Watercolour Oriole an exercise in underpainting

1. Introduction: Welcome back, Skillshare People. It's me, Paul. For those of you that don't know me, I've been a Skillshare teacher for six years here, and I paint both traditional watercolor and digital painting on the iPad using Procreate. Today we are focusing on digtal watercolor, and we are going to paint this Oriol. Yes, Oriole. It's right in front of me. I should remember that. I've got my painting here all sketched out. What we're going to do is we're going to break this down into sections. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna do the black areas of the bird or the brown, whatever you want to call them. They're very dark brown or black, ready black. I don't know. Whatever they are the dark areas, the head. We'll start at the head up here, and then we're going to do the other black areas down here. And we're going to try and just work with the painting, letting it dry as we go. If I have to stop and dry it, that's fine. Once that's done, the black areas, then we're going to start with a yellow base because there is yellow undertones in there, and there's actually yellow areas like here on the wing and such. Then we will proceed to add in the orange and then the shadow areas, and we'll move on to the feet and then finally the branch. Oh, and we'll do the eyeball and the um the beak separately, as well, because those will get messed up, and if we try to, you know, do it well, it's all wet. The technique that we'll be using is mostly wet on wet. Basically, we're putting down a wash of wet paint, and then we're going to add in colors to that. That will be the just of things. Again, with the exception of the beak, the feet, and the eyeball, because those require finer details. Okay, let's get started. 2. Painting the blacks: Okay, so we've got I've already wet my palette here, you can see here on this side. You know, I've got paint from a previous painting, but I'm going to use those again, so whatever, it's all wet, it doesn't matter. The first thing I'm going to do is, if we look at this head area up in here and the face, there's some lighter areas, and there's some darker areas. It's kind of a reddish undertone in there. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take some magenta, paint here, pigment. I'm not sure which one it is. It doesn't matter. You know, you'll see they're all very similar here. I've got three of them. One of them is quinacridone, one of them is a lizard and crimson. They're close enough. Just a reddish color. It doesn't matter. You can use red. You can use whatever reddish color you have. I'm going to take that, I'm going to put as much water on as you can. I could use a larger brush, but I've been painting with these smaller brushes, doing a series of paintings lately that I really enjoyed, and I'm just going to stick with them because they happen to be here in front of me. So I'm trying to keep as much water on here as possible, and I'm just going to fill in this whole black area up here at the top with this Um, and you're probably thinking, Hey, Paul, the bird isn't red. Whoa, easy dude. What are you doing? Um, you're right. It's not. But like I said, the undertones are reddish in color. So that's why these are here. Okay? So stop bugging me. And, uh, just listen to what I'm saying. Okay, so filling this in, blah, blah, blah. If I stop talking, just just watch. So you see this small brush doesn't have a huge doesn't carry a lot of pigment and water with it? That's okay, because we're gonna cover it up. We're doing this in two sections here. I normally stick my face right in my painting. Makes it so much easier to see and I feel like I'm slowly going blind. But my camera's in the way. And I can't do that. Thanks to some head in the painting, you're not here to look at my head. You're here to look at the painting. So, okay, now, what it is, I picked up some indigo here on the same brush. There's a drop of water there. Get rid of that. And now I'm gonna come in and start filling in these darker areas in there. Now, watch how this bleeds around really nice like that. And here we go. And I will pretty much cover up all of the red. What I'm just trying to do is give, like, a hint of that reddish color that's underneath. Really important that we do this while the paint is still wet, we want it to bleed. We don't want, um we don't want to have, like, watercolor marks in this part of the painting. I mean, maybe you do. I don't if you choose to do that differently, let me see how it looks. Okay. So now I'm just gonna grab some cleanish water here, and then try and pull these pigments in with this water. So you see now we've got this wet and wet area there. We've got our lighter areas at the top here. And we're covering that up, but we still have those darker areas. Okay, now we can grab the darker pigment again, and we can come up here and we can start to drop this in where we think it's going to make a difference. Now, one thing if you're using a large brush for that, you're gonna carry a lot of pigment and a lot of water on the large brush, and it makes it more difficult to control. So I've now got this tiny little brush here. Can you see this? I put my hand underneath it so it focuses properly. Very small. And I'm going to use that to just have more control where some of these lines and things are in here. See that how? Even though it's wet, it's not flowing as much as it would if it were a larger brush. Okay, so we'll get some darker areas, and we'll get all the kind of this parts out of the way here where these details are here. You see how nice and dark this is. I printing, we have, uh there's a thing called a super black. And what that is essentially is, like, an underprinting of usually cyan. And what it does is it makes your black blacker, right? 'Cause black itself is a very dull kind of color. It's not overly saturated. It's very dull and flat. So now I'm pulling some of these pigments, you know, again, we don't want it to be red. We just want a red undertone. But I don't want to lose that light area. So I've got a kind of damp brush here. And you see what I'm doing is I'm pulling these pigments in over top. So I'm really not adding paint or water. What I'm doing is I'm just basically making this gradation as subtle as possible. You've still got our undertone in there. You can still see a little hint of the red, but not too much. It's very, very subtle. Try to see this as something that's relaxing and enjoyable. Okay, so we've got some finer lines here. I just picked up some of the pigment on my brush here, and I'm just putting it in where I think it needs to be a little bit darker. Again, I'm going to use my brush just to dry this off. And I just want to feather it out, we'll call it feathering. I think that's a good word. So just like in the picture, see those details are so subtle, right? Like, how it becomes super, super soft. And getting these gradations on your painting, it takes a lot of practice. So don't beat yourself up about this. And a good exercise to do sometimes is actually just make a sphere and try to paint that sphere so that you see the dark side and the light side and get those gradations to be as soft as possible, okay, which we've done here. Yay. Alright. Now, the other parts, there are some lighter areas in here with undertones, but there's a lot going on, too. So we've got some light areas there. We've got these whites in here, and then we've got some down here, we've got some white lines as well. So we're gonna paint in and around that. And for that, we're going to use a different combination of colors. We're gonna mix in I'm going to use Pains gray and indigo, just to make it as black as possible. And I'm just gonna fill that in. I just want it dark, right? And then I'm going to lighten it a little bit after with water. So why do it differently here than on the head? Well, the head is where that eye is. That's where the connection in the painting is. That's where it drives it home. I could spend I I could do it the same way. There's no, you know, and there's no reason why you can't just not that worried about it, to be honest. I'm just whatever. It's just a wing. And it's more of like a dark area, right? And the other thing is too, it's gonna be so overrun by the yellows and such that you won't even see it. Don't really notice it. So basically, I don't have any masking fluid on here. I I would like to, but I left it somewhere else, and I don't have it here with me. I've been meaning to go get some 'cause I've been doing this 30 day painting challenge thing, and I can't tell you the amount. I've used crayons. I've used everything else. And it's just not the same as masking fluid. And I hate masking fluid. It's terrible stuff to work with. It's just I find it too fussy and whatnot. Um, I just filling in some of those lines in there. And you can just do it the old fashioned way, just paint around it. Which is what I'm doing. 3. Painting the yellows and oranges: Now we will move on to the orange and yellow. So I'm going to get a little bit bigger brush for that because we've got a bigger area. And again, this brush is smaller than I would normally use. But, yeah, it's what it is. So, okay, first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start with yellow undertone. That's like I said, I was. So I've got some cadmium yellow hue, not cadmium yellow. And just like we did with the head, probably get more water on there, just like we did with the head, I'm putting down a base layer. Of all yellow. I want this to stay wet. That's important. I'm trying hard not to touch the dark areas here because I don't want them. They will bleed a little bit, and that's okay. But I don't want to contaminate my paint and then put a big dark streak across where the bright yellow areas are. Okay, so I'm trying to go quick and talk. But I don't want this to dry out. So let me just speed this up a bit. I missed some details over here. We'll fill those in later. Okay, now, we got a base yellow color down. Nice and bright yellow, ya. This up here is very bright. Might even grab a lemon yellow in there and try to throw some of that in. Or you know what? We can also do is we can dab in some fresh water in here, clean water, clean ish water to get a little bit more white in there. Okay, good. Now, we've got some dark orange colors going on here. I'm going to mix in some cadmium orange with the cadmium yellow to start. We're just going to build it up. These orange colors. Just like we did with the head, we're trying to blend in this area. I'm gonna clean off my brush or some of the lighter areas and just pull in some pigment there and don't want. So this kind of comes down like this, and then there's a shadow area under here where it gets darker. Okay. So for that area, we can put in as much orange as we want. But it's gonna be a shadow anyways. Same for over here, we can darken this up with a little bit more orange. It's a shadow anyways. We need that white section there. So this is starting to dry, which we didn't want. Okay. Alright. Looking good. Clean that off. I'm just gonna pull push a little bit of this orange out of here because there was yellow in there. I'll grab some yellow and plop it in instead or add it in, I guess. It's gonna darken it up. Hey, will. Now now we've got some shadow areas in there, right? Were we have I'm gonna leave that little hard line in there. I kind of like it. I'll soften this one up. Um, now I'm gonna use some Panes gray. It makes a good shadow color, and I'm just mixing it in with the orange. So orange and Paine's gray. Now I'm gonna come over here to these shadow spots. Well, it's still wet, and we're gonna get our shadow in. So where the wing sits there, there's gonna be shadow. I mean, you can see it, right? It's plain as day, where the shadow and the dark areas are. So just paint them darker. That's all you got to do darken it up. Wherever you see the dark, put it in the dark. Easy, peasy. Okay. Again, let's get our brush as dry as possible so we can just sort of try to feather this out a bit. There's almost more red to that orange, isn't there in this area here? I'm gonna try and make a new orange. That's what I do. A new orange there. We go, it's too dark. Oh, well. Here get what I'm trying to do. Trying to make it darker. Okay. We do a little bit going on down here. We also have that black there, and we have a shadow area on just the yellow. So I'm just gonna grab some Pain's gray here. And right down this side here, we've got a shadow. Actually, this whole area is kind of shadow, isn't it? Because of the branch or whatever's there. So we'll just darken that whole thing up. A bit more dark for the shadow. They're always going to have darker areas where things are behind or in front or basically they're being blocked. The light is being blocked there. Okay, now you can see my painting is starting to buckle a bit. I do have a taped down, so it will dry properly. But I'm gonna stop the video here. And actually, you know, before I do that, I'm just gonna fill in this dark area that I missed on the back, grab some pain's gray, mix it in with my indigo. And whatever was going on down here, this was just dark. So I'm just gonna make this dark. I'm try to smooth out some of these lines here. There we go. Of course. Now I got a little bit of orange bit I need to fill in there. Well the world. Okay, we'll let this dry here. Now we'll let this dry. Now we'll let this dry here. I keep looking where the cameras, new setup and all. And we'll be right back. And we will then do either I don't know. We'll see. Surprise. 4. Painting the eye and the beak: And we're back. Our painting is dry. We can touch it. Yay, there's no water, wet spots. And for the first wash, it looks pretty good. We got a lot of details in here, and I don't know that I would change too much. What I will do, I'll tell you, is I will add in more contrast in some of the shadow areas and maybe just maybe put in another layer of orange in these parts just to make it more orange so it doesn't look so flat, but we've got some pretty good coverage, all things considered for the first wash. I'm very happy with that. Let's move on to the eyeballs and the beak. I don't have a beak. I have a mouth, this beak here. And so we'll do that now. So when we look at we look at our reference picture nice and close, you'll see in the eye, wish I could zoom in on my painting here. I can't you know many times I do that? I actually take my fingers and try to zoom in on my painting. I like, What? No. It's the world we live in. Crazy. Get your tin point hat on. Okay, so first thing we're gonna do is we look at our eyeball underneath here. Inside this area, there is some brown on the bottom. You see that? The brown. Over here. Stop looking at me. And look at the eyeball. I'm gonna get some quinacridone gold, even though I did say brown. I'm gonna get quinacridone gold anyways. And I'm gonna paint in underneath that eyeball. I don't want that much water on there. I'm just gonna paint the whole eyeball brown. I'm gonna leave the little white spot at the top. If I can, if I miss and screw up, or if you do not the end of the world. Um, you can always fix it later with a gel pen or some wash or something like that, whatever you like. Now, you'll notice that I made my eyeball, white area. I left too much space, which I didn't do for any reason other than I was just being very careful. But now I've got this big white area around here, which really isn't that color. And it's going to be difficult. There is white around the eye, but not as much is there. So I'm just going to try and close that gap down a little bit, and still, while at the same time leaving the white area. Trying to keep my head out of the top of the camera. So yeah, just focus on the eye for now. Okay, I think that looks pretty good. It will when it's dry right now, it's wet. So when we're looking at it, it's wet. There is a bit of a dark area around the eye, like, almost like an outline. Gonna try and add that in without hitting the white. Too much. Too much. Reinforce some of these areas in here. Okay. Good enough Let's not overdo it. I always do that, and then I make a mess. Now, I'm gonna turn this this way because I need to paint the beak. Don't be alarmed. The bird is okay. It's gonna be fine. But I have a hard time drawing straight lines this way, so I like to turn things, so I'll go up and down sort of sideways. Now, for the beak, we've got kind of gray blue color. And if you look at my palette here, you'll notice I just happened to have gray blue color by Daniel Smith. That's not actually a real color, not by Daniel Smith. I have a bluish I have a mess here on my palette, and a mess always makes gray. Someone's gonna swish around some colors there. You could use ultramarine blue, mixed with pains gray, you know, something like that, and nice and watered down. You don't want too much too much. And I also don't want too much water on there. So I'm just gonna give a little dab there. We've got a shadow area underneath the beak here. That comes up, we're gonna paint these in, and we got another one up at the top here. Themes down that way a little bit. But for the most part, there's not a lot of color in our beak. So let's not overdo it. Okay. Got that in. Now clean brush, some water, and I'm just trying to drag in. No, not gonna work. It's already dried. Look at that. Too dry, too fast. Alright, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna just get some really, really light blue, and we'll paint in too much. I just clean it off with my fingers. Okay. All right. So if we look at the values that we have here, which is, again, light and darks, my values are a little bit on the pale side. So I'm gonna grab my small tiny brush again and I'm going to grab some darker paint. And I'm going to just dab that in along the bottom here and up here at the top. And we're gonna come straight line straight line. I made it crooked. Um, our straight crooked line, which kind of does another weird little thing here where it goes up and then down, up and then down. And I got some now we can do some of this shading here. That's what I'm gonna clean off my brush, and it's just damp. No, it's wet. And I'm just pulling some of the pigments from underneath, trying to, while keeping it. No. Okay, we got a little dark spot here. Hm. Be careful when you're doing this that you don't accidentally hit the eyeball with your hand. More than one painting has gone in the trash because of that. Okay, how are we looking? Looking good. Alright, keep in mind, now this white area around the eye isn't really white. So what I like to do is just kind of dab around and soften it up a bit. I'm just pulling my brush through the dark ring that we just put around. And just slowly breaking up that little dark area. Okay. Good. Let's zoom out a little bit here. I'm zooming out on my iPad there, is what I'm talking about. And I want to just emphasize some of that shadow area in there. So I'm gonna grab some of the orange brown color shadow that I made, and I'm just gonna drive that home a little bit. So I'm gonna put on the paint. I know, I know it looks dark. Hang in there. I'm gonna wet my brush, clean it off. Actually, I'll just use this other brush here it holds more water, and I'm just gonna dab that along the edge here. Just to soften it up a bit. And while that's wet, if I wanted to, I can now grab some really dark, like some indigo, and just come right up along the edge in here. Just to drive that shadow home a little bit. Okay. That looks good. And what else did I I was gonna do? Oh, I was gonna add in a bit more orange. For that orange, I'm gonna grab some cadmium yellow, and I'm gonna grab some red. I'm just gonna 'cause it's more of a deeper darker orange. And we're gonna put that in up here. And we also had a little boo boo right there. You can see that right there. So we'll just fix that kind of fix it. We can round out our bird a bit, hopefully, and just putting this in where the darker areas warrant it. I don't want this to dry. I don't want any hard streaks too many, anyway. So we've got some, and that's okay. But that's not what this painting is about. This painting is more detailed. So clean that off as much as possible. We're just very, very, very lightly damp brush, and I'm just slowly blending that in. Pushing, pulling, however you want to call it. Clean that off as much as possible. And keep in mind, I'm using a synthetic brush here. I wouldn't be so hard on a real hair brush. I'd use a cheaper synthetic brush like this one for this. Okay, so we got our darker area there now. Yeah. Probably should have used more water and looks a bit funny, so I'm just gonna plop in some water over top of that. What I'm doing is I didn't like the streakiness that I was putting on that came out there. So I just put on some clean water, and I'm just blending it all over everywhere I had that so that the pigments will bleed a bit more. And I think it's working. I'm gonna grab some dark here here now just 'cause we fix this here our heads kind of not lining up. Oh well just make it a little bit thicker. And we can bleed some of these colors in. That's always nice. I'd like to clean up this white wine so it doesn't look so streaky. It does look a little bit on the streaky side right now. Just adding in a bit more dark. Okay. 5. Painting the feet and the branch: So let's move on to our feet, okay? I've got to remember I got paint on that brush. I grabbed my tiny brush again. This would be a number zero, zero, zero, triple zero, in case you're wondering. It's also known as a tiny brush. Okay, so what have we got down here on this feet? We got a little area there where the foot comes to meet, and then we've got dark on the top and dark on the bottom. It's pretty much always the same. So what I'm doing is I'm kind of outlining this, like, almost like drawing around it. I'm going to fill in the nails because there's just too fine of a detail to get that much to worry about. Okay. Did that. Now I'm gonna grab my brush without any water, and I'm just gonna see if I can't pull the pigments in sometimes if it doesn't dry fast. No, not this time. So what color are the feet? The Cafet are a little bit on the purply purply blue side, I guess. Uh, yeah, and we'll just grab make it up. So I took some, um, magenta. And some blue. And I mix it together with water, and this is the color that it made, which is close enough to the feet, I think. I don't like those lines on the edge. I'm gonna grab my small brush here, and I'm just pulling the pigments in. I might have to add a bit more. That's okay. I just want it to bleed in more and not have lines there. Now, lastly, we've got a branch here, which I'm going to paint brown. Even though it's very light, I'll paint it a very light brown. I'm using my same brush that I've always been using. And what I want to do is I just want to again, same thing. I'm just putting this underlay underneath. And once we have that on, then we can fill in the shadow areas. We want to keep it wet so that it keeps that lovely watercolor effect. So we're gonna be dark on the bottom, the lights coming this way. And for this, I'm using sepia. You could use burnt umber. You could use raw umber. You could use mixed orange and black together. Orange and sorry, blue together. They give you also the same kind of thing. Usually, when you look at wood, this one here is very pale. In the reference photo, which you could do, it's up to you, really. I just want it to look like a branch. I'm gonna throw in some yellow. There's some different colors in there. A bit of the orange because we got it in the bird. Always nice to harmonize things that way. Now that we've got our colors in there. Okay. I'm gonna come back here a tiny brush again, and I'm gonna get these dark shadow areas. Gonna be shadow underneath where the bird is. Le me shadow areas up here, under here. Gonna be shadowing here. Me shadowing here. Shadowing here, shadowing here. Shadow under here. Go clean that off. Gonna wash these down a little bit. Just running some clean water over them just to break it up a bit so it's not so strong of make this shadow darker under here and darkness up in here. So it's all uniform. Basically, this whole thing should be a shadow area. There we go. And do, there's a bit of an orange bit up here are going on. Some clean water. And, yeah. 6. Recap and final comments: We're good. What do you think? We painted a bird. An Oriole. All done. Zip zip. Finished. So let me know what you think in the comment section. Make sure you paint this, first of all, put it in the projects and resources section so that I can comment and critique on it, and you can help inspire other people to paint this Oreo bird, which helps me. I'm helping you paint it. You help me by posting your picture in the Projects and Resources section. Thank you very much. Have a lovely day. Goodbye.