixing and mingling of colors, somewhat random anyway. But when you start to stack layers like this, things are going to be a little bit tighter because you're not going to get as much of that. A good painting has a little bit of both. It's going to have some wet and wet. It's going to have some wet over dry. A painting needs a little bit of detail in there. If you do everything wet and wet, sometimes it just comes across. A little bit too loose and you can't really get your edges and your shapes down as much. Now, when I picked out that hue right there, I had to keep in mind that water color is going to dry lighter. We've talked about that before too. It was important for me to do that. It may come across a little bit strong at first, but you always have to consider things are going to dry a little bit lighter, then they go on again, taking my hair dryer to it, Now I'm going to get it dry. And then hopefully you can start to see how just a simple, very basic painting concept of understanding values is the key to painting light on form. It's the key to making your subjects stand out no matter what style you paint in. You always have to consider value hierarchy. So take a moment and look at your lightest lights, your darkest darks. Know where they're going to be and then plan it accordingly. Since I didn't go too dark on the front of that barn. I can come back now with a slightly darker color and just indicate a few details. Again, I don't normally like to put a lot of details and shadow. I recommend be very sparse with the amount of information you put in shadows because that will start to ruin your light and shadow. You can start to see now that the barn has taken shape, just getting again the value right is important. But then also remember we were able to use that layering on mixture over another. In this piece, we still end up with some transparency when you look at the, the barn, the shadow side. We still have plenty of transparency in that dark area. I took a brush right there. A wet brush, a damp one, and removed some of that black, some of those hard edges. Just so we didn't have all a bunch of hard edges and shadow. Just to finish this off, I mixed up a little bit of green with a little bit of my yellow pail, a touch my ochre gamboge. I'm also going to make this one angle on the barn a little bit lighter because the angle of the top of the barn, because there's two angles there that's going to be more direct and sun, it's almost as flat as the ground plane. The ground plane is going to be the lightest value besides the sky. The sky is where your light sources. Unless you're dealing with a very cloudy day or some atmospheric condition, the sky can be, is generally lighter, the lightest in value then the ground plane, then your angle, like the roof angle, and then your verticals. Verticals tend to be a little bit darker in value as well, especially if they're in shadow. We won't talk too much about that. This course really isn't about painting finish so much as it is about bouncing around between the techniques. The watercolor characteristics Painting a variety of subjects, working on a multiple topics you get all around education and experience with different things. Yeah, just painted a few trees back there, a little cast shadow and there's the finished art. Hopefully you can understand a little bit more getting back to those basics of stacking dry layer over dry layer, keeping that transparency, making sure we don't go too dark. Allowing for that watercolor paint to dry a little bit lighter in value than when we put it down about 15 to 20% Again, just minimalizing the details and the shadows. If you get them too hard, too stiff, you can always do what I did, which was use my brush to lift some of those hard edges. There you go a little bit about planning your values, the importance of it. Sometimes if things are too dark, you have to scale them back a little bit. Don't paint them quite as dark, sometimes they're too light. You have to paint them a little bit darker to make them work. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this demo and I'll see you guys in the next one. 28. Project Complex Barn with Variegated Washes: All right. Our last little barn here. Again, forms and edges, light on form, trying to capture a realistic idea on the page for light, understanding that some edges have to be hard, some can be soft and blended and so on. So we're going to work with wet and dry layers. Again, we will consider our values and then a little wrap up at the end. All right, there is our barn. It is consider the golden hour, right as the sun is setting or possibly in the morning, early morning as it just is breaking the horizon there. And this one, to me, I picked this image because I thought it was a little more challenging when you're dealing with these really heavy shadows. Because the sun is so low in the sky, you're not getting a lot of reflected light. The front of that barn that's in shadow looks very dark because of that. When the sun is higher in the sky, the whole sky is illuminated. Even though something is in shadow, it's receiving reflected or bounced light that's coming from the ground even though it's in shadow. All right. Just in terms of my technique, what I did is wet an area where I knew the barn would be whenever you wet things like that, pre wet it and you put pigment into it, it's going to dry even lighter. That's because it's dissolving into that water. As opposed to loading your brush with pigment and just painting it on a dry piece of paper. Again, we pre wet the paper like this, it's going to dissolve it a little bit more. And we talked about that in one of our very first series of lessons. Where we let the paper, we drop paint in it and we watch it disperse into the water. This is getting back to knowing a little bit about those basics and then exploiting those ideas a little bit. Now, I'm going to take a hair dryer here in just a second. Anyway, once I draw my little rectangle around our piece, I'll dry it off again, You're going to get quite a bit of a drop off here, especially because I pre wet the paper. As I alluded to you a minute ago, that's going to work to our advantage because right now we have all that Alizarin Crimson. We have yellow ocher. A little bit of new gamboge, that side that has light on the barn. It almost reads too dark. But you can see as I'm drying it here, it's already starting to fade a little bit, quite a bit actually. Now that is dry, I'm going to draw a little swatch there, square around it. And now we have to consider that shadow side. This is where things get tricky because the roof is darker than the front of that barn. Okay? So we have to leave a little bit of wiggle room. The common mistake here is to go too dark on the front of the barn. And so when you do that, then you have nowhere else to go for the roof. Now, I'm going to remove the image for a second, just so we can focus on the mixing of the paint. I'm using a little bit of ultramarine, a little lizard and crimson, a little bit of burnt sienna. It's good to have some test paper Again, you have to consider, we're painting on a dry surface now. We're no longer painting on wet paper. Everything I do now will be on the dry surface of the paper. I'll do a little cast shadow under the Eve, and then I'll go into the front of the barn again whenever I picked out the color here. And as I was mixing, I had to keep in mind there's going to be a drop off. But I also have to keep in mind that we're going to have a very dark roof. That's going to be our darkest dark here. I'm just dropping in a little bit of a lizard, crimson, a little bit of blue, lifting it in a few places, then you have to get in and get out. Right. If we go around and we get too fudgy with it, we're going to lose that lovely, crisp watercolor feel. Now, just for giggles here, I'll just connect the fence to the house here and make a little bit of a scene that I'm not really trying to paint a finished landscape here. I'm just adding a few details here and there because, you know, I love the paint, just like you guys do. And it's hard to stop, right? Get a brush, loaded brush in your hand and hair dryer and the other one. And I'm going to town here, I don't know when to stop. Basically I do. My wife will tell me. All right, it's your time's up. Get in here and help me with the kids and get some dinner going or something that she's not like that she's really relaxed anyway. So now I'm going to dry it again. We'll see a little drop off in value on the dark side of this barn, but the main thing you have to know here is that this is about leaving yourself wiggle room, okay? You got to have enough wiggle room to add the really black roof that's on it. That's what value hierarchy is all about. It's about taking some time to look at your subject just to see where those lightest lights and dark darks are. And then you may have to make some decisions on, okay, I need to scale that back, or I need to scale that up in terms of value now, just a little bit of ultramarine, a little bit of neutral tint. I even put a little bit of yellow ochre in there just to warm it up. And, but I always want to keep in mind, I don't want to go pure black. I don't want to go super thick, super opaque. If I can always maintain some transparency in my washes, that's fine. Sometimes I will use color straight out of the tube. When I do that, it's generally more of an accent than it is a wash. For my washes, I like to keep a sense of transparency to it. All right. So maybe a little bit hard to tell here because we have a little bit of a glare, but you'll see when this dries and I'll show you the image. When I'm done it it's going to come across darker than the front of that barn. Promise. All right. Now, still that dark there on my brush I will use considering just bouncing that dark around a little bit in a few other areas. We've got a little detail of the barn there on top. I'll just suggest that I'm not going to get fussy with it, I don't think. Now, just going into some lighter values here. We call those mid tones. You have your lightest values, and then you have the mid tones. The bulk of a painting is generally a mid tone. A lot of the work we do is going to be in that mid tone area. You're going to have splashes of light, lightest lights, and you'll have your super dark. But for the most part, mid tones are where the bulk of the painting is. All right, now again, I can't help myself here just adding in some scribbles of tree branches, tree trunks. Again, I wasn't really planning on trying to do anything finished here, but I thought just do a few details just just because it's fun to do. But the main goal here was to focus on that hierarchy. The challenge there is understanding how water color dries and how thick is your pigment. If you're dealing with super thick attitude pigment, you're not going to get much drop off. But if you're diluting it with water and you're putting it down into a wet surface, there's always going to be that drop off. That's adding a few darker tones into the tree for branches. A few little details there. A little cast shadow from the fence and maybe a little barn door there and maybe a roof on the other side. Eking out there a little window for the top. Yeah. Hopefully, I think you can see now too, how that roof just reads a shade or two darker than the front of that barn. But I left a few gaps there. I left a little bit of that original ocher color on the roof. I think it's good to do that. My perspective is that rooftop roof line should have been angled downwards and I didn't quite get that right, but I'm a little bit rough around the edges when it comes to that stuff. I don't really paint for perfection so much as I like to just end up with something that's fun to look at like imperfections. But anyhow, that is where we're at now. Little cast shadow on the barn there. Maybe another, a tree back behind the fence, slowly but surely coming together. Hopefully you're starting to understand a little bit more about your value planning. Just taking time to look at your subjects, which is key if you don't do that part. If you don't get your values right, then nothing else really matters. You can have the best flow, loose fusions and stuff going on, but when your values aren't there, a lot of times that will ruin it just because it doesn't quite ring true to you and the viewer. That's that. Let's have a look at the finished piece here. I'm just going to take a moment and I'm just going to dry it off at this point. And then we should be good to go. So here it is in all its glory. Nice and dry. Again, I take my images and natural light, indoor lighting is going to give you a yellow tint. So hopefully this will give you a more accurate depiction of what we got. Again, painting a more complex subject but removing a lot of those details. Working wet and dry, sometimes even wet and wet, value planning people, that's where it's all about. I have to always understand those lightest lights and darkest darks and plan accordingly, that's that. I'll see you guys and the next one. 29. Drawing with The Brush: Welcome to the lesson. We're going to explore some painting techniques, different ideas we can do to put paint on the paper. This section will be drawing with the brush. We will infuse watercolor characteristics all along the way. We will mix light and dark values, avoid details. We're just trying to get the general idea down. And then a lovely conclusion, wrap it up at the end, Type a talk so that we hopefully get the most out of this lesson. Now you know you can draw with a pencil, which I'm demonstrating there, but also we can draw with a brush. Some people just think a brush is for painting only, but it can be used similarly to a pencil. I have my sword brush and then I also had this small pointed around. Both of those are conducive to making good, thin strokes, long strokes, which is what I'm going to demonstrate in this video. Whenever you're drawing with your paint brush, it's probably best to have a thin or milk like mixture of paint. If it's really thick and dry, you're not going to get a very long line. In this case, I'm going to pre mix a few colors and there I've got my inspiration image. I'm going to bounce around. We've got some buildings, we've got some cars. And so on the, I believe it's a taxi towards the right hand side. I'm going to explore that one first. You can see this image is gray out. I'm not focused on color here, I'm focused or I'm not focused on, I'm thinking more arbitrary colors. And when I use a gray image, I think it helps me get away from the actual color of the subject. Even though these cars may be yellowish or yellow orange. In real life, I'm thinking more arbitrary. I've used some thin blues, grayish blues and purples as well. Notice that I'm keeping that idea of letting things mingle and mesh a little bit. Working wet into wet, letting the color do its thing, not trying to control everything. If I get a little bleeding or a little drip here and there that maybe was an accident, I'm not going to sweat it out. I'm going to let it be here infusing a little bit of yellows and different things. You want to find that drawing or just having the idea that your drawing is useful in painting, especially water colors. Because you get to a certain point in a painting and you may have to add some details. You may want to do some line work and all that. Having the experience of using your brush as a tool for drawing is very useful, honestly, painting is drawing, there really isn't much of a difference between the two of them. One is you have a brush and you're putting down color. The other one is you have a pencil and you're putting down some gray. It could be a colored pencil and so on. But they're all the same. Brushes come in very thick sizes, different shapes and all that stuff. And pencils tend to come with a point, or maybe you're using vine charcoal that has a wider base to it. But in any case, the goal here is to just find some freedom with the idea of drawing with your brush. When you're doing this, again, we're not trying to draw picture, perfect images of what our subject is. We're just trying to find freedom with using the brush so often that it's easy to get super tight when you have a brush in your hand. But if you use it in a calligraphic free, letting it explore and roam around way, then it's just a really good experience to have. It gets you thinking a little bit differently about your art. Again, this is a very important thing as you will see as we progress through this drawing with the brush section. How useful this will be when it comes to infusing it with the idea of painting blocks of color and shape and so on. So as you can see, very imperfect, but very nice, and that we're getting that watercolor effect. That's what we're after here. I will bounce around to the next one and I'm going to do the taxi in the left hand corner. Again, not putting down, trying to color the taxi itself, I'm not adding any blocks of color. It's just more looking at it and then saying, okay, if I had a pencil in my hand, how could I scribble around and doodle and draw this thing? Just trying to keep it nice and loose. That's the flow after anyway. And letting things run and mingle and all that stuff is a vital part of this exercise too. Cars are interesting, they can be a very challenging subject, but they're basically rectangles. Or I guess you could say rectangles that are hovering above ground level and then the tires connect that rectangle to the ground. When you have a shadow, you just had this shadow underneath the floating rectangle. I don't know if he can envision that or not, but that's how I see them. And then of course, the rectangle is chiseled out into angles and shapes that help make the hood and the windshield and so on. But continuing that, I'll add a little shadow there, coming across again for this stage in the game. That's all it needs to be. Again, just finding that freedom with the brush to draw. Giving my brain, my body a chance to the idea of drawing with a brush. It's all part of it. Going through those physical motions and then mentally training yourself that you can easily a draw with a brush is important. Now, I will look at the building in the back. Some a public building looks very important, doesn't it? I'll start with just the top and then the steeple, and then work my way down again. Just hit and miss on certain areas of the building. I'm not trying to get completely absorbed with everything that's involved in the building. Just looking at it, trying to get a few shapes down, trying to get a few details down, and then letting the rest settle back a little bit. Even at this stage, I'm trying to keep that random painting feeling going, but this time just thinking more about random drawing, like sitting around sketching and doodling, versus trying to render picture perfect drawings of things. It's good. This is a really good way to get familiar with your brush. It's a good way to create thin lines, thick lines, dry brushing lines where you get quicker strokes and you start to get a little bit of that paper texture showing through some lines like I'm putting in. Now, I'm using my other brush now. Actually, no, I'm sorry. That's still my sword brush, but just using the tip of that to create really thin feather pencil like lines. And then of course, as I press into the surface, it's going to spread the bristles out a little bit. I'm going to end up with a much thicker line. A really good exercise to do. We'll do this quite a bit just to feel it out here. I'm just playing around with one of the figures standing there. And again, not trying to pick a color or hue that should be there, I'm just randomly dipping my brush in the different areas of my palette and getting some paint out. All right, moving along here and getting into It looks like the building. Again, I'm going to go back to the building in the background there and play with that some of those shapes. And just takes a moment to just observe the building and try to see things that I wouldn't ordinarily see if I were just simply glancing at it. Hey, it's a background so I don't need to really worry about it, just needs to have an interesting shape. And I'll move on here. I'm taking a little more time just to notice how things connect and fuse together. And of course, just trying to keep it loose and playful with the execution when you're doing this. To just take note if you have weaknesses and perspective. If there are certain challenges with drawing figures. If you find there are certain things you're attracted to, you will do this and you're like, man, I really enjoyed working with the cars. Or maybe you want to draw the trees or the shrubs or the rectangular buildings in the background. It's good to know as an artist we have most of the time. Anyway, paint and gravitate towards the things that we find interesting. In a landscape like this, where we have figures, trees, buildings, things of that nature, you may get ten people, ten different watercolor artists to paint it. Each one will feel differently about each part of that. Some may be more inclined towards the architecture, Others may be more fascinated with the car or how the cars are connected with the bushes and the trees. That's good things to know because that's where you start to develop somewhat of a style. You start to find out the things you're interested in painting. Just because you're interested at looking at something visually like, oh my gosh, that sunset or that mountain scape is just phenomenal. It doesn't always translate into a good subject for you. If you take this idea and you start drawing fruit, you start drawing tea cups, you start drawing different things, then you may find that you know what, I enjoy drawing tropical fruit. That's just something that for some reason when I paint it or draw it like this, I'm really gravitating towards that as a subject and as an artist on that creative level and maybe you never really knew that something that would appeal to you. You all the while making these connections that become very important as an artist to your work long term. So easy to fall into that trap and like, oh, that's a really cool image, I'm going to paint it. Then you lose way for a variety of reasons. But sometimes you lose your way just because there's not enough excitement there. There's nothing that you can sink your teeth into as an artist that you're excited about. You're like, wow, You're like, well, what's going on? I enjoy looking at the image, but for some reason it's just not connecting with me on an art level. I don't. Just something to keep in mind there. All right, we'll have a look at the piece here. Again, drawing with the brush, This is your breaking the ice with this idea. And you can see nothing is really colored in, it's all outlines. And hopefully it's going to do us some good and use some good as we move forward. Okay, so we were drawn with the brush, infuse the watercolor characteristics. So we're looking for transparency, bleeding dry brush, all those wonderful things that we have talked about. We're mixing light and dark value. So you don't want everything too watered down or light and value. You don't want everything too dark. So just mix and match. It doesn't have to be dark or light in any specific area, just whatever you feel like putting down. Again, avoid too many details. Don't get too caught up in things that don't matter. Just get the general idea down like you're sketching and doodling and move on. There it is. I'll see you guys and the next one we're going to add to this wonderful idea of drawing with the brush. 30. Blend Drawing and Painting: Welcome to the lesson. We're going to explore painting techniques again. Again, these are various ideas. We're starting out with drawing with the brush. Here we're going to blend the idea of drawing with the brush, with the idea of painting. So we're going to block in some color, again, minimal details using thick and thin paint. And then the wrap up at the end mixing up some paint. Here, I'll go with my yellow, little bit of touch of orange and read into that. Get something substantial but maybe a little bit thicker. I'll put down a splash and then I'll put in a little punch of red. Even though you can't see my palette here, because I'm bringing in the image, the goal here is to think about like a variegated wash. We don't want to dry flat like we've talked about. It's good to have a little warm, a little cool. Just whatever you do, don't, don't just use one. He don't mix up a batch of orange. If you want to do a yellow orange taxi and just use that same one off to the side, you can put a little more red in it off to the side, you can put a little more yellow in it. Over there, you have a wide range of similar hues that would work for the taxi. That way when the wash is done, it's interesting to look at versus something that is going to come across. Again, weak and timid look in. We wanted to have that carefree feeling of water color that we worked so hard to get there. We really work that idea in that last section where we worked with chairs and we painted the barns and stuff like that, where we hopefully took a very simple subject and let water color be the focal point. Instead of letting the chair, it's how we paint it that becomes interesting. That's when art, I think, takes on a much more, what's the word I'm looking for here? I think it when it becomes a little more engaging, when the style and the way something is done is as interesting or more interesting than the subject itself. That's when I feel like, you know, you're on the right track. Now, let me kind of backpedal here where I'm working now. Remember I put that down and I let it dry a little bit. Allowing it to dry a little bit is going to reduce the amount of bleeding now. It's still really wet. When you see the image here at the end of the video, you're going to notice that there is plenty of bleeding and fusion going on. But if I did that a little bit too early, then maybe there would be too much. We wouldn't get a good separation of the values and stuff. I let that dry a little bit. I'm still blocking things in. I'm getting a few colors down. I want to put color down. I want to block it in. But I'm also taking my time about it. I'm working back and forth. I'll put a little splash there, mix a different color, put some blue one in, put a little splash there. Let me go over here to this area and work a little bit over there. I tend to bounce around a little bit. I don't get too caught up in one area of the painting there. I use a little yellow for the head light. Notice how all that fusion is really starting to become important now. Now I'm going to start working in eventually some strokes there. You saw that was drawing, that was drawing a circle around the headlight. I'll add my little shadow here to start to make this thing sit down on the page a little bit. Shadows have a tendency to do that. Then I'll start and a little bit of drawing as we get a little bit deeper into it. Just dropping a little bit of color here and there. Again, this is about random painting, right? We want to hold onto that idea a little bit even at this stage. Of course, nothing is perfect and that's fine. There's a green bush behind the taxi. I'm going to use that to negative space paint a little bit, which we haven't talked about. Putting that green behind that car allowed me the option to make an edge on the hood. And define the left hand side of that car, the front, left hand side. Now just some water on the brush there. So I clean my brush and I put some water down. I'm going to bounce around now to the building. Now, the goal here isn't to create a finished piece of art. This is to use that idea of drawing and painting combining. You'll see now I'm drawing more than I am painting. Bouncing around, hitting a few edges, hitting a few lines that create the shape of that building. That's the fun part about this exercise is you paint a little bit to block in something in. Then you pull back and say, okay, well I don't have to really paint that. I can almost draw it. Put a line there and draw and it'll be fine. I'm going to negative space paint around this taxi in the background just to create the shape to define where the top and the sides of that taxi are now. Just putting in a little bit more saturated value there and all fun stuff. So at this point, mostly painting, I've started the drawing process, but I would say I'm still more painting then I am blocking things in that I am drawing and that's because everything is still wet, right? Go in there and I start putting a bunch of line work around, then it's just going to bleed too much into that water color. So that's where timing is important. So we don't want to rush the line work. We have to be somewhat methodical and careful about when we put it down and then once we go for it of we're going to really go for it. All right. Now, just removing a little bit of paint on that hood. Just a napkin. So there's my line work coming back in, adding details with that line here, drawing that tire. Now I'll get in, I'm testing that underneath the grill. And now I've got my small liner brush there and I drew a few lines to represent the grill. It was probably a little bit too early because that dissolve pretty quick. I was hoping that would hold form a little bit better, but didn't quite get it all. We'll pause right here and I will see you guys in part two. So all of this is still setting up, everything still fairly wet on the paper. I'm going to take another little section here and toy around with that building in the background. You saw me lift a little bit of that paint on the orange swatch there. And just removing some of the moisture so I can get into that area and paint it a little bit sooner than later. All right. I've got a smaller brush now. This is really small pointed round. I want to dry off some of these areas so I can start to infuse some drawing into it. I want to get to that point here adding a little block of color there. And I'm going to do a little bit of negative space painting around this car, again, just to play with it. Again, this exercise is still random painting, just playing around with this idea. The goal was to always keep that playful thing in mind, but we want to add some color to our subjects and then of course, come back and draw into it. We get this line work that becomes part of the subject. It's as if we're again holding a pencil and drawing into it. That's the attitude you want to have with it. But again, the drawing is going to come in shortly once things get dried off. But here and there, I'll add a line in there and I'm thinking I'm drawing it. I'm not painting it. I have a pencil in my hand and I'm simply drawing it as if I was just using a drawing paper and a pencil there. Again, just a little negative space painting. Playing around with that little taxi in the back. Playing around with colors, arbitrary colors. For the most part, I know those deep mahogany looking color, they don't really exist much in the photo I'm using, but Just exploring and having fun with it. This is pretty dry. I added a just a wild mark there. Now I'll get into this idea of drawing in a few details of the building just to give it a finished look, to give it this playful, sketchy look. I mean, there's a lot of artists that do these line and wash techniques. I'm not crazy about putting a line around every single square inch and edge of a subject. I like things that are more random than that, less predictable I guess, than doing this. Draw a coloring book thing where you put a line around everything I like to hit and miss it. That's what I'm after here again, I'm in that mode of I'm drawings. You can see the really fine lines and I'm basically drawing out my subject now, which I will put back up for you. But I'm not really paint it. I'm like, okay, how much information, how many lines or how much drawing do I have to put down to get a sense of my subject here? I just used very few lines, didn't just a few around the columns. And the little triangle pitch there. A few for the steeple as it reaches up. And now I'm going to take a little bit of sky blue and detail the rest in. I'll do some negative space painting around the top of that steeple. If I were doing a landscape and I needed a sky, or if I wanted to paint this, that's all I would have to do. I'm learning like, okay Robert. Hey, a little splash of color. A few lines here and there. Hit miss on the drawing. A little blue around the edge. And you got yourself a cool building, a nice playful, care, free, not force idea. There's a lot of discovery going on with this thing. Now here you can see I'm drawing a lot more. Instead of putting down a big batch of color, I'm going in with my small brush, adding some details here, and attacking this example with more of a, of a drawing. To begin with, I like the idea of putting down color first, but you can mix and match however you want to do it. Now that was more blocking some color in getting some color down, but using my small brush to do it. But look how cool that looks when you start combining this random idea of painting and drawing and bouncing back and forth between those two ideas. Super cool, fun way to approach your subject and to approach applying paint. These are all painting techniques, things that are going to hopefully get you to think a little bit differently about your subjects and how you, instead of doing things in an ABC way, you have multiple ways to play with it. So here I've got my small brush again and I'm drawing, I'm drawing a few lines around the sign on top of the taxi. Drawing a few lines on the back of the taxi to create the trunk, adding some dark hues into that for the tires, creating some cool line work there. I'm going back into the grill so you can see it's funky. It's not really anything that is somewhat close to the subject, but the image is just a means to paint. That's all it is. It's a, hey, look at me, I'm cool. And then that's it. We take it from there and we put our own twist on things. We add our personality and our way of putting it down. In the end, I think it's just, it becomes a little more creative. There's a lot more freedom, more room for error too. But it's so much better than painting in a cookie cutter fashion. Look at all the drawing I'm putting in on this one taxi, nice and free with it. And you'll start to see how this can become an addictive way of painting. When I'm painting, honestly, I like to infuse the two ideas. I find myself always picking up a crayon, a piece of charcoal, or even my brush. I draw with my paint brush a lot to. I carve my subjects out through painting the blocks of color values. And then I use the brush or whatever else to, to draw some of the details and edges and things like that that need may be a little more attention anyway. Yeah, you can start to see how this combination is starting to help out a little bit. I've got a little bit of leftover paint on the palette, and I've got a little time here and I got some paper leftover too. So I'm going to fill this thing up. I can tell you when I was painting this, I just had a ton of fun with it. I did a bunch of them. I'm only showing you this one, but I have a stack. I really got into the idea of it and just really embraced it. And I did a bunch of different things that I did with it. Maybe at the end of the class I'll show some of the stuff that didn't make the cut. It's just that you don't want to hear me say the same thing over and over again. I just try to get the ideas out there. And then I figure if what I have out there is good enough, then I don't need to repeat myself. And you guys don't need to hear me repeat myself. All right? Now, just blocking in color. So just kind of random painting. Random drawing, right? You can see me drawing in the head lights, drawing in different details of the taxi, the wheels. I'm running out of space down there obviously, but I'll get in what I can. And again, combining the two, which is a lot of fun, and of course you could do this with any subject. I thought this would be cool because a scene like this has a lot of detail, there's a lot of options. It gives us pretty much everything we need. We've got some manmade object, we things in nature of the trees and stuff. A lot to choose from there in terms of how we can bounce around. But of course you can use images from your beach, vacation and fruit, whatever. I'm going to do some tropical fruit with this idea in the next few lessons. Starting out with some cars and building, I'll show you how we can take it and blend it with something else. And hopefully that's enough of inspiration and information for you to run with it. Now notice the strokes I just put down that was very much drawing with my brush, that you don't always have to use thin, transparent watercolor. Sometimes it's nice just to dip into that thick paint and just put a little bit of water on it and go rich and put down those big accent colors. Pop it on a few places here and there. It has a nice look to it as well, Especially if you can infuse really thin washes with those washes. And then give it some of that nice thick paint as well, more opaque, that honey mixture, there it is. There's my study infusing painting and drawing. I'll bring you in a little bit closer so you can see some of the paint. And see some of that thicker texture and stuff like that that I use. Again, fun, fun stuff. That's the way it should be. Should be fun. You shouldn't be stressed out, biting your fingernails and sweating out the next masterpiece. Just have fun with it, people, the masterpieces will come so long as you're enjoying the process and learning how to use the medium. Okay, so again, blending drawing and painting using various techniques. Minimal details, thin and thick paint. And you saw the picture there, so have fun with it. You guys run with it and I'll see you in the next lesson. 31. Going Bananas: More painting techniques and drawing with the paint brush This time we're going to go bananas. We're going to draw details with a brush, some outlines, some shapes volumes, things like that. We want to maintain that watercolor look. We're going to blend some cache shadows so they don't look too stiff. And then of course, a little wrap up at the end where we will check out the artwork. And then give you a few more tips on how you can use these ideas. There is the inspiration image. Again, drawing with a pencil is common. I'm just going to demonstrate it here. I would think about this more in terms of a sketch playing around with it. Not trying to do a photo representational drawing. Just working quick and looking at angles and being a little more playful versus being a little bit trying to be realistic. As I mentioned before, we take that same idea and try to replicate that with a paintbrush. I'm going to use some yellow ochres, some burnt sienna, some neutral, some different colors that are on the palette. I, I encourage you to be loose with the colors when you do this exercise. Because if you don't, then you're going to end up with a drawing sketch painting that's going to completely be free or the drawing isn't going to be visible. When you use the arbitrary colors and you put a few dark values in the light area, a few light values in the dark area, then those marks tend to hold up throughout the sketch. All that second drawing there, again, just drawing with the brush. And here I'm going to add some hue to the volume of the banana. Now notice is hit, and miss, I didn't cover up every single inch of the white of the paper. I'm being loose, but I'm, I'm letting the colors mingle and fuse a little bit on their own. That second hue was just a little bit of burnt sienna with that. That was just a little bit of dark blue. Since the banana is a dominant warm yellow, I thought it'd be good to add a little bit of coolness to that. That's just like the chair exercise and the different things we've done so far to break up a flat wash. A flat wash would be if you only used one hue and everything was warm or everything was cool and when it dries, it just looks flat and boring, even though there's no blue or green. Perhaps in the inspiration image, you have to remember that the picture or the photograph is what it is. As an artist though, we have to make things look interesting on the paper. Now, if you had a job and your job was to create an illustration that represents the photo, then of course you wouldn't have the liberty to do these things. But if your quest is to create a nice watercolor sketch and to have to portray and to have that sort of loose carefree feeling, that water color is so good at that sort of randomness, right? Happy accidents. Then we have to take some liberty to make some changes, okay? And to have a little bit of fun with it, I'm there, I'm just doing a little bit of lifting. So that was a damp brush but had very little water in it. It was just damp enough to extract some of that paint. But it was important to note that I got in and I got out. I didn't sit there and fudge and mess with it too much. I had a job to do. I decided how I wanted to do it and I did it and I left it alone. All right. So now I'm going to work a little bit of cash shadow into the banana there on the bottom. And I'll do the same here for the banana on the left. Just creating some hard edges. When you paint wet into wet, obviously the colors are going to fuse and blend. But as I do the hair dryer here and things start to dry and they become a little bit lighter in value as water color does when it dries, then I can come back and make a hard edge or two just to show the shape and volume of that banana. All right, here I'm using a little bit of red, a cad red light in with some burnt sienna and doing some drawing. All right, adding details. By drawing and not so much painting, that's where drawing can really be fun. If you are an illustrator and you like to do these things and you like this idea of drawing, use this in your illustrations because it's really a great way to have a nice playful look to the artwork, everything that it needs. It gives it shape. It gives it form. You can start to feel where the shadow is. You can start to feel where the darker sides of the banana are. Here, I'm just doing a little more drawing, just using some more of those hues that are on the palette. Creating that peel and trying to make it look decent. The goal is to, again, it isn't to copy the image, it's just to create a capture the essence of it so that when you stand back and you look at it from a normal view and distance, you can see it's a banana, so you don't have to sit there and scratch your head about what it is. But then as you get up close to it, it starts to fall apart a little bit. All these hues and these lines and everything, they start to pop out a little bit more and you start to see that playfulness right now as I go into this banana, I'm using much thicker paint. This is almost straight out of the tube paint. A lot of people don't use watercolor that way, that gets back to that milk and honey. Tea is very thin, watery, and transparent. Milk is very transparent, but not so much as tea mixtures. And then honey is a really thick out of the tube paint. You can use it that way. It's okay, it's perfectly fine. You don't have to have the entire watercolor sketch or painting to be transparent. I personally feel you want a little bit of each. You want that light transparent wash. You want that thicker milk wash. You want those opaque areas too, like for accents and things like that. Whenever we look at this image, when it's done, you'll be able to see those thicker areas that I put in. That's fine. It's almost like painting with acrylics, but you're getting the best of both worlds. You're getting those transparent, watery mixtures. And then you're getting those thick strokes of almost texture paint there. I painted the banana first and then I came back with the shadow. I'm letting that shadow bleed into the yellow and the gold in the banana. Whenever you're experimenting with these ideas, mix it up a little bit, paint the shadow first, and then come back and paint the banana. Paint the banana, then do the shadow. Draw some outlines first and then come back and fill it in with some color. Put some color down like I'm doing now, just random going back and forth to the shadow side, the light side, and then come back and add some line work. That's what it's all about. You don't want to get stuck or get in this habit of doing things the same way all the time there. The beauty of this doodling and sketching, and hopefully this whole class, is to introduce you to the basics, the characteristics, and get you to embrace that first. Then to teach you some ideas on how we can exploit and have a little bit of fun with it and not be so stiff about it. All of these techniques can be combined. You can use this idea of drawing like I'm doing now, and combine it with different things that we've covered, different subjects, things like that. You can see now I'm going back in with some line work and all of this is still not really wet. But you can see that bottom left banana has a lot of sheen to it, that's very wet. But I've got another little area here. I want to cover this page with bananas again, just playing around. Now I find the more I do this and the more I get into it, the looser things become, the more ideas start to circulate too. That's why it's so important to do these things. Finished art is good, but it's just simply a. Measuring stick of what you already know. You're never going to do your best work when you're doing a finished painting. It's like a performance, a ballet dancer, actor or whatever. When they do rehearsals or whatever, they nail it. Or when they're in there practicing on their own, the nail it. But when you're out there in front of the audience and the music's on, the lights are on, we tend to give it about if we can do 80% 75% of what our capability is, we're lucky, that's the way it goes and that's how finished art is. But when you're in here and you're doing these doodling and you're care free about it, there's no pressure anymore. So you're not stressing out on having to paint something awesome that you can post on Instagram. You have this, okay? I'm going to experiment. I want to play and I want to learn. And I want to push the boundaries of what I know. If I sit there and paint what I know all the time, then what's the point? This stuff, what I'm showing you now, mindless sometimes maybe or may seem like what's the point? What am I after? But for artists, for those of you that spend time, you do this, what it's going to teach you, and what you may already know is that it starts to develop a style. You start to find things that you latch onto. There's other things that you may not latch onto that you may say, well, but that isn't quite what I'm after. Maybe I don't want to pursue that angle. But the goal is to do things in a way that you wouldn't ordinarily do them. And you find discovery. You start to see things differently. And you start to develop these signature brush strokes, these color mixing. And approach just the attitude alone that, hey, I can approach my art in this very carefree way and not stress out about it. Or I can sit here and knuckle down and hold the brush tight and clench my teeth and do something very forced and stiff and predictable. We don't want to do that. Art is once you start learning the medium and you start getting comfortable with what its ranges are, then it comes down to your signature. What is your art like? And how can you put your personality, your style and energy into it? And this is what this stuff teaches you. If you do it over and over and over again, you're going to start to develop that personal connection to the medium and your subjects. And unifying your own voice, your own way of doing things. Hopefully this video helped. I thought it was pretty good there. I'm just removing some paint so you can see the shadow. But yeah, that was a lot of fun. I totally enjoyed this exercise of painting and drawing and working with a simple subject just to find my way. But in the end, I thought it was a great piece. I mean, I would probably take that hang in my kitchen. I love stuff like that. But anyway, so drawing details with the brush, varying the hues and values and the thickness of the paint, we want to maintain that care free water color look in different ways that you can blend, cast shadows, working wet into wet and so on. So hopefully you enjoyed it and of course, I'll see you in the next one. 32. Project Melons with Fusion: All right, similar to the bananas, we're going to do the same idea. So we want to draw a little bit, but this would be more of like a minimalistic drawing, just adding a little touch here and there, again, varying the hues and values, maintaining that loose watercolor look. We'll do some wet and wet fusion to get some gradation, fuse shadows in the object and then a conclusion at the end so we can have a look at the artwork and a little recap. All right, so using my small pointed around. Going to start with this drawing of the top of the melon. If you're looking at the melon inspiration there on the right, I'm doing the one in the top left hand side now. I know I can come right below that with some darker green. I mix that green with a little bit of cobalt, a little bit of lemon yellow. Barely touch it. When barely touch it like that, it's going to blend. We're going to get that fusion. The green and yellow will start to mix, but also the yellow that I put down was thicker than the green I'm putting down now because it's a little bit thicker paint, that this thin wash that I'm doing with the green on the shadow side isn't going to invade it as much. Just a little thing about using that thicker paint is going to, again, allow the moisture to be a little more resistant to it. But it's still going to blend a little bit like you see here. You notice if we look at the inspiration image and compare that to what I'm doing, they're not really close. They're similar perhaps in the perspective and all but color matching, looking at the exact places where it's light and value and darken value and all that stuff. I mean, there's imperfections when we compare it to the image, but you can't be too concerned about that, okay? I mean, if you stress out about that stuff, then that's where you're going to ruin the watercolor feeling all here. I started with the shadow side. I took the green, the darker green in first. Here I'm adding some yellow ochres and some siennas and dropping that into it. Now I'm going to go super thick on the yellow. This is in between honey and milk. So a nice thick mixture. We this is the skin or the rind and then I'll just wrap that around. That was a nice drawing line by the way. Although it was just a thin stroke, I treated it as I was drawing that edge right around. I'll get to that yellow in a minute. Apparently, I'm going to do a little gradation here. I know it's wet. Okay. So I can take a darker mixture of the green and run it along the bottom. And now I just let it mingle. I'm not going to fuss with it. However it dries is fine with me as long as I get a little touch of that darker hue towards the base of the orange where, where it's fading away from us. That's all I wanted. A gradation from a lighter shade of green to a darker shade of green when we go in there and we start messing with it and go, oh, it doesn't look like the picture. It's look like that picture. That's when we start really getting in trouble. We just want a depiction of a melon and a sliced melon and that's it. If you're after a photo representational um, piece here, then honestly you probably should be doing oils or acrylics or something more conducive to that because you're really going to lick your paint so much that it's going to lose that watercolor look about it. And what's the point of using watercolor? If you're going to force control to not really do what's best designed to do. It's like buying a Ferrari and going 10 miles an hour everywhere. You know, if you just want to put around, then buy yourself a little Hyndai or something here. I did the inside green of the melon and now I'm going around with a ochre and some burnt sienna and adding the feel of the rind, there was a little bit lighter value on that area. That's hitting sun, hitting the light rather. And I know that's going to blend and bleed a little bit. That's okay. That's what it's supposed to do. When we start to get in the way of that is when we tend to get in trouble. Water color is like, hey, this is what I'm designed to do, oh, well, I'm not going to let you do that. All right. Now I'm going to mix up a nice dark shade here, a dark value, I should say, where some of this is starting to dry. Now I can start to go back into it where that rind is now. It is probably still damp, but it's starting to dry a little bit. I'm going to get some bleeding but it shouldn't bleed as bad as it would have had I did it as soon as I painted it. That's just a matter of timing, being a little bit patient with it. I'm dropping a little bit thicker and darker paint there at the base where it's touching the ground. That's going to anchor it a little bit more so it doesn't feel like it's floating there. It's good to have that little bit of a contact shadow in it here. Just more of a neutral gray there. Not as much color in that shadow. You can see it. All that green is still very wet. All that's bleeding into the shadow. But that's what I did and I think the natural instinct would be to try to try to fix that instead of letting it do its thing when it dries. That's going to be interesting to look at, just as interesting as something that maybe is painted a little bit better or more accurately. It's those accidents really that are a big part of what are color painting. But unfortunately, our brain doesn't like imperfections, especially us adults. We try to correct things to death. I'm going back in with some darks now, starting to just put some dots down and draw some little shapes of seeds in there. And speaking of drawing, as I said, this is more of a minimalistic drawing. I'm getting the bulk of the painting down and then I'll come back and do some sketchy lines later on. Now I'm using thicker yellow paint to capture the light hitting the slice there. That top part of the slice, it's going to show the thickness of it. That's all starting to look good. I like how everything is starting to fuse together. I'm using a little bit of Cad red, a little bit of burnt sienna, some neutral ultra marine as well, into that. And coming up with the wish dark color and mixing that a little bit with the greens as well. Now I'm going to add some color first, but add some seeds or a little shapes that could be the seeds in this part of the melon at the end, The viewer to look at it, they could care less. They're not going to see the inspiration image, they're just going to look at it. Oh yeah, those are sets. You only need to draw one or two or have one or two defined. The rest just can be little dots are done really loosely because they're going to envision or make up the rest of it in their mind. Once they see one, they'll see a bunch more. That's the beauty of loose abstract painting. Now, using my dark hue here, a little bit of this grayish color, grayish blue that's on the palette, and adding a little cast shadow, That yellow is still wet, so the rind of that, and that's okay. I want that to run a little bit of enticing the water color to give me some magic. Right? Not trying to avoid it here. I'm starting to draw, now. I'm drawing some lines, some edges and some angles and stuff like that. Details that I missed out on when I was painting it. But when we paint wet into wet like this, you know, you're going to have a lot of soft edges. And now I can come back with this brush, my small little liner here, and just draw some details. That's all I'm doing here. You can see I'm drawing the, the wedge on the top. Bringing that line down into the Rhine. Drawing a few seeds and just bouncing around a little bit there. Using some blues, more of a blue green here. Playing with color, trying to see how far I can push it. Again, minimalistic drawing, but drawing nevertheless. Again, this will be a lot of fun to do for some illustration and different things like that where you want to look like the object, but you want to add a little playfulness to it. But anyway, there it is. Hopefully you liked it. So some minimalistic drawing and painting, again, varying hues and values, keeping that loose watercolor look little wet and wet for fusion. And using Fusion, of course, for the shadows and the object, everything is nice and loose the way it should be. I'll see you guys and the next one. 33. Exploit Drawing: This demo, we're going to exploit drawing. We're going to keep the washes thin. We will look at variegated washes, adding perspective lines just to give the piece a little more depth. And we're going to use minimal details, which could be an ongoing topic as you probably know. And then a conclusion. At the end, we'll have a look at the art and a little wrap up. There's my inspiration image in the right. Even though this is an off white building, if you squint down, it should remove some of the color. You'll realize how dark that building is. The mistake when doing this, this type of artwork, I should say, is either to go too dark or too light when you're dealing with a light subject like this. If you just compare the building to the sky, you'll see it's definitely a mid tone. You have to take into account, you want to lose about 15 to 20% of the value of the color because we are dealing with water color, there's going to be that drop off as it dries. What I'm doing now was just using a mix of some neutrals, some yellow ochres in there. You can see there's a little bit of blue as well that is considered a variegated wash. You're not using one hue, you're actually using multiple hues. We've done this before, this is nothing new, but a variegated wash is suitable. Even though we look at this building, we could easily just pick a pinkish off white and just paint the whole building that color. You have to know it's just simply going to look very flat and dull. The goal isn't to reproduce the image and do an illustration of it, is more to use it for inspiration, for creating some art. Something that resembles water color, that has the characteristics and so on. Here I'm dropping a little bit of yellow in there. And I just want to make sure again that we have an interesting wash when all of this is done. Now we don't want to fudge with it too much. That's just simply going to dull the colors. Even if you add warm and cool hues, you're just going to basically rub the paint to death and all the crystals and things like that are going to rub together. And then you end up with something that's flat even though you use multiple colors. All right, so as you can see, as this is drying, it's getting much lighter. I think for this example, I wanted to do two versions there. I'm just showing you my sword brush. So I'm going to get mix up. Any of gray, slightly warm, slightly cool in some areas, water down. But we can't go too thin or the line is not going to show up over this mid tone that we've put down for the building. But we don't want it too thick either just in that milk mixture area. Something like that. Should work pretty good. I don't like using the same color. I'll mix up a little burgundy, a little blue, and then maybe a gray just so that when, when I'm painting, I get multiple colors. Again, this is a fairly dark version, probably a little too dark, but we can still work with it. But we have to think about and plan things as we do our art. Let's say you wanted to do a style like this and exploit some of the drawing techniques that you've learned, then you have to start to think in terms of layers and say, okay, well if I put down this darker value building, what's that going to leave me? Then I'll have to go even for the detail. As you see, I'm adding details. I'm drawing, all this is nothing but me pretending I have a pencil on my hand or a piece of charcoal, and I'm drawing those windows and the other details in the building. But again, so you have to say, okay, well, if I have to put a darker layer down for some of the details and then maybe there's another layer of dark that I'll need to put in for, maybe even more details. If we look at the windows, the windows are very dark, then there's the detail inside the window. If we want to add a little hint to that stuff, then we have to plan accordingly, so we have to knock back the value a little bit or sometimes just again, it depends on what you're painting. In other cases, you may have to go too dark or a little bit darker. It just depends. But again, this is just thinking about a little bit of what you want to do with the art before you begin. You can see that little green blob that's on the end of the building. I just did a few little drawing marks around that, just to say that's a tree, it's very playful, it's very simple, and it's got a really nice look about it. I think it or lends itself well to watercolor painting here. I'm going back in and just adding a few dots, a few lines, some drawing strokes in there just to give the painting and building a little more depth here. I'm using really thick paint so the windows that I painted in earlier have already started to dry again. They're going to dry a little bit lighter, so now I can go in with thicker and darker paint and add a few more details, a few more accents just to make it a little more believable. But again, I really like this sort of look, this idea of combining drawing and painting. It's just a lot of fun to work with. And when you get a, a subject that has a lot of details and information like this, like a building, then you can really have a lot of fun with it and take it to the next level. But I'm going to pause right here and I'll see you in the second example of this demo. In this example, I'll use the same image, but I'm going to knock the value back a little bit. The building itself is going to be a midtone, but I'm not going to go as dark. That's going to give me a little more wiggle room. That's, I think the, the challenge with watercolor painting is when you want to do this layering thing and all that, it's just really trying to get your washes the right value because it's tricky to see. That's exactly why I put the value challenge early on in this course. Because when you're looking at colors, a lot of times we're enamored with the yellow or the blue or whatever it is, but we don't really see the true value of it. That just takes a little bit of time and then of course, you factor in the fact that water color is just going to dry. Lighter depends on how wet the paper is when you put the paint down. As far as like, how much of that pigment is going to get absorbed and blended and washed out by the water. All those things matter, It takes mileage. But I think those are the things that many artists get frustrated with and they move on to acrylic or oil or whatever. I think if you can start to harness and some of the mystery of it or some of those particulars. And I think the medium is going to become very enjoyable. And it's really imperfections and everything that make the medium so charming and so much fun to work with. But again, if you're new or if you've been doing it for a while and you're just approaching it the wrong way and you're trying to control everything, Then of course, you really struggle with it because you're trying to use it in a way that in my feeling, an opinion that it's just not really intended to do. All right, so look at the drop off we're getting already. You can see with the hair dryer there, that hue is really starting to lose a little bit of value. That's it, that's the characteristic of the medium that we have to contend with. But when we start to compare that to the value that I'm doing now to the building on the right, you'll see I'm a couple of shades lighter. That's going to, again, give me a little more wiggle room to use a little bit lighter lines initially. Then my detail, my final marks. I don't have to be as dark as well. If they are as dark then they're going to pop a little bit more, even at this stage. If you compare the lines I'm doing now to the lines that are on the first version, you'll see they're lighter in value. I'm not having to opt for a much darker value to get this first layer of detail and drawing in, that's what this is it. That's what I'm doing, right, exactly. What's happening is I'm using my brush as a drawing device. That could be a piece of charcoal, crayon, or whatever. I'm basically drawing in a lot of those details in the building here. I'm just decided to spontaneously add a little figure. I'll lift a little bit of that paint there, put a little skin tone on it. Perhaps we'll just make something a little bit more out of this sketch here, out of the study. I also left a little area there to add a car. We're turning this one into more of a painting almost. But again, that's not my intention, just letting the creative spirit take over a little bit. I've got my windows, obviously. If you looked at the windows, if you measure them, proportions and all that stuff, I'm way off. But I just simply trying to paint a building that has windows and some architectural interest. The image is just simply a way, means for me to do that. I'll glance at it once in a while and extract a few details and then I do my own thing. It's a lot of fun. All of this dry marks too, we're getting that texture. Now, I'll go back in and add a few more details towards the top. Again, I'm not counting the windows trying to get them perfect. I'm not looking at every single detail on the building as well. All of that is, it is what it is. But I want the art to be different than the actual building. If I were hired by the person who owns the building and they wanted a piece of art that resembled it, then maybe I would tighten things up a little bit and do something that was more of a depiction or more accurate of the building itself. But since this is art, I've got freedom to exploit it however I want to do it. And I tend to always take that again, look at all these lovely little drawing marks here and lines, having fun with some of those features and details. And that's what it's all about, the variegated wash, adding that little bit of yellow and blue to that wash initially on both of them, that really makes a big difference. That takes a flat, boring color into something more exciting. Yeah, you can't look at the building and say it exists, because it really doesn't. But when you look at the art though, you can tell it looks more alive and it looks more interesting and all that stuff. I'll add a little shadow to that side of the building. Even though, again, that shadow really doesn't exist. I thought I would go ahead and make it a little darker just so it has a little more a shape and volume to it. I'll use the napkin once in a while just to lip the little paint so the wash doesn't, again, become too flat and similar all the way in the shadow area. Using my hair dryer here, I'm drying it off a little bit. I'll lift a little bit here and there just to break up hard lines and that sort of thing. The main thing is we always want to leave out more than we add to it. I think that's a good rule of thumb to think about in terms of details. Again, you don't want to add every single detail that's in the image, or then it's going to lose that fresh, playful watercolor look here. Working a little bit thicker now a little bit darker in value, adding a few details. Now I'm going into the windows to add the little lines and stuff that are in the windows. But hit, miss, hit and miss get a few of them, a few go hit a few of them, let go. It's a balance game, but at the same time, you have to know what it is you're working with and what it is you're trying to do. This is all about exploiting drawing and infusing more drawing into it. The drawing is, as you can see, ideal for details, adding texture, adding information to the building itself. Any outline, like I did with the tree or something like that is a plus. This is a really good way to go outside and do plane air studies and things like that as well. This quick line and wash thing, line and wash. I think most artists, when they use that, they'll They tend to put a line around everything and then just fill in some color, which I think is a little more interesting, a little bit different than that. These are just perspective lines. I'm going to pretend this is a square, we've got these big stones or whatever on the ground, but it adds a little Perspective lines even pulls you in towards the building a little bit, but those are always fun to put in. I can see there's some cobblestone or something going on on the street in the piece. I just changed up the stone type and decided to do a little bit different here. Throw a few figures into the piece on the right, that's really thick paint that's basically added the tube stuff. You don't want to go too weak over dark paint like that. It'll really start to look washed out. Look what happens once I add the shadow on this first version. Things really start to get dark. Now that there's anything wrong with that. Maybe you want to pop it against a blue sky or maybe there are some white cars or some figures wearing white shirts. And you want to accentuate all of that by having a dark background. Of course, you can do all that too. I'll just throw a little figure here in the foreground. Just for fun, notice the quick little drawing strokes there. Nice and easy. This is just a wet brush. Nice and clean, no pigment on it. I'm just going to lift some of that paint. When you lift it, just make sure there's times where we don't want to disrupt the paint underneath and there's times we want to disrupt it. It just depends on what you're after. I was trying to remove paint, Obviously, rubbing a wet brush into that would lift it here. Mixing up a little bit of a dark green, throw a little shadow on that tree. A lot of fun. And this is just a tremendous amount of freedom to paint this way. And think about your brush as a drawing tool sometimes. And just study your subject and try to get an idea of how you want to use lines in the work. Just experimenting, which is what this is. Again, doing studies like this is more important than doing finished art. All right, let's have a look at the piece here. There it is. Taking a natural light. I'll bring you in a little bit closer just so you can see some of the detail, some of that nice drawing work and how that blends nicely with the subject itself. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. In this lesson, we exploited the drawing. We kept the washes mostly thin so that we could draw on the lines and we wouldn't have to go too dark. We talked about variegated washes. I showed you a quick little tool of how you could use perspective lines by adding some little squares or just something like that on the ground to pull you in towards the building. Minimal details. Again, leave out more than you put in and you should be good to go. I hope you enjoyed it. And I'll see you guys in the next one. 34. Project Introduction: Now it's time to move on to some projects In this section, we're going to back pedal a little bit and revisit some of the exercises or similar exercises that we have done, but we're going to add a level of complexity to them, so you're going to see some things that are familiar to you. But again, they're going to be a little more challenging because the subject requires perhaps a little bit better drawing skills or a little bit better handling of your brush and so on. All right, so I hope you enjoy the projects now. We'll see you when you're finished. Bye. 35. Project Ice Cream: All right, welcome to the project. Three scoops and a cone. So wet and wet techniques working with thin washes. We're going to use the background and do a little bit of negative space shaping and painting details. So we're going to use drawing to add some of the details. And then a little wrap up at the end using my mop brush here and just a little bit of water. And I'm going to draw out loosely, three scoops of ice cream. Again, leaving a little bit of the white of the paper or the dryness of the paper. I'm not covering every single little spec of the paper. So just roughing it in, similar to what we did with the metal pots. Now a little bit of green on top, so maybe a little mint chocolate chip or something there, a little pistachio action for the top scoop. This scoop can be a little chocolate or something. Little salted caramel. My favorite. Anyway, I love that salted caramel. Can't beat that. Now, working with a little bit of Alizarin Crimson just really thinned out a little strawberry or something on the bottom. We got that roll in there, there's our three scoops. Notice I'm using scrap paper. I'm going to use a dark background. I thought it'd be fun to use a little sheet like this. If you had the quarter sheets or little scraps sitting around. They're great for these fun little paintings. And I don't know, there's something about painting on a piece of paper that's not stark white. That just relaxes me. So I'm not stressed out like, oh my God created something awesome. So it's like it's just a scrap piece of paper. I can go for it. What's the loss? The bottom, there was just a little bit of yellow ochre, a little burnt sienna for the cone. Notice I'm slapping the brush down, I'm getting these little splatter marks on some of the cones and stuff like that. Just adding to the fun. This is a super easy subject. It's not like we have to stress out about painting figures and cars and things that require more effort and drawing skills. These are just simple shapes now, just working with thicker paint here. Okay, And just dropping it into the ice creams that the scoops that are already there. That's all I'm doing is just adding a little bit of thicker paint into it, allowing the fusion, allowing it to go. I want the bottom of the ice creams to be a little bit darker. The bottom, each scoop, then that top left hand side to be a little bit darker. Light source, say coming from the top left. Using my hair dryer here, I'm going to dry it off a little bit and remove some of that moisture. See, it is really starting to puddle up. I guess I'll use my napkin there to remove a little bit of that pigment. Probably remove too much. I'll remove a little bit on each side of the scoop of ice cream just to give the illusion of some light. Again, just my small liner brush now and I'm drawing, okay, I'm using my paint brush as a drawing tool, as if I had a pencil and just drawing in the texture and the detail in the cone. That's another good way to go back, take a little stroll down Memory Lane. Remember, the drawing with the brush is a lot of fun. It adds detail. It can take something that was just a blob of yellow and brown and make it into a cone just with a few diagonal strokes. Now I'm going to tilt the board and encourage a little bit of back running with the wash. Instead of it all running in one direction, I'm just going to have it run uphill a little bit just to mix it up. That's it. You can see it's starting to dry, it's starting to get a lot lighter in value. Remember, you're always going to have that 15 to 20% drop off. That's just the way it is now for the background. I don't want to be too thick, so I want to maintain some transparency. I'm going to use a little bit of ultramarine, a little bit of burnt senna, a little bit of neutral tint. As I go around the ice cream, some areas I will overlap and we'll get that transparent, those layers that stack over top of each other. Then in other areas, I'm going to leave the white of the paper. I'll steer clear of painting over any of the ice cream or the cone that's just going to create some white edges. The background color, it doesn't have to overlap all the ice cream. So you're getting some areas that are some areas that are layered. Hopefully in the end, it'll just be an interesting shape with the background. That's all I'm doing. Notice as I did the cone, I'm trying to get that texture of a cone. I use the lines to create the diagonals, but if you were looking at the cone, it would be like these indentations of that texture. I just tried to indicate that real loosely, wasn't stressed out about it, was trying to do it perfectly. But I thought, well, using the negative space painting, using that background to short it up a little bit and just to add a little texture is always a good idea real quick here, painting a lot of fun. I'm going back into the cone a little bit just to add a bit more of the texture. Some of that just faded a little bit as a dried, removing a little paint with my napkin as I go here too. Nothing really to see here. Just eight times real speed drying it off and there's a finished piece. A lot of fun. My daughter has already claimed this one. She wants this in her room. Here you go with this one. We again work wet into wet using mostly thin washes. We use the background for shaping. So to shape the ice cream, to shape the cone, to give it a little texture. And that's about it. So I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one. 36. Project Lipstick and Makeup: All right, welcome to the demo. We will do some perfume and lipstick. Working with wet and wet again. Thin and thick paint. Try not to control the fusion and gravity and minimal details and a little wrap up at the end. All right. Using my small detail brush, I'll start out with just, well, it's a neutral brown. A little bit of neutral gray with some yellow ocher and burnt CN in it. And I'll touch a little bit of darker in that as well just to get it to bleed and blend a little bit so it's not flat. Now I'll draw the case starting out very simple here. Just maybe a little canister or a little make up thing there. A little eyelashes or whatever it is, it could be. And lash makeup, I should say. And then we'll start to get into some color and some more exciting stuff here. But now moving in with some color, I'll start with some yellow. That's got a yellow ochre, A little bit of lemon yellow in it. And I'll remove some of that, so we start to get that thin, very transparent look. I'll mix in a little bit of red, that's probably a little bit of a lizard and crimson, a little touch of orange in that as well. And starting to get that fusion going on. Nice blending and bleeding of hues into each other that we love so much. And a little bit thicker paint there for the top of the bottle. I guess it could be a little bit of perfume or something. Now, I'll move into a little bit of thick yellow, that really thick paint again, it's going to be hard to penetrate that for a thinner wash. Now I'll use a little bit of neutral tint there. You'll see that yellow on the top is bleeding down into it. But again, that dark hue there isn't going to be able to penetrate that thick paint as much. Now, I'll just touch that on to the right hand side of the bottle. It'll look a little bit too dark at first, but over time that's going to bleed and dry. So it's going to look a little bit lighter once it's all said and done. All right. Now I'll move in with some watered down, thinned out Alizarin crimson. And I'll take a little bit of straight cad, red medium there and just drop it into the pigment. You'll get this pink under base and then the red fusing into it. It's hard to pick it up on the camera, but I think once the demo is over and I'll show you the artwork, you'll see a subtle difference there. I just lifted a little bit on the right hand side of that bottle. Just give it a little bit of a boxy look. The other objects were more round, they didn't really have a square look to it. I wanted this one to have a square look. This is all random. I've seen art and different things make up. My wife has it and my mom had it and all that stuff. Just making things up a little bit. I've seen little sketches like this on Pentrast in different places, just working out of my head. But just really the goal here is to let the watercolor medium shine, really encourage those happy accidents. Do these easy things so that we can remember and remind ourselves how important it is not to control every single brushstroke and every single area of the painting. That's why these easy objects like this are so important because there's more room for freedom for some reason when we start to do the simple things. Then when we start to do things that are more complex, what we're hoping for is that some of this carefree attitude and tolerance that we've learned with these things will bleed and blend into our fussiness. And hopefully we get more and more tolerant and lenient as we go. All right, a little bit of lipstick there, started with the bottom that ochre and then added some reds and crimsons, even thicker paint there at the top. Here. I'm starting with the lipstick itself, starting with the intense reds and now changing into a black base for the bottom. A little bit of dry brush there going on, and you can see that bleeding nicely into it. And that's what we're trying to do. We're after this goal of just allowing the water and gravity do its thing, to allow the colors to mingle and mix and not get in the way of it so much control the values, control the thickness of the paint, control what colors we put down and all that stuff. But once we start working that wet into wet and letting things, that's where we have to get out of the way. We work with what results we get versus say no, no, that's not what I was after, that's not going to work, That's not where I wanted it and then we start fighting it a little bit. That's why I put a lot of these projects into this course. Because I wanted the memory, the physical activity of, and mentally allowing these things to go and be versus the other way where we do very complex subjects and the next thing you know we're fighting it. Even the complex subjects can have just as much freedom and we want that. But again, you're stitching together backgrounds, middle grounds, foregrounds, and you're trying to compose and all that stuff. That's a whole other bag of tricks you got to pull out. I'm going to do a course next on composition design for watercolor. I think that's going to help a lot in terms of finding the freedom in those more complex subjects. But it does require a little more planning than just painting these simple objects, but very doable. And something we're going to work on a little bit more down the road. I was going to work that into this course, but I thought it was just a little bit too much. I wanted this course to be about embracing the randomness of water color, allowing it to be random. Trying to show and illustrate the things we can control, the things we need to control like value. And trying to get our forms to have light and shadow, to look decent and define that happy medium with our subjects, with the water color itself. Hopefully, by the end of this course, you will have embraced that. And you won't be a slave to all the details your subject and everything throw at you because they are. It's going to continue to hammer you and tell you you have to paint this, you have to paint that, You must include this detail, you must include that branch, but you don't. That comes over time with practice and just putting the miles and visually seeing your art in perhaps a more unfinished and raw state. Of course, the exercises help too, because it gets you in the mood and it teaches you that you don't have to have all of those things. Less can be more here. Just lifting some of that paint. Very little water on my brush now. Damp. Nothing else really on it but just damp, bristles and trying to lift some of that pigment. I thought maybe a good idea to do a little label on that one, since I haven't really drawn into any of these. Maybe at the end I'll do a fancy label on that one. Now I'm dropping a little bit of dark values here and there. Everything is still pretty wet. So I can start to time things a little bit. If I see something that needs a little bit of a darker value, I can drop a little bit into it. All right. Another little purple hue wash here. Putting that down nice and thin, very transparent. I'll probably have to let that dry before I go too much further with it, but I'll add a little top to it. Then I'll come back in a moment and add a little detail to that. Just dropping some warm in that as well. It's not all cool, even though these are simple. I try to put a little bit of warm in there, sometimes add a little bit of cool into it as well, just to balance things out a little bit. A little bit of color harmony. You can see even though I've worked diligently to lift that label, that pigment is still very wet. The paper is very wet, so it's back filling that area. Not a problem. I can come back and lift a little bit of that now. I'll take my hair dryer to this a little bit and slow the bleeding down. But also the bottle on the left here that is that purple color. I want to get that nice and Dro, I want to add a little layer over top of that. That's all drawn off pretty good. I'm going to drop a little bit of dark value into the handle there. Probably a little perfume bottle. We will be off to the races to do a little bit more. Again, this is not dry yet. Probably getting to that 70% dry stage, I'm just dropping a little bit of color into it. Again, you have to be very careful here that you don't have too much water on your brush, because if the water is dominant, the paint isn't. So if you don't have like a good milk mixture thing going on or even thicker, then that water is going to disperse into that original wash, and that's where you start getting the cauliflowers that we don't really desire. All right, here's a little bit of drawing for you. Just making up a little label there into it. Just to add a little bit of drawing, add some of that, those techniques we worked on earlier in this course. Maybe one more to go here. Again, work in these pinks and magentas and violets. I'll just keep this one simple lipstick here, a faded slate gray with some very light pink. That pink is just water down a lizard and crimson lizard. And crimson is a great color for finding pinks that was very thick yellow. You know, now that really thick paint, it's going to get penetrated a little bit, but it's not going to dissolve like the thinner paint. Now, I'll add some darker touches here and there. Maybe some lighter touches if it needs it. Maybe a little bit of drawing a little dot and it's bouncing around and adding some interest to some of these. But we want to be fresh, and loose, and imperfect, and we don't want these things to look like we labored over them. We want to look like we had our feet kicked up, sipping on some ice tea and watching TV at the same time, like it was no big deal. That's how we wanted to look. If it looks like we were sweating bullets and gnashing the teeth and all that stuff, then we let the medium get the best of us and we didn't embrace what it can do. So well, that's a random painting. Happy accidents and all the things we've talked about. Anyway, a little extra touch here on that one in this. Go ahead and have a look at the artwork here so you can see the piece a little more saturated then probably the video camera can pick up on, but very loose, very free and very colorful. Again, this will make a nice little gift or a little piece for your bedroom or bathroom or something. Anyway, it's a good exercise for us as a learning tool. Again, working wet into wet, thin in thick paint, trying not to control fusion and graby, let it do its thing. Minimalistic details. That's it. I'll see you guys in the next one. 37. Project Metal Pots: All right, welcome to the project. This one is metal pots. So we're working with a minimalistic palette similar to what we did very early on with the spoons and forks, but we're going to use mostly thin washes. We're going to add touches of thick paint for detail. We're going to go over removing paint from a wet surface and then of course, minimal details, since we're just trying to get the gist of the subject. Now what I'm using is my large mop brush. And I'm using that one because I know it will hold a lot of water and it should be able to unload enough to do the entire shape of my metal pot. Now what I'm doing is I'm basically drawing with the brush. I am going over this, I'm going to bring it up close to the camera. I'm getting the basic shape down. But notice the little white areas, the dry paper that I'm leaving. That's important because once I start dropping paint into this, those little areas, they're not going to get covered. That's going to make a little more sense as I start pre, mixing my paint here. I'm going to switch now to my small brush. As we learned early on, water is a conduit for wet paint. If you use the tea and milk like mixtures and drop it into a wet surface like this, so long as your brush isn't too wet, it's going to extract the pigment off of the brush. Notice as I do this, it's spreading, but the areas that I left dry on the surface are remaining white. It's a really interesting technique, a little bit different than what we've tried, but it's basically the same idea. Again, just bouncing around a little bit using mostly neutral tint about my colors. I do use neutral tint on my palette. You can pre mix a gray. I covered that earlier on in this course, but I'm adding just a touch of yellow ochre in some areas, also adding a touch of burnt sienna. And there's probably a little bit of blue on my palette as well. I don't do a good job of cleaning my palette. I do that on purpose because I like using neutrals and a little bit of randomness to it. I don't like starting with a clean white palette mixing area, but mostly clean. Alright, so you can see now I'm starting to drop paint into it. This paint, it is a little bit thicker. I am using my small detail brush, so that is just a really small pointed liner and good for getting in these little bits and pieces of the pot. And now I'm mixing in a little bit darker mix here, again, neutral tint, and just adding a little more color to it, a little more of a darker value to the bottom of the pot. This is very random. I wasn't staring at an inspiration image or anything. I just wanted to paint this idea of simple gray scale pots and just really focus more on the technique of removing paint. Working wet into wet, pre wetting the paper like I did in the shape that I wanted, letting the paint do this thing. And it's not really about the pot itself, it's more about the approach to it. And a lot of times that's what art comes down to. It comes down to not so much the subject, but how was done and the approach you take to it. Here, I'm doing the same thing. I'm using my small detail brush this time because there's a few more little nooks and crannies in this one I'm pre wetting some of the areas, some of the masses of the shape. But I'm also leaving some of those as well. I say leaving some, I'm leaving some of the white of the paper. I'm leaving it dry. As this one progresses, you're going to see it's got some of these stripes that are coming down the front of it. Those stripes are getting wet and then the rest of it is staying dry again. As I add water to the surface, I'm trying to leave random areas where dry again. Once I add that, pigments going start to circulate and spread through the water, that's then the areas that are dry. Should remain the white of the paper. All right, Working again with a T mixture here, very thin but the neutral tents got a good amount of stain to it. It's going to do a good job in adding some value to this area. You can see already that as soon as you start touching pigment into those areas, it's going to spread. That's the cool thing about this technique. I want to say no, it's not as random as we did in some places where we did the chair and we splash water in random places, and the results were less predictable. This one is a little bit tighter than that because we're paper in the shape of the subject that we're doing. But again, some areas are dry so we're not wetting everything. You can see mostly neutral tint. I've got a little bit of that ochre in there as well. I think it's good to add just a touch of warm into the gray just to break up that coolness and the monotone, monochromatic look about it. I'll make the lid on this a little bit. I'll keep the bottom this very faint shade or value and then I'll keep the top part of the top a little bit darker and a little bit war. I have a bit of a ocher and burnt sienna in that. We've got this one working pretty good all the while. I'm going to work into these things a little bit. I'm trying to get my timing right. You see me going back into the first pot. Now, remember, whenever you go back into a wet surface like this, you have to be careful. I think this is where accidents will happen if your brush is too wet, if you don't have enough pigment and you have mostly water, you're going to start to get those ballooning results. You may or may not want those. I don't know, but I'm going to assume you're not going to want them. Just be careful about having too much water. Just make sure if you're mixing up paint, dry your brush off really good and then go back into your mixture and load your brush and then drop it into it. You don't have excess water on your brush? My water that I'm using to clean my brush is starting to get a little bit of contamination in there. It's got some of the grays I've been using on my brush, which is good now. As I pre wet the paper and pre wet the shape, you can start to see it a little more clearly what's going on. Again, wetting it, but leaving some of the white gaps in the paper, which you can see a little bit better here on this third version. Now that these other pots are starting to dry, timing is everything. You have to wait for things to set up. I want to work wet into wet. I don't want to dry completely and then go back into it because that's going to create those hard edges. And I want these to look blended and really have that fusion and gravity look about them that I love so much. Hopefully not overworked. Now I'll bounce back to my third pot here that was very thick paint and notice I did a quick stroke along the surface there, left a little bit of that texture of the paper mixing in a that fast stroke in there as well. Dropping in thick paint in places and then more diluted and thinner paint and others that when it dries it's not flat. It's interesting, it's enjoyable to look at. It wreaks the water color effects and accidents and stuff that we have worked so diligently on in this class. I wanted this last series of lessons to be a recap. But I also wanted to make them a little more challenging so that we're not, we're adding a kind of a layer of complexity to it. I'm trying to make them similar but slightly different. That way you got a little more of a challenge, but also you have some really good reminders. And sometimes you can try to do too much and it starts to get overwhelming. I wanted to make sure this course was bite size, it had plenty of content and information, but don't ever feel like you're overwhelmed. I think a big part of learning process is building upon what we, what you already know and adding to it that way. It's not like you're constantly throwing new things at you all the time. Hopefully this project, in the way I'm painting this, my approach to it, you can see that it's a little more challenging, but very similar. Hopefully, it'll be learning. Another tool, I should say, in your water color arsenal. And you can whip it out whenever you want. We could paint anything like this, bottles landscapes, it doesn't matter. You can always pre wet the shape you want to do and then let the water color in the fusion gravity and all that stuff take over. So here's what they look like. Dry. So again, these images are taken in natural light so you can get a good feel for the real color and everything. Nice and loose and easy. Nothing spectacular here, but a good playful stuff. And I think it's just a great learning exercise. Again, a minimalistic palette, mostly thin washes, but we did add thicker paint. As the piece in each pot progressed, we were able to remove paint with the brush. Again, make sure your brush isn't too wet so you don't leave a lot of water and water marks minimalistic details. Okay, that's it. I'll see you guys and the next one. 38. Project Slotted Spoons: All right, welcome to the project. This one will do slotted spoons, very similar to what we did with the pot. So a minimalistic palette, mostly thin washes. We're going to preserve some of the white space, very small details of little holes in the spoons. And of course we're going to allow water color to do it magic, starting with my pointed round. I'm going to pre wet some of the spoon, but I'm also going to leave a little area that I want to have some white dots title this slotted spoon, but there's really small holes that are in the utensils, but I'll use a similar thing here, again, in pre wetting the paper, getting that close to the shape that I want. I'm a little bit off screen here, but no worries. I'm going to adjust that in just a second. There you go, So you'll be able to see everything. I still paint myself off the screen here, but just basically putting that shape down for the handle. And now I'm going to pre wax mix a little bit of yellow ochre and a bit of burnt sienna, mostly yellow ochre. And that, I'm going to drop that in a few other places. Just a little bit in the handle and then a bit in the, the spoon, or it could be some cake slicer. I don't know what these are, I just have seen them before and I thought it'd be fun to do. Again, this is very similar to our forks and spoons We did earlier similar technique, but we're trying to use this wet and wet idea. But also we're trying to do a little more elaborate art here because we're trying to reserve a little small circles in the, in the utensil. We're having to do a little more detail for that reason. I'm using my small pointed around. I could have used my sword brush, Whatever small brush you have. Just come up with a nice little design there to indicate some of those little holes that we see sometimes. Again, this is all about controlling it, dealing with water, dealing with accidents. As you do this, some of your holes will get water. We'll just pull up around them and then you'll have a breach and the water will just run and back fill them. That's okay. This is where you should know by now that those things are going to happen. You can't control the majority of water color, especially when you're working like this in this wet and wet environment. That's great, that's what we want to do. We want to surrender it. But there's also a certain amount we can control things like value, controlling how wet the paper is or how dry it is. Those are the things that we can do on our own. But for the most part, we have to always expect the unexpected with this medium. And when it happens, go with it. And that's the beauty of it. The, the mistake is to try to correct it and over correct it and beat it to death and try to fix it. Then you're left with something that looks fussy and overworked. I don't want to be a broken record there, but that's the way it is. Just that's the nature of the medium and that's the nature of us. Humans is to try to match everything we want. And we see vision, especially as artists, we have this idea of what we want to do that may be fine, but water color is going to have its own agenda. And how well you get along with it, how well you coexist with it, is what's going to make the difference, okay? And you will, if you start to go with it, let those mistakes happen. Almost encourage them. You're going to find that the mistakes are much more interesting than sometimes our original idea. That's what really is the beauty of it. The beauty is in the imperfections. Once you start letting it go and letting it do its thing, embracing it, things are going to take on a much easier. I think agenda for you to do it's a much easier task. Now, I'm not saying be sloppy about it and be careless and just, oh, well, I'm just going to throw whatever at it and it's going to be fine. Because Robert said the mistakes will work themselves out to some degree. We still have to manage the piece and we have to, you have a decent drawing, we want decent control over the values. We want the value hierarchy to look decent. But in pieces like this, we don't have to stress about that too much when we're doing landscapes and things like that. Where we have to get our values in the ballpark or the painting just doesn't hold together, then that part becomes more important. We have to be on our game there. But anyway, you can see I'm putting a darker value now down and I went really dark around the holes because I wanted some good contrast. I'm using thicker paint too. In between milk and honey is where I'm at and dropping a little bit of that into the handle, blend it a little bit where I'm at now. And I've got a little hair dryer going there just trying to speed up some of the drying process. We have to be careful. The whole goal here is to start and finish these wet and wet. We don't want to completely dry it and then layer over it. We don't want to paint wet and dry. The goal here, again, is to go wet and wet, beginning to end. When you use a dryer, sometimes it'll, it'll dry too fast, so just be very careful with it. Don't hold your dryer too close to your artwork. Remember, a dryer will warm the paper up. Sometimes, even when you turn the dryer off, it's still going to dry the paint pretty quickly. Because the paper is so warm, it's drying the paint for you. You have to allow things cool to cool a little bit. Sometimes too, if you do that when I'm using it in this environment like this, where I'm want to work wet and wet, I tend to hold it back from the art work quite a bit. About 8 ", 10 ". I don't get close to it and that helps me from getting ahead of myself. Here you can see I painted around the wet area or the area where I wanted the holes to be. Now I'm dropping in and splashing in a mostly water. There's a little bit of pigment on my brush too, that water is going to disperse. This is the part of it that you can't control once you splash water in there and you encourage it to balloon and get these water marks, then you have to leave it alone. You can't go back into it and start to push it around. Put it down and you get out of there. Just mixing in a little bit of warm there. You can see there's really no rhyme or reason for that or why I'm the warmth in certain areas and why some areas are gray other than I'm putting dark around the holes. Just because I'm trying to accentuate that part of it. I'm trying to really show that contrast between the white of the paper and the darker values around it. All right, so you can see a fairly dark value there. So I'll just spot it splattering, I should say, into it. And I'll take my towel and just touch it in a few places just to lift a little bit of the pigment so it doesn't, when it dries. It's not all one value. You don't want area, you don't want an area, any area of the spoon or the handle, that's too much of the same value. You want each little spot like we had a dime size or a dime size cut out in a paper. You hover that over your art and you move it around. You want variation within that little cutout. You don't want to hover over too much of an area and get all the same value. You want that variation all over the place. Even in an area, where's a lighter value mean? We can have infinite degrees of that along the way. We want to keep it interesting by making sure there is variety. All right, so the holes here will be working around in an oval. I guess this will be more of a spatula then a spoon. But I like the name slotted spoon. I guess this will be a slotted spatula. Slotted spoon just rolls off the tongue, a little bitter. You can see just drop in the darker value up towards the top here and that's just a wet brush there And just running it along the bottom and let whatever is pulling up that bleed down into the bottom of the spatula there that was that thick straight out of the tube thick. Now I ran a little bit up into the handle and I'll drop some darker value into it and let it do its thing. It's just like a little river there of water color running down the stream or whatever and doing its thing. This looks easy, but when you start to have certain areas that you want to keep white of the paper is tough, especially when you're working wet and wet and you're doing this and you've got these little details of the white of the paper, the holes, not easy to preserve them. I think you're going to have fun with the challenge with this project. Again, if you lose some of them, it's not a big deal. You don't sweat it out. I'm going to clean my brush off really good. Get some nice thick paint there and then touch that into the top part of the spatula. You can see that where the handle was where I dropped that darker values already started running down into where I had that thick yellow paint. But I'm going to lift that in a second and you're going to see how that thick paint still holds its own. There you go. I'm going to lift that little wash and look how that really thick yellow, it's still there, doesn't get diluted even when the water color, that thin wash runs over top of it. It's like hitting a little speed bump and that thick paint and running over top of it. Another trick you can do there. And I knew probably that was going to happen. That's why I use that really thick paint. Because I knew I could come back and and lift on it. If gravity did his thing there and covered it up, I could get it back. All right. So you can see taking a hair dryer to it now this is we've got some pretty wet areas, so I'm just going to remove some of that moisture, add a little bit of value here on the spatula to get a little bit of a shape there. All in all, you know, it's pretty good. Again, it's a little more challenging than it looks to preserve those little holes in that white space of the paper. Again, especially working with this wet and wet technique. Adding a little bit more of a challenge to then than what we had before, but certainly something you can do. And when you're done, you'll have yourself a nice little painting and study to work with here. And maybe even a nice little gift to give yourself or one of your family members or loved ones. There's a finished piece all done all dry. Let's go ahead and have a look at both the pots and the spoons. There you go. Hopefully you enjoy the techniques. You've got some more fun ideas to try out. Again, minimalistic palate, mostly thin washes, preserving that white space. Working wet and wet again. Nine, easy. But I know you can do it, allowing water color to do its thing. Okay, I'll see you guys and the next one, bye. 39. Project Tea Cup: All right, here's a simple project that will certainly be a little bit challenging. We're going to pre wet the surface. We'll do some wet and wet washes, thin and thick paint, adjusting hues and lighten shadows so they have a little more of a realistic quality to them. All right, I'll begin by taking my wet brush, so it's got a pretty good amount of water. Slap the water down in various places. Some parts of the paper are wet and some part of the paper is dry. Hit and miss, I'm not wetting the entire area that I'm going to be painting on. Very important. That's going to give you a nice random look where you have hard and soft edges. But you didn't sit there and plant it. I think this is very conducive to watercolor painting, that random painting, right? A little bit of yellow ochre, a little bit of yellow, lemon, and a little bit of orange. I'm going to get these squiggly lines that represent the rim of the tea cup. I'll do the ditto that for my saucer. It takes a little bit of vision there. You have to have some confidence to do this without a drawing. But if you wanted to put in a drawing, if you're not comfortable with it, then certainly do that. But for me, I wanted to wing it. I didn't want to put the drawing down, because then I felt like it would go against the whole randomness of this technique. But again, you have to be comfortable with your drawing skills to pull this off that. And just imperfections you have to realize when you're free hand drawing this like and painting it at the same time, You're not going to nail it. But it's those imperfections that I think that, combined with the random results you get with watercolor anyway, that make it good. But there is a line that you can cross where the drawing just really lacks and just doesn't hold together. You're losing that believability factor. But I think if you can pull it off and get this wet and dry beginning that random splashing of the water we did to begin it, you get some really wonderful results. When we tried this technique with the chair earlier on, the chair is a little bit easier. You're dealing with mainly legs and squares and rectangles. When you're dealing with a coffee cup, you have more round shapes. And of course this coffee cup, we're looking down at it. Our eye level is above it, so we're getting some perspective going on there. Spheres, oval shapes, anything like that, tend to throw artists off when they're in perspective. You just have to go with it. If you find that you're trying this technique but the art itself just isn't holding together, then just fall back and grab a pencil and paper and draw some as if you were holding a paint brush. And see if you can find your errors. Of course, if you've never taken a drawing class and you know your drawing skills are lacking, then of course you have to shore those up because painting is an extension of drawing and it's only going to be as good as your drawing skills. There are four drawing skills I look at. There's the ability to draw accurately, and then the ability to sort of draw gesturally. So to exploit and kind of go with more of a loose style, you have to be able to know how things are constructed before you can deconstruct them. There's value, you have to be able to do good value studies. There's also composition and design. That's something that's very important. Those are all very important drawing skills you have to master. If you bypass those, then it's going to show up. Getting back to the artwork, what I'm doing now is I'm splashing in a little bit of the details in the cup. But notice how I'm using dark reds and burgundies and the shadow a little bit thicker paint then where it is catching more light. I'm trying to thin that paint out a little bit with water so I get a lighter value. Those get down to those very beginning lessons that we talked about, using water to hues and also to reduce the value, but it's very subtle as I'm picking my colors. As I'm doing this, I'm very aware of the value and the color that I'm putting down. I'm trying again, to come up with a hue that's either going to be lighter or darker according to where I want to place it here. I'm just going to strengthen the shadow a little bit. I'm keeping this very drifty and transparent, nothing too thick and intense. It'll be a few places where I'll go a little bit thicker paint at the end. But the hard part here with a painting like this, in a style like this, is to not go too far. I think that's something we can all agree on. It's so easy to go too far, Keep it light, keep it easy. And don't try to stress out on capturing every detail here. I'm using a little bit of burnt sienna mixed with some reds. A little bit thicker, yellow ochre. Just touching a few shadow areas in the gold trim of the cup. And again, just hit and miss, I mean, that was probably somewhere else. I did leave it out where there's a little bit of a watermark there where smearing into the gold. Now I like that imperfection. I like that happy accident. So I didn't put any shadow over and there, purposely because I wanted that to remain part of the art. Let's have a look at the finished piece. There it is. I think all in all it turned out well, I think it looks like a coffee cup, even though when I first showed it to my wife, she thought it was a crab. Go figure. Anyway, with this one, we did a simple tea cup. We pre wet the surface. We use mostly wet and wet washes. Thin and thick paint. Mostly thin though adjusting hues for the light and shadow. Darker hues in the shadows. A little bit lighter hues and value in the lights. That's it. I'll see you guys in the next one. 40. BONUS Project Galloping Horses: All right, I thought it'd be good to add some animal paintings to the course. Something a little different then Maybe the style might intrigue you as well. To take this idea and use it for some other animals or whatever the idea is, we'll just do a bunch of like galloping horses. I did something similar to this in my abstract animal painting workshop, but that was with acrylics, collage and mixed media. I'll just do some horses here and again, we'll just do maybe a series of them galloping across the page here and keep it nice and loose. We're going to embrace that watercolor feel. Let those characteristics of watercolor shine we extend that one a little more forward. That's really the goal. We want to always keep that medium in mind. This looks like a tiger. Let me pin those ears back a little bit. May do another one here. Maybe going up, maybe a smaller head. Uh, you can mix and match. Your design doesn't have to be anything like mine, it can certainly be different. I encourage you to make it a little bit different once you start drawing them. I think they'll start to get a little bit easier as you go. I'm saying that more for me than you. We'll do another one in here. What we're going to do though when we paint them is we're going to use layers. So we're going to start that idea of working light to dark there some maines. Forgot about the manes, the lighter horses, they'll be more in the distance, the ones in the very back. Then we'll get darker as they come towards us. But we're not going to be like dogmatic about it. We're going to do it, but do it very loosely. Of course, maybe we'll do one down in here, sort of with his head down. See, truthfully, drawing it out is probably going to take more time than the actual painting, but that happens, We'll do one more in here, maybe another one head down, do the mouth open. And maybe a leg back in here. Another leg back in here. Man back in here. Let's do one sort of going up now. Well, staying pe going on, maybe a little something in here. Let's sort of do the. I think that'll work. I'll use a sword brush for this. I've got my small and medium neutral tint is down here. Again, starting very pale, I probably should take a picture of this so I have a template to share with you. Again, I would encourage you to mix and match a little bit. You don't have to do horses like mine. Also, I'm going to do mostly gray scale. I'm going to do a touch of these ochres and browns in there. They're already on my palette, so they're going to be in there anyway. Once I put water on the stuff, it starts reactivate everything. I'll get a little something down here and then I'm going to get a little more neutral tent. A little bit of a lizard and crimson, a little bit of yellow ochre there. I'll do a little more. I've got some darker hues here. As I add features and different things. I'm going to put some darker hues in there and just let it bleed out, mix and mingle on its own. This one leg going off the page there, maybe we'll do a little man maybe the head is more on the brown side. You can leave maybe even some markings indicate a little eye there. Good. And I'll do another one here. We'll move into this one. This is the mom with a really small head touching some darker stuff into this. Now, pretty much everything with these really thin washes, you know, leg extending out here, Maybe I'll make this leg a little bit darker. Then of course we want to let them touch and mingle, throw a little splash in there and now really pale back to my weak mix here. I'm going to do this one because I'm going to go back and do that a little bit. I can go right into this. I know they're going to bleed into each other because I'm working wet into wet. I don't want it to be brown. I'm going to get a little more neutral tint here on the palette. Make this a little bit more on the gray scale. Guy's got a big bunch of drool there, dry it up. Probably made the body too small so I can make that adjustment as I get into it. I'll go a little bit darker here for the leg. Just a little bony leg there. One more back in there. This be connecting in here a little bit. Now I'll go to one, maybe a little more on the brown side there. I think I'll even make it a little more brown crimson. A little bit of these neutral tents. And just dipping my brush and water off camera. This is mainly water I'm using and just diluting what I have. And now I can go much thicker and draw on some legs. Now I will go almost into that real thick paint. There you go again. Maybe dark there. Drop a little bit in there for giggles. Go ahead and do this one. Yeah, once you play with this a little bit, maybe take some cows, kitty cats, whatever excites you and see if you can come up with something on your own there. I'll add maybe a few more of these over time. This course will always grow. I just think it's got some really good content in there, I think embraces the character of water color. And there's a lot more we can learn from those lessons. And I want to try to make that possible through more content. We'll get in here and touch a little bit of a dark into those while it's still wet. Let's get this one here, belly there, Let them blend and bleed a little bit. We're keeping it fresh, put that hue down and let it do its own thing. Okay? Don't try to control it too much. So this is like pure pigment here. I'll do some little ears drop a little dark there, get into some of these browns. I think I'll switch to my small brush here. I'll do a little outline here. Very little pressure there into the surface again, letting these mingle a little bit spine. So I'll do this one really pale and it's leaving little whites in the paper. They could be eyes or whatever, but the viewer will make that decision for themselves. We indicate sometimes you don't necessarily have to paint everything. You can just suggest things and the viewer knows what it is. By now, they can look at certain details and whatever they want it to be, something you have to know exists so you don't have to draw and paint everything for the viewer. Let them do some of it. Let them use their imagination. A little bit of a lizard, crimson, a little bit of yellow ochre, and maybe a little more yellow ochre into that. Now, I'll just come in here and strengthen some of these hues, Not all of them, so we don't need every horse to be dark. But I mean, I think something like that's pretty good. I'll just go pure black here and just drop it into this one. That's good. So I'll just leave it dislike that. I'll make it official here. Maybe put a little gradation into this, letting that color again. Maybe a little black there. I'll do it. 41. Recap and Projects: Congratulations, you are finished. I hope you enjoyed the watercolor workout basics and beyond. It was a pleasure to bring this to you. I hope that you were able to embrace some of the watercolor characteristics. Remember that watercolor isn't a perfect medium. It's not really intended to be done in a very realistic way, although I know some artists enjoy painting that way, and that's perfectly fine. My approach is to use the medium for what is best for, that's happy accidents, fusion, gravity. There are times when we need to control things, but for the most part, water color is intended to not be controlled so much or at least not all the time. I want to thank you for checking out the course. I have other watercolor classes you can check out. Be sure to leave your comments or any questions you may have in the discussions. I'm always here to answer those for you. Of course. I hope that you were able to dive in and complete the projects. Every single lesson was a project. It was done with the intentions of you watching the video and then rolling your sleeves up and doing the same thing I did. If you didn't do that, then I would recommend that you go back, start with lesson one, and do all the exercises that way you get the most out of this online learning experience. Again, my name is Robert Joyner. I want to thank you for your interest in my courses. I hope to see you again real soon in another class. Take care. Bye, bye.