Watercolour Sketching For Beginners: An Introduction to Watercolour

1. Introduction: Welcome to my class, Watercolor Sketching for Beginners. My name is Imran, I'm a graphic designer and illustrator, and this class is for anybody who wants to learn the basics of watercolor, whether you're an absolute beginner or whether you're somebody who has not used your watercolors for awhile and he wants a refreshing course in the wonderful world of watercolors. We will start off this class by going through some of the materials and supplies that you will need, absolute basics, that is beginner's watercolor class. We will look at watercolor paints and different grades. We will look at the different types of brushes you get with watercolor. We will also be delving into the different surfaces that you can use in water color painting, and as a bonus, we will be looking at how to stretch your watercolor paper and the benefits of stretching your watercolor paper. Then we will also look at the other items, small items that will really give you a nice enhanced experience in your journey in watercolor. We will then move on to some of the characteristics of watercolor and do simple little exercises that will get you warmed up in this fantastic medium. We will then work through examples of watercolor techniques such as the wet on wet technique, wet on dry technique, glazing, creating textures, creating color variations, looking at values, and also looking at monotone painting. We'll then be moving on to completing a full step-by-step sketch, where we will be demonstrating and implementing all the techniques that we've learnt. On completing all the many exercises and the full sketch and the examples that we go through, you will have a nice library of skills and experiences that you just developed to be able to implement into your amazing class projects. This class is for absolute beginners in the field of watercolor. So we will be covering things very slowly and step by step. What are you waiting for? Grab yourself a nice drink, get yourself some nice treats, sit back, relax, and let's get started with this class. 2. Watercolour Paint: Okay, welcome back. Let's start off this class by talking a little bit about one of the main components of watercolor. That is the watercolor paints itself. Now, watercolor paints are made up of pigment and binder. The pigment is usually coming from a natural source or a synthetic source. The pigment is what gives that watercolor, the actual color of that particular watercolor. Now the higher amounts of pigment that you have in a watercolor, the more saturated color you're going to get and the higher quality of color that you're going to get. The binder part of this component is usually what binds the actual pigments into a usable paste. Otherwise, the pigment is usually just a powder that you can't really apply. Now the binder tends usually to be a gum Arabic that most companies use to get this paste like consistency. Now, the watercolor paints generally themselves can be divided into two main categories. The first category is a graduate grade watercolor, so the student grade watercolor or a second category, and the main category is the artist's grade or the professional grade, watercolor. Now the difference between the two is the actual quantity or the ratio of the amount of pigment of binder. With the graduate grade, you can have a lot less pigment inside the actual mixture of that paint and with the professional artist quality watercolor paint are going to have much more pigment to binder in the ratio. Now this does not mean that the graduate paints have inferior pigment to them, lots of brands produce a graduate version, and it's basically a student's version and a professional artist's version. They usually have the same pigment that's in it but the quantities of pigment, the ratio of pigments to binder is different, so it's a lot more in the professional artist grade and a lot less in the student grade. This translates to price, so the difference in price is what is determined by the difference in the amount of pigment. The graduate grade paint, the student grade paint is going to be a lot cheaper than the artist quality grade, so the question arises, which one should you go for, especially if you are an absolute beginner in the field of watercolors and you're taking this class and you want to learn about this beautiful journey of watercolors. I would recommend that you go for the graduate student grade unless you really want to try the high pigments and highly saturated professional colors, it doesn't make a real difference at this stage. I would say, get used to using these graduate grade colors. You'll be able to have more colors available at a cheaper price. You can experiment, learn the medium, and then maybe move on to the professional colors and you'll be able to appreciate that huge significant change from that graduate pigmentation all the way to that highly saturated professional pigmentation, so that choice, I'm going to leave to yourself. All of my recommended paints and sets and brands are going to be in the resource sheet, accompanied with the advantages and disadvantages of each, so do check that out before you decide to go ahead and buy and follow them class. If you already have watercolor paints, then that's great. If you've got sets of graduate quality paints or even some other brand paints so different types of paints absolutely use them. But what I will suggest is that if you've got some really cheap paints, for example, like you've got Boston watercolor sets from the pan shop, or an own store's brand. I would say, don't follow this class with those paints because usually the cheap paints don't have much pigment in them at all, If any. Lots of these one pound, two pound paint sets that you get they are usually made up of cheap dyes and they are buffered up a lot with clay and gum Arabic to produce these really nice vibrant pans of color. But when you use them, the experience just isn't there and you just can't get the effect that you can with the graduate grade paints. I would say avoid using them. Stick to graduate grade. You can get some really, really good value graduate grade watercolor paints, so absolutely go for them. Now let's talk about the different formats that watercolor paints, come into. Let's move on to that next. 3. Pans or Tubes?: Welcome back. Let's just talk a little bit about the formats and modes of these watercolor paints that we can get in the stores. While there is, I'll just quickly run through some of the advantages and disadvantages of these so that you can make an informed decision as to which ones you want to go for, especially if you're a beginner and it's the first time you're purchasing some water color material. Firstly, we have over here, we have the pans. Now these pans are basically set of watercolors in these small little wells which are filled up and they need to be activated with water and they can be used. Huge advantage of these is that you usually get some wells on the side where you can actually color mix and start activating and creating your washes of paint. That's a huge advantage, that you don't need to carry any extra clutter or pallets with you. I would highly recommend getting yourself a small set of watercolor pans. Now, this one that I've got here, this small one, This is a graduate grade. If you remember, like we discussed earlier on, that the graduate grades are a lot cheaper than the professional. Again, I would recommend going for this type of graduate grade small set rather than a biggest set like this, which is the professional grade. Again, this is probably nearly five times as more expensive as this one. You do get a lot more color in it however, for this beginner's class, I highly recommend that you just stick to the graduate grade. Now if you really want to just start off with a professional grade, absolutely go for it if your budget allows it. But what I don't want you to do is just spend lots of money on an art material and then later on, if it's a medium that you don't really like or you're not going to use much, then that would be a waste of money. With the pans, you've got a huge advantage as we discussed before. You have these wells for mixing. You can easily remove the pans and replace them with the colors that you need to replenish. That is a great way of keeping up-to-date and keeping your colors full so you never run out of colors. Again, these you can buy from the shops, from the art stores. What I will say is that depending on where you live, in which parts of the country you live, it will depend on your local art store supplies and brands that you have in the country that you live in. Because these brands the I'm using, these are usually available in the UK. These are actually made in the UK. If you can't access these brands, then what I will do is I'll suggest other brands in the resource sheet that are from various locations in the world that are very high-quality, high-grade painting company brands that I would suggest that you go for. This is Winsor and Newton and this is the main brand, that I use in quite a lot of my supplies, not just in watercolor. I would highly recommend them, they work great. The graduate range in them is excellent. The saturation level is actually very good. You're not going to get high saturation as you get with professional paints, but the level of saturation is fine, especially for this beginner's level. That's basically the pans. Again, some of the disadvantages having these pans is that sometimes they can get stuck. If you see here, I've got all the paints wedged in between each pan and each holding well. Sometimes that can be tricky to remove it once it's finished, all you need to do is just get a sharp blade to wedge it out and that's about it. Generally, I wouldn't say there's any other main disadvantage apart from the fact that when you do use them, you can get this cross contamination of the colors going from one end to the other. If you're working really fast, but quick solutions of that is, you just use a damp cloth or a damp tissue to just wipe off the contaminated areas. Not a huge deal breaker on that. The alternative to pans are actual water color tubes. This is basically what we discussed before. These tubes have got the same material that's inside these pans and they're inside the tubes. All you've got to do is you've just got to squeeze that out and you're ready to go. They need to be activated with water, just like the pans did. However, there are already a ready-made paste because of the gum arabic and this water solution that's inside them. They're a great way to actually replenish your pans. You can actually empty out the entire tube into one of these empty wells. You can use that to create your own palette, but I guess you can do that once you've got yourself used to using different colors. That again, I'll come back to it. I personally think that it's better to just go for a set of pans rather than go for these tubes. Because you will end up having a lot of wastage, especially at this early stage where you're just learning how to use watercolors. Again, it's really up to you. I wouldn't say don't ever buy tubes, if you really want to buy the tubes, maybe just go for the primary colors. Like you've got yellow, blue, and red. Maybe just go for these primary colors and buy the small tubes. You can get much larger tubes in these as well however, the larger you go the more money you're going to end up spending. Like I said before, I'd rather that you spend minimum, but get the best experience that you can in this beginner stage, in the wonderful journey of watercolors that you're about to begin. That's pretty much it for these. We went through some of the advantages and disadvantages of pans. With the tubes again, the disadvantage is that they are really expensive, another disadvantage is, I guess, would be that you can easily lose them because it's so small and you don't have a container to keep them all nice and compact in. Whereas with these, you can easily just close these or take them on for your travels and do watercolors sketching wherever you are on the go. Sometimes with these, especially with this particular set you even get a little brush. Getting some extra freebies is a win-win situation. Let's move on to the next one where we will discuss a little bit more about this amazing journey into watercolors, and we'll be talking about watercolor brushes. 4. Watercolour Brushes: Okay. Welcome back. Let's now talk about the wonderful world of watercolor brushes. Now, watercolor brushes are the main tool that you apply your watercolor with. They are an essential item in the journey in watercolors. Now, the ones that I've got here on the screen, you can see I've got a variety of brushes here. Do you need to buy all of these bushes as a beginner in watercolor? Absolutely not. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to divide these brushes into three categories. Then I'm going to give you a recommendation for this beginner class level on which ones you should go for. Then slowly and gradually as you learn this medium and learn tools, you can build up the set that you have with more experience. Let's start off by moving all of these watercolor brushes away so that they don't look too daunting, and we'll start dividing them up into different categories. Okay, let's now talk about some of these main types of brushes that we have. On the left here, I've got sable brushes. This is one of the main types of brushes that you'll see in watercolor. Sable brushes are basically original real hair brushes. They usually made from animal hairs, such as squirrel hairs or even goat hairs. These are kind of the premium type of brushes that you can get. So the first category is the sable brush. The second category, which is this group that we have over here. These are the synthetic brushes. Now, synthetic brushes are not real animal hair or they're not real hair at all. These are synthetically made fibers that mimic what real hair should be like. These are the kind of secondary brushes that you get which mimic sable brushes but are not real hair brushes. Then the third category, and I only have one of these brushes. I guess this is probably my most important brush that I use. This category is the sable synthetic mix. This brush over here, this category of brush has both sable natural hairs in it. It has synthetic hair in it mixed together to give you best of both worlds. Now let's talk a little bit about these individual categories and look at the advantages and disadvantages of both and See how they're applied using watercolor. 5. Sable Brushes: Let's now talk about our natural hair brushes, the sable brushes. On this sheet over here I've got three different types of brushes. I've got hake brushes on the left here. These two are called hake brushes. These are made with natural goats' hair. In the middle I've got probably the most expensive sable brushes that you can get. These are the Winsor & Newton series 7 Kolinsky brushes. I'll talk a bit more about these towards the end. Then on the right, I've got more of a basic brand in sable. These are the Pro Arte range sable brushes. Again, the cost really varies depending on the type of brush that you buy, and especially the type of hair, the natural hair that's in the sable brush. As I said, these ones that we have in the middle, these are the Kolinsky brushes. These are renowned brushes for their quality, and they have a historic royal attribute to them because they were apparently ordered by one of the queens of our country, Queen Victoria, back in the day to Winsor and Newton. They were commissioned to create this brush as her number 7 Kolinsky brush. It's a world-famous brush. It's the series 7 brush and she wanted the number 7 done. You have a bit of royalty with these brushes. Again, with royalty comes a royal price. These are very pricey, very expensive. I would not recommend getting these as beginners purely because you're starting off in the world of watercolor and you don't want to be spending 50- £100 pounds on your brushes, just on a couple of brushes just to test them out. What I'm going to do is I'm going to quickly show you, bring this closer to the screen, what this brush is really all about. I've got a couple of sizes here. I've got a size 5, and I've got a size 2 brush. These are round brushes. Watercolor brushes, just like any other paint brushes, they can be divided into sable, or synthetic, or a mix of both, and they can be so categorized into their different shapes and sizes. You usually get round brushes in most paint brush types or mediums, and you get flat brushes as well. These are considered as flat brushes. These hake brushes that we have. We have this flat side to them. You get many different types of brushes. But for this beginner's class, there's no point us going through every single type of brush that is available. I really want you to start off quickly and not get confused about all the different types of brushes that are available so that I can recommend to you maybe two or three different types in maybe sable and synthetic, and that way you can quickly get started, and as you go along in this journey in watercolor, you can really build up that experience and then you will know your preferences, whether you like sable brushes, or whether you like synthetic. This was the Winsor & Newton series 7 Kolinsky brushes. Absolute expensive brushes. I don't recommend them. Just wanted to show you these to give you an idea of the price range. One of these brushes, this number 5 brush here, is around £50. Which is a lot of money for a brush, especially if it's a brush that you are just testing out. If you're going to be using this like I do on a daily basis in my career, then it's worth getting. But it's definitely not worth getting for a beginner, not at this stage anyway. Let's just put these royal brushes to the side for a minute and let's talk a bit more about these Pro Arte brushes that I've got here. These Pro Arte brushes are basically exactly the same as these Winsor & Newton sable brushes. The only difference is that the hair in them, the natural hair, is not at the high quality as it was with the Winsor & Newton. The Winsor & Newton they use a hair from a Siberian squirrel, I think. But do check that out. I might be wrong about that, but it is a very rare hair that they use which has some great properties of holding water. Whereas with these brushes here, you do have natural hairs in them, but they're not going to be Siberian squirrel hairs. They're just going to be general animal hairs that they can find. You're not going to get that same performance out of these, but these, I would say, are a good start point to your journey into the world of sable brushes. I wouldn't say that you need to buy sable brushes because you might not even like the feel, or the performance of sable brushes compared to synthetic ones, which we're going to come onto next. But it's just having an idea of what's out in the stores because it can get really confusing especially when you're trying to buy brushes for the first time, so many different types, and varieties, and shapes and sizes, and you just don't know where to start off. My recommendation is, whether you go for stable or synthetic, start this journey with a round brush. Because a round brush is probably the most flexible and advanced brush in terms of you can make as many different types of strokes with it as you would possibly need, especially at this beginner level. I highly recommend going for a round brush. These are the Pro Arte ranges, you can get different sizes in these. These often come in sets. I think I got this quite a long while ago, in sets. You get the zero sizes, 1, 2's and 6's. I would recommend getting maybe a mid-range size such as a size 5 or a size 6. This is the size 5 in the Winsor & Newton, just to give you an idea of what that size looks like. This is a size 6 in the Pro Arte range. You can see there's not much difference in it. I think that's a pretty good size to start off with. The key in any brush is the brush's ability to hold a sharp point. If you look at both of these brushes you might be thinking, "Well, they don't hold sharp points. They're quite roundy from the edges." While that is usually the case with these types of natural hair brushes because they do lose their shape over time. However, the real test is when you dip them in some water. Let's quickly get some water here. 6. Sharp Point: I can show you what this brushes look like. So we'll start off with the Winsor and Newton. All I'm doing here is, I'm just dipping it into the water here. I'll bring this a little bit closer. You can see that that brush just dipping it in, giving it a little swivel, not smashing it on that basis, just normal plain water, give it a little swivel. Take it out, and you can see that it's gone to sharp point. Now that's the key in any brush that you use, whether it be synthetic or sable. A quality of the brush is determined about how that point is made. You shouldn't have to make so much effort for it to get to a sharp point. Again, that is why these brushes are so expensive, because they're purely that good. If this is in your budget, I would maybe recommend getting a smaller size sable brushes, Winsor and Newton one, one any other brand sable brush that uses natural Kolinsky hair. In the resource sheet, I'm going to put down all the different brands of brushes that have Kolinsky hair in it that you can get. It's not just Winsor and Newton. You can get them in different brands, there's Da Vinci brushes. There's many other brands. I'm going to leave all that information for you to have a look at in the resource sheet. We just literally popped it into water and look how sharp that point has become, I mean, the point was pretty much expanded like this Pro Arte one and then just putting it into water. I just made it gel up together really nicely and that's great. That's exactly what we want. Let's test this out on the Pro Arte one. This one tends not to usually go into a sharp point purely because the quality of the hair really isn't that good. But I still would recommend this brush as a beginner, for a beginner, just to have as an experience in the sable brush world range. We have got a little bit more of a sharper point than we had before, which is not bad, but it's definitely not as sharp as that Winsor and Newton point that we have there. This is one of the key aspects of the brushes to maintain and hold the sharp point. When they dry out, they usually falls away and they get rounded, but once you just pop them into water, they should retain their shape and go back to a sharp point. You see, it's still not too bad and that's what it's really all about. We've got the Kolinsky expensive brush on the right, we've got the Pro Arte brush here. Now, we've got the other Kolinsky brush here. This is just to know the smallest size. What I will do with this is I'll just quickly demonstrate this again. Just add it into water, just twist it around a little bit, bring it out, and there you have it. You've got yourself a beautiful sharp point there on this smallest size brush. Maybe we do the same with the Pro Arte smaller brush. I mean, I guess this is probably a similar size, this is possibly a size 2. We can move these other ones out of the way. If you see right away, you can see it's quite dispersed on the tip right over there. So if we just add this to the water, twist it around a little bit, make sure you don't press down, especially with sable brushes. You don't want to be pushing down towards the bottom of your jars because what that will do is damage the brushes, and with sable brushes because they are so soft and natural. They will not hold their shape very well over time. Sometimes, they do get ruined very quickly, so you can see that we've got a pretty decent sharp point. There you have it then. This is what we've got for the sable brushes and natural air brushes. Again, I would recommend going for the Pro Arte range ones if these are some that you can get hold of. There are other more budget versions of sable brushes. Again, all the details of those will be in the resource sheet, the Hake brushes. Now, these ones, what I'm going to do with this is I'm just going to wet this and show you these don't retain any shape because they are just flat brushes. But just to give you a demonstration to keep everything nice and complete, we can just wet this up. You can see it wets up and it holds a lot of water. There's a lots of water soaked into that hair and that's the massive advantage that you have of natural hair brushes which hold up and they can release a lot of water, and that really is the key to watercolor painting, watercolor sketching. I would recommend maybe getting a couple of round brushes and a Hake brush, maybe a one-inch Hake brush like this, and maybe a size 4 or a size 5 round brush like this Pro Arte one, and I think that is a great start point. We will demonstrate these later on in the class and you'll see how we use these brushes together. So now, let's move on to the synthetic brushes. 7. Synthetic Brushes: Looking at our synthetic brushes, the brushes that are not natural hair, they're made-up fibers that replicate natural hair we've got a nice little range over here. Now, starting off from the right, let's look at this funny-looking brush down here. This is what we call a water brush, and this is one that I would probably say avoid using for watercolor because I personally, from a personal perspective, don't really like using these because I think that they're a bit difficult to control. But you might like using them, so I've just thought I'll show you one of these, if this is something that you might think that you might like. They're not very expensive at all. Maybe just if you fancy trying this one now I'd maybe get a normal size in it. I'm not quite sure what size numbers they come in because I bought these a long time ago. You can get these in packs and sets where you have many different size variations. They have their own little caps on at the top, and you can see mine have gone quite dark with that because I've probably not really used them for watercolor, I've used them more for ink. But I guess they are handy, especially if you go traveling and you don't want to carry any water with you. What you do is you literally just open up the back and you fill this little well area full of water, and then you can just control the water flow by squeezing out that water onto your paper and then just dipping it into your paint. But again, personally I don't really like using these, but maybe something that you might want to look into. I thought I'll just quickly go pass that one and we can just move that one back in its place. Now, the ones that I really recommend are these four over here. Now, this first one is the good old round brush, like we mentioned with the Winsor & Newton brushes. If you remember, we had the Winsor & Newton round brush. This is just a replication of a round brush in a synthetic form. Now, this is just a own store brand, you don't need to worry too much about brands with these synthetic brushes. I would definitely recommend going to your local art store or having a look at your local art store's website and checking out what their own brand synthetic brushes are like. Just make sure that you get the ones that say watercolor synthetic brushes because brushes are available with acrylic paint, oil paint, ink brushes, you want to be going for the ones that say watercolor on it because the fibers have specifically been created and treated so that they can hold watercolor, and what you don't want to be doing is using an oil brush or an acrylic brush with your watercolor paints because it's not going to produce very good results and you're not going to be very happy. With this one, this is a size 10. The sizes are going to vary from brand to brand. The size 10 in this own store brand won't be the exact same size as a size 10 in, say, a Winsor & Newton, you are going to get some discrepancy. But I say maybe a size 8, between an 8 and 10 is a good starting point to have as a nice, decent, wide, round brush that you can use to apply your watercolor in this watercolor journey. Round brush, nice short handle. That's another thing to mention. Watercolor brushes come in short handle sizes, they come in long handle sizes like this as well. That's entirely up to you which size you're comfortable with. I prefer the short handle ones, the long handle ones are generally created to hold like this towards the end, especially if you've got your watercolor paper mounted on an angle on a board. They do have their advantages of having long handles, so you have less pressure on them, but we will go through that in the upcoming lessons. Short handle, long handle, the only difference is in the grip. The advantage of having short handle ones is that you can actually hold them like a pen. If you're used to doing drawings with ink pens or with colored pencils, you can actually mimic that style of holding your brush, and that's what I personally do. That's pretty much my style of art. I like to draw my watercolor paintings with the brush, if that makes sense. That's the first synthetic brush, absolutely brilliant. I would say it's a must-have for any watercolor class or any watercolor project. Moving onto this next one, this is a Filbert brush. This is a watercolor size 8 Filbert brush which is basically just a rounded-off, chiseled-off brush that works nice, especially if you want to add in some edges or want to create some details. Now, I wouldn't say that you have to have this brush or it's an absolute must, because, again, the more brushes you buy the more money you're going to spend. I would say if this is something that you want to try out, then go for it. This is a Maestro brand aquamarine watercolor brush. Again, I'm going to leave the links in the resource sheet for all the sizes of brushes and brands for you to check out and read up on the reviews or to purchase if that's what you want to do. But again, this one is absolutely not necessary, but it's a good one to have. Let's move on to the next one, and it's this huge massive size brush here. This is what we call a quill brush. You can see over here Golden Taklon Quill. These are quill brushes, or in some cases they may be called mop brushes because they basically look like a mop. These are absolutely brilliant for doing backgrounds. They soak up a lot of water, you can get these in the sable versions, but they're going to cost a lot of money. You're looking at well over £100, especially for this size of a brush. I would recommend going for one of these quill brushes. This is a size 220, the number of the size, it depends on the actual brand. This is by Silver Atelier, so it depends on which brand you go for. Again, I'm going to leave the links to all the different brands for these quill mop brushes. Absolutely, brilliant for backgrounds and you're going to see me using this in the upcoming lessons. Finally, we have the good old flat brush. Now, these flat brushes, I would say, again, these are really, really good for watercolor, especially if you're doing light washes and you want to quickly lay down your watercolor without making too many rendering lines or mess. Now, this one is again an art company own brand by Jackson's, and it's a one-inch brush. I think one inch is a pretty good start off size. I wouldn't go for anything bigger because for the beginner's class, we're going to just work on small-sized paper, no bigger than A4, and these size brushes are ideal to start off in. Again, the synthetic, you can get the sable versions, but they're just going to be too expensive. That's a nice little roundup of the synthetic range. Again, if I were to choose two brushes out of these five and recommend to you to get to start off in, I would probably say go for the round brush synthetic and either go for the flat one or the mop brush because you can get similar effects with both, they're both created to create big washes to cover up space quickly. Either one of these would be great. The Filbert-style brush, I would say if it's something that you really want then go for it. But it's absolutely not necessary, it's just a good one to have. This brush, I don't recommend it at all. I don't personally like it. There's a lot of watercolor artists that use this, especially when they go out on their travels when they're sketching on the go. But I personally don't like them, but I'm going to leave that up to you whether you want to get that or not. It's definitely not necessary for this class. Let's just do a quick roundup of what we spoke about with the sable brushes and the synthetic, and then we'll move on to the final brush that I use probably more often than any, which is the sable synthetic mix. 8. Summary & Mixed Brush: We went through sable brushes like we've got here and the synthetic brushes like we've got over here. I recommended that you go for a round brush in either or in sable or in a synthetic. Maybe have a couple more options with the synthetic brushes for the wider brushes, for your bigger washes like these two down here. We have the hake brush, so it's a good brush to have just to have big wide washes of brushes, but it's not necessary. These brushes that I have got on display over here, these are the ones that I would generally recommend for this class. Alternatively, you can get yourself a set of brushes where you have a set of round brushes or a set of mixed watercolor brushes, absolutely try them out if you want. But generally speaking, when you buy set brushes you tend to probably only use two out of the six or seven brushes that you get in a sets and the rest are usually a waste. You really want a brush that you can make fine details with, so something like a number 2 in size, in a round, and then something a little bit bigger than a number 2, a five or six, that would work nice for bigger washes of watercolor. Then I would say you probably need a size 8 or 10 brush, such as the synthetic one to really give you some good coverage when you're doing your watercolor paintings. Then finally, a nice big, heavy wide brush, like the quill brush and it's flat one-inch brush to give you a nice range of being able to the thin marks, medium marks, and wide wash marks, to give yourself all the options that you can at this beginner stage. Now, you can make even thin marks with the biggest brushes depending on how sharp the point that they can maintain. Again, with this synthetic brush over here, if we deep this in a bit of water. We got my water jar hair just with plain plain. I'm just going to mix it up and you can see the color is slightly changing. You do need to wash your brushes up after you use them. That's an absolute key, and I clearly haven't done that. So that's not very good demonstration. We've got this nice little point that you've got over here. On this brush, you can do some really nice detail work even if you have a number 10 brush. If you don't want to buy five or six brushes initially, then I would probably say just get yourself a number 8 size brush, around eight size brush and that is it. You don't need to spend any more money. Get yourself a good own brand, artist brand, number 8 size, synthetic watercolor brush, and get yourself some paint, nice small sets of graduate grade paints, and you're ready to go in this class from the watercolor paint and the brush side of things. Finally, after going through the sable and the synthetic, there is one last brush that I want to talk about, and this is this one over here, which is the sable synthetic mix. Now, I'll just move this to the side so you can see this one a little bit better. This is basically a hybrid brush of the sable and the synthetic. You're getting best of both world. This is the brush I personally use more often than all the sables and the synthetic brushes that I have, and the reason for this is, that it has the flexibility of a synthetic brush because synthetic brushes are a lot more flexible than the sable brushes. The sable bushes are made with natural hair, so they tend to bend a lot more. There are a lot softer, and they do tend to lose their point quite quickly. Whereas with the sable brushes, they're a little bit more rigid because of the fibers they artificially produce, they bounce back. There were a lot more springy. What you really want, or what I really prefer is to have best of both worlds, and that's where this guy comes in. This brush has the springiness of a synthetic brush and it has that water-holding quality of a sable brush. I personally think that this brush is one of the best brushes that you can get. However, these are quite pricey brushes. They are a medium price range brush compared to sable and synthetic. It all depends on your budget, what you want to spend initially. Now if you really want to try this brush out, I would say go for a size 8, between a six or an eight, and eight I think is absolutely perfect. The width of this brush is great. It's completely black because of the fibers that we use. It just black colored fibers, and it works really well. I think it has squirrel hair in it, I'm not sure if it's kolinsky, but this is by a company called Silver Black Velvet. You may or may not have seen a lot of watercolor artists use this absolutely gorgeous brush and it works really well. Absolute solid performer. I would recommend this if this is what you want to go with, and maybe if this is just the only brush you want to go with and you don't want to bother with any of the others then just go with this brush if that's what you want. But a summary, I would say if you're a one brush person and you just want to start off by using one brush. Then don't go for the sable brush, don't go for the mixed sable synthetic. Instead, just go for the synthetic round brush and either get a size 8 or gets a size 10 to start this journey in the wonderful world of watercolors. That's about it for the brushes side of things. There are many other brushes that you can get in watercolor. You can even get these fan brushes which are great. bow again, for this beginner's class, I don't really want to delve in too deep onto the like in a shapes and forms of brushes. I'd rather just keep it nice and simple for you to really warm yourself up in this excellent world of watercolors. Now that we've gone through the brushes, we've gone through the paints, all we need to do now is move on to the third essential item, which is the surface. It's all about the surface. Let's move on to that next. 9. Surfaces: Welcome back. Now let's talk about the third most important item that you're going to need in the journey of watercolors, that is, watercolor paper. Now you can paint with watercolor on different surfaces. There's many different surfaces that are available in the forms of paper, board, even some canvases that you can paint on that have been treated for watercolor. However, for this beginner's class, I'm going to recommend that you just stick to watercolor paper. Let's start off by going through a cheap brand of watercolor paper just to get you warmed up. This one that I've got here is by Reeves. I don't recommend that you get this to do your final watercolor sketching on or to follow the class on because this watercolor paper just won't work. However, it's a great pad of paper or a water paper that you can use as scratch paper just to practice the color saturation, or just to test out your brushes before you actually start doing your real watercolor exercises. So the weight is the most vital part of watercolor paper and I'll show you here on the screen. I'll just bring this up. The weight of this particular pad of paper is 190 GSM. This is not adequate for good watercolor adherence and absorption. What you want is a 300 GSM, which is the equivalent of 140 pounds in weight. Now this is only 90 Pound in weight and again, 190 GSM. This will not do. If you have any other type of budget watercolor paper that's in this weight level or is even lighter than this then, absolutely avoid it, even avoid this one if you don't have it already, but if you do have something like this just at hand, then you can use it as a scratch paper. Which ones should we go for? Let's pull this one out of the way, the one that we don't really want to use, and let's switch to probably one of the best watercolor papers you can get and that's is lo and behold, Arches. Now you might be thinking that Arches, if you already know about Arches Watercolor Paper, this is a very expensive paper. But the main difference between this and this cheaper grade paper is: there's two main differences. The first one is the weight. On this one, remember I said 300 GSM is key and that's exactly what this is. This is 300 grams per meter squared, 140 pounds. So that's the ideal thickness and the weight of the watercolor paper that you want. This watercolor paper has an additional specialty to it and that is, it is made with 100 percent pure cotton. That makes a massive difference in your experience of watercolor. What that does is it absorbs off the watercolor itself. So the actual pigment, it has a different effect in absorption of the pigment and absorbing the water. It will bring out the best colors of the colors that you have, whether they be graduate or professional artists colors, this will really bring out the best in the watercolor that you're using. So I highly recommend this. They are very expensive. So what I would suggest is maybe get yourself just one pad of this Arches Watercolor Paper and get in either a hot press or a cold press. 10. High Quality Paper: The difference between hot press and cold press basically is, hot-pressed is a smooth finish. I'll show you here, the paper has a really nice, smooth, lovely finish on it. You can do a lot of detailed work on it, especially if you're going to use pen. With the cold press, which is also known as the NOT, this is the medium-grained paper, so you've got a texture on this. I'll just show you, I'm not sure if you can see this on the camera. What we'll do is we'll just bring this closer to the screen, and if you can see this, it really has a nice texture to it. It's got this nice velvety type texture, and it just feels lovely. When your watercolor painting is dried or your watercolor sketch is dried, it just gives it that gorgeous, gorgeous look and texture. Either, or, get one of these. I would recommend. These come in different sizes and formats. This size that I've got here is the standard 9 inch by 12 inch, and it's the same here with this hall press pad. This is my go to paper. This is what I use on a daily basis, if not on a every couple of days basis when I'm doing watercolor work, and I just can't highly recommend this enough because it's just brilliant. It's absolutely brilliant. I've been using this for years, and I really wouldn't go to any other watercolor paper. However, if this is not within your budget range, then what I would suggest is getting yourself a good quality, paper-based, watercolor paper. Now, an alternative to this would be, in my experience, Bockingford, which is a great watercolor paper. This comes in different varieties and sizes. I've got these blocks here. These are watercolor blocks. The difference between these blocks and those pads over there of individual sheets is that these blocks are actually glued on all four sides. You've got this side here of the watercolor paper block glued up there, and the other side is glued on this long end. On the other side is completely glued. Then on that opening side where you open it from, I will try bringing this closer to the camera and show you, you have a slight gap. So what I'll do is I'll just try pulling this gap. If you can see this, you've got the slight gap where what you do is, you just paint on your actual watercolor block, on the front page. You won't have any seepage going through. Once you're done, all you've got to do is get yourself a ruler or a palette knife, and you've just got to literally put this under the sheets that you've painted, so just there, slide it in there, and then lightly just push across the edges all the way across. What that does is, that releases the glue attachment on the paper from each corner, and just like that, you can see, I've released that paper. Now, you've got to do this all the way across to release the full sheet. I'll quickly do that while I'm talking, and I would highly recommend Bockingford watercolor blocks. You can get these in individual sheets as well. I have them here, bought like that, they're just really easily removable, and then you've got a complete sheet. Now, the advantage of these Bockingford Block that I've got or this Bockingford paper is that, again, the key is that it's 300gsm, 140 pound in weight. This one is a cold-pressed one, the NOT, so it's the one like the Arches green one, like this. It's exactly the same texture as the Arches. The Arches has a slightly different feel to it, but this is, I would say, a decent brand of paper. Now, there are many other types of brands that you can get. This one's actually made in the UK, in England, and it's mold-made, its acid free, and archival, which is again, great qualities to have. I would not recommend any other brand that I know of, but if you have different brands where you live, there are Canson and then this Fabriano, which again, is an expensive brand. These are usually not 100 percent cotton boards or papers, and what you'll find is if you do use cotton and non-cotton, you'll find that the colors show slightly different in terms of absorption and saturation, and it really does make a huge difference in my experience and opinion. I would recommend that if you don't want to spend too much money on the Arches paper, then maybe go for Bockingford, maybe buy a block. You can also buy these in individual sheets, like I've got over here. These come in individual, bigger sheets, so they might be a lot cheaper for you in terms of economy. You can cut these sheets down. Now, the only thing to notice here is that if you're using a cotton paper such as Arches, it will not buckle up as quickly as the mold-made paper, fiber paper. When we come to buckling, and we'll discuss this on the next lesson, we will look at how both of these papers are impacted with water and the level of water, and how they buckle. Buckling is basically just the warping and bubbling up of the paper, the surface, when water is applied to it, and that's a key issue with watercolor paper. Every paper will buckle, that's a given. Some will buckle a lot quicker. The Bockingford will buckle a lot more quicker than the Arches, but the Arches, even though it's an expensive 100 percent cotton paper, it will also buckle. Now with the Arches, you can buy the Arches in a block as well. However, the blocks usually quite more expensive than these pads. The pads themselves, they just have 12 sheets in a standard pad. It's just standard pad, 12 sheets. Open it up and just tear out the sheet itself. All you do tear tear out the sheet, and you're ready to go. Best to use the front surface, but you can also use the back surface. I would stick to the front. Another way to avoid the buckling is to stretch the paper, and we're going to talk a bit more about stretching the paper to minimize that buckling and warping. That's another step that you'd have to do if you want to do it, but we will discuss that in the next lesson. Just generally speaking, I would suggest go for Arches if you have it in your budget, and maybe also go for Bockingford as well to have as a secondary paper. But if your budget doesn't allow you, then just stick to the Bockingford. It's a lot cheaper than the Arches, and you can get some really decent results with it. Again, it comes with the hot-pressed, the smooth surface, or it comes with the cold-pressed, the textured surface. I'll leave that decision up to you. All of the links to these products will be in the resource sheet, so do check them out, and I'll also put links to other brands of watercolor paper that come highly recommended that I have used in the past. But again, my main two brands that I use, and the ones that I recommend, are the Arches and the Bockingford. Now, a third type of watercolor paper item, I would say is probably worth having a look at, is a watercolor sketchbook. Now, watercolor sketchbooks are great because you can just do some practice work and it keeps all your watercolor paintings in one place. These are usually paper mold-made and they tend to walk quite a lot. This one that I've got here is a small version and then it's just a bigger version here. Links to these sketchbooks will be available in the resource sheets again, and I'll just quickly show you over here. This is the type of things that I do in my watercolor sketchbook, and I use this every single day. I go through quite a lot of sketchbooks because I do, do quite a lot of drawings and illustrations on a daily basis. These are the type of results that you can get. Again, my style is quite loose sketching, heavy ink work. I do a lot of ink work and then I go over with the watercolor, and that's pretty much good for what I use it for. I do recommend it, maybe get a small one of these. These are fairly inexpensive in the grander scheme of things. I would probably suggest getting a small watercolor sketchbook. Now, you can also get watercolor sketchbooks that are made with the 100 percent cotton paper. However, those are quite hard to come by and they can be very, very expensive. So I'd avoid them, wouldn't worry too much about them because even cotton paper buckles and warps, so there's no real point in spending that much money on a sketchbook that's got cotton paper in it. These will work fine for the type of things that we're going to do in this beginner's class. I'm going to leave it up to you, to which surface you want to get. Again, I'm going to leave all the details in the resource sheets, so do check that out before you decide to go ahead and buy. If you've already got watercolor paper, then just go ahead and use that one. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about the dreaded stretching of watercolor papers. Let's move on to that one next. 11. Stretching Paper: Welcome back. Let's now talk about watercolor paper stretching. Now, as we mentioned before in the previous lesson, we need to stretch our watercolor paper to minimize the buckling or the warping that you get when you add water to watercolor paper. You can stretch your watercolor paper in a number of different ways. Generally, the principles are the same. The tools that you might use might be a little bit different. This technique that I'm going to show you, we're going to be using gummed tape. We've got gummed tape on the left side over here and all gummed tape is is paper tape that has a glue on the inside of the tape. You can see over here on the screen, we've got the paper part on the outside and we've got the glue on the inside. Now, the glue at the moment, it's not sticky, so it's not sticking to anything. How you activate this is by adding water to it. The glue will become activated by water and that's why we have a water bottle or even a wet brush at hand to just get this activated so that it can become sticky and we can use this to tie down our paper. This is the first item that you would need in this method of stretching your watercolor paper. The next item we need is the board that we are going to stretch our watercolor paper on. Now, the board that you use is very important, the surface of the board is important because what you want is a completely flat surface. You don't want something that's too shiny or too laminate because then the tape will just keep spreading on it and you don't want it to be completely porous that the water just sinks into the board. There are many different options that you can use. You don't have to specifically go out and buy a watercolor paper stretching board, but that is an option if that's what you want to do. I will leave again all the links and details in the resource shades under this area of watercolor paper stretching of all these materials and the different types of boards that you can get. But there may be something that you already have in your house that you can use. For example, over here obviously is just an old chopping board that I have. It's a nice, lightweight chopping board and this will work fine. Also got here a backing board from a picture frame. This is a backing board that I just took out from the picture frame. You can see that's how they usually caught and these will work fine as well because they have a nice shin finish on it that's not too slippery, it's just right. It will resist the water and it's nice and thin and it's really lightweight. That's another thing to consider, the weight of the board that you're using. You can also use an empty shelf board if you have one lying around and I often tend to do this. I've got an empty shelf board here so you can see I'll show you on the camera. This was just a empty shelf board that I had in the garage and it works great. It just has like a table finish on it and this is absolutely perfect for what we need to do. What I'm going to do is I'm going to demonstrate this on the shelf board that I have over here so that you can follow along. Don't worry if this is something that you've never done before and you're a bit nervous about using your watercolor paper. Watch me do this in this video and then give it a go yourself. But by all means, you don't have to stretch your watercolor paper. I prefer to stretch it purely because I like to have a complete flat surface to paint on. Now, that's not a prerequisite to watercolor. If you're happy with your watercolor bubbling up or becoming a little bit wonky, that's entirely up to you. But I'll go through the stretching method for those of you who really want to have a maximum flat piece of watercolor paper that you can paint on, and I think personally, I think that experience that you get will be absolutely brilliant. Let's make a start with this one. Step 1 is to actually cut your brown tape, your gummed tape into its right sizes so that we can do this in advance without having to worry about it because once you start wetting your paper, then what you don't want is you have wet fingers and to handle this in contact because the moment any drop of water goes onto this tape, it's going to become super sticky and it's going to stick all over the place and the glue is going to move around and you're just going to get super frustrated. We need to cut our paper tape into size. So what I'll do is I'm going to get my A4 watercolor paper here and we'll start cutting this up into its right size. What you want is you want to have extra overlap of the tape that goes beyond the length and size and edge of the paper and that is so that it sticks to this edge. What we're going to do is we're just going to roll this out about this much. You can see over here, I'll just move the board a little bit higher. I'm just resting that there, I would leave maybe this much space and then just cut away the same amount of space on both sides and you've got yourself a nice strip that will fit this side here and it will fit the top side. Again, we just need another one to fit the top and bottom and it will curl away like this. The best way to deal with this is putting glue side down. It's not going to stick on anything because it's not been activated yet. That's all I'm going to do. Again, all I'm going to do is roll this out and have approximately the same size like I've got up there and what that will do is give me two nice strips that are ready to glue and take down. Again, what we want is a strip to go about this much. So I'd say maybe an inch and a half or maybe two inches above or bigger than the size of the actual paper edge and that would be just right. You've got that one going there and then we're going to do another one pretty much the same size as we did before. You don't have to have this perfectly measured. It doesn't matter if you have some going bigger than the other. The key really is to make sure that it covers the length of the paper and beyond so that we have nice sticky point that we'll seal each other, and that's what we're going to do. We're going to basically use these to seal the paper top, bottom, left, right, just like so, and another tip in this is that how much should you actually glue inside. Now, I would suggest maybe one centimeter to one and a half centimeter. It's always a good idea to get this measured on your paper. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to get myself my little pencil, and with my pencil, I'm just going to measure one centimeter point inwards here and another centimeter point here on each corner so that I can have a bit of a guideline to follow when I'm gluing my tape down. Let's get on with that now. We've got a nice one and a half centimeter border going all the way across and that's our rough guide where we will be overlapping the tape over so that we have a nice little guide where we can go into, so it doesn't all go wonky and you'd have a very nice finish. We've made our guidelines and one important note to mention here is that the brown tape that we put on, once we've wet the tape and the paper has been wet and it has dried out and it's being stretched, you're going to effectively lose this border area because the gummed tape is very difficult to remove without leaving residue on the paper and that's what you don't want. What I mean by that is like you can see on this sheet of paper, I stretch this and I move this off just for purpose of illustration. You get this horrible, it's all glued area because the glue is very strong on these tapes and that's what you don't want. It's best to just cut that off and disregard this area of your paper. You do lose it, but if you want to use that later on when you're framing your work, that's absolutely fine and it can get hidden within the frame. Our next step is we need to wet the tape. Now, this is one of the most important parts, steps in this method of stretching. You need to wet the paper completely. So not just the front side, but we need to wet the entire sheet from back and front. The best way to do this to have it really efficiently wet is to have a bucket or a square container full of water and just submerge the sheet into that container. That's what we're going to do next. 12. Soaking Paper: Okay, so now I've got my buckets full of water. You can see I've got water over here. This is just normal lukewarm water. What you don't want to be using is warm or hot water. Cold water, lukewarm water will work fine if the water is too warm or too hot, what will happen is the actual sizing inside the watercolor paper may get dislodged or move, or just come out. Sizing is a substance that they put inside the fibers of the mode of the watercolor paper. That is the key ingredient that pulls and cleans onto the actual watercolor paints itself. So if the sizing is removed, the watercolor paint won't adhere properly or fully onto the watercolor papers do bear that in mind. I've got my sheets here, that I marked with a 1.5 centimeters border going all the way around the edge. What I'm going to do is submerge that into the water like soap, and just ensure that all corners have been submerged properly and the timing of how long you need to keep the sheet in water, that's going to depend on the brand that you're using. But just generally as a rule of thumb, I would suggest between five all the way up to 10 minutes having it's submerged. You might think that's a long time to have a sheet of colored paper or any sheets of paper submerged inside water. But I assure you nothing will happen to the paper. It won't come below because it really is that type of paper that can withstand this water. The point of doing this is to stretch the fibers of the paper out before you start adding watercolor paint to it, because the papers have fibers have not been stretched out. They have nowhere to go when water is added to them. So they naturally want to move. If you've already got them stretched out, then they've already been fully expanded. That's the whole purpose of stretching your watercolor paper. I've just submerged in. It's only been about half a minute now. All you do is just keep turning it over, press it down. Don't press too hard because you might get like bumps or little scrapings of your nails going into the paper. Just use the tips of your fingers just to keep it in and eventually it'll stay down. That's all you need to do. If you don't have a square bucket or square container, like I've got here. This is just a drawer from a sets of plastic chester drawers that I use, which works perfectly for an A4 size sheets of paper or 12 by nine like I am using here. But if you don't have this, then alternatively you can just run your sheets of watercolor paper under the tap, under the faucet. Just run it under the faucet for a few minutes and that will work. It's just that it can get a little bit messy. This way, you have everything in control and can control where the watercolor paper is being wet or moist and where it isn't. Just like that I'm just twisting it's over. You can actually perform a test to see whether it's been properly soaked or not. The usual test to see whether your watercolor paper has been soaked properly or not, whether it's ready to put on the stretching board, on the board is to see if the paper flops. If you hold the paper upright like this, it should flop over. You can see that took a little bit a while to flop over. It's not flopping over completely, so it's not ready yet. Even if you hold it from this side and you see is it flopping over see that's still a bit steady, it's going down but not as quick as it should. So it needs at least five more minutes in the water until all those fibers have been completely soaked. That way you will get the best results. Now, I've let my watercolor paper soak for about five to six minutes. You can tell now it's very floppy. It's not holding its shape at all. It's got no rigidness left in it, you can say it's completely soaked. We'll just do a quick little test. Lift it up and before I even I lift it up, it's already falling down, it's flopping away. That's pretty much ready. What we're going to do now is, we're going to remove the sheet and we're going to put it straight onto our board as it is. 13. Taping Paper: There we go. So I've just got my sheets and you're going to place it onto my board, I'm just going to let it drop down, and just lightly with nothing else I'm just going to spread out the sheets so that there's no air bubbles. Now, it's important that you don't have any air bubbles underneath the actual sheets. So while these, I'll just gets a quick little zoom in on that. You can see over here, what I'll do is I'll just move this a little bit forward. What we don't want is we don't want air bubbles going in here at all. Because if you have air bubbles in it, once its dried out, those air bubbles will appear again when you apply the water. So very important to make sure that just with your fingers very, very large, you don't press down to hard, just lightly finding out those air bubbles and ensure that it's completely flat. So there we have it. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to dry my hands with some paper towels. So that's always another thing to have handy, some paper towels and tissues, because what you don't want is you don't want your fingers to be wet when you're handling the tape. Now, before we start applying the tapes to this, I'm going to get my little bottle spray, and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to spray around the edge of the paper. So what I want is I want that board area to be wet. Now, the reason I'm doing this is, so that I don't have to overly wet the tape before I put it on. When the tape hits the actual board and the paper itself, then it's already wet and it will activate the glue and we won't have to move it around. The more you move the tape around while it's wet, the more that glue is going to slip over, and you may end up getting pockets of air going in between those gaps that you create. So just with your spray bottle lightly spray the paper as well. Just to see you've got a nice bit of moisture going all the way around. That way, we'll avoid getting into trouble with the tapes. Again, just lightly, make sure there's no bubbles there or there's no residue or anything on top, and we're ready to go. So we've got some nice bit of moisture around this whole area here and dry your hands, make sure your hands are completely dry, get all of your tape and ensure that you are not touching the glue side. So I've got my tape here. This was the longest side. So this was the longest side here, and line it up with the actual line that you've got. All I'm doing here is I'm just lining it up, lightly pressing down, not pressing down hard at all, and you'll notice, it's difficult to tell on the screen, but you'll notice when you do this. At the moment, you end up putting that tape down, it's automatically adhering because that glue's touching that water and it's automatically adhering to it. So you can see now I've gone slightly behind the line that I drew, but that's fine. Don't worry about that because you're going to lose this side of the paper anyway. Lightly, with your finger, just press down on this edge here to make sure there's no air gaps down here. Lightly just run your finger down this across the edge and if you can see anymore air gaps over here, make sure to press them out. The paper should be completely wet from underneath. There should be no dry areas underneath, and that's pretty much it. So what we're going to do is we're going to do exactly the same. Dry your hands with a bit of tissue, your finger tips and then get hold of the next roll of tape. What we're going to do is we're just going to overlap this on top. Now, this area is not going to have any moisture on it. So good thing to do is just get your spray and just lightly spray that area, little bit of moisture so that the tape adheres over there so we don't have a gap. Again, all we're going to do is line this up with the line that we did, and lightly press down with our fingers, run it down, and you can see it's added that beautiful seal at the edge where that paper meets the brown tape. You've got that gorgeous seal going on there and it's completely wet just like we did before. Dry your fingertips and then just run your finger across the edge. So you get rid of all those bubbles, those potential air bubbles, because they're the ones that are going to be the little monsters that come to bite you when it dries off and we don't want to have any of them. So let's just run our finger across there. There we go, it's completely sealed from where the paper is. Now, another thing to check is to make sure that you've not added any air bubbles while you're doing this. Just run your fingers past this again to make sure that the air bubbles are out, and this one is looking good and don't dry your fingers, and we're going to repeat that process. There we have it through the center, bring your fingers out, get rid of any potential air bubble, and then outwards, center and outward so you run your fingers across that, make sure it's sealed on these edges. Dry your fingers and just do a final run, with your dry your fingers across it, make sure it's completely attached to the board. There should be no air gaps on these edges from the tape and there should be no bubbling of areas on where the overlap of the tape is over the watercolor paper. So I'm happy with that, and if you do see like some tape coming forward or coming off from the edges, just get a little bit of water with your watercolor bottle, spray it, and then just spread it across. What you don't want to do is over saturate the tape with water because that will just make the actual tape move around, and that's the last thing we need. So there we go. So we've got our watercolor paper taped down, and the next step now is to wait until it dries. Now, this can take about 4-6 hours if you let it air dry. Alternative is again, your hair dryer out and let it dry out with your hair dryer. Personally, I don't like using hair dryer because I think sometimes if it's a little bit wet or moist and you end up using your hair dryer, too much of the high power or a high heat, that can also skew the tape a little bit. So I always prefer to let it dry overnight and then I deal with it the next day. This step, if you're going to do this the way I've done it, do this the day before you decide to actually do your watercolor work, and then by the next day it will be perfect and ready. So I'm going to leave this as it is, and we'll come back tomorrow. 14. Drying Paper: Welcome back. I've left my stretched watercolor paper on the board overnight and it's completely dry. The test that you can do to see whether it has been completely dry is if you just feel it with the back of your fingers, it shouldn't feel cold or damp. It should feel completely dry the texture of the paper is what you should be able to feel. You can see here that the tape is nice and snug. It's not coming apart from the edges in this side. This now is ready to paint on with watercolor. Do remember, you don't want to be taking these tapes off and then painting, because you're going to have the same problem again. What you want to do is keep it as it is, and then you can go in and paint. You can remove this once you've completed your painting or your sketch in watercolor. However, it can be quite tricky because what you've got to do is you've got to wet it. I guess what you can do is use your spray bottle or a brush, a damped brush and just brush it over with water. To be totally honest, I never do that because it just gets messy. Sometimes a glue can slip over to your artwork, or you can ruin your artwork by adding too much water and it just becomes a bit of a mess. Instead what I do is, I take the tape off and then I cut out these edges where the brown tape is overlapping. Or I just leave it as it is. Then I use that inside a frame and if I'm going to frame my artwork, I recommend that you don't actually try removing this, just leave it as it is. Just except the fact that you're going to to this border. It's all good because you've got plenty of space to work with, especially on a sheet that's 12 by 9 size like this one. Another thing to mention now is that, the brown tape that we use, this gold tape that we have over here. It's vital that you do not get any water droplets on this. Now if you can see, hey, if you noticed while I was stretching the paper, while I was using the tape and applying the water I accidentally got couple of drops here and then I can show you this as a demonstration. This pretty much ruins the tape because what happens is that water sips through and it starts activating the glue. Then you get these add bubbles left where the glue is being removed from because of the water, it doesn't completely remove it. It just moves it around. Then what happens is when you use the tape again and those areas have got no glue on it. It pretty much ruins the actual stretching of your paper. You going to start getting gaps in the tape. The tape is going to start coming apart. It's very important that the tape, once you've cut it, put the roll away in a dry place and if you've got like a seal bag, or just a handy bag that you can put the tape in just to store, I would absolutely go ahead and do that. Never have your tape next to you like I did when I was demonstrating this. Make sure that you have a good, safe dry place for your tape after you've cut it, so you have no chance of getting any water or spillage onto it. That's about it for the stretching of your watercolor paper, this is now ready to paint on and it won't blow off or bubble up. There still is a percentage, a chance that you may get some type of bubbling up or warping up of your paper. That is if there is a slight little air gap that was left initially, when you placed your watercolor paper down. It will massively improve your experience and it will make a huge difference compared to a sheet of the same watercolor paper that has not been stretched. You'll be able to see this when we go through some of the techniques that we demonstrate in the next lessons in the classes. I will just wait and I'll show you that when I'm using this sheets and I'll compare it like by like with the same sheets. I'll do similar techniques, so you can see what the difference this makes. It's absolutely not necessary for you to stretch every single sheets of watercolor paper off for you to practice during the techniques in this class on stretched watercolor paper. It's just an option for you to try out. It'd be nice if you could just try this out and see how it is, just to give you a complete picture of watercolor paper and the overall rounded experience of using watercolors and watercolor supplies. That's it for watercolor stretching now. Let's move on to some more of the smaller items that will really help assist you in this watercolor journey. Let's move on to that next. 15. Other Supplies: Welcome back. Let's now run through some additional materials and items that will really assist you and enhance your experience with watercolors. Let's go through these one by one. The first item is two empty jars. Now, for these two empty jars, we need to just fill them up with water. This is going to basically be the lifeline of your watercolor because as we seen before, watercolor requires water to be activated, and it's always a good idea to have two jars. One of the jars, fill it up with normal clean water and do the same with the second jar and keep the first jar as a jar to mix your dirty brushes. When you're adding color onto your watercolor paper, and then you want to switch to another color, before switching, wash the brush in that first jar and then rinse it in the second jar to have a clean brush so that when you can enter into your second color in your color palette, the brush will have no contamination of the previous color. This will result in beautiful, fresh, clean lines of color. So two jars, jar number 1 and jar number 2 filled up with water, mixing jar, cleaning jar. Second item that we will need is a mixing pallet. So just a normal painting mixing palette. I have quite a few of these, as you can see on the screen. Now, these are great for mixing colors. You do sometimes get mixing wells with your paint sets, but to be totally honest with you, you will use them a lot less than what you use with pallets, especially in this class. Later on in the class, we're going to look at how to mix colors and create colors from just basic primary colors, and having these mixing palettes absolutely brilliant. You don't have to have the same one that I've got here, these are just cheap ones that you can get from the pound store. This is probably one or two of the only items that I'm going to suggest buying from the pound store. Get yourself a couple of mixing pallets like so, or if you can't get or find these, then just use a normal clean plate and keep that plate for just mixing your watercolors. The next item is tape. You've already seen gummed tape where we used this to stretch our watercolor paper, only use gummed tape for that purpose of stretching watercolor paper. Don't use it generally just to tape down your normal watercolor paper, your dry watercolor paper, because it just going to become really messy. Again, because it doesn't come off once it's completely sealed, so just use this one for stretching your watercolor paper. The next two are masking tapes, and you've got two different variations. I'll go through the simple one that you can get from pretty much all stores. This is just the bog standard masking tape. Now, remember with masking tape, make sure you don't buy anything from the pound line or from a store where they're just selling low quality masking tape because the glue that they used underneath sometimes isn't always spread out properly, and it's not always going to the edge. What will happen is, when you're pulling back your masking tape after you've done your painting, it can tear or the water can seep through quite a lot and it will just make a whole mess. I've got a list of the ones that I recommend on the resource sheet, so do check them out. You can get them in different widths. I tend to use this wide one quite often. You can get thinner ones. So width of about this one here. This one in the middle that I've got, this is actually called a frog tape. So this is just another variation of masking tape. This is what the painters use on the walls when they paint in walls. You can use this type of tape as well. It will do the job. It's just going to be a little bit more expensive than the standard masking tape. That's pretty much it for the tapes, really nice and simple, checkout the resource sheet where I go through some of my recommended ones, and now let's move on to the next item. The next item or items are a spray bottle. Just an empty spray bottle, which we also used in the stretching lesson. Just get yourself maybe a couple of these empty water bottles. You can get these from the pound store. This again, this is an item that I would recommend, just get it from the pound store. You don't need to spend too much money on this. Something that can spray nice bits of water on your watercolor paper or on your board. It works really great also for wetting your watercolors themselves. Instead of having to dip your brush into water and then on to your paint, it's a good idea to just set the water colors open, get them moist with a nice spray of water. This comes very much in handy. I'd probably get yourself a couple of these if you can. Again, I'll have links too in the description where you can get these from, but generally can get these for most pound stores or bargain stores. On the right here, I've got some empty containers. Now, these containers are great because they are airtight, and these come in quite handy when you're using tubes. If you do decide to go to the watercolor tubes option, then I would probably recommend getting yourself a couple of these. Again, these you can usually get from the pound stores. I'll see if I can find any available online and leave the links in the resource sheet. I actually got all these in a set. I had a couple of bottles, and I had a couple of these little airtight plastic containers. The reason I say keep this for your paints are that you can make up the solution like I've got here, and so your solution doesn't go to waste and that will keep for quite a long time. You can see over here, all I've done here is I'll show you up in this closer to the camera. I've got some orange paint here. You can see it's dripping all over my table but I'm just showing you right there, that it's orange sprayed with water, and that will keep and it won't be a waste. Again, this is my professional color. I highly recommend that you get some of these if you're going to use watercolors from tubes and that will minimize your wastage. The next item we need is a tissue box. I would highly recommend that you get yourself maybe a tissue box that you just keep your watercolors or just a roll of tissue paper. They're going to be what you use more than anything in watercolor. Again, highly recommend them, any type of tissue will work. You don't want type of tissues that fall apart. Maybe a mid to decent brand of tissue. So just basically clean up all the water mess and the water colors that you have with spillages like I have them here from the table. But just generally to clean your fingers as well so that you don't get water going all over your watercolor artwork. Get yourself some tissues, and maybe even a sponge. Just a standard sponge that you keep just for your watercolor, just to clean up the mess because watercolors can be quite messy, you can get spillages everywhere, and if you have access to some water baby wipes just like I do because I've got little kids in the house, then these work even better. You've got a white full of moisture. It's just great to have at hand, clean your hands, and you can even have these for your brushes to lay your brushes on once you've used them because they shouldn't have any scents in them. They should be the ones that are just basically just water inside a wipe. So again, tissues, some water wipes, baby wipes, and maybe a sponge and I think you're good to go. 16. Highlighting Tools: Okay. The next item that I would recommend is some masking fluid. I've got some liquid masking fluid here. All you need to do with this one is open it up, dip your brushings away and just use it to mask out areas on your watercolor paper that you don't want water color to touch. It dries off and you can peel it away and it leave beautiful white highlights, the color of the paper, which is quite difficult to achieve, especially if you're trying to paint around them or you're creating some details. Great little products to have. However, do not use your expensive brushes or any of your watercolor brushes to apply this. Ideally, you want to have a brush that's a cheap brush that you're not going to use. Because when you do dip this in, it will completely clog up that brush so you have to wipe it away completely and immediately. That can be quite tricky. An alternative to using this masking fluid with a brush is to have a masking fluid pen like this. This one that I've got here is a 2.0 millimeter one. It's a fine tip. You can get these in a couple of options. Again, I'm going to have the links to all these materials in the resource sheet for you to have a look at, and this is a colored fluid, so you just basically do a pump action on this just like a pump action marker and it will apply that masking fluid and you can just design this out. The huge advantage of this is you don't need a secondary tool to apply it. The tool in itself is a pen and applicator, and it works great. You can achieve some beautiful results with it. I will say, however, that with this one, it can be a bit difficult to remove once it completely dried. You've got to be careful when the masking fluid dries. Even the case with this one is that you don't scratch it off too hard, otherwise you're going to damage your paper and you could scratch off the paints that's on the sides of the masking fluid. Do bear that in mind. Again, I wouldn't say this is a absolutely necessary item to have for beginners in watercolors, but it's a nice item to have a bit of fun with, just to experiment with, and overall to see what results you can achieve. Another important item that I feel that you absolutely need to try out in watercolors is to create white highlights. Now, with watercolors, we're going to move on to the characteristics of watercolors in more detail in the upcoming lessons. However, one of the main characteristics are that watercolors are a transparent medium. They can be medium opaque, but they will dry transparent, and what that means is that you can see through anything that is underneath. Now if you want to produce a really white bright highlight, it's very difficult to do with watercolors on its own. You've got to use the kind of whiteness of the paper with masking fluid or you've got to paint around the area that you want to highlight. So the solution, so that is having a applicator of an opaque white material. So over here, I've got four options. Let's go through the one on the right first. So this one is the standard Gelly Roll pen. Great option. What you can do with this is literally just draw in the highlights over your watercolors once they dry. Now this particular pen here, it's opaque. However, I would say it's semi-opaque, so it's not the most opaque white that you can get. So you're going to get more of a matte white finish with this one. So moving on to the next one, which is much more opaque and brighter than this first option, and that is the paint marker pens. Now, these are absolutely brilliant. I use these all the time on my watercolor artwork, and I highly recommend them. They come in different nib sizes, so I would probably recommend going for the finest nib that you can get. But again, I'll have all the links in the resource sheet, so the various sizes that you can buy these in. These are an absolute treat. They are the push pen paint markers, you just got to push them in. They have a roller system in them that releases the paint. It's effectively just white paint that they have. They dry out brilliantly and you can even go over them with watercolor again. So these pain pen markers are an absolute must for highlights. So that was a second option. Third option is using designers' gouache. Now gouache is basically an opaque version of watercolor. As I said before, watercolors dry transparent or semi-transparent. Gouache is the in-between between acrylic paints and water colors. So you can get great levels of opaque gouaches of paint with it, you can dilute it down and make it a bit more transparent. But overall, it's opaque and it works great. Gouache in itself is a complete different medium, and I'll probably do a class on this maybe at some point in the future. But just having a tube of the white, white gouache, the designers' gouache, is vital, I feel to add some speckles of highlights or some special effect and you can just apply this as you would apply any paint. So just squeeze it out of the tube. Use a normal brush to just add in or draw in or paint in your highlights. Absolutely brilliant thing for highlights. So I'd highly recommend using gouache. The final option that I've got here for highlights is white ink. Yep, you heard me right. We've got white ink here. I like using white ink if I got real fine details to produce in highlights, it comes in a nice little bottle like this, and it just works like liquid paint. So again, it's ink but it's white ink. I'll show you here on the screen. They are bubbly there. I just pop that bubble, and that's basically all it is. Great items to just add in those beautiful opaque white highlights, and you can use this with any brush. You can just clean the brush as you would normally do or you can even use it with a dip pen. So if you've got a dip pen at hand or if you use nibs and dip pens, then these work great as well. I wouldn't go out and buy a dip pen just to test this ink out, but if you have one of these dip pens, they work great. You can get some really, really nice thin lines, beautiful details with some dip pens and some white ink. But again, if you don't have a dip pen, don't go out and buy one just for this watercolor class, stick to the brushes that you have. The watercolor brushes will work fine with this ink. Just make sure that you wash them out, and that's pretty much it for the highlights. You've got four nice little options. I wouldn't say go for all of them, maybe just go for the paint markers over here. So out of the four, if I could recommend one, I would probably recommend these because they're the quickest thing that you can use to apply. I would recommend it more than the Gelly Roll pen because you get more of a brighter, more opaque highlights, whereas with the Gelly Roll pen, you get more of a matte finish. So I would generally recommend these if you just want to try out one, but if you want to try all four just to see what they're like, then absolutely by no means you do have to stick to just one, go ahead and get all four, but it's not necessary. So that's it for the highlights. 17. Fine-Liners: Okay, and now we're going to look at probably the most important item or tool for sketching, specifically sketching in watercolors and doing watercolors pen and ink, and that is fine liners. Now, the number 1 key aspect of fine liners or any type of pen that you're going to use with watercolor is that the ink it must be waterproof. If it's not, waterproof, then after you've done your inking, when you apply the water color, it will smudge everything and it will be a horrible mess, so I've got to warn you when you do get your ink pens, if you haven't already got them, make sure they are watercolor proof. Now I'll show you here these are three of the brands that I use on a regular basis, all three are waterproof I'll just bring one of these up to the camera here. With this one, I'll show you here. Now if you can see that on the camera, where it says micro pigments ink for waterproof and fade proof fine liners. There it is, that's the important part, waterproof. When you draw with these or sketch with these, you can complete your sketch, go as dark as you like, add as much ink as you like, and then go over it with watercolor, then it works fine. They won't smudge out, it won't dissolve away or smudge away. These work, great. These are basically the pens that I use. Again, I'm going to have a list of all of these in the description in the resource sheet. It's an absolutely vital item, vital tool, for you to use in watercolor sketching. Finally, just a couple more items that will just help you on the way, I've just got a standard pencil here. Pencils work great to do on the sketch. Then you can go over them with watercolor. I wouldn't use anything that's more than a 2B pencil. I'd stick to maybe a 2B or a HB pencil, they work fine. You won't really get the granulation of the actual graphite interfering with the watercolor you shouldn't do anyway, but I use this brand style or I've been using these for years and these work fine. Just make sure that you test out your pencil beforehand, so just maybe do a bit of a scribble on some paper, then add your watercolor to it to make sure that the graphite doesn't melt away or mixing with the watercolor, but generally it shouldn't. So HB pencil will work fine. A ruler, just to draw out the edges of your masking tape guide. If you're going to use masking tape or if you going to stretch your paper, always good idea to have a ruler, so just at hand. Finally some scissors, just to cut your tape or your masking tape, instead of having to tear it away. Sometimes when you tear your masking tape, you end up tearing too much of it off and it just becomes a waste. This are just some general items that will help you along the way? That's about it for all the items. Let's now do a complete summary of materials, lists, and items that are essential for this class and they are nice to have. Let's move on to that one next. 18. Supplies Checklist: Okay, welcome back. Let's just go through a quick supplies checklist, after going through all the individual supplies that we just went through. It's nice to just have a summary, so that you can focus on what you may or may not need. I've divided this table into two, where we have basic essential supplies, and then supplies that will give you a better experience. I would recommend going for the basic essential, and if you really want to get a better overall experience, then maybe adding a couple of items from the better experience columns. Starting off with the paints; for watercolor paints, as we said before, graduate paints will work best especially if you're a complete beginner. I would recommend going for a graduate paint pan set just like the one that I got, and maybe 6-12 colors would be ideal. The more colors you have, the better it will be, but even if you have six of the basic primary colors, that will also do. For a better experience, maybe get yourself three of the primary colors in graduate paint tubes. That will give you an additional option when it comes to color mixing and doing the column mixing parts of this class. Secondly, let's look at the brushes. I would recommend that you get yourself a basic round synthetic brush, a size eight or a size 10. That is all you need to complete this class and really start your journey in watercolor. But additionally, for a better experience, maybe getting another round synthetic brush in a small size, maybe a size one or a size 2, just to do finer details. We will be doing a few finer details to see how the smallest size brushes can really help in adding those final touches to your illustrations. Secondly, another brush, the flat synthetic brush that we used earlier on in the lessons. I would recommend going for a size 1 inch like the one that I had. Maybe going for a flat brush and a round brush, or having an option of having a couple of round brushes and a flat brush, that would work great. Alternatively, you can also get the big mop brush, the Quill brush that we went through, but that's entirely up to you. Out of the two, I would probably go for the flat synthetic. Number 3, let's now look at the paper. For the paper, as I said, 300 gsm watercolor paper is what you should be going for, nothing less in weight or thickness. For your basic requirement for the class, I would say, get yourself maybe a watercolor block or a pad that is paper-based, such as the one that I was using, the [inaudible] or any other brand that is 300 gsm. For a better experience and an all-round experience, you could maybe get yourself another 300 gsm, 100 percent cotton watercolor paper, like the one that I did with the arches. Now, you can get all the 100 percent cotton watercolor papers as well. If you want to get them, absolutely go for them, but it's not a necessary item that you need for this class. Moving on to the fourth item, fine-liners. As we said, waterproof fine-liners would be great for this class, because we're going to be doing sketching and then doing watercolor. I would say at least have one waterproof fine-liner with a tip size of about 0.3 or 0.5, which is the middle ground. Or alternatively, get yourself a full set of waterproof fine-liners with various nib sizes, chiseled tips, and more thicker nibs, and that will give you more of an option when it comes to actually illustrating. But again, it's not necessary, you can get through this class with just having one fine-liner. Moving on to the fifth item, and that is your highlighting tools. I would say as a minimum, I would get a paint marker with a thin nib. This will work ideally when it comes to adding beautiful opaque highlights, or alternatively, use masking fluid. Again, I wouldn't say masking fluid is an absolute must for this class because it isn't. You can also maybe get the Gelly Roller pen if you want matte marks rather than full highlights that are bright and opaque. Get yourself a Gelly Roller and a paint marker with thin nibs, and I think that will give you some great options. If you really want, get yourself some masking fluid. But just remember, you need an old brush if you're going to use your masking fluid. Don't be using your new brush or your old watercolor brushes, stick to an old brush that you not going to need. Moving onto some other items now. For the mixing palettes, I would say, you absolutely need a mixing palette, unless you've got a great sets of palettes that are built into your paint pan sets. But even if you have a couple of wells in your paint pan set for mixing, I would still recommend get yourself at least one mixing palettes. The reason for that is, so that you really have options and you don't run out of space. Additionally, if you could maybe get yourself a couple two or three mixing palettes from the pound shop, that will really make your experience a lot better. Because you won't have to continually keep washing them out and cleaning them to keep your colors nice and crisp. Another item is tapes, I would say, you absolutely need to use tapes with watercolor. Get yourself one masking tape, it can be any thickness, a thin one or a wide one. Just make sure it's a good quality one. Just check it out in the resource sheet, the ones that I recommend. Additionally, if you want to stretch your watercolor paper and give that a go, get some experience in stretching watercolor paper, then you would need one gummed tape roll and a flat board as well. Again, not necessary, but it's just good as an experience if that's what you want to do. Some final items, some general basic items. One or two spray bottles, which I would say is absolutely necessary to have a good experience, and to save time having to keep using your brush to add water. Two empty jars, absolutely, for your clean water and your dirty water, a pencil, ruler, scissors, and a box of tissues. That's all you need for this class. Stick to the basic essentials or add in a couple more items to give you a better all-round experience. This table will be provided in the resource sheets, so do check it out. Again, I'm going to have links to every single item that I've gone through in this class where you can have a look at review, and then decide whether you want to get it or not. Now, let's move on to the main parts of the class. Let's get on with the exciting stuff. 19. Watercolour Characteristics: Okay, welcome back. Let's starts off the class now with some information on the characteristics of watercolors. Now, we're going to go through these characteristics fairly quickly, and then we're going to demonstrate some exercises that you can do to start off and get warmed-up in this beautiful watercolor journey that you're about to start. The first characteristic of watercolors, we can say, is transparency and opacity. Now, watercolors, by nature, they dry out after they've been wet, and they either dry out to a transparent color or a opaque color. Now, depending on the brand of watercolor that you use, this can be categorized by different keys or wordings, or codes. Generally speaking, they dry out to be transparent or opaque, or they can be made semi-transparent or semi-opaque. Now, this will make a difference, especially at this early stage, because you'll be able to identify which one of the colors that you have in your set are transparent, which are opaque or which are semi-transparent or semi-opaque. This will make much more sense when we come to do the exercises. So that's the first characteristic of watercolors. Generally speaking, the thinner the layer of paint that you paint, that layer will be more transparent than the thicker layer of paint that you paint. Again, that will make more sense when we come to doing the actual painting and the exercises. Let's move on to the second characteristic. The second characteristic is permanence and also lightfastness. Now, these can be interrelated; you can get confused with these terms. In general, at this beginner's level, you don't really need to be concerned too much about permanency and lightfastness. I'm just going to basically, quickly run through what they mean, just to give you an idea when you come across these terms. Permanence or permanency is basically the resistance to change when exposed to light and atmosphere. What we're talking about here is, once your watercolor has dried out. Once you've dried out your watercolor and it's complete and finished, if you put it up in a frame, your artwork, and leave it over time, the resistance to the atmosphere or the exposure to light will make a change to that color over time. This is again coded, depending on the manufacturer with different grades and levels, but to be honest with you, at this level you really don't need to worry too much about it because you're just getting used to the medium. So permanency is the resistance to change when your watercolors are exposed to light and the atmosphere. Secondly, the lightfastness. Now, if you watched my other classes that I've done on Skillshare, you would have probably heard me repeat talking about lightfastness, and colored pencils and markers, and all sorts of materials. Lightfastness is basically the pigment's ability to withstand fading over time when exposed to light, and that's all it is. So in other words, whether your color will fade over time. Now, this has its own rating system depending on each brand and each material. Again, you don't need to worry too much about this at this stage, but if you do want to know more about this, then the great thing to do is, when you buy your watercolor set, whichever brand you're buying from, go onto their website and have a look at the lightfast ratings and codes for the colors that you've got, and they'll be able to explain and expand on the information that I've given you. That's about it for the second characteristic. Now, let's talk about the third characteristic. This is an amazing characteristic of watercolors, and this is granulating and staining. Now, granulating is basically the pigments inside your watercolor making a slight texture once they've completely dried. The actual pigments themselves, they scatter across the page, and they look absolutely beautiful, especially if that's the type of look that you're after. Now, not all watercolors have the granulating pigment effect on them. This usually happens more in the professional-grade watercolors, rather than the graduate-grades. But however, you do get some graduate-grade watercolors granulating, and a lot of artists use this granulation effect to their advantage to create beautiful textures. Secondly, staining. Now, the staining properties of watercolor basically mean, that color's ability to be lifted off your piece of paper without leaving a mark. Staining basically means, are you able to remove that color completely from your piece of watercolor paper once you've applied it? Sometimes you may accidentally drop a couple of drops of paints on your piece of paper, and you might think, oh God I need to quickly move this. How do I move it? That depends on the color that you're actually using. If it's a staining color, it won't lift completely out, you'll have some residue of that color leftover. If it's not a staining color, then you can easily lift it out with a damp cloth or a sponge. Now again, this will make a lot more sense when we come to testing the colors that we have. That's pretty much it for the characteristics of watercolors at this stage. The three characteristics, to quickly run through them again, it was transparency and the opacity. Number two, we looked at permanence and lightfastness, which isn't as important at this stage as the others. Finally, we looked at the granulating pigment effect and the staining ability of the color, and that's about it, there's nothing else involved. What we're going to do now is, we're going to look at the colors that we've got in our set. So if you've already got a set of watercolors that you've had previously, you can apply this exercise to them, and if you haven't, if you've just bought a brand new pack of watercolors, then let's make a start on this exercise. 20. Colour Swatch: So in front of me here I've got a nice layouts off some of the basic things that we're going to need for this exercise, and we're going to basically do a water color swatch initially of all our colors. Let's get on with this. Over here on the right-hand side, I've got my two jars with water in it. Remember from the previous lesson, we've got one for mix cleaning your brush and one for clean water. I've got my standard round brush, this is my number eight size brush. So whichever brush you are using, the round brush that you've got gets hold of that. Next to that I've got my ink marker, my waterproof ink, and we're going to be doing our outlining with this. Then I've got my ruler and pencil which we can do our rough out or sketch of our palette. Then finally the most important, I've got my sets of watercolors. Now, these are my graduate sets of watercolors. You can see I've been using them. I've replaced some of the actual wells with some new colors. But whatever colors you have, this is why I want you to do your swatch with. You might not have the same colors that I have, these are the basic set that you get in the Winsor and Newton graduate travel kit. So if you have got this, you should have similar colors like I have. I've replaced the whites that they usually give with an indigo color because I personally don't really use whites. White can be used to make colors a little bit more matte or to slightly lighten the value or the hue of the color. I don't personally use that much, but if you have white that's absolutely fine, just use the white for your color swatch. So get your watercolors to one side, and what I want you to do now is, I want you to get your paper. Now, I'm going to be using my Bockingford block purely because it's just so much easier to do exercises like this on. If you've not got a block and you've just got sheets of paper, then that's fine. If you want to tape your paper down onto your table, go ahead and do that absolutely no problem at all. If you've got a block then again, you've got the advantage of not having to tape anything down. I would not use expensive paper for this exercise. So I'm not going to use my Arches paper purely because this is a exercise to just get warmed open. You may make a couple of mistakes while you're doing it, you might have to do it again. So I don't want you to waste your really expensive paper. You can do this on your standard watercolor paper. Let's make a start on this. On my sheets of Bockingford, a watercolor paper in my block. What I'm going to do is I'm going to mimic this shape that I have of my palette. I've got 12 colors here in two rows. So all I'm going to do is I'm just going to draw this out to approximately not full width of the actual paper itself. I'm holding my Bockingford sheet in portrait mode, so I'm holding it the long way off. You can do this this way but It will be a lot better if you could do it long way off. I'll just do a quick zoom back so you can see. You can see I'm holding the sheets in a portrait position rather than having it landscape. The reason for that is that we can do the additional exercises side by side when we move on to them. Get your paper in a position which you're comfortable with, portrait position. Get yourself a ruler and add in the numbers of wells and colors that you have onto your sheets and draw them in as boxes. You can do this, measure itself and have it exact, or you can just roughly sketch it in, it doesn't really make a difference as long as they're roughly about the same size. So that's what I'm going to do right now. I've got six going across and then two going down. I'm going to use my ruler where I've got six inches across, so just going to mark a little dot where the six is, a little dot where the zero is, and draw myself a little line. So that will be the length of the actual colors themselves. There's my line and all I'm going to do is drop this down a little bit and at each inch measurement, I'm just going to do a little dot. What that will do is nicely divide up my line into six equal parts. It'll make the job a lot easier for me. We've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 12 wells, and what we're going to basically do is color each of these wells accordingly with the same colors that we have in our color palette. Before we do that, what I want you to do is; I just want you to measure approximately one centimeter coming down from the top over here. So just one centimeter there, one centimeter mark there, one centimeter mark over here. Draw yourself another line to join them up. What that will do is, that will be a little box where you can actually label your paint color. That will be super handy when it comes to using your paints. Doing exactly the same over here. On the second line, just doing a one centimeter dot there, another one centimeter dot there, and let's do a joining on this so join this across. That's about six, so we've got a nice little template that's mimicking our color swatch on the top. All we need to do now is basically use our fine liner with a waterproof ink to go over this, so that with nice and permanent and we can see it and it's really bold so that we don't lose it when the coloring gets in. All I'm going to do is go over this with my pen. Now I've got my nice outline drawing of my little grid that represents my color swatch. Before we actually go in and start coloring this in, let's label each one of these colors. So now you'll have the color code and the color name on each of these individual wells. What I did was I replaced a couple of them. If you've already got these in and they've been wedged in, a good thing to do is just use a blunt knife to just wedge them out, clean the edges, and just have a look at what the color names are. It's a good idea to do this before you start the class so that you know which color you're referring to and which color you're using in the exercises. All I'm going to do now is I'm just going to label what these colors are. On the left, going from the top left, I've got lemon yellow, I've got cadmium yellow, I've got cadmium red hue, I've got alizarin crimson, ultra marine, sailor blue, viridian, sap green, yellow ocher, burnt sienna, burnt umber, and I've got indigo. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to write those names in these top areas here to reference them as labels. We've got our labels done, we don't need our fine liner anymore so we can put back to the side. What we need now is our water jars. We've got our two water jars, and we need our brush. Again I'm just using my standard round brush, this is my size ten standard synthetic brush. Just use whichever brush that you have for this exercise it does not really make much of a difference. But you want something that will color up these little square rectangles that we have. Let's grab ourselves some tissue because we need to make sure that we have a clean brush. So just get a tissue and put your tissue on the side over here. What this will do is we can just use this to dry off our brush. We also need our wetting tool, which we've got is our spray bottle. As we mentioned in the earlier lessons, that spray bottle is absolutely brilliant to wet our tray colors. What I'll do now is, I'll just quickly wet this tray of colors, I'll bring it closer to the camera. All we want is a light spray going across each color to just get them activated so that we don't have to dig into the color. Just one or two light sprays. Just let it settle down for maybe ten seconds before you start going in, and we're ready to go. 21. Applying Colour: All I'm going to do is, I'm just going to rest it there, so you can see what I'm doing. Then, get your brush. I'm going to use this as my main water jar to mix out the color. This is going to be the color mixing, the dirty water jar, and this one's going to be the clean water jar. So dirty water and clean water. Let's just wet our brush, get rid of some of the excess on the edge of the glass. What I'll do is, I'll just slightly shift my sheet here, so you can see what I'm doing exactly with the brushes. I'm just getting rid of some of the excess of that water there. What we can do is, we can start off by going into the lemon yellow here and just lightly dab your brush in. What I'll do is, I'll show you this on this initial one. All I'm doing is, I'm lightly dabbing in my brush, and you can see the paint, that pigment, that color, is attaching to that brush so easily. I'm not going in really hard, I'm just lightly giving that a slight stroke on the sides. Because we already made it wet with the spray, you can see how easily that color comes onto your brush. I'll just put that back. All I'm going to do now is, rest my hand on the page, and I'm just going to basically color this box in from top left to top right. Now, what I want you to do is, I want you to leave a slight gap where the edge of those lines are. I don't want you to color all the way to the end. The reason for that is, because watercolors, water-based obviously, the natural property of water is that it blends into where else there is water, basically. So what'll happen is, if we keep painting all the way to the edge, when the water touches one edge, that color will bleed into the other, so avoid doing that. Make sure you leave a nice little gap at the end. We're not doing perfect coloring here. All we're doing is, swatching out our color, so that we know what it looks like, and that way we have a great reference point. There you go. I've just added that color, really nice, nice little layer of color, going as far close to the line as I can without touching it, and that one is done. Once you've laid that color down, all you do is, get your brush. This is what we call a dirty brush, so get you dirty brush and put it into that dirty water jar and give it a good rinse. You can see the color changing, and get rid of that excess and your brush should have no elements of color on it. Then what we do is, we put it into our clean water, give it a nice rinse, and that will get rid of any particles of color from that first swatch. As before, just give it a little dab on the edge of the jar. Go into your colors again, and now we're moving on to the cadmium yellow. Now again, you can see my well is pretty much used up in this. All I'm doing is, twisting the brush so that it touches the sides of the well. You can see that the paint's coming on really nicely. Again, that's a huge advantage of watercolor. It's so easy to activate and so easy to apply. I mean, we've not even gone through any of the different techniques of applying watercolor yet. All we're doing is, we're just dabbing our brush into the paint and we're just literally, just making these little swatches of color. That's all we're doing for this first, very simple warming up exercise, and you can see how nice and vibrant that color is. I mean, this isn't even artist-grade color, so if the standard graduate-grade colors are so nice and vibrant, then imagine how good the artist-grade ones are going to be like. Again, all I'm doing is just drawing out a rectangle within that rectangle without touching those black lines that we did, just to ensure that there's a nice gap and that the watercolor doesn't bleed into the other watercolor, and that's about it. If you find that your watercolor is running out, you're running out of watercolor and it's drying up on your brush and you've not got enough to color your square or your rectangle, then all you do is, just go into your dirty color water, get rid and do the same process again. Just add in a little bit more water, take a little bit more out of there, go straight onto your color swatch. What we're going to do now is, I'm going to do the same. I'm going to repeat that exact same process, going across all of these. Okay, welcome back. Now you can see, I've got all my lovely colors filled in in my little mini color swatch here with the labels on top. Wait for this to dry once you've completed this. Then, once it's done, you've got a brilliant little reference card for you to keep. If you want to cut it out, you can cut it out, or maybe do another one that's a little bit smaller that can actually fit into your actual water color palette, like I've done over here. I've done another swatch over here which is dried out now. I did this so that it can nice and easily just fit in, into my watercolor palette. It's always handy to have this in your little tray there when you're using your watercolors. So you can see here, I'll bring it closer to the screen, you've always have a nice reference point of what these colors are going to look like once they've been dried out. That's another important thing. The colors that you see on the actual wells or in the tubes, they're never going to be the exact colors that you see once they've been dried out. So it's always a great idea to produce a color swatch, a nice clean color swatch of color on just some watercolor paper. Have it labeled up somewhere, so that you can have it for a reference, and that will work great, just as a initial exercise into the world of watercolors. Now, you can see that because I've left a gap in-between, the colors haven't bled over to each other. Now, if you notice over here, you can see the color collecting up on one side. I'll just show you down here. I'll just move this a little bit higher, get a zoom in on this. You can see with these colors, the colors are actually going from one side to the other. The reason for that is, is because I'm using my Bockingford watercolor paper and it's warping slightly because of the liquid that's on it, and that's what you tend to get if you don't stretch your paper. If you remember in the earlier lesson, in the water color paper stretching lesson, what we did was, we stretched our paper. Now, if I had done this on a stretched piece of paper, then I would not get this warping at all. I may get just maybe one percent of it warping depending on how well I stretched it, but that's the advantage of stretching your paper. But for this exercise of these color swatches, I don't recommend you to stretch your paper. It's a long-winded method, and for what we're trying to produce, it's actually worthwhile having these little pools of water because once they dry out, you can actually see the variances of the color. So you can see on my little mini card over here, you can see the pools basically pooled up on this side because the paper was basically bending like this. That gives you a nice little resource to see how dark and how light the colors can become. I mean, you can do a more detailed color swatch if you like, where you can create more lighter shades of these colors and more dark shades. But at this level, all I want you to do is, just get used to using your round brush and just using your color palettes, just to get an idea and a bit of a practice before we start doing the more detailed things. It's just nice to get warmed-up by doing a color swatch exercise. That's it for the color swatch exercise and the characteristics of watercolors, for now. What we're going to do is, we're going to move on and look at these colors in a bit more detail and compare them to see which colors are more transparent, which are less, and then we'll be able to move on to the next exercise. 22. Transparency: Welcome back. We have now waited for our colors to dry in our color swatch and they've dried out really nicely, as you can see over here. Perfectly dry, there's no moisture on them at all. That's again, another important point. Ensure that you color is completely dry before you put anything on top of them so that they don't smudge out. You can see, we've created our color swatch for our colors that we have in our palette. Again, you may have some different colors than I do depending on your brand. Or if you've got the same one like me, you're most probably going to have white here instead of indigo. But just do exactly what I've done here, for this first exercise, it's a great way for a reference point for you to have for your colors. Now what we're going to do next is we're going to do something similar, but we're going to test out the transparency and the opacity levels of each one of our colors. This will aim to be another guide for you, another reference point for you to see how transparent or opaque your colors are, so that when you decide on the color choices that you make in your upcoming actual class projects or any of the projects that you do, then you have that experience at hand before hand. What I want you to do is I want you to basically copy out this exact little grid that we did and do the same thing. Just label the paint code names or just the color names on the top and leave a similar distance in between each of them, I've already done this, so I'm going to shift my sheet above There we go. All I've done is I've just imitated what I had on the sheet above and that's why one of the reasons I said have your page in portrait mode so you can have these side-by-side. I'll just do a quick, let's all zoom back. You can see I've got the top area where I've got the first normal color swatch and over here now what we've got is our table where we've repeated our design. All we're going to do here now is we're going to have an additional step before we start actually putting the colors down. We're going to create a little bit of undertone on the sketch lines with a bit of cross hatching. What I want you to do is I want you to get you fineliners out. Now, I've got a couple of different brands of fineliners as I mentioned in the previous lessons. The main pens I use are these two that I've got here. This brand that I have got on the right-hand side, the Pigma Micron pens, these in my experience work brilliantly. Another thing to consider when you're working with fineliners is the drying time of the fineliner. Now both of these have got waterproof ink in them, as we mentioned before, both their drying times can vary. It depends from brands to brand, how quickly the ink dries from the moment you finish doing your sketch and that is vital when you're doing watercolor sketching. The moment you start doing your sketch and you finish, don't immediately start using watercolor. This is going to make more sense when we do this exercise. Always leave it for at least a minute or even longer if you can to make sure that the ink is completely dried. As I said, the Micron pens dry a lot more quicker than these pens, the Staedtler pens, these take a bit longer to dry. However, they are both waterproof, they will both work. I use other brands as well, but these are my main brands that I use for watercolor. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use my Micron pens for this exercise, and if you haven't got Micron pens, if you got another brand, go ahead and use it, just make sure that you've given it enough time to dry out before you start applying the watercolor. Now if you don't have a set of pens with different nip sizes, then not to worry, just use whichever pen you have. Just again, ensure that it has waterproof ink in it. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to use this nice thick graphic 1 pen and I'll just move the others to the side. What I'll basically want you to do is in each one of these boxes, I want you to create a little cross hatch, and this will serve as an under sketch. Just roughly, just draw out some straight or squiggly lines. It makes no difference, you don't have to be accurate with this. All I want you to do is basically fill this little box or rectangle in with some straight lines going on top. Then, what I want you to do is roughly about halfway point, I want you to make lines that are going across this way. Leave a similar distance in between each line. It doesn't matter if it goes up and down, the points of this really is to see how much texture we can put in this little box. Then what we're going to do is we're going to add our watercolor on top of this. Just like I've done here, a line is going down vertically, then from halfway point line is going down horizontally. I want you to repeat this pattern in every single one of these boxes like I'm going to do now. Now, I've filled in each one of these rectangles with the same pattern with lines going from top to bottom and then crossing across with a bit of cross hatching from the bottom half of each. Just give that ago, it doesn't have to be accurate, just try staying within each box and that's absolutely fine. Now we've got our lines, a bit of texture that we can use to test out our colors on. Now before we start looking at the colors themselves, what I want you to do is just give this a couple of minutes, maybe a minute or two for it to completely dry out. To test out to see whether it's dry, just give it a little smudge with your finger after about 30 seconds. But while we wait for this to dry, what we can do is get our palette ready. 23. Thin Solution: What I'm going to use is my standard palette here. Your palette might be a little bit different from mine. It makes no difference as long as you've got a couple of wells in it, a couple of sections in it for you to start doing your color mixing and watercolor. Now again, what we're going to do is, as we mentioned in the previous lesson, the transparency of watercolors is dependent on the actual characteristics of that particular color pigment, and one other determiner for this transparency is that the thinner your paint is, so in other words, the more water you have on your watercolor mixture, the more transparent it will be when it dries. So the thinner the layer of watercolor, the more transparent it's going to be, and then the opposite, the thicker the layer of water color with more pigment in it, the more opaque it will be. That's just a general rule of thumb. That doesn't mean that that's going to be exact for every single watercolor. It's just a general rule of thumb where you can refer back to when you're doing this exercise. What I want you to do is, I want you to get your brush, your standard round brush that we used in the previous video in the lesson, and I want you to start looking at your colors and spraying your colors again, with a bit of water. So give them a nice spray, and this time what I want you to do is, I want you to spray them a little bit more. So like if you remember, on the previous one we only gave a couple of sprays, this time what I want you to do is, give it the double amount of spray. So maybe give it about 3-4 sprays instead of just two, and do that for each color. Try not going too close to the color or it will splash back, so just from a bit of a distance like this. You can see, I'm holding it up here just so that spray touches the watercolor pan and it starts creating a bit of a watercolor solution on each pan. That's about enough, and if you can see on the camera, you've got that really nice bits of watercolor all ready, ready for us to use. Now, we're not going to go in as thick as we did with the first swatch. That was just a pure color swatch, we didn't watery it down much. So with this one, what we're going to do is, we can have a look at our ink. You can see here, you can see I'm moving my finger across, it's not smudging. That means it's completely dry. This is now ready to add our watercolor on to. So what I want you to do is with your first color, just get your watercolor brush and dab it into your actual jar like we did before. Give it a good mix, get some water onto that brush, and I don't want you to remove the excess on the edge like we did before. Instead, I want you to just dab that water into one of your wells, add a little bit more water, maybe three or four times. I mean, you could even just end up using your spray for this. So if you've got your empty water spray, from a distance, give it a couple of sprays and then you've got a little bit of water in that well already. Just make sure that your wells are clean. You can see I've got a little bit of a fluff in there, just make sure you get all that fluff out, just get rid of it on a tissue, and that's good to go. What I want you to do now is, is go into your first color, and mine is the lemon yellow. I want you to twist your bush into it, but not too much, just give it one little twist and then take it off. You see, you've got a nice bit of pigment on there, then I want you to enter that into the water. You can see that we now have a solution, a water color solution, and it's quite watery, and that's what we want. So we want this type of ratio, we want maybe four or five sprays from your spray bottle and then just a little dab of paint going in, and then just give it a little swirl with your brush. Then just like that, what we are going to do is move your paint to the side. I got to zoom in back on the camera here, we're just going to lightly now load up that brush, so just get the water to go towards one end of your palate, put your brush in, and just give it a little twist up and down on both sides. Now, your watercolor brush is fully loaded, and all I want you to do is, as you did before, I just want you to apply that water color on them lines that we've just drawn inside the box. Remember, to keep a little bit of a gap on the edge from one color to the other so that they don't bleed into each other, and that's all I want you to do. Now, you can see while I'm layering this on, I'm just applying it. We've not actually done any dry layering yet, I'm just applying this right now. As you can see, all I'm doing is I'm just applying that water color nice and thin. It's just a thin layer of watercolor on there. You can see right through the lines and the lines are showing very nice. So this color itself is already looking quite transparent, but you're going to know the exact level of transparency once it completely dries. That's all I want you to do. That little bit of solution, just keep that to the side, we can use that again. Clean your brush, so give your brush a nice clean in the dirty water jar. Now, I want you to do exactly the same and load up more water from your clean water jar and start adding dabs of water into the next well that you have. So there's my next well, I'm just going to add a couple of dabs and then I'm just going to go to my spray, and maybe do about four sprays in there,1, 2, 3, and 4. That's about enough. You just want a bit of a solution so you can see it moving around and then you've got yourself a nice bit of solution, Four four or five sprays of water, that'll do the trick. Then what we can do is, we can actually go in and move on to our next color. Just like that, let's all dab into the water solution that's inside the well, bring it over here, and you can see it's dispersing and mixing in with that water to create that nice watercolor solution. It's like an ink, isn't it? As we did before, swivel your brush around it, get as much of that watercolor solution onto the brush so your brush is fully loaded and nice and even. Now remember, we're using a synthetic brush here, so the take-up of water is not going to be as much as a sable brush. If I were to use my sable brush, then I wouldn't have to go in quite a lot to soak all that watercolor up. It would just be a couple of swivels and the sable brush would get loaded very quickly. However, because this is beginner's class, I'm just going to stick to the synthetic brushes for these exercises and we may demonstrate some of the sable brushes on the later lesson. Now, what we've done is we've covered up all the little crosshatching boxes with our colors. You can see that because we've gone in really thin, this is a very thin layer of color, you can still see a lot of the crosshatching lines underneath, even though the paint is wet, this is most likely how the colors are going to turn out when they are dry. You can see on some of them, not too sure whether you can see on the camera yet or not, I'll see if we can get a bit more of a zoom in, you can see like over here, we've got this yellow ocher, it's not as clean and clear cut transparent as the sap green. You've got a little bit of like a thicker color pigment covering up those lines. You can see speckles of them. So that's indicating that this color is a semi-opaque color. As I mentioned, we've gone in very, very thin. Once these colors dry out, and I'm going to quickly dry them out with a hair dryer, you'll be able to see the true effect, where we can see them a bit closer up to the camera. So let's just quickly dry this one out. 24. Opacity Levels: Now, our colors are completely dry, so we can observe these a little bit more. Not too sure if you can see this on the camera, but we've got a couple of colors here that have gone over the lines, they've dried out over the lines. You've got the yellow ocher, speckles of it are going over the line, so it's semi-opaque, a little bit as Sap green as well, it has gone a little bit over the lines, the burnt sienna again. We've also got the ultramarine. But generally speaking, you can still see the lines very crystal clear. Most of these colors, if not all of them, are very transparent. Now, the opacity levels are always going to be written per color on the color code. The opaque colors from this Winsor and Newton set, according to the codes and the code names that they have on the actual leaflets themselves, the opaque ones are the burnt umber, the indigo, and the yellow ocher. These are the three out of the ones that we've got here that are more opaque and the rest seem to be transparent. However, sometimes when you're using the colors, it also depends on the materials that you're using, how the transparency and opacity actually comes out. Usually the color choice in the brands when they have the color numbers like they have over here, they usually have a key key the side and they say which one is opaque, which one is transparent. That is just a rough guide. It usually isn't exact all the time because the way they test these colors out, they test them in optimum atmosphere and standards and environments. Whereas depending on the humidity of your room, or the paper quality, or just generally the type of water, how heavy the water is, how hard or soft of water is, these factors will all play a difference in how the characteristics of the watercolors actually come out and how the watercolors perform. But generally speaking, again, these are graduate grade watercolors. When it comes to the professional grade, the characteristics are quite more different. Some of the opaque colors are very opaque, and the transparent ones are very transparent. But just as an overall, this is just a nice exercise to do for you to get a bit of an idea before you start going in and start creating sketches. You can identify which colors are very transparent and which ones are maybe semi-transparent or semi-opaque. Let's just get a zoom back on this. I've just changed the orientation of the page to landscape so that it will fit the screen and you can see both side-by-side. You can see there's quite a difference in the swatch compared to the thin paint that we put on this cross hatching chart that we've just created over here. The same colors, they appear quite different, when you just do a light, thin, more water based film of color over a little sketch of cross hatching. Whereas if you just use the colors as they are from the pans themselves directly without using too much water, you get some really nice bold colors, very opaque looking, both similarly, they're transparent when you thin them down. These will also be transparent even if you use a thicker paint, but generally the ones that are more opaque or semi-opaque, they will cover up more of what's underneath. That was just an introductory two-part exercise where you could just get more familiar with the colors that you have in your palate. Hopefully, that would have given you a bit of an idea and got your nice and warmed up for the next lessons. Let's now move on to the main part of the techniques next. 25. Watercolour Techniques: Welcome back. Now we're going to do one of the main techniques in watercolor. We're going to cover this in different stages, so let's start off with this first exercise. The best way to learn is by doing exercises and practicing. The first technique that we're going to be looking at is called the wet-on-wet technique. There's nothing complicated about this. It's pretty much exactly as it sounds: wet on wet. It's referring to wet watercolor solution on top of another wet watercolor solution or any solution. Let's demonstrate this. What I want you to do is I want you to draw six circles on your watercolor page. Now I've just done this roughly. I've just used my kind of FrogTape to give me a bit of a guide, and I'm just gone in and drawn six circles. That's roughly the same distance apart in one row and then again in another row. I've just done this in pencil. No need to use your ink for this. Once you've got this done, then the next step is to get your water jars ready with clean water. Just in case you were using it before, make sure you clean them out because it's very important that you use clean water to keep your colors clean. Have them set up on your side and have your watercolor bottle set up on the side. If you have it, get your standard round colored brush, make sure that it's clean as well, and get your paints ready. Before we do anything, what we want to do is we want to make sure we give our paints a little spray, so just damp on them a bit, and get into the habit of doing this before you do each exercise or before you do anything in watercolor. Give them a nice, little spray, just a couple of spray. You don't need to go too overboard, maybe two or three sprays in each pan. What we can do now is just let that rest for now on the side, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom in onto this top right-hand circle to demonstrate one exercise that we can demonstrate with the wet-on-wet technique. I've got to zoom in on my top right-hand circle. What I want you to do is get your round brush and give it a good soak in your clean water jar. Just give it a little squiggle in there, get it nice and wet. What we're going to do is we're going to use our brush to basically just go into this circle and just add in a layer of plain water. This is going to make more sense as we come to do this technique. Again, the wet-on-wet technique is just applying wet color to a wet surface or to another wet color. That's why we're actually wetting this circle so that we have this wet surface that we can apply wet paint onto. This is a great technique to use. It's used by many artists. You don't have to just use one technique in watercolor when you get on to doing watercolor paintings in creating your beautiful illustrations, you can do a mixture of techniques and that's what you'll find you end up doing depending on the subject that you're actually painting. What I'm doing here is lightly just adding water to get that circle moist. Don't worry about making it go all the way to the edge, just be as neat as you can. If you go over the edge of the circle, don't worry too much about it. If you do end up spilling loads of water everywhere, just get yourself a bit of tissue and just clean off the edges to make sure that there's not too much water going around that circle line because it's really important to keep everything nice and compact for this actual technique. Now I'm doing this in circles because I think it's a nice way to illustrate this and to get a bit of brush control with your brush at this beginner's stage. Now you can see I've got a nice, little layer of water around here. What I want you to do now is grab hold of your colors and I want you to select a nice medium, middle value color. So maybe from one of the earth tones. I've got this nice burnt sienna color here and just tap your brush with that color. Make sure your brush is being wet thoroughly before you do this and that your paints are wet. Tap a bit of color, and then just drop that color into the middle in little dabs. You can see what's happening; that color is actually dispersing outwards where that water is. This is the wet-on-wet technique. Now, in addition to this, you may find that your water has quickly dried up before you actually added that color. Not to worry, all you need to do is get your little spray bottle and just do a light, little spray in the middle. What that'll do is add a nice pool of water that you can carry on adding your paint here. I can see about quite a lot of paint on that brush there. So all I'm doing is I'm just lightly dabbing it in the middle and you can see it's slowly spreading out, it's branching out into wherever the water is. That's one of the huge characteristics of watercolors; they're going to move wherever water is. That's just a property of water in itself, water goes into water, and you can see it creates these beautiful branching effects which you can use in abstract art, you can use it in illustrated art, you can use it in really fine art, beautiful, diagrammatic art. You can use it in any type of art really, but it depends on what type of effect you want. I absolutely love using these effects when I'm doing a small or little illustrations that I want to create a bit of a texture in. That's what happens. This is effectively adding and creating a texture. You can see I'm moving my brush in different directions just to make sure I get more of that color on. The spread of color will depend on your wetness of the water, how damp the actual paper is, if the water dries up and the color is not going to spread. What you'll find with this is that if you've wet your paper correctly and you've kept the water within the lines of the circle, that paint won't go outside the corners or the border of that circle; it will only go where the wet is. Again, my water is slightly drying up now from the side because I actually got the lights on, so it's going to dry a lot quicker than yours well. But I can see here got a little pool of water here on the left-hand side, and I'm just dabbing my paint into it. You can see I've not added anymore paint to my brush. I'm using that same amount that I picked up initially, and it's covering up the huge mass of space inside the circle. You can see it creates that beautiful, beautiful pattern effect. Now, if you don't want a pattern effect and you just want it to have a smooth color, there's another technique that we're going to go through that's actually part of the wet-on-wet technique, and that's pretty much the pulling technique where we pulled the color water droplets down. Well, we're going to come on to that after we've covered most of these wet-on-wet techniques. If you just have a look here, what I want you to do is lightly keep dabbing that paint onto the areas where you've got no paint and no color to just complete this little circle, and it looks really nice. You've got that intense bits in the middle and it's all spreading out. I'm doing this on my Bockingford paper, so it's not being stretched. What's happening is it's actually raising up a little bit and that's fine. That can actually help this exercise and get that watercolor spreading out. If your watercolor paper is completely flat, then what will happen is it won't spread as much. So sometimes it's a good idea to maybe have it at an angle that will help move that watercolor along. But again, we're going to touch upon that in a lot more detail in the coming-up lessons. All I want you to do is I just want you to enjoy this little exercise. You can see that beautiful color. This one's a burnt sienna. It's just dispersing into that circle. Wherever you have these little pools of water, just keep dabbing into them and get them as close to the edge as you can. You don't need to be super neat. This is just an illustration exercise and that way you'll get that lovely, beautiful, soft, clean finish of color within your circle. Now you can see my color is like gone out from the side there. Not to worry. Quick little tip is just use your dry finger and push it back in. You can see I've pushed that back in. What I'm going to do is go on top of it like that. As long as your watercolor is wet, you can maneuver it around on your sheets of paper and it can work wonders. Now you'd notice that when I push that back in, it didn't leave a mark where that initial color was and that's because this particular color doesn't stain. So It doesn't have a staining characteristic. If you can remember what we went through the three characteristics before in the earlier lesson, the third characteristic was the staining ability of the color. So this is not a staining color. Whereas if this was a staining color and I had moved it in from the left there, it would have left a patch of color there and I wouldn't have been happy about that. That's why it's important to know which colors are staining and which colors are not. I'm going to leave that as it is and I'm going to let it dry, and what we can do is we can move on to the next one. 26. Wet on Wet: What we're going to do is on the second circle, the middle circle in our row, we're going to add in that water again with our brush just like we did on the first one. On this one, the difference, what we're going to do is we're going to add two colors to see how that wet on wet technique can really create a beautiful pattern and design of color. Again, all I'm doing here is I'm just wetting my little circle over here. I'm not too bothered about not going towards the edges. I'm just trying to keep it within that circle line. Just try your best to keep it within that circle line. It may take you a couple of attempts to get this right, first time, so not to worry if you think, " Oh no, I've made a right mess in this, don't worry at all, this is how you learn. Again, I've got a aspect of water going on there, clean my brush, go in back into my palate. Now, for this exercise, what I'm going to say is go for a lighter color. Let's go for this yellow, yeah, this is like a medium yellow color. If you've got the same colors as I have, then absolutely follow with the same colors. If you haven't, choose a color that's similar in your palate. I've just got this yellow, and again, all I'm going to do is just add it in. You can see that's dispersing quite rapidly, and that's because we've got more water on it. The colors can spread differently depending on the category of color or the amount of pigment that's inside the color. Those characteristics depend on the actual brand or the specific pigment, whether the pigment's natural or whether it's a synthetic organic pigment. Now, you'll only be able to tell that once you've actually used the color, but it's not something that you need to worry too much about, of how quickly a particular course spreads. I wouldn't worry too much about that. All I'm doing now is, again, just dabbing a little bit more paint in there just to give a bit more saturation in this nice little expanse of color. It looks beautiful, doesn't it? It looks like, it's like this, it's flowering into this beautiful pattern. Again, you don't have to keep dabbing. What I'm doing here is I'm just using the brush to maneuver that color, and just help it along the way so that it can quickly move to the edge. Again, I have gotten overhead lights, which is really drying up my water pretty fast, so I've got to move pretty quickly here. But for yourself, if you're just working in normal conditions in your room or in your office, anywhere in normal conditions without an overhead light, then yours will have a lot more maneuverability and flexibility in it. There we go, I'm happy with that. Let's just make these corners a little bit neat. Now, we've got to work fairly quickly because if the water dries out, if our solution dries out, then we're not going to really get much of a spread of color for this exercise. I'm just going to clean my brush in the dirty water. Make sure you clean it thoroughly, and make sure there's no pigment left on that brush. Go into your clean water, clean it out, and you should have no actual pigment going into your clean water jar, that's an indication that you brush isn't clean. There's another tip, make sure you clean it thoroughly. Loading my brush again with water, and now I'm going to go in with another color, so we use a light yellow, so it was a midtone yellow. Let's go in with a blue. I'm going to go in with this stain of blue. Now, I'm just going to dab this slightly, not too much. I've just got a little bit of color there, and all I want you to do is add that color in the middle, and let's see what happens. Look at that, so you can see how beautiful that is, it's added to that yellow mixture, and what we're getting is we're getting a slight hint of green there. What's happening is the colors are mixing, it's that wet on wet technique. This is a great way to actually produce different shades and different hues of color without having to premix them. This way, you get a nice random effect, a random color, so especially if you're working in abstract, or if you want to create a nice visual effect, this can be a great way to actually produce that effect, and that randomness can work really well.. Look how beautiful that is. Can you see how it's spreading out, and when you use colors to produce a third color. If you use primary colors to produce a secondary color, that's how you get the best out of these particular wet on wet technique effect. You can see all I'm doing is I'm just dabbing this on. I don't want it to completely mix, I want to have those packets of yellow in there, so I'm going to leave it as it is. Try this one out, have a bit of fun with it. Then you try out with different colors, once you've completed this exercise sheet, then try out some other color variations, it's just so you get used to the idea that you don't have to just paint straight from the actual palette onto your paper. You can create wonderful textures, beautiful patterns with watercolor and use it at its advantage. While this one dries, let's move on to our third circle, so I've got my third circle here. For this one, what we're going to do is we're going to do exactly the same, so make sure that your brush is nice and clean. I'm just going to clean my brush, so let's go in and add in that water layer really quickly. I'm working quite fast here now, so I don't want my water to dry because it's vital that we keep it wet for it to be wet on wet. That way we'll be able to get that maximum spread of color and create those wonderful patterns, there we go, let's just leave it at that. Now, for our base color, let's add in another light color. Let's maybe start off with a lemon yellow. This is a more lighter shade of yellow. I'm going to load up my brush with fairly well with this one. Let's just drop that in. There we go, dropping that in. You can see it's spreading, dab it around. Not to worry if you've got gaps of whites in there. I don't really want it to completely disperse and color the entire circle. For this exercise, let's create something funky. I'm going to clean my brush now in my dirty water. Clean it out thoroughly, make sure there's no pigment left on their otherwise we won't get very nice results. Then go in with your clean water, mix it in, get it loaded up nicely. Now, what we can do is have some fun. With our yellow, let's maybe add in a nice bit of red, so just dab a little bit of red onto your paint like so. Let's start dropping this in. Now, if you drop this in, in the white areas, you'll have a bit more variation, as you can see. I'm just going to drop it into the white areas, wherever there's whites areas. Don't worry if you don't have any white areas, if your yellow has completely covered up the entire circle. Not to worry, just drop it out randomly and space it out. You can see that creates a beautiful effect. What I'm going to do now is clean my brush, we use the read, so again, into the dirty water and then back into the clean water. Now, let's pick a third color. With a third color, how about we go for maybe a brown? Or actually, what we can do is let's just go for a nice green. If we go for this green here, we've got that viridian, really nice sharp electric green, go dab it into that. Now, let's add this on in the gaps and see what happens. You look at that, that's gorgeous there, isn't it? Just look at the way it disperses. It looks like a cell from a biology textbook. There you go, you've got that beautiful bit of color. Now, you can practice this on the other circles that we've drawn. That's why I've initiated this with six circles, and that way, you've got a bit more space to practice with it. Now, you can see it creates that beautiful flowering cauliflower effect. That's what sometimes they refer it to. It's like this cauliflower effect, it disperses out and flowers out into each other. You can create some absolutely beautiful patterns. 27. Variations: Now, we've got three nice little circles with some interesting patterns. Firstly, we just did water with a flat color going onto a dispersing using the wet on wet technique to just fill up that space. Secondly, we used a color and then another color on top to create a nice blend of color to create something nice and funky. Finally, we created this little mesh of colors that creates this lovely, natural looking, weird looking pattern. But this is really to illustrate that watercolors don't just have to be used like a coloring pencil where you just going in and just coloring things in with flat colors, you can experiment creating some beautiful variations and that way you'll get more familiar with your materials and your new medium of watercolors and that will really, really kickstart your lovely journey into watercolors. What I want you to do now is once you've completed these three, just do exactly the same on the circles that you've got at the bottom or vary it up a little bit, change it around, maybe do four colors, maybe just start off with some color and then go in with a little bit more water. That's what I'm going to do. I'm just going to go in and I'm just going to create some different variations. Then at the end, we'll have a look and see what we get. Okay, so now I've created three more different designs, all I've done is on this first one, I just added blue in half and then added some more red and orange on top, just to let the colors blend in. On the second one I added the green first. Then just with the dots way, the dot patterns just added in a little bit of fallow blue around the edges and you can see it's bled over, created an nice little pattern on the inside. Then finally on this one, I went in with the crimson red and ensured that I painted around within the circle really nice and tight. Then I use my spray bottle to just spray in a couple of dabs of water just to create a bit more fluidity, added a bit more red to it and then I added some ultramarine blue just to get that grayish, purplish shade. You can see it create some pretty nice textures. They effectively look like little marbles, beautiful marbles. There we go. We've got six nice little circles all painted in with different textures and different colors. I want you to really give this a go and enjoy this exercise experiment. Do maybe a couple of shades, maybe two shades with six different circles. Try out different shapes if you really want to. I mean, you can also have a circle in here if you can fit in a small circle in these little gaps, really fill that sheet up with shapes and get your color inside. Try this wet on wet technique, add one color, start off with water, or even start off with color, add in a second, third, and maybe even a fourth and you could create some beautiful results. That's the first exercise for the wet on wet technique. Let's now look at how we can apply this technique in an illustration. Let's move on to that, next. 28. Mini Sketch Wet on Wet: Welcome back. We did our lovely six little colorful circles using the wet on wet method by varying some colors, just adding a single color, adding multiple colors, and creating a beautiful pattern and design. What we're going to do now is we're going to use these techniques that we did to actually apply them in a small mini sketch, mini illustration so that you can see it in practice and see how it works so it can get you prepared for your class projects. Let's move on to that one. What I've basically done is I've just drawn four rectangles on my page, and that's what I want you to do. In these four rectangles, I've pretty much designed a simple sketch with simple shapes, as you can see. I've just repeated this in all four just roughly, not doing anything difficult here. If you just pause the video and have a look at this design when it's close up to the screen. Just copy it out on your sheet in the rectangles that you draw, and then we're ready to go. Here's my sketch. I did this in pencil in one of the rectangles, and I've just repeated it in all four. It's basically just a curly line going from left to right, and then doing a nice semicircle. I just did that with my duct tape that I've go here, FrogTape. Just used it as a guide. Then I just did this small little house silhouette with a little cut-out window in the middle. Simple shapes, that's all we're going to do to illustrate this technique. Once you've got this done, just do it in pencil, no need for any ink at this stage. Then, what we're going to do is we're going to wet our brush and then start with this wet on wet technique. Now, the reason I've done four of these exactly the same is so that you can practice this technique and produce different colors and variations so that you don't have to worry about the type of sketch that you're doing. Firstly, what I'm going to do is I'm going to wet this foreground just like we did in the wet on wet technique. All I'm going to do is apply my wet water. Well, water is always wet, isn't? I'm going to apply the water to this little area here. Everything beneath this curve line down here, we're just going to give it a nice layer of clean water. Just ensure that your brush is absolutely clean and rinsed out and that you've emptied out your jars and put in freshwater. We're just going in just like that. Try your best to keep it within the lines. Another good way to ensure that you've got it within the borders of the rectangle is if you tape up that rectangle. But I wouldn't worry too much about that. You don't really need to do that. You can actually do this just like I am. Again, I'm using my Bockingford block, I don't have to tape it on the edges. If you're just doing this on a sheet of watercolor paper, then absolutely tape it on all four corners so that stays in place. You can see now I've just added a beautiful layer of water. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to go in and actually spray our paints like we've been doing all the way now. Mine are fairly damp already because I was just doing a bit of painting before. Just give it a little spray, get it nice, and wet, and moist. Wet your brush again, and now what I want you to do is pick up a green color. Let's use this sap green. I just want you to dab your brush into it like we did before in the previous exercises. Dab your brush into that little solution that's collecting in that little well and you've got a nice bit of paint on your brush. Put the colors to side side. What I want you to do from this side, I want you to just start dabbing in that color. Now, you can see that color is dispersing, spreading out really nice. Keep going until you've got a nice bit of coverage in this area and stop approximately halfway through where you've got this little house. I've tried placing this house pretty much in the center of the rectangle. It doesn't matter if yours isn't in the center, just get the color halfway across the rectangle. Like you can see here, I'm just adding that color in. Now, what I'm doing is I'm spreading it out. I'm just spreading that color with my brush using the wet on wet technique, and because everything is nice and moist, the color can move really easily. Sometimes it helps just changing the angle of your hand just to get the brush tip in a more favorable position for yourself. I prefer to keep the brush tip away from me when I'm painting. That way I can easily guide it across any borderlines or any guidelines that I'm doing, just like this here. For me, I like to have more control when I'm doing these brushstrokes, but sometimes people are really good at keeping a steady hand. But even if you have a shaky hand like me, it makes no difference. You can still do watercolors. Like that. I've got a nice bit of green there. What I want you to do now is rinse out your brush, get it nice and clean. Make sure there's no pigment on there at all. Now, go back into your clean water. Make sure you've got your two jars: one for dirty, one for clean like we've been doing. Make sure it's nice and moist, the brush. Now, I want you to go into your second color. Now, the color I'm going to suggest is the ultramarine blue. Get a good dab of ultramarine blue. If you haven't got ultramarine blue and you just pick a blue that's similar, like a mid-tone blue. But if you have a set, you do tend to get ultramarine blue. It's quite a common color to have. Now, you can see I'm just adding this on and the paint isn't spreading as quickly as the green, and that's because the water underneath has dried out. Again, that's due to the light that I've got. Again, all I'm going to do, I'm just going to keep dabbing this onto it to cover as much of the white as I can underneath that curvy line. We're effectively just doing the foreground. We're just painting in that foreground. I'm going to give my brush a little clean, and then go into the clean water and just add in some water droplets there. You can see now that's going to help it along its way. Don't worry about the edge for now, I'm using quite a big brush. It's the same brush that I've been using up to now, my size 10. Don't worry about it if you can't get it all the way to the edge and it's too watery like it is to me right now. We're going to fix that just after we complete this. Now, what I'm doing is, with that brush, I'm just going in over the green. Now, just slightly going in over the green, dabbing it across. What we're effectively doing is we're creating this gradient. Now, we're going to come to actually how to create a gradient wash in the next coming lessons. But just generally, as a flat wet on wet technique, this is a great way just to blend in two colors. Now, you can see I'm just slowly blending it in, going back into the blue. The ultramarine blue is really nice and solid. Again, I'm just picking up a little bit more from there. If you got a little spilly down here, just push it away with your finger. No problem at all. Just keep going in and melt them colors together. You can see it's creating that gorgeous blend of colors. They're just melting into each other. That's about enough for that. What I'm going to do now is, again, give my brush a nice clean. I'm just going to put my brush to the side. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a smaller brush. Now, this brush came with my set. This is just a travel brush which is really good because it's really thin, it's really small, fine tip on this one. I'll show you how I open this up. You can see that really nice fine tip. It's a synthetic brush. What we're going to do is we're just going to go in, and we're just going to pull this edge, this pool of water to make sure that we have a nice finish. You can see what I'm doing there. I'm just pushing that water out all the way to the edge of my line, and because it's quite a lot of solution there, I can maneuver it around however I like with a smaller brush. 29. Paper Angle: That's the advantage of having a couple of brush sizes, which is why I always recommend get yourself a big-sized brush, big to medium, and then get yourself a small-sized brush as well to do these finer details and to do more finesse in your watercolor movements because it's a lot easier to get these done with a smaller tip, a smaller brush. If it helps, just turn your page around. I quite often like to turn my page. I turn my actual block just to help the angle of my hand. So if that helps you, absolutely go for it. Now, if you've taped your paper down onto your table, then it's not going to be very easy for you to turn your table, which is why I always suggest taping your paper to a thin board, or even just a chopping board and if you're just using single sheets. That way, you'll easily be able to swivel your paper around. Again, that's another tip. Move your paper around to suit your angle to best help you with your brush movements. Just like that, I'm slowly doing this really nice and gently. Again, what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn this a little. I'm going to literally turn this the other way around. What that will do is that will help me see the edge of the line. So I can see the edge of the line, and all I'm doing is I'm just going to bring my brush across like that and it makes the job so much easier. Now again, you don't need to worry too much about having everything perfectly lined up like I'm doing here. I'm just doing this for demonstration to show you as many tips as I can in this beginner's course because that's what it really is about; just learning the tips and tricks so that you don't fall into traps or end up wasting your watercolor paper because you've made a mistake. Always a good idea to have a go and just find out what works best for you. Just like that, I've just dragged the water across and that's created a gorgeous gradient. Let's turn this back around. Beautiful. Let's have a look at this. Let's just finish this off from the top. You can see now the color in the middle, it's that mix between the ultramarine blue and the sap green, so we've got a gorgeous, nice little blend going on there. Now, if you want to encourage that to blend even more, a great thing to do is just give your brush a clean. Make sure you do this with a clean brush, and we're using a small tip here. Again, just go in with a little bit of water and just keep adding those dabs of water. What that'll do is that'll blend out these harsh edges that you get where you get one color going into another. It'll give you a more of a softer look. Now, if you want to look that's a bit more grainy, a bit more gritty, then leave it as that. We're going to do that in another example where you can create a bit of texture. But for now, what I want is I just want this to be a medium-snoozed gradient just so that you can see how easy it is to move this around. Now, you'll notice that the water has pulled up into this bottom right-hand corner. The reason for that is, as I mentioned previously as well, the paper is buckling upwards, so it's slightly warping upwards because of the water content that we've got on. The more water you put on, the more your paper is going to buckle, and that's just given. So the only way to avoid or to completely minimize that is by stretching your paper. But I'd rather you not waste too much time stretching your paper or worrying about stretching your paper at this stage, maybe leave the stretching paper for your class project or maybe towards the end of the class and just practice. That way, you'll be able to get an experience of how to maneuver the pools of water that you get from the natural buckling of the paper. Now, I'm using the block like I said before, but even with a block, you're going to get pooling. You could minimize the warping by actually sealing the gap that's in the buck. If you remember when we went through the different surfaces, there's a little gap, that you have to slide your ruler through or slide a flat knife through to just open up. If you seal that gap, that will minimize the warping even more because there'll be no air underneath it for the paper to move, but you're still going to get warping. I'm happy with that. I think that looks pretty nice. What we need to do now is be a little bit patient and wait for this to dry, because if we go straight in and start coloring in the next element, we're going to have to leave a gap between this edge where the watercolor ends and the edge where we start. Now, you can't leave a gap; it'll leave a nice little white line, effectively like a brake line, but there's always a chance that your hand might move and you might end up hitting into the watercolor, and then that's going to bleed through and you're not going to be happy. What we're going to do now is we're just going to let this dry, and if you have a hair dryer at hand, which I do. A light encouragement in drying; make sure you don't put your hair dryer on too fast, especially if you've got a lot of water on, like I have, because what's going to happen is it's just going to splash that water all over the place and you're going to be a little bit annoyed about that, because I know I would, so just keep your hair dryer really far back and give this a dry. That's what I'm going to do next. 30. Using a Hair Dryer: Another thing to remember is that if you're using a hair dryer, you can actually maneuver the water if you'd be really careful. So you can see what I'm doing is I'm placing my hair dryer around about this angle. If I just move slightly back on the camera, you can see I've got my hair dryer here and all I'm doing is I'm just holding it at this angle because I've got the pool of water here, just very gently from a distance. If you allow the hair dryer to hit the water from this angle, you'll see the water move up. That again will create a much nicer blend and it'll help the drying time, so try that out if you can. If not, not to worry about say, let's just carry on. You can see now with the hair dryer, I've just given it some heat and and hair from this angle and you can see it's dragged that water all the way to one side. Now what you can also do is if you have your paper on a board or like I have on a actual block, then you can actually grab hold of your paper. I'll just zoom back on that. You can say what I can do is I can lift this up and then just slightly angle it so that the water carries on flowing. You can see the water flowing from here, it's moving that way. I'm just encouraging that water to go forward. That's another technique where you can use it to drip and feed within another color to create some interesting effects, and you can see now I'm just dragging it upwards now. What that does is it creates a beautiful pattern. You can see that water, it's just like it's trickling across, looks really nice. If you end up doing this and you don't like the results that you get, you can easily fix this. What to do with something like this is if we could just zoom back in, you can see, you might have like I've got down here, I've got this little area down here and I might want that dark part to be at the border. Just get yourself a wet brush, wet your brush with clean water, and just start moving it around. It's just so easily maneuverable that you can literally have a nice bit of fun just playing around with the colors and the water to create something really interesting. You're never going to get the same patterns when you do this again. That's what gives this medium its unique characteristic where you just don't know, especially if you're doing wet on wet techniques, you can't really predict exactly how the watercolor is going to behave or where it's going to end up. It all depends on your environment and on the surface and just generally how random it can be. Like you see over here, what I'm doing is I'm just dragging those little pockets of water upwards, and that can create a nice texture for this little foreground that I'm getting. What I'm going to do is I'm going to speckle this within that area. Again, great advantage of using the wet on wet technique. Try this out, try doing what I'm doing here. You're not going to get the same results as me because it depends how much watercolor you put down or how much pigment you have in your watercolor, or how much water you have, and it also depends on the surface. Like I said, I'm just maneuvering this around because I really like this texture and I think it will work great, so carry on doing this and allow your watercolor to dry. If you don't want to use a hairdryer, just leave it for maybe an hour or two until you start working on the next stage. I'm just going to carry on moving this around until I'm happy with it and that will also encourage the drying time. I'm happy with that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to carry on with the hair dryer and just use the hair dryer in a flat position until this is completely dry. Now you can see I ended up getting a bit distracted and I ended up blowing too much air on this and it went spilling out in this corner. But what I did was to quickly recover. I just got myself a little bit of tissue and I just wiped it towards the actual watercolor, so you can see it's left a little bit of a stain because it's a slightly staining color, but that's not a problem. If you do run into that problem when you're drying, then you can easily fix it by just reacting quickly and then just going in and then just doing some touch-up work. Again, just going in like this and we're going to carry on. But this time I'm going to concentrate. Welcome back. Now, our nice little gradients color on the foreground has been dry. As long as it's dry to the touch, we're ready to move to the next part. 31. Subtle Textures: For the next part, what we're going to do is we're going to just do this little circle area over here. You can do the background if you want this bigger area. But I'm going to go for the circle purely because it just makes it easier for me when I'm doing this illustration. Again, we're just going to go in with our clean water, go straight in and this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to keep my water away from the house and just keep it within the circle part of the drawing. So you can see there, starting in my water trying not to go over the little house so wet. But even if you do accidentally go over the little house so wet, not to worry. It's not the end of the world. Because we've done four little drawings of these, you've got plenty of drawings to practice on, even if you do mess up a little bit on the first attempt. But you do have to get used to working on this wet on wet method. Basically it's really getting used to and getting that practice in. Because sometimes you might not really know what to do if you've made an error like I did when the watercolors stretched it out with a hair dryer, but no reason to panic. Don't worry about it, just carry on until you get better and that's what will happen. You'll just keep getting better the more you practice. So I've got a nice layer of water in there. Get your colors, and let's have a look at what we've got. Let's go for maybe a red. If we just pull out a little bit of red, I am using my Alizarin crimson. Just dab it again with your brush and drop it straight into that circle area for that beautiful wet on wet explosion. Beautiful stuff going down and it just looks so nice [inaudible]. It's just such a relaxing medium to use. I know it can get frustrating when you're trying to achieve something and you can't achieve it. But instead of worrying about making something perfect, especially in this beginner stage, just enjoy the medium, enjoy this expressive color you're doing. There really is no pressure at all. Take your time with these exercises there's no rush. Go back to the exercises again, there's plenty more exercises. [inaudible] plenty more techniques that we're going to go through. So just enjoy this process and learn while you're working. Just like that, I've covered that. I'm liking that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to clean my brush. Just into the dirty water jar back into the clean, and let's get in a secondary color. I'm going to get this lemon yellow. Brush in a bit with yellow. If you don't have lemon yellow, just choose the lightest yellow that you have and start dropping it in. I'm going to drop it in at the base of this circle so that we get a bit of a blend going in from yellow to red, and they will mix in to a nice, orangey color. So just like that, all I'm doing is just adding in them dots. You can see it's creating a gorgeous blend. Look at how beautiful that looks. So just leave it like that. No need to mix it in with your brush, just dab it in. Let that color disperse into wherever it wants. Just around the house a little bit more, around the edges. Let's keep that part red. Now I'm just going to clean my brush, and I'm going to go back to my small brush, give my small brush a nice rinse in the clean water, and let's soften and neaten up these edges. I'm going to tilt my page to the side and just like I did with the foreground, I'm going to go in and start neatening this up, bringing it across to the edge and then from here, coming in like this. This is one of the things that I love about having a small brush like this. Again, this brush is free, it came with the set, so this is one other reason I always recommend getting this set that I've got. Because you literally got a complete set of colors, great choice of colors, and you've got yourself a pretty decent brush that you can use to fine details and to just neaten things up. So just like that, I'm just going over the areas where I can see these white spots just dabbing without adding any more paints, we're just using what we have already on the paper. Just like that, we're going to carry on and finish this one off. Take your time, don't rush because the thing with watercolor is, you've got to be quite patient, just don't rush. Because if you rush, you rush and make a mistake, and you won't be happy. Just finishing this off cleaning these gaps over here very lightly, just using the paint that's on the edges on the corners in that vicinity, finishing them little dots, and then let's just go around the silhouette to make it nice and clean. Nice and clean silhouette, clean, crisp lines and we're pretty much done. Just a little bit more on tap. Take a look, turn it around, beautiful. right now what we can do is we can start adding in a little bit more color. Just with my small brush, I'm going to go back in to the crimson red and just adapt a little bit of red on to the top areas to increase the saturation and increase that vibrancy of the color with a little bit more red. Again, clean your brush and dab a bit more paint on that tiny brush, and then just go in where we have a little bit more pale color and just to make this a bit more vibrant, a bit more saturated and interesting. You can see it's creating a lovely texture by just adding these dots into the wet areas. The areas that actually dried already, that's where you don't get much dispersion. That's another thing you can use to your advantage. When the paint is semi dry or just about to dry up, it's always a good idea if you want to get some nice medium shop designs and patterns in. Just start dropping in your paint at that point. You can see here, I've got a bit of dry area so underneath it's not as wet, so if I just drop in these dots, you'll be able to see the dots a bit more. That's a great way to add texture to your actual artwork where you don't have the water completely melting into another parts of the paint. Just like that, we're just going in, and I think that's about it. Let's just spread this area here. Just do the best you can with what you've got. If you don't have these colors again, just use yellow and a red from your palette that you have. But you can create some beautiful colors. You've got this lovely orangey red circle, absolutely gorgeous. It's that time again, we're going to have to dry this out. But before we dry this out, we can add in another element, and we can actually go in and paint this little windows. That's what I'm going to do, I'm going to use my lemon yellow straight from the actual pallete and my brush is 100 percent clean, you can see it's getting contaminated. Just make sure you clean your brush thoroughly, go back into clean water and then start adding. There you go, we've got pure yellow there on the tip of that brush and just go in. I'm just going to paint this pure yellow. I'm not going to bother with any gradation on this one because I'm just going to keep this as a yellow window, and that's it. Just like that, a nice thick layer of paint in the middle, just to add some variants, and we're done. Again, all I'm going to do is I'm going to dry this with the hair dryer, and I'll see you once that's done. 32. Flat Colour: Now, all I'm going to do now is I'm just going to use some of the phthalo blue solutions. I've just added a little bit of water to some phthalo blue and I'm just going to go straight into the background and create a nice flat layer. Let's do that now. Now, all I've done is added a flat layer of phthalo blue just directly to the paper. We didn't have pre-wet the paper. All I'm going to do now is I'm just going to clean my brush. Make sure my brush is nice and clean. Let's creates a nice dark texture for the background. This phthalo blue, I'm going to add just a little bit of crimson red and just dub it in the top corners, like so. You can see that's dispersing into a really nice dark purplish color. I'm just going to do that on this side here so that we have a little bit of variations. You can see the paint is nice and wet. What we did here was we added the color as it was, just a color solution with another color solution on top. Again, keeping it wet on wet instead of having to go in with water. What this does is it creates a lot more variance. It creates texture. It can even create a damp at dry brush look. But generally speaking, the reason I've done this is so that you have just another thing to actually work on so that you have another technique to look at and see how you can create beautiful patterns using the wet on wet technique. Just like that, all I'm doing is I'm just adding on that crimson. Maybe we add on a little bit more. We'll just clean up brush, go into the crimson again, dub it in, and let's make this nice and vibrant. I'm going to tilt my page. I'm just going to bring this in a little bit from that corner. Go in with that crimson to create a beautiful blend of color. You can see we've got this nice reddish-purplish color on the right-hand side of our mini illustration, our mini sketch. Then we've got a nice intense blue on the left. Just have a play around with this. I mean, you don't have to use the same colors that I'm using. Go ahead and use whichever colors you like and just use this method of either wetting the paper and then going in with color, or going in with color straight away by creating a color solution like we did with the phthalo blue and then adding dots of color to create a nice blend variation of color, or just do both, like I have over here. It's always a good idea to keep your small brush at hand. Then what you can do is you can go in and you need to knock the edges, like I'm doing here. Just go in, need to knock them edges, no need to add anymore color. What we're doing is dragging it to the edge so we have a nice clean finish and it looks quite nice. Again, it would be that you'd have none of these bubbly effects if you were working on stretched paper. But sometimes, these bubbly effects that you have, this warping of the paper, that can work to your advantage, especially if you're trying to create some texture and some random variances. It can look rather nice. Let's just carry on doing this. All I'm going to do is, with my small brush, I'm just going to go in, clean that brush out and add a bit more of the phthalo blue. We got the phthalo blue here, just add a bit more of it directly onto this so that we have a nice little pattern. Some of these dots melting away in the background making it look quite funky and nice. Let's carry on with that. If you find that you've have an area where you want to make it darker, just go in and add a bit more of the pure pigment from your palette, that will cover it up and make it look a lot more saturated. But I'm happy with how this is looking right now. Again, this is just a demonstration. We're not doing a complete sketch. All I'm going to do now is I'm just going to wait until this dries, and just get the hairdryer out, give it a good drying over, and then we'll just fill this little housing in the middle, or you can leave it as it is. It's entirely up to you. I'll see you after that. Now, our painting is completely dry. What I'm going to do is I'm going to leave this little silhouette. I'm just going to leave it white. At the end, what we'll do is we'll use our fineliner to go in and just finish and touch this up with some details. But what I want you to do is have a go at this, like I have use. Maybe it's different colors that I've done or just follow the color scheme that I've done here. 33. Experiment with Colours: Just go ahead and vary your color, have a play around with the texture, with the wet-on-wet technique, add color first or add water first, mix and match it, and let's see what you get because this is a great exercise to get used to the wet-on-wet technique. That's why I'm going to do now. I'm going to quickly go through all three of these color them in, so you can have a look at the end once it's completely dry, how these turn out to be. Let's do that now. Now, I've completed all my four little mini sketches, and you can see I've done quite a lot of different variations on all four of them just to give you an idea of what can be achieved, try this out. For example, over here on the top left, I used very vibrant colors, nice contrasting vibrant colors, blending some phthalo greens and some phthalo blue and then going in with yellow ocher and orange, and then just a flat yellow ocher for this little circle. Try this color variation out, try a few other color variations out. Then on this area here in this bottom left-hand side used some nice earth tones and nice bits of brown and yellow ocher with a bit of green. This worked really, really nice as well. You can see it actually went in over the circle and the background at the same time. As the colors were dispersing, it just maneuvered in and out of it to create a beautiful marbling look. Then on the right-hand side, a bit of an explosive color scheme going here. We've got very vibrant lemon yellow going in with a bit of ultramarine. Again, with this one, I mixed both of the main with the circle and the background at the same time, and I maneuvered it while the painting was going from wet to dry. Again, it creates a nice little variation. Try this out, try a couple of different color options that you have from your palettes and it'll give you a nice experience in wet-on-wet techniques. All I'm going to do now is I'm just going to use my fineliner and I'm going to outline the shapes just to finish off the illustrations. You don't have to do this in yours, if you want to leave them as they are, but sometimes, it's nice and neat to nook them rough edges with a nice fine line, so I'm going to do that now and I'll see you once that's done. I've just finished off with some nice little clean lines for my illustrations just to outline them, so that they look a little bit nicer and neater. You don't have to do this. But if you do decide to do this, make sure that your paint is completely dry, otherwise, you're going to have an absolute mess. That's it for the wet-on-wet technique illustrations. Now, let's move on to the next technique. 34. Wet on Dry: Welcome back. Let's look at the second main watercolor technique. We're going to be looking at the wet on dry technique. Now, previously, we did the wet on wet technique. This is pretty much the same. The only difference is we're going to be using wet paint on a dry surface. For this one, I'm going to demonstrate this using my stretched piece of paper, the one that I stretched in the previous lesson, so I'll just show you here nicely sealed with the gum tape, and it's ready to start using. Let's just get a zoom back on here to fit the screen. Now, if you don't have any stretched paper or you haven't stretched your paper, not to worry, just watch this class, stretch your paper, and then come into the class and practice this exercise. Or if you don't want to stretch your paper, that's fine, just use whichever watercolor paper you have. Tape it down on all four sides with some masking tape or with some insulation table, whichever tape you have at hand, and you can follow this class step-by-step. Firstly, I'm going to be using a different brush now. Let's use this flat one-inch brush. If you have this brush, then use this brush for this exercise. If you haven't, just stick to the standard round brush that you've been using up to now. What we're going to do here is, first of all, we're going to create some watercolor solutions. With the wet on dry technique, you're basically using a pre-made solution or a direct solution and just laying it onto the paper, onto the surface, the dry surface immediately. Now, we've actually already done this in the first lessons where we created our color swatch if you remember. We went straight from the damp paint onto the paper, and this is basically just an extension of that original technique. Let's start off with creating our watercolor solutions. Now for the solutions, I'm going to get my palette. I'll just put my palette here, just make sure it's nice and dry from the bottom. We don't want any paint going on the paper, so we'll just place the palette here and then we're going to get our good old water bottle. This is vital for this method that we're going to be looking at. I mean, you don't have to have a water bottle for this you can use something else to actually add your water in, but it just really initiates the solution really quickly. I'm going to use this as my first one. With my water bottle, I'm just going to spray in one full spray. Got one full spray of water, just some speckles of water there. In the second one, I'm going to do about 3-4 sprays of water, maybe five, depending on how much spray comes out. You can see, we have a difference now. We've got a nice pool of water here and we've just got some speckles, and this is what's going to make all the difference. Let's just put that to the side here, and let's go straight into our watercolor palette. With our small brush, all I want you to do is before you actually use a small brush, just go in and wet your palette like we've been doing with the spray just to get them colors going. What I want you to basically do is get some red, so the darkest red that you've got, mine is a crimson. Just go straight into it. You can see, it's quite thick. If your is thick like this, that's fine. If it's watery that's still fine. Just go in, take a nice decent bit of paint, and then I want you to go into your palette and where we sprayed the small amounts of water, just drop that paint in that. You can see we've got a nice thick consistent water solution with a nice bit of saturated paint. Now again, all I want you to do is basically go in into your palette, take out a little bit more and just add it to that solution. We're just dropping it in to create ourself a nice wash of color. Just like that, go in, giving it a nice mix and that's ready. We're going to do the same with the second one here. We're just going to take in the same amount of that red color and just drop it straight into that, and you'll find that over here we've got much more of a fluid watery solution compared to this first one, and that's what we want. We just want a watery solution here and we want a more saturated solution there. Just again, maybe another dab, and that's looking good. Put the palette to the side and move your little brush. We don't need this brush anymore for now. Just clean it off in your dirty water jar and put it to one side. Now, what I want you to do is I want you to get your brush that you're going to use. If you're going to use your one-inch brush, grab hold of your one inch brush and dip it into some clean water. That's what I'm going to do here. I'll just quickly show you. Dip it in, get a nice dip, twist it around, so that's it's completely drenched in that water. That's what we want. We want it to be nice and watery. Then just like that, what we want to do is place it into this first solution where we have the saturated red, and get that water solution into those brush bristles. All I'm doing is just pressing down on one end, lifting up, pressing down on the other end, and just twisting that solution around, and picking up as much as this brush will take. Now, if this was a sable brush, we would have pretty much soaked up all that solution in one go, because sable brushes have a much higher take-up of water compared to synthetic. But again, I don't expect you to have a sable brush for this beginner's class, and I'm not going to be using any of my sable brushes. I might use them towards the end when I do my full project in the class project, but for now let us stick to synthetic. That's a nice bit of color on that brush as you can see, so it's well and truly wet with color. What I want you to do now is I just want you to, on the top right-hand corner, just press down and then lightly drag that color across. Take it as far as it'll go, and it'll only go as far as the brush will allow to release that water. As you can see, I'm getting a couple of speckles there. That's absolutely fine. Now what I want you to do is give that keep that a rinse. Give that a rinse, get this completely cleaned out. All that pigment needs to come off so that we can use our second color. That's done. Move that to the side, go into the clean water, give it a nice rinse, our brush is nice and clean. We can just put that to one side now. What we're going to do is we're going to do exactly the same that we did with the red with our second color. Now we've not used that watery solution, yeah, and there's a reason for that. What I've done is I've decided to do these two solutions because we're going to use this in the second part. Still keep this solutions as they are. Don't take them out or dry them up. What we're going to do is, I'll just place this down here with our water. We're going to be the same, one spray in this one, one. Then two sprays in that one, 2-4, so three, four. Just get a nice bit of solution there. Maybe one more in here and we just want that variant, so maybe 4-6 sprays in this one and maybe 1-2 in that one. What we're going to do is we're going to go in with our small brush again, and we're going to choose our second color. Now for the second color, I'm going to say go for a blue. I'm going to be using ultramarine blue. If you haven't got this color, just use any blue that you have and just dab in, just like we did with red, and start adding it into that little compartment. Now we need to get this nice and saturated to pick as much color as you can with your brush. Don't do it with your big brush because what happens with that is it just spatters all over the place and I don't want you to get frustrated with having to clean your colors. Again, that's about enough. It gives us a decent solution to pick up with our flat brush. Now, again, we're going to go in directly into that and go into the watery solution. Maybe two or three little dibs of this ultramarine blue. You can see we've got two different types of solution and that's watery one over here, and then we've got a nice thick saturated one over here and that'll do. Again, just put your brush in the dirty water jar, give it a rinse, put it to one side. Now, what we're going to do is exactly the same. We're going to get our flat brush, have it nice and wet. Nice and wet with clean water, and we're going to go into that first saturated panel that we created to. Again, put one side in, press it down and drag it down, so that the water goes all the way across. Turn it around and you can see a lot of that paint solution is going into the bristles of the brush. We're just going to keep doing this until we get that maximum uptake of water until it won't take any more water. That's looking good. Move that one to one side. Again, straight underneath here. What I want you to do is press down and just slowly drag it across. 35. Brush Pressure: I can see we've got these little pools because these pools will appear when you press down on the brush, and the lighter your stroke, the lighter the release of water from those bristles and you'll get this little variance. You can see on the one over here, I pressed down and I just went in one sliding motion and you got a nice smooth flow of paints over here. I used two hands to press down initially here, dragged it across, and then I pressed down a bit more towards the end and you can see it adds a nice variance. You can see with the stretched paper, it's not buckling at all. You can produce some beautiful clean lines. Now, I'm going to go in to the burnt sienna. I love this color, burnt sienna, one of my favorite colors. Let's demonstrate with this one. Just add a dab of that color in there, a bit more to create our saturated solution. We could possibly have a little bit more in there. Not to worry if you've got too much water in here and you're thinking, oh, I've not got it that saturated, this is just an exercise for you to practice this technique of wet on dry and just pulling out your brush as much as you can to get a beautiful smooth line of paint and that's about it. We'll do the same for the watery solution. Give it a good mix. Make sure that there's no lumps in there. Sometimes the watercolor in the pan can dry out really quickly and not mixing well. It depends on the actual color itself. Some colors mix in immediately and some take a bit more work to mix in. Just make sure you've got a nice, consistent, smooth mixing of color. There we go, nice flat color there. Now, I'm just going to go straight into the saturated solution, the first solution, really pressing those bristles to pick up as much paint as you can. Go back and forth like this to soak up all that lovely paints, as much as that brush would take. Try going all the way to the end of the actual bristle. This is usually called the belly of the brush. Where that belly of the brush is right there, try getting the water to go all the way off the belly of the brush, all the way to those bristles where they start getting exposed, and that way you'll be able to drag out as much paint as you can when you're placing it on the dry surface. Again, that's nicely soaked in and we can move that to the side. With this one, what I want you to do is, I want you to try doing a nice quick sweep of color. So I just lay that down. Quick sweep of color. Now, my watercolor is completely dry. We've dried it with a hair dryer and you can see it. There is no bubbling whatsoever because we're using our stretched paper. If we just analyze here, we've got some nice bits of texture going on from pressing the brush and then just spreading that watercolor out. We've got the little white speckles of where the water was drying away from the brush as we were applying it. Again, we've got this really nice smooth area. This is a great exercise just to have some brush control and get used to practicing using your flat brush if you're using it. You can get similar results with a round brush if you just use it on the side. But again, that's one of the reasons I always say, for beginners, get yourself maybe three brushes: a round brush, a flat brush, and a nice detailed bush, a small tip round brush, that way you can get a nice enhanced experience of watercolor. We've got a beautiful dry bits of color, three nice little strips going on there. Now, let's move on to the next technique and this is quite an important technique in watercolor. It's a variation of the wet on dry technique, but instead of going onto a dry surface just of paper, we're going to be going over these dry colors instead to create what we call a glaze. Let's move on to that next. 36. Glazing: Okay, welcome back. Let's now look at the second wet-on-dry technique, the glazing technique. Now, glazing basically means we're just applying another layer of watercolor over an already dried layer of watercolor. What that will do is, show up the color that's underneath because of the transparent properties of watercolor, and that's a great way to practice to get used to and familiar with how watercolor works, and so that you can apply this technique in your class projects and in your beautiful illustrations. If you remember, we created a pallet of two different solutions of each of these three colors. Now, what we're going to do is, we're going to use the second solution, so we're going to use the more watery solution. What I want you to do is, let's start off with the red because red was the first color. Get your brush, your flat brush, give it a nice dip into clean water and then go straight into this watery solution of the red that we produced. This just saves us having to create the solution all over again. That's one of the reasons I said, let's go ahead and do both solutions initially. Again, we're going to take this up as much as we can on the brush. Take it as far up where the belly is, get a good soak in there. That's looking good. Move that to one side. What I want you to do now is, with your brush, just carefully put the brush at the top end of the red, gently drag your brush down, we don't want to be pressing too hard. Be as gentle as you can and take it as far as it'll go on the third line. There you go, you can see a beautiful little addition. All we've done here is, we've just added a glaze of read over these three strips of color. Now, you can see immediately, it's a layering technique, and what happens is, that the color underneath has darkened or changed according to the actual properties or the hue of that particular color. This is where the color wheel and a bit of color theory comes into it, but we're not going to go too deep into color theory. For now, all I want you to do is, practice and experiment with these techniques, and maybe we'll do a deeper dive into color theory in the more intermediate to advanced watercolor classes that I will be doing in the future. Let's just do exactly the same. Clean the brush that you have in the dirty water jar, give it a nice rinse. Make sure there's no pigment on it. Go into your clean water now, and we're going to do exactly the same with the other color. Our second color was the blue, so let's just go into the blue with our watercolor brush as we did with the red. Go in, and because this is a nice thin solution, it's not going to overpower the colors that are underneath, and that's what glazing effectively is. You're using a thin wash of color to just lightly put a secondary layer, a thin film or a thin glaze on top to change the color. Either you want to mute the color, or desaturate it, or just give it an additional effect. You'll be able to see when you experiment with different colors and you glaze with different colors on top of other colors. That's about it for the brush uptake of that color. Then again, all we're going to do is, just carefully leave a bit of a gap and then just drag that brush down. Beautiful. You can see now, we've got some pooling over here because I pressed down a little bit hard on that one, but it's all fine. If you're pressing hard and light, you're going to get variation in this. Not to worry, the more variation you get, the more different speckled effects you're going to get, it also depends on the granulation power of each color. This is ultramarine, this has some granulation in it, so you'll be able to see how those bits of pigment are granulating and further enhancing the effect. Let's do exactly the same now with the third color, our burnt sienna. Let's go into that water solution, that watery second solution, take up as much of that color as we can. Again, add it on, lightly drag it down. Beautiful. Right. Okey-doke. What we're going to do now is, we're going to let this dry. I'm going to use the hairdryer again, but be very careful if you're going to use a hair because it will splatter if you end up putting the hairdryer too close to the paint. Let's do that now. Okay, now our paint is nice and dry and you can see we've got some really nice effects going on over here. This is the glazing technique. What you can do is, you can further go in and add another layer of color on top of these to intensify that glaze. That's all it is. We're just using layers in-between drying the color and we're just building this color. If you can see on the top left here. What we'll do is, we'll get a bit of a zoom in on the top left so you can see. Let's get a bit of a zoom in on that, so it's a lot easier to analyze. You can see right here. You can see that we've got the pure red, the pure crimson. Then, when we go over it with just a light wash, it darkens that. So again, if we work on this more with crimson, you can create a monotonal effect, or you can just paint in one color, going darker, darker and darker. We'll show this, we'll illustrate this on this right-hand side, but for now, let's just have a look at how the blue reacts. With the blue, we went over the red with the blue and it's darkened and created this gray color. Then, when we went over the red with the burnt sienna. You've got that nice dark, beautiful orange, and you can use this at an advantage, when you have a painting. What we're going to do is illustrate this in an example. You can lay down red as a background color and then maybe go over certain elements of your illustration in that burnt sienna to produce that gorgeous, deep-looking orange hue. So again, looking at the blue strip here, when we went over the red with the blue, we've got this nice dark blue. Then, we've got that tonal match going across here, and then we've got that slight tinge of grayish-green when we've got the burnt sienna going over the blue. Again, with the ones on sienna, you've got this gorgeous color here. Again, that color is very similar. If we just zoom back out to show you this. If you have a look at these two colors over here, this top right and the bottom left, over here you've got the red with the sienna on top, and over here you've got the sienna with the red on top. Now, these are very similar, but one is slightly darker than the other, the other one's slightly more orange. You can have a great play around with this. You can produce some beautiful shades of color, just with three basic colors. Effectively, you've actually got nine different colors. You've produced nine different colors with three colors only, and that's a huge advantage of watercolor. You can go in and create color upon color, different values, different hues, and you can produce beautiful results. What I'm going to do now is, let's move on to looking at the monotonal effect. That's basically going in a little bit more deep by looking at these three, where we've got the same color glazing over with the same color, and then maybe adding in some saturated detail. Let's move on to that next. 37. Monotone: Now, what we're going to do is, we're going to do a little monotonal exercise by using this little grid of paint that we've already produced. On the right hand side here, where we've got the speckled areas, I'll just get a zoom back on that. So we've got these three speckled areas here. We did our little glazing on the left hand side. On the right hand side, we're going to use these strips to add in some details to see what type of effects we can get. If we zoom right back in there, now I zoom-in going on there, and we'll concentrate on the red one first. All I want is today now is, go back to your color mixtures and let's go on to the red. So with the read this time l want you to go back into the saturated ones, the first one that you did that has a bit more saturated color. Use your small brush or if you just got your normal round brush just use that, dip it in, we don't need to add any more water. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to dip it in and go straight on to this. This is again, using the wet on dry technique. We've got the dry color here and we're using the wet brush on the dry surface, on the dry color. All I want you to do here, is just come up with a nice little pattern or just block out some color. This could maybe be just a kind of edge of some hilly areas in a landscape scene. You can see how nice that is when you're putting the same color on top of already the same color. So you can see these little speckles of white, they can work really nicely as well. This works great in illustration, say if you're starting off working on a background, maybe have a nice light wash initially and then further in the distance you can have some more light faded soft details, and this is how you produce them. Again, I'm going to create a complete illustration after this lesson to show you how you can use all these techniques, this wet on dry technique to your advantage and it works great. As you can say all I'm doing is creating these little peaks and you've got that nice little texture going on there. That was just one exercise, creating a monotonal value. Now, if you want to go in and maybe do a bit of wet on wet, you can go ahead and do that. If you get your crimson, because this is the crimson color that we use and you just lightly dab in your brush into your crimson. Now what we can do is, we can just go in and just add a little bit more dark here, and because the pain is just a little damp you're effectively using the wet on wet technique over your wet on dry technique. If you want to encourage that wet on wet a little bit, just add your brush into a little bit of water and splash a little bit of water there and you've got a bit of wet on wet going on over there. So just like that you can create some gorgeous effect, and I do love monotone paintings when you just painting in one color. It really looks really nice and you can learn quite a lot from it. You can learn how the color behaves and how you can really expand and stretch the color from creating different values by creating a saturated paints all the way down to a completely diluted paint with the background, and just like that. Just adding in some more details and quickly do this, is just a little example exercise, nothing too complicated, and we can actually go ahead and do the same for the one one. So that's what I'm going to do next. I'm just going to move this up, clean my brush and I'm going to do the same for the blue and I'm going to do the same for the one underneath. So I'll see you after I've done that. Now, I've just done three quick little sketches. I was just coming up with some little shapes and sizes just to illustrate to you that, how easily you can create this monotonal watercolor sketch. Now we don't know drawing lines or inclines or anything like that. This is just a basic exercise and I really want you to try this out. So try out with the three colors that you put down. If you're not using the same colors as me that's fine. Do it with whichever colors you can and maybe practice with three other colors. Once you've done initially this one here and got a bit of practice, try coming up with these little sketches. These little nice, little mini sketches, doesn't have to be anything specific. It can just be some shapes and triangles. You can see like here, I have just done some silhouettes of houses and maybe some type of a fuzzy little wamp that I've got there. Then over here, I've just drawn these little triangles, and within this circle I have just done a house shape. Again, with the ones on top I did just some peaks there with just some red color, and that's about here. For this wet on dry technique we've covered a couple of things. We've just covered flat wet on dry, we have covered some glazing with the same colors and with different colors to see what effects we can get, and we've also created some monotonal little mini sketches here just to practice on, nothing too difficult. So give this one a go, and now let's move on to doing a complete sketch using all the wet on dry techniques that we've just gone through. 38. Mini Sketch Wet on Dry: Welcome back. What we're going to do now is a small little illustration that demonstrates all these techniques that we learned on the wet and dry technique. What I've done here is on my page, I've just turn my page around on my stretched watercolor paper. I did the exercise in the previous lesson on here. I had a bit of space at the bottom, so I'm just going to use some of this space that I've got, and I recommend that that's what you do if you have space on your page. If you don't, start on with a new page and don't go too big with this illustration. Maybe have a double the size of my illustrations. Maybe half the size of an A4 sheet, just so that you have some room to maneuver around. I'm going to work in quite a small tight area here just for the purpose of this actual recording part. It's a lot easier to record in small spaces. I'm going to work on this area, lets get zoom in on that. It should fit in quite nicely on the screen. Lovely. For this sketch, we're going to do something a little bit more intense compared to the simple sketches that we did. Not too complicated, so I'm just going to do this step-by-step. Firstly, what I want you to do is get your pencil and make sure that your pencil isn't too sharp. Because what we don't want is we don't want the sharp pencil to create an indent or groove into the actual surface of the paper. A nice standard blunt pencil, not too sharp, and we're ready to go. Firstly, what I want you to do is just do a rough line from left to right, just about a centimeters high, all the way across, and work really lightly. We don't want to be pressing hard, doesn't have to be a 100 percent straight. It can be a little bumpy, it'll look a bit more natural. I've just got this little line that I've drawn from left to right. First step. Second step now is to create these little peaky shapes. We've got these peaks, little round semi-circles, touching the line like this. This is all I want you to do. 1, 2, and 3. Going small with the last one, medium and large. Perhaps something similar like this. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. Thirdly, what I want to do is create these similar shapes on this side. Just from approximately here, we'll just create a steep curve. Then we'll do another one from this point going up like this, and then maybe a final one from here going like that. You've basically got these curly shapes and you've got this straight-ish line to start this illustration. Next, what we're going to do is we're going to create a background peak going in like this, slope it down, make it finish approximately that. Then another one from here, going slightly higher and finish it at the end of the page. That's the basic structure of our little mini illustration. Let's drop in, say a little house shape like we did in the previous lessons. Just a small house shape at this point here. You can have this as wide or as thin as you want. It doesn't really matter as long as you have a nice sharp shape in these curvy shapes that we've just created, and maybe just a light little window, and that's about it. Again, we don't need to use our pencil anymore now, so just put your pencil to the side. What we're going to do now is we're going to start adding our watercolor using the wet and dry technique. For this one, I'm going to use my round brush. We don't need a flat brush for this because we're not covering huge masses of space. Get your round brush and give it a nice little dab in clean water. Make sure that you give your paints a nice spray if you haven't already done so from the last lesson. Just moisten them up with one or two sprays in each well to get them going, and we're ready to go with our paint. Firstly, first color I'm going to use is my crimson red. Dip a little bit of your brush into your crimson red and just bring it over to your pallet. What we are going to do is, we're going to create the solutions as we did in the previous lesson so that we can go ahead and do the painting all in one go. Just create yourself a nice little solution with the red crimson. Going in again, add a little bit more, and possibly a third, add just a little bit more of that. Then with your spray, just give it one little spray. Don't go too dark with this. We want to keep it nice, and loose, and light because we want to be able to produce the gradients and the glazing effect that we did when we were layering our color. That's about it for that one. Give your brush a rinse. That's the first color done. Second color, let's go in with some ultramarine blue. Let's go into our burnt sienna. You can see I'm using the similar colors like I did with the previous exercise. For our fourth color, I'm going to go with the good old sap green. Let's now add in our crimson red solution. Get your brush in there as much as you can, give it a good mix, get the paint all the way to the belly of the brush like we did with the flat brush, get it completely soaked, and we're ready to go. This is going to be a fairly light mixture, but that's exactly what we want for this exercise. What I want you to do is, I want you to paint this entire area here. So this top area, these two peaks, and the house as well. I want you to go over this entire top half of this illustration with your crimson red. As you can see, I'm just laying that down nicely and the paper shouldn't do any buckling because I'm using the stretch paper like I did before, and We're just adding this wet color, this light wash of wet color onto our dry surface. Now, one key thing to remember while you're doing this is that the more moist you have your watercolor, in other words, while the watercolor is wet, you always have that chance of maneuvering it around. We're going to come to this in a bit more detail in the upcoming lessons where we talk about the harsh edges of the watercolor. Say for example, you've got this edge over here. When it dries out, it's going to be quite harsh edge. It's going to be quite strong compared to the wet-on-wet technique where you get really nice soft edges. With a wet on dry technique, you always get harsh edges. Now, there's a way of avoiding that, and that is to keep your brush wet and you paint wet while you're laying that colored down. If you run out of moisture and the watercolor dries out, you're going to be left with a hard edge to your watercolor illustration, and that sometimes is what you don't want. I mean, sometime you might want that just for the effect, but to avoid that, keep your paint moving. Your water part of the watercolor is your lifeline. Let's add in a bit more to finish this off down here. You can see, it's still moist so we're not getting any harsh edges. But again, we will come to doing a little bit more about harsh edges and how to create softer gradients. All I'm doing is just adding that color on, and we're nearly done. Another tip is don't press too hard with you brush because the harder you press, the less of that watercolor is going to be released from the brush. You just going to end up moving the watercolor away. For example, in this area, if I go back in and I press a little bit hard, you can see, I've just moved that watercolor away. Now, that's true for synthetic brushes because the bristles are quite tough and hard. But with sable brushes, you get a bit more leniency or a bit more flexibility. Always use your watercolor brush with a very light touch. Once you've laid down that first layer of color, try not going over it again and again because you're ultimately just going to keep moving it around. This is my first layer of paint. I'm going to be happy with that. I'm not going to mess with it too much. I'm just going to clean these edges a little bit with the tip of my brush just to make sure everything is nice and neat so just give that a go. You can still see the pencil lines underneath and that's why I was saying, ensure that you've got nice soft pencil lines. We don't want anything harsh coming underneath the paint, and that's about it. The next step. I did say cover the house with the actual red, but I've decided not to do that. Just go around the house like I have. Try not going over the house. But if you have gone over the house, not to worry, it will just add another layer with the glaze. Let's leave the house as it is, and let's just wait for this to dry. I'm just going to get my hairdryer out and give this a good old dry, and I'll see you once that's done. 39. Second Colour: Now, the paint is completely dry. We've got no moisture on the paint at all. That's another important thing, as I mentioned earlier on, that the paint must be completely dry before you add your second color on top. That's what we're going to do now. We're going to look at our burnt sienna mixture that we did. As you can see, we've got a lovely burnt sienna mixture here, and just load up your brush, and give it a nice twist, get into that belly of the brush. Then what we're going to do now is we're going to paint over this first peak area and on the second peak, and we're also going to cover the house as well. Just like I'm doing here, all I want you to do is start adding your burnt sienna. Now, if you don't have burnt sienna, then just use whichever color you have that's similar to burnt sienna. Maybe a light yellow ocher, or cadmium yellow, or a light brown. Any color that's an orangey- browny or a yellow tone will work on this. But even if you don't have those colors, just add another color on top and see what happens. Try not adding a color that's too dark in saturation, such as a thalo color, or a thalo blue, or a thalo green because that's just going to overpower the color that's underneath. The crimson color is quite a light color in comparison, so we don't want to be doing that. We just want this nice layer of burnt sienna going on top, and you can see how beautiful that color is now. The reason I said leave the house is so you can see the difference of the burnt sienna on its own compared to the overlap that we gain with the glaze over the red, and you can see how beautiful that is. It just looks amazing. It puts the house at a distance. It puts these peaks at a distance, and it puts the house at a distance in this little mini scene, this landscape scene that we've got. So you can see you can achieve beautiful results with this glazing technique. That's all we're doing, we're just glazing over and layering our color over another color. So we're creating effectively a third color. It's just looking gorgeous there, isn't it? You've got to work quite fast with this because you're using a thin layer of paint and it will dry out fairly quick. To avoid those harsh edges or harsh lines, you really need to work fast. But however, if your paint gets dry, just go over it very lightly with a bit more color, and that's about it for that one. Let's go ahead and now dry this, and then we can move to that next step. Okay, now you can see that the color has nicely dried, and all we're going to do now is do another layer of the same color for this peak and the house so that this layer is slightly lighter and it looks like it's in the distance. If you remember, this is adding another layer of the same color to intensify it, just like we did in the glazing grid that we did before. So let's go ahead and add a little bit more of this beautiful burnt sienna on this area here. There you go. All I've done is I've just added another layer of that burnt sienna on top of that mixture, and you can see it's created three different zones here. With our glazing technique and layering technique using the wet on the dry, we've created three beautiful colors and tones. What we're going to do now is, again, we're going to go in and we're going to dry this with a hair dryer, and then we can move on to these foreground pigs. Okay. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to add in our ultramarine watercolor, so the remaining part of this illustration. We're going to do all this area here in ultramarine, and this bottom layer as well. If you find that while you're drying your colors, your mixture is, again, a little bit dry, just give them another couple of sprays with water, and a bit more of watercolor dab, maybe one or two dabs to get that mixture to the level that it initially was. Don't worry if you keep drying up on your watercolor solution, it's always better to have more than less. You're going to get some of these ultramarine and you're just going to drop it straight in here. Now, just be careful when you're dropping the ultramarine, you don't want it to splash over the orange because we want both of these areas to be quite separate from each other. We don't want any mixing going on there. Just like that. Bring it across nice light layer of color, nice light film of color. Some people say a nice thin film of color. You can phrase it however you like. But all we want to do is lay it down really quickly, precisely, and lightly. So let's carry on with this. You can see with the ultramarine, you do get some granulation, which looks really nice. We're nearly done on this. You can leave a little gap in between where the orange is, where this orangy red color is, where it meets the blue if you want to. What I'm going to do is I'm going to close that gap because I want to end up doing something else with this illustration in the upcoming lessons. So instead of having to do another illustration from scratch, we can work on the same illustrations to demonstrate another technique. So what I want to do is just carry on with that, and so I'm happy with that. Let's give it another dry. Okay. So it's nicely dried, and you can see with the ultramarine, you've got this beautiful granulation, this little texture that's coming out once it's completely dry. So just remember, like we said earlier on, some colors may have granulation or some colors may not, and ultramarine usually is one that you get some nice granulation effect. That's why I use this color for this kind of foreground area where you can see a little bit more details. What we're going to do now is we're going to add in our second color on top of this, and yes, you've guessed it, It's our beautiful sap green. Load up your brush and make up a bit more solution if you need to, if it's dried out, and that way we can start adding this on. What I want you to do is I want you to add the sap green into all this area here above the line. Now, you might not be able to see the line very clearly because of the texture of the ultramarine drying out, but I can make it out on here, I don't know if you can see that on the camera. So I'm going to just keep within this line. Don't worry if you go over it too much, but just try keeping a bit of a gap between this element and this element at the bottom. So that's what I'm going to do now. I've added a nice layer of the sap green over the ultramarine, and you can see how beautiful that looks. The colors have blended with one over the other bringing out a third color. They've not color mixed because we're doing wet on dry. But they brought out that glazing effect where you can still see a little bit of the ultramarine while you're looking at the sap green, it looks like a third tertiary color. So that's just looking absolutely beautiful, and yes, you guessed it again. What we're going to do is give it a dry and then we'll come back and do another step. Okay. Now, our sap green has completely dried and you can see there's a beautiful texture with the ultramarine and the sap green. 40. Smaller Elements: What I want you to do now is get yourself a smaller brush. I'm going to use this small brush that I used in the previous lesson. If you haven't got a small brush, you can still do this with the tip of your round brush, but small brush would probably help a little bit more and vary your water color stroke. With this small brush, all I want you to do is dab it into your sap green. If your sap green is dried out, again, like I said before, just add in a little bit more sap green from your palette. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to actually add in a little bit more of my sap green to the solution just to get a slightly more saturated solution. You can see my solution is a bit more saturated now by just adding that extra dab, load up the brush. Then what I want you to do is just create a random pattern over here going up and down. Basically, we're creating these triangles. If you just create these little triangles like this, randomly, keep them about this much length from that baseline. You can see what we're doing now is we're doing that monotonal design, like we did in the previous video. You can see, I'm just adding in the same color on top, going in again with the sap green. Now, if you find that you can't see this very clearly or your solution is a bit too wet, then all you do is just go in directly to your pain and use another well and create a thicker solution. We're just going to add in, and that's quite thick as it is. With that, just go in and go over these little patterns that you've created. You're creating a very subtle pattern and then carry on like this, creating these little triangular peaks, just to add a bit more visual interest. Just again, to demonstrate this monotonal effect. You can create some beautiful designs, simple designs and beautiful designs with monotone. Going in again with that sap green, thicker layer of paint and just carrying on. Just carry on doing this. I've got myself a nice subtle little pattern going on where this hilly area meets the bay area of the water, so it looks really nice and subtle. What you can do is, you can go in a little bit more if you like, if you want to darken it slightly more, just go in directly at paint and make sure there's a solution inside your paint. Well, like you can see here on the camera, it's still a bit wet in there, so you can use that and just go back into your palette and thicken off that paint mixture, and then just go over the areas where you want to make them a bit more prominent. That's pretty much it for this part of the exercise and then all we need to do is wait for this to dry out to do some final touches, and then we can just observe and see what we've learned. Let's do that now. Now, our little mini illustration is completely dry. Now, you can see we've created some nice variations with glazing, layering colors using the wet-on-dry technique. You can see the results are quite different from the wet-on-wet, where with the wet-on-wet you'd get a lot of the blooming of colors and melting of colors, softer touches. With the wet-on-dry, you get some nice, clean sharp edges and you can use this technique and the other wet-on-wet technique to your advantage in an illustration. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to neaten this up a little with some fineliners. You don't need to do this if you don't want to. But if you want to, go ahead and follow me and just do what I'm doing here. I'm just using an 0.8 fineliner and I'm going to be using my thicker 1.0 graphic line. I'm just going to go in over the lines just to make them a bit more prominent, clean them up a little bit, and I'll see you after that. I've just done a little bit of outlining to add some details just to enhance the actual little illustration. If you're going to go ahead and do some drawings over it with some pen and ink, go ahead and do that. Like I said before, you don't need to, but it's just nice to have this as a complete little mini sketch, little illustration so that you can use it again for reference. So when you do your class project, you can have a look at how the wet-on-dry technique or even how the wet-on-wet techniques can produce different types of results. That's about it for the wet-on-dry technique. We're going to move on to some other things now, but we will still be incorporating both the wet-on-wet technique and the wet-on-dry technique a bit further to show you how it can be used in combination. Let's move on to the next set of lessons. 41. Colour Mixing: Welcome back. Let's do a nice little exercise with watercolor mixing. Over here, what I've got is a grid of all the primary colors of the watercolors that I have in my set. As we mentioned earlier, it's always a good idea to buy a set of watercolors. You generally get a good range of primary colors and secondary colors. Over here you can see I've got two blues, I've got two reds, and I've got two yellows. These are the primary colors: red, blue, yellow. Now the ones that you have in your set may differ. They may be the same as mine, but it really doesn't make a difference as long as you have at least one of each primary color. What I want you to do is I want you to draw up a grid like I've got over here. I want you to divide it into columns and rows. The number of colors that you have in your primary rain, so the number of reds, blues, and yellows that you have, that will determine how many actual vertical columns that you have. Then the same amount will go on the rows over here. As I mentioned, I've got two of each colors. I've got the yellows, the reds, and the blues. I've got two of each in my columns going across. Then I've got the exact same repeating in the rows going on the left. It gives us a nice little matrix. What we're going to do is we're going to premix our primary colors to produce a range of secondary colors. It's a great exercise to get warmed up in column mixing that we can apply in our class project and in the next coming sets of lesson. Let's get on with this. All you need for this is your palette and you need your spray bottle and your brush, and just your normal standard brush that we've been using. What I want you to do is I want you to firstly, just do a couple of sprays in each one of your palette wells, so maybe two sprays in each. What that'll do is that will just give us a bit of a solution to start working with immediately, and maybe one in the middle there. Then let's just go ahead and wet our colors. We don't need to use too much color, too much pigment for this exercise. We just need a little dots of color to produce these beautiful color swatches. I've wet my paints and all I'm going to do now is I'm going to go in, have a look at my top left. I've got blue ultramarine and then I've got blue ultramarine. So this one is just going to be plain ultra marine. All I need to do is go into my blue ultramarine, wet the brush and take a little dab of the ultramarine blue, little dab and just place it here. Now, what will save us time is if we go ahead and start placing this ultramarine blue in all of these wells. Because we're effectively, what we're going to do is we're going to mix ultramarine blue with phthalo blue, with red crimson, with cadmium red, with ocher and with yellow lemon. We're going to mix the blue with the other primary colors. To avoid having to go into your ultramarine blue again and again and get all your cause muddied up, it's best to just take out all your ultramarine blue in one go, so you've got this ready to start mixing. That's all I'm going to do. Is going to add in a bit of a swatch in each one of these wells, and that way I'll be able to mix the colors in advance without having to go into the same color again. What I've got is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I've got seven. Don't really need seven, but it's always good to have more. Then what you can do is you can wash these out quickly and then move onto your next course. All I'm going to do is, let's start with the first one. Nice little bits of color swatches. Let's go with the blue ultramarine and the ultramarine. All I want you to do is just double it to be a paint in this little box. We don't want to cover it all. We just want to go about this much. Not too watery, not too wet. Keep it nice and saturated. Like we did with our actual color swatch that we did right at the beginning of the class, we just want to leave a little white border around there so that the colors don't mix into each other. I've got my nice little plain color swatch of ultramarine blue. Go in and make sure you clean your brush out. It's vital that your brush is clean for this exercise so that we don't get muddied colors going all the way across. Get yourself a nice rinse there. Go into your clean water jar. Make sure that brush is nice and clean, and we can move on to the next color. Going across, we've got phthalo blue. With the phthalo blue here, we're juts going to go in with the phthalo blue, and then I'm going to go directly into the ultramarine. Now, I'm going into the same swatch that I did that with. It makes no difference because we're not going to need that swatch again. We're just going to add that phthalo blue to the mixture. You can see how intense that has become now with the phthalo blue and ultramarine. That's looking good. Now you might think I might end up putting too much of the secondary color into it to mix it up. It doesn't really make much difference. We don't want loads of color, we just want your brush to be slightly dry. Take a little bit of paint and then just dab it on the edge there. Let's just go in and do our swatch. You can see you've got that phthalo blue and ultramarine blue, beautiful. What a gorgeous color that is. This is such an advantage of watercolor where you can mix your colors, premix them and use them. You can effectively create many colors just from the primary colors. That's how the colors are usually made anyway. The pigments from the primary colors are what determine the secondary colors and all these fantastic colors that you get in watercolor. That one done. With my clean brush, make sure your brush is clean. Let's go in, give a good dab, crimson red, and now just drop it into this, give it a good mix and look at that gorgeous color there. What a beautiful color that is. That's like a ruby purple, dark red, absolutely gorgeous. There we go. Let's just do a nice little swatch down here. Absolutely gorgeous color there, when you mix crimson red with ultramarine. Now, it will depend on the quantities of color that you mix. If you mix a bit more of the red, you're going to get a slight more reddish tone. If you're going to mix more of the blue, it'll be a bit more blue. But that's the great thing about it, you can a bit more to it to experiment. But generally for this initial swatch, what I do is just stick to how much heavy you take out. Try keeping the quantity similar, and you'll be able to produce some beautiful results. Now, let's add in the cadmium red color that I have. You may not have this cadmium red color, you may have a different red color, such as a rose color or anything. Whichever red variant you have, just go ahead and use that. I'm just going to dip that into the cad red and then drop it straight into that ultramarine blue, and we've got ourself a nice little mixture. You can see here, it's a nice darkish tone that we've produced, so let's go in and swatch this one out over here. That's a lovely color as well. The colors, again, with watercolors, they look very vibrant and saturated when they're wet, especially when you place them on your paper. They will dry out a lot lighter in terms of saturation and sheen, so do bear that in mind, don't just take it as it is. This is a brilliant reference for you to keep these little watercolor swatch grids that we're doing here and the initial water color swatch that we did of your palette because this way you've got a great reference point when you're coming to do more watercolor sketches. You don't have to keep trying to mix your colors to see what you're going to get. You have an indication already, effectively like a reference chart. The next color is this yellow. Let's get a good bit of yellow there, and let's add it to this blue. We're getting a really nice mix of green, an earthy greenish tone, is similar to sap green this tone over here. There we go. Let's just swatch this one out, earthy green color there. We can produce some gorgeous colors. Now, on the camera you're probably getting a bit of a shine with the actual light that have got. If I move it around, you might be able to see a bit better. But once these have dried, we'll come in and analyze the exact colors. Let's just do the last one. The last one is our lemon yellow. Let's just go in with the lemon yellow, go in into our ultramarine blue. You can see it's created another variance of green, a very nice green shade. Look at how gorgeous that is, isn't it? Just have a play around with this, complete your chart and see what results you get. Just lay it down really nice, keep within your box, and that's about it. We've got our first row, complete blue ultramarine, going in with phthalo blue, crimson, cad pale, yellow and yellow lemon. You can see it's created a gorgeous range just from the primary colors. We've got six beautiful colors, starting off with a pure ultramarine and creating five new colors by using the primary colors. Just like that, I'm going to complete my chart over here. I'm going to go to phthalo blue with the ultramarine and keep working this until we've completely finished. Then we'll analyze how the colors look and get them completely dried. I'll see you after that. 42. Completing the Grid: Welcome back. We've done our color swatch now of our color mixing with the six primary colors that we had, two variants of each, and we've got some wonderful periods of all results. So what we'll do is, we'll just go through this quickly line by line to just get an idea of what type of colors we can produce with a limited palette of three primary colors and two shades of each. Let's just go a zoom in quickly on the first row. That's a bit better, so let's just get a zoom in on that. You can see over here we started off with the blue ultramarine, just got a nice swatch of blue ultramarine and that's how it's going to go in this diagonal form, so we've got the phthalo blue, that's without any color mixing, crimson, and then we've got the cadmium red pale, we've got the yellow and the yellow lemon. This little diagonal line of colors are just the pure colors as they are. You can see we've created a really nice range of colors over here, we've got some secondary colors that we've created, so we've got like this, pure red shade, we've got a bit of a brown, we've got our greens now, we've got a nice earthy green and a lighter green, over here we've got more purples and we got some oranges as well, and if we move up, we've got some nice brighter greens and turquoise, shades of turquoise going on over here, so you can see you can produce such a huge variety of colors from just three basic primary colors, so if you haven't got the two shades of primary colors, like I said before, then don't worry, just do your little grid with just the three colors. If you just have ultramarine, and a red, and a yellow, just create this grid, a three-by-three grid, which will give you nine different variations. We've got 30 brand new colors that we've created with six colors that we already have, so try this exercise out and vary the quantities of each color. We've got these two colors that mixed in with the exact two same colors, red crimson and ultramarine blue, red crimson and ultramarine blue, and we've got two different results, and that's just the variation in the proportion of one color to another, and that's the huge advantage of water color, you can vary the percentage of the color to produce an entire range just with two colors, so we can get darker shades of this purple, we can get lighter shades of the red crimson,and to change the actual value of that color, so for example, if we have this red crimson here, we can still produce another two to three more different values of this without doing anything, and all we need to do is add water to dilute that down. This will be our most saturated mix, and then we will dilute this down to give a two to three even four or five different lighter values of this one particular color. It's just so vast, and that's where we're going to be moving on to next, we're going to produce another grid similar like this and select three or four different colors and produce different values by creating a lighter solution. Let's just get a zoom back on this. Please try out this exercise, it's a lot of fun and you'll get more familiar with your colors and you'll understand a little bit more about what you can achieve with some basic colors, and the results are absolutely stunning. Let's now move on to the next exercise. 43. Colour Values: Welcome back, so let's now do another exercise where we're going to be looking at values of our colors. Before, like we did, we did a grid of the colors mixed with the same colors on the opposite sides to create new colors. We're going to pick out raw colors and mixed colors, and we're going to come up with a value range using our water bottles. Let's move this to the side, and let's quickly run through which colors we're going to do. I'm going to use burnt sienna, so burnt sienna, I've got that in my sets over here, so I've got burnt sienna there. Then I'm going to go to phthalo green, phthalo green over there, cadmium red pale, that one there, the orangey red, burnt umber, I've got burnt umber there. Then those are the four colors that I'm going to use directly from the palettes. Then I'm going to use maybe 1, 2, 3, three colors that have been mixed together. From the chart, if we have a look, I've got phthalo blue and I've got crimson. If we've got phthalo blue and crimson red, so I want this dark shade of purple will get the values out of there and bleach them out. We've got the ultramarine and crimson, so ultramarine and crimson sets these two colors that I want to really pull out the values and get them diluted to a lighter color. We've got the ultramarine and yellow. We've got yellow down here, yellow and we've got the ultramarine blue, ultramarine to get this nice earthy green. We've got a range of colors in total, how many have we got? We got 4, 5, 6, 7, yes, so we've got seven colors in total. Let's get started with this. I'll go through a couple of examples, and then we'll have a look at the end. This is a great exercise to do to really understand how we can lighten up colors and produce very light values. I'm just going to cover the colors up so that it's easier to follow. Let's get our pallet ready, and we can make a start on this. The first color that we're going to look at is the burnt sienna. We just need to have a clean brush, and let's go straight in with the burnt sienna. We got the burnt sienna here, my paint is still nice and wet from the earlier spray that I did. Just drop that in there. We've got our burnt sienna as it is as saturated as we can get it, so we can go straight into the burnt sienna into our little box as we did before. I've put down the number of sprays of water in these little boxes here. We're going to go four levels. What we're going to do is we're going to go in with one spray and then we have a total of one. Then we're going to go into that same mixture with four more sprays of water giving us a total of five. Just like that, we're going to keep adding four until we get a variance of four different values. What I'm going to do is I've got my raw color there, let's do the first one. Get your water bottle out and just give it one full spray. So that's the first color value that we've got of this raw sienna. As you can see, it's going to be nice and saturated. Let's just load up our brush, I will just paint this in. I've just painted in my swatch of the one spray of burnt sienna. It's nice and saturated, got some good color going on over there. Now all we need to do now is we don't need to make another mixture, we can just add in four more sprays into this mixture that we've already got. Let's do that next. Let's get our water bottle, 1, 2, 3, 4. You can see, we're diluting this, so just clean your brush, give it a little clean. Because we're using the same color, we don't need to bother about using clean water. We're going to use the same water. We've got the same water in there. Now you can see we've got much more of a fluid color there. Let's see how this one turns out. We've done our first desaturated value for our burnt sienna with a total of five sprays compared to one. You can see already you've got that lighter value just with that wet water solution. Let's just add in another four more sprays into this mixture that we've got and do the same, 1, 2, 3, and 4, four full sprays. Just dry out your brush and go in. We've done our third value over here with a total of nine sprays, we just added in four. You can see you've got this nice gradual change from the most saturated value all the way to the lightest value that we've got so far. Let's do the next one, add in four more sprays into that and repeat that process, so 1, 2, 3, and 4. This should give us a lighter shade of our burnt sienna. Now we have our nice lovely four swatches of the same hue going from a saturated to a completely desaturated color. Now we'll wait for these to dry out, and let's move on to the next one. We've got phthalo green. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to repeat that process, go in with phthalo green and then add in one spray, add in four, four more, and then four right at the end totaling 13 to create that swatch. Just like that, I'm going to fill in this whole table all the way to the end. All we'll do is we'll stop here, and we'll come up with some more mixes before we actually continue. I'm going to do these three next, so I'll see you after I've done that. Burnt sienna, phthalo green, cad red pale, and burnt umber. You can see the colors are still a little bit wet, so we wait for this to dry to see what the results are like. But initially, by just having a quick look, you can see how nicely they come down in saturation level and how the values become really lighter. Let's continue now by creating our next three which are the mixed colors that we created in the previous class. Let's just quickly create our mixed colors. 44. Mixed Colour Values: I'm just going to use my phthalo blue, go into my phthalo blue, add it directly into there. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to clean my brush. Make sure the brush is really clean because we've been using a lot of colors, you don't want your colors to get contaminated. We're just going to add in some crimson. Roughly same amounts of crimsom and the phthalo blue and that's going to give that lovely dark purplish tone. We might add in maybe a little bit more of the crimson because the phthalo blue is slightly overpowering. I want it to give it that purple color. So let's go in with a bit more crimson. That's better. We've got a slight tint of purple in there. You've got that gorgeous plum like purple color there. Again, all I'm going to do is, do exactly the same. Just go in with the spray once and then carry on diluting this and creating those lighter values. Let's continue with that. We've done our phthalo blue and crimson, nice purple hue there. Not sure if you can see that on the camera properly but you'll be able to see this once it dries. I'm just going to continue as I did previously with the next two color mixes. Let's do that now. We're now complete with our color value swatches. We've got some beautiful colors going on here. Have a look at this ultramarine and crimson, that purple, that beautiful deep purple, it just looks absolutely gorgeous. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to dry these out now with a hair dryer and then we'll come back and do a quick little analysis and sum up this lesson. Now all the lovely swatches are nice and dry. Let's have a look at these. You can see the first row where we just had the most saturated color with only one spray of water. That's come out really nice and bold. Then moving on to the next row, we added four more sprays of water to dilute it further, to desaturate them. The saturation or the value keeps getting lighter and lighter. Let's just cover these up to show you the difference between the most saturated and the least. You can see there's a vast difference there. Now you can use this at your advantage now in your illustrations, in your watercolor sketching because you'll know how much to dilute a certain color and what shade or what value of that hue you're going to end up getting. It's a great exercise to do this. You don't need to stop at this level that we've got here. You can actually further continue until you get an absolute minimum value and a very light hue of color for that particular color that you're looking at. It's a good idea to practice this with as many colors as you can so that you have a reference chart to look at so you can quickly come up with the solutions that you're after. I really hope you try this out and it'll give you that firsthand experience in dealing with color saturation and values. Now remember, I did this on my [inaudible] , so I've got a bigger block here. This is on the cold pressed [inaudible] paper. I've got this warping going on, this bubbling, which is why you've got these little bumbles and cauliflower effects coming within the color. If you want this to be a complete flat value chart, then you're going to have to stretch your watercolor paper, so I'll leave that one up to you whether you decide to do it on your normal watercolor paper, or your stretched watercolor paper. Give this a go. Try it out with different color variations and also try out the previous lesson, where you've got your color swatch, mixes of colors. This just opens up an entire new world to a simple little color palette that you have. This will, hopefully, enhance your experience and get you well and truly prepared for your class project. Let's now move on to the next set of lesson. 45. Gradient Technique: Welcome back. Now, we're going to go through a nice little technique of blending two colors into each other on our paper. This is effectively creating a gradient that you can use on the background of your illustrations and your watercolor project. What I've done here is, I've got myself a little bit of watercolor paper, and I've just taped it down with some masking tape on a board so I've got two panels that are empty. What we're going to do firstly is, we're going to look at this panel over here, so let's just get to zoom in on that. We are going to create a nice little fade from one color to another. Let's get out our colors and let's add in a swatch of crimson into our pan here, nice bit of crimson into our little pan, and then clean your brush out and then add in a bit of cad yellow to your pan as well. I already had a little bit of paint already in my pan of the same color, which is great. We're going to do this in two ways. Firstly, we're going to do this as a wet-on-dry technique like we were doing before, and then we're going to look at the wet-on-wet technique, and we'll use the same colors to show you what type of effect we can get. You can use this in your background parts of your illustration if you really want to. You don't have to use this technique, it's just a good technique to know and use and utilize in your watercolor project. [inaudible] to paint that, so what we can do is, let's start off with the red, and let's put the red in on the top just like that, all the way across. You can see the paint is quite wet, and we're just dragging that all the way across up to approximately halfway, so about there. That's looking good. Now, quickly clean your brush in clean water, go into your yellow. What I want you to do is now, I want you to start at the bottom of the actual page now, not from this point, from the bottom. We will quickly work that painting all the way across, get some more paint, carry on like this, and now we're going to do an overlap. Lightly overlap the paint about there. You can see what's happening is, that the paint is mixing into each other, the yellow and red are making that beautiful orange. What you can do now is to intensify a bit. Add a bit more of the crimson on the top just to intensify it a little bit and bring that over that orange mixed paint. As you can see the color is intensifying. Again, go in with a clean brush again, go into your cad yellow, and go in over it once again to intensify it and then bring it over to that mid mixed area. You can see, we've created ourselves a beautiful gradient from one color to another, effectively creating a third color. That's the wet-on-dry technique of fading one color into another. Now, you might not want to have the orange really apparent there. So the best way to do that is use a more diluted wash. What we'll do on this side is move this across, we'll create a nice diluted version of that using the wet-on-wet technique. For this technique, what we're going to do is, we're going to spray our little area with some water, just a little water to get that moistened up, and that will aid the wet-on-wet technique, and we should have a nice smooth gradient from top to bottom. Just spreading that water out so it's evenly spread, we don't want this pooling too much. That's the reason for using the masking tape. If you don't use masking tape and you're not using a stretched piece of paper, then you're going to get all sorts of bubbles everywhere. Let's go in again with the red, nice bits of crimson red there. You can actually use it straight from the pan. Mine is running out, so I'm just going to try salvaging as much as I can but there's plenty there for this actual exercise. It's going in there, same method that we did before. You can see, you're getting that softer tone, softer touch, just halfway point, approximately there, and it's really nice and soft. Cleaning the brush quickly and you do have to work quickly with the wet-on-wet technique. The paint does dry out quite quick. Just like that from the bottom, taking that up in nice little even strokes, not pressing too hard, and then there we go. We've got a bit more concentration there. Clean the brush, add a little bit more yellow, drag it off very nicely. You can see such a softer gradation from one color to another. If we zoom back on this and just have a look at it while it's actually wet, you can see we've got two different variations over here. You've got the wet-on-dry where you've got the bold colors and they mix in really, really heavily in the middle to produce a solid orange. Then over here, you've got the yellow going into the red, and it's really nice and light and airy. Let's wait until that dries out and then we can have a quick little look at this. Welcome back. Now, we've dried out our two little swatches, the wet-on-wet and the wet-on-dry, and you can see there's a huge difference between the two. Now, we can go in and remove the tape. Our color fades and really nice and dry, and you can see there's a huge difference using the same colors but with different techniques. Remember, we used the same brush, our synthetic round brush, so there's no difference in what materials we used. The only difference is in the technique that we used. You can see the results are very, very different. On the left here, we've got a gorgeous smooth fade from one color to another, and on the right, we've got a nice bold fade from one color to another. You can try this out as many times as you want. Try it out with different colors, with blues and greens and maybe darker browns with the yellow. You'll come up with a lot of variations, and it's a lot of fun. Just do remember to tape down your paper because with this technique, you've got to work really fast. If you're getting bubbling up of your paper, then that's the last thing you want because you're going to get loads of harsh lines. You can see, if we bring this closest to the camera, there's no harsh lines in there at all. You've got a gorgeous, smooth, gradient going from one color to another. That's it for that one, let's move on to the next one. 46. Full Sketch: Welcome back. Now, the next set of lessons that we're going to do all the way up to the end of this class, we're going to be based around some techniques that we outline using this little sketch that I've done here. If you want to copy this sketch as it is, I've got a link in the resource sheet which you can download, print off, and then just transfer it onto your watercolor paper. Just copy it, they're very simple shapes. I did this with pencil first and then just went over with a thick black fine liner, waterproof of course. Just make sure when you do do this, if you decide to go ahead and do this actual sketch, make sure that you use your waterproof fine liner. With this sketch, what we're going to do is we're going to look at a couple of tips and techniques for you to really get up to that stage where you've got a well-rounded understanding of watercolors as a beginner so that you can tackle your class projects. First thing we're going to do in this is we're going to look at the background. You can see, I've not got too many intimate details in this yet. They're going to come in the later stages. We're going to build like we've been building with the wet-on-wet technique and the wet-on-dry technique in this little sketch, in this illustration. Firstly, we're going to start off with this background. Let's get our paints ready. Just going to do a quick little spray like we've been doing in every lesson to wet my paints. I can see some of my wells are getting quite used up, and if that's happening to yourself, not to worry. Just spray your water on there and get it all activated and leave it for a while so that you can have a nice solution of watercolor. Let's just move this to one side. What I want to do here is, I want to create a really smooth finish. Now, if you remember in the previous lessons where we were using the wet-on-wet technique, you could get really nice soft edges if you wet the paper first. But what I want to do is I don't want to wet the paper first in this particular illustration because I want to demonstrate something else to you, how to achieve a nice, smooth finish, clean watercolor wash without having too many harsh lines or edges. Now the key to this is, is having your watercolor paper at an angle. What we're going to do is, we're going to lift our watercolor paper. By the way, I'm using my balking third hot press watercolor paper this time. This is the one with the smooth surface on it. Previously, I've been using the cold press. I'm just going to lift this up slightly. I'm just going to put this little tape roll underneath so that it can hold it at an angle. This is now coming in at an angle, and what that will do is that will force gravity to push the watercolor downwards rather than the watercolor spreading out in random directions, it will push it downwards, and this is vital to have a smooth wash of color. Now, before I actually add it to the illustration, I'm just going to quickly demonstrate this to you so you know what to expect. I've just got a small piece of watercolor paper here. Actually, what we'll do is we'll just move this out of the away for now, and let's demonstrate this on a small piece of paper. Again, I'm going to have this at an angle like this. I'm going to make myself a small bit of watercolor just to demonstrate this. I'm just going to clean my brush and I'm going go in with, let's say we go in with some of my favorite color. Let's go in with the burnt sienna, little bit on the palette there. Don't need too much for this demonstration. All I'm going to do is I'm going to add in a spray of water, couple of sprays of water to just loosen that up so we have a nice fluid mixture. You can do this with any color if you want to try this little exercise out before you go ahead and start doing it on your sketch. Just like that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to hold the water color paper in place. I'm just going to create a straight stroke going across. Now, you can see if I bring this up closer, you can see that it's quite a dry layer of watercolor on there. You can see the watercolor solution pulling up. What we want to do is we want to start adding some dots of watercolor to this. This is the key to actually having a smooth wash of watercolor. You can have a smooth wash of watercolor if you use a little watercolor, however, with little watercolor, you don't have much room for maneuvering your paints on your surface. What you do is you just keep on adding. All I'm doing here is I'm just tapping into my little solution here with my brush, and I'm just adding dots of this on this little stroke of paint that I've got on my watercolor paper. You can see that it's all collecting at the bottom and I'm holding this at an angle so that the water comes downwards. This is what I'm going to refer to as the water line. This is basically what will continue the water to move downwards and give you a nice smooth spread. You can see what I did there was I just went over that water line with my brush. Again, I'm going to go in into my solution and just keep adding that dot to it so that effectively, it's just falling into this line. It's effectively like a water drip line going in, right at the bottom. As long as you've got this line, you've got this solution gathering up on the edge of your water color stripe, then you're good to carry on moving this. We're just going to press down and then drag it across like this. You can see the brush is just touching that water, and we're getting a really nice smooth wash of color. We're not getting no harsh edges in there. Again, all I'm going to do is just keep adding that water to that strip while it's wet, and that way it will keep the watercolor alive without it drying out. Because once it's dried out, you're going to end up getting a harsh edge if you try painting over it. Just like that, I'm just adding, and then I'm just going to place my watercolor brush here, drag it across so it touches that water line, and you can see that water has come down and we've got a beautiful, smooth, clean wash. Now look at that, it's a gorgeous, smooth clean wash without having any harsh edges to it. I'm just going to continue doing this. This is a great little technique to create some nice smooth backgrounds or just to really have a smooth wash in any part of the illustration that you want. Just keep adding that water. Just tap it on so that it collects on that water edge line, and then keep moving it down with your brush, and that way you won't have any harsh edges. You can see I've got a little gap there, not to worry. Just tap on that gap and that water because of the angle will keep trickling down, and it'll give you the lifeline if you like. It's just basically a water line. Just carry on like this, and we can create a gorgeous, smooth, clean wash of watercolor. That's how easy it is. That was a nice little technique to show you. What we can do now is we can go back onto our sketch. 47. Smooth Colour Wash: I've got my sketch here. You can see on the screen it's at the angle. I've just put that tape back at the bottom, and we're ready to go on this. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to get my watercolor palette. Just using that same technique that we did with this little swatch of color where we just added that waterline and kept bringing it down, I'm going to do that same technique just for this background area. I'm going to do this in a crimson red, so let's get some crimson red, and let's put it in our little pellet here. Nice bits of crimson red there, and also we just wash this off, clean in your dirty water, and then back into your clean water just like we've been doing. I'm also going to make some yellow. If we get some yellow and we just add it to this little palette here, we've got a nice watery solution going on there, and this is a great technique to use to cover your background areas. Now if you have a big wide brush or a mark brush or a flat brush like what we used in one of the previous lessons like this, this is a great way to just spread that across in one go, but you will find that the more you keep working over the color, the more it's going to end up moving away. Usually the first or second time you lay your color down is the best, so let's just get our brush nice, and wet. What we want is we want a nice wet solution. What I might do is I might just add in a couple of sprays of water in both of these pans, and that way, we don't want to run out of our watercolor. Just like that, nice, a bit of crimson. I'm just going to go in, drag it across, and you can see that waterline is on that bottom edge. I'm just going to go over that again so that waterline just keeps coming down. You can see it's creating a gorgeous, lovely smooth wash of color, and that's really the technique that you want to be using just to have a nice clean wash of water. I mean, with watercolor, you would have come to know now that you have to work fairly fast if you want to keep your colors moving, and if you don't want your colors to dry out, that's just the nature of watercolor, but if you follow the techniques and you end up doing this water wash line, then you won't fall into trouble. Let's just carry on adding more, so you can see my watercolor is right there. Just like that, we're just going to keep adding our watercolor, so make sure that it doesn't dry out. We can just stretch this out, right to the bottom where we've got our little building roofs. Just like that, just go in and carry on, fill it all up, and it's looking really nice. Nice bit of crimson, they're really light value there. If you remember from the previous lesson where we were creating the values, I've watered this down quite a lot. I'm just going to keep dragging that water, I don't really want it to pool up too much, so give that a go. Just go over areas if you need to, and another tip is that if you find that your water is not moving, and it's just being a bit stagnant and it's just staying in one place, then here's another tip. What you can do is you can just get your piece of paper and you just tilt it a little bit more, and what that will do is, it'll make the water run downwards. What you can also do is you can actually maneuver your sheet. If you maneuver your sheet, the watercolor is going to drip in the direction that you move it. If you put it really vertical, it's going to go in, and if you put it the other way, it's going to go that way. That's another good way of just spreading your watercolor out. You can see on the screen, the movement of that water is going up, but do be aware that if you do this a bit too much, then what will happen is wherever the water dries out at that level, for example it's dried off there, you're going to get a bit of a harshness, but not to worry because what I'm going to do is I'm going to add in my second color now. I'm just going to clean my brush, get it nicely. Rinse it in the clean water and now I'm going to go in with my yellow. So nicely load up that brush and I'm just going to start dabbing in some yellow over this crimson. What this will do is, this will give it a nice effect. We're just adding again. Keep your brush wet at this stage. Just keep adding that in and we can create a lovely effect. What we'll do is we'll just carry on having a bit more yellow hair. Now you don't have to do exactly the same colors that I am doing here. You don't have to mix them up like I am, you can do it however you want. Just watch the videos in these coming up lessons and then you can get a bit of an idea, and then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to tilt this backwards. What I want this to do is I want this to roll backwards. You can see how that's rolling back and it's merging in with that crimson. Then again, I'm going to let it calm down. What I want is I want it to have a nice little random pattern effects. Just like that, you can see that the water is moving, and the water won't move past where the water already is. You can see here it won't come on these little peak areas because we have no solution there. If we just carry on, moving this down, we've got a nice smooth blend on the crimson, and then with the yellow, we've got this really nice random pattern that looks like it's in the distance, and that's what I want to do. This is effectively a bit of wet on wet technique. We did a wet on dry with a crimson and now we're just moving this around on the page, so that it creates random patterns within that waterline. sell that's about it for that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just slowly with a smaller brush now, so with my small brush, just dab into a bit of water, and get that color into the areas where you want them. What I want is I want that color, so just go into the white areas right there so that it's nice and neat. You can remember we did this in the point of the previous lessons where we used our small brush just to neaten up our drawing and sketch. Just like that and close those gaps, and you can see it's created a beautiful effect on the background here. You can move that effect across, move a bit of that. Mixture of that color of that lovely yellow crimson is going to create a really nice light orange hue. Maneuver that water if you want to, to create more of a random pattern. I think that's looking good. I'm going to do same over here. I'm just going to go in, and I'm going to lightly move it around, so it creates this nice random look, and it's looking very nice. So I'll just carry on with that. Now you may have a complete different pattern from me depending on how you move the water and that's absolutely fine. This was just to show the wet on dry technique and the wet on wet technique and create some random shapes in the background just to give it that nice effect. Let's now wait until this dries, but before it dries, we can actually work on some other elements in this drawing, so what we can do is we can work on the areas that are not touching any of the wet. Maybe we can work on, let's say these parts of the houses, so let's work on that next. 48. Light Tones: For those parts of the house, the frontage of the house is not the roofs just a frontages. Let's create our next watercolor solutions. What I want to do is I want to actually keep these two in here, because I'm going be using some of the yellow. I'm just going to go in with some water on my light brush heads, just make sure it's clean, and I'm going to go in with my favorite color the burnt sienna. With a burnt sienna, I'm just going to create a swatch over here nice swatch of burnt sienna, and with that we're going to do some color mixing. I'm using the same brush that I've got, and I'm just going to get that burnt sienna and start mixing it into that yellow over here. You can see it's creating a really nice yellowy shade. You've got that beautiful yellow burnt sienna here slight hint of orange I I think that's looking rather nice. Let's go into that, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to lighten the [inaudible] on a nice light value. What do we do to make it lighter? We add some more water. Maybe about four or five sprays of water to really lighten it up. Let's go back in with the brush and see what color we get. It's always a good idea to have a spare piece of watercolor paper with you just to see what your swatches are looking like before you actually add them on to your illustration. That's what I'm going to do, I'm just going to use a spare bit of paper so I'll see where I can find a spare paper. I've got some spare here. I'm just going to see what that's swatch looks like. That's what the color looks like, and I think I might add in a little bit more of the yellow. So just clean my brush, and maybe add a little bit more of the yellow just to make it slightly brighter. What that'll do is work really nice. You can see I'm getting a bit of contamination from my previous color here. I had a bit of pthalo blue in here or some ultramarine and that's just mixing in. I'm actually happy about that because I wanted say to slightly dull this color. I didn't want it to be too bright so that's fine. It really is important that you clean your palettes that you mixing in your mixing wells. Let's have a look, and that's the color that I'm after. What I'm going to do is I'm going to give that another spray to move that one out of the way. Let's give that another spray so that we have a better solution. Looking good. With my bigger round brush let's give that a clean, let's go in and start loading up our brush. We're not really going to need much of this, that's why I've used this small solution here, very light and pale. Let's just go in into the front of the houses. I'm just using the wet on dry technique here. Not going to do the wet on wet technique, just going to keep it nice wet on dry and that's looking good. We'll carry on with that and we'll fill in the spaces. Let's do that now. I've just added in a light layer of this yellow orange-ish type mixture that we created. What we can do is we can move to this midground over here where we've got these little round elements. Let's go and do that. For that one what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my other palette, and I'm just going to make sure that my other palette is clean. I don't need these colors anymore, so I can just dry these out. It's always good idea to dry your colors out so that you don't end up contaminating them. But sometimes if you have like a little bit left that you may use, it's always a good idea to keep that there. But I don't really want that because I'm going to be using my palette quite often. Let's just give this a nice little clean, out of the way. Now, what we can do is we can go in and start adding in our other colors. Let's go in with the round brush. For that I want a bit of sap green. Let's get some nice raw sap green out of their. Add it into our palette. What I'm going to do now is, I'm just going to add that sap green as it is, pure color on these little elements down here. Let's continue with that. We've got a nice flat layer of sap green, just pure sap green going on the front. A lot of colors I'm adding in at this stage are going to form the under painting of this little sketch. You'll come to see that when we start layering in the colors and start glazing with other colors, how these colors will bring out that vibrancy and tone of this illustration. Let's just get the hairdryer out and let's dry off this painting. Welcome back, I've dried off my watercolor and it's looking nice and dry. You can see we've got some nice blooming cauliflower effects going on, even got some down here that's because of the hairdryer pushing it back. But as I said before this is just the under painting, don't worry if you're getting these little effects here and there, it makes absolutely no difference. In fact, it adds to the texture of the overall illustration. What we're going to do now is, we're going to go in on the top of these roofs, and create another flat color. As before, we did a sap green, and I'm keeping that mixture in there. What I'm going to do is before I move on I'm just going in add in a little bit of water just to keep that flowing. I suggest you do that if you've got a similar amount as I have. What we're going to do now is we're going to go in to the brown color that we've got. We've got this burnt umber, beautiful lovely brown color, and let's just drag some of this out in our palette. I've got myself a nice saturated amount of burnt umber, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to lightly desaturate this with my water. Let's maybe put four sprays in here, 2, 3, and 4, 5 maybe. Let's just gets a nice little bits of color going on over there. I'm going to use this color directly onto the roof area. I'm just going to add it on like this. Still doing the wet on dry technique here, just adding that color. Then I'm going to go in with my smaller brush, and just start coloring this in. Keep everything nice and neat, keep it all within their lines. We don't need to keep our board at an angle anymore because I'm not going to be using the flat wash, so let's just move the tape and let's just put this completely flat on the table, in that way we can easily stop maneuvering our color on the roof. Just like that, I'm just going to quickly go in and maneuver this around so it fills in the spaces. A lot of times you'll be doing this with watercolor sketching, so if this is a type of style you like to work in, then it works really great when you do your inking first and then you just start filling in those gaps with the watercolor. You can also just do a pencil sketch and start filling that in, and then do the inking after. The order of the inking to watercolor doesn't really make a difference. That just depends on your own personal style and your own personal preference. I always prefer to put the ink lines in first. That's just my own preference. But sometimes if I'm not doing something that's too heavy on the inking, the outlining, then I may not even bother using ink. I may just use the watercolors to darken edges and make them really sharp. But for this beginner's class, I don't want you to delve too much into how to create perfect shadows and how to create a lot of depth in illustrations. I just want you to get used to this medium, and the best way to get used to any medium is just keep everything nice and simple. The more technical aspects of water color can be covered in the next upcoming classes that I'm going to be posting in the future, where will be doing a bit more advanced or intermediate level watercolor, looking at shadows and things like that. We can just keep everything nice and simple for this class. There you go. What I've done is I've just easily curled that up and that's looking good. 49. Texture Variances: What I'm going to do next is, I'm going to work on this area. Now, we don't need to really wait for that to dry because this area isn't really touching. We may have a little bit of wet there, so we'll start from here. The color that I'm going to put on here is going to be a mixture of this brown and the sap green. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to slowly add my brown to the sap green, so that we have a slight darker shade. Just clean my brush and then go back into the brown, into the burnt umber, and just darken that value. You can see that that sap green is really darkening up with that brown shade. Just make sure that you keep cleaning your brushes in between taking one color and bringing it into another, so that you don't contaminate that color because you can use that later on. Again, just going to keep adding into the water, add a little bit more, and just like that. It's very subtle, it's just a subtle inclusion, but it makes all the difference. With that mixture that I've got, I'm going to just transfer to my bigger brush. Clean that bigger brush out and just add in a nice big dollop of this brown to really darken up that green and make it a little bit more warmer than it already is, so I'm happy with that. Again, if you want to just double-check on your swatch card, in your little scrap card, you can do that. Yeah, that's the color that I'm looking for, it's like an olivey-green, so I'm happy with that color. Just to make sure that we have enough color to cover up our spread, we just want to be adding a little bit more water to this. One, two, maybe three, so we can have a nice light wash of this olive value. That's about enough water solution, and we can just go straight in, so we're just going to go straight into this. What I'm going to do is, I'm also going to cover the green. If you remember, we were glazing over colors in one of the previous lessons on glazing. I'm just going to lightly go over that green and you can see how it changes its look. It slightly just adds that glaze of color onto it and it gives it a bit more of a deeper, more rich look. Again, it's just going to go over the whole thing. Sometimes what might happen is, that if you're glazing, and I mentioned this before, that if your watercolor's not properly dried out, then it's going to start melting away in your glaze, and you don't really want to do that because then you're really taking out that color from the base painting, from the underpainting. It must be completely dry, so do take your time drying in-between these layers and washes of color, otherwise you'll just end up getting a mess and you won't really get that separation of color. Just like that, going in, keeping everything really nice and light. Lightly glazing over those round little bumpy things that are at the foreground, and just taking in a bit more color. Now, this area here, it should be dry now. Even if it does melt away a little bit into this, I'm not really that bothered because it's a similar tone, so let's just go in and add that to it. You can see my watercolor paper, it's slightly warping now because I'm adding quite a lot of solution, but I want this color to be quite textured. I want this illustration to have a nice textured look to it, rather than a complete flat color, so that's going to work well. Another thing to mention is, that with the hot press watercolor paper, if you want something that's very textured or granulated, then it's always good to use the cold press, as we said before, because the paints will react differently. They will dry to a different granulation depending on the surface that you use. So if you use it on a hot press paper, which is smooth, the granulation won't be as scattered, it will be more localized, purely because there's no grain for it to scatter across. With the cold press paper, because there's a grain, there's a tooth to the paper, the granulation, the speckles of the pigment, they can rest randomly as you stroke the paper with your brush, that will make a difference to how the granulation works out. They we go. I've layered a nice light layer of this color and I've glazed over these little bumpy things at the front, and it's looking quite nice and earth-toney and nice and warm. So if this is what you're following, you should have something similar to this, and if it's not, that's absolutely fine. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to dry this out now with the hairdryer, and then we can add in the last bit of color to the underpainting, to these other elements that we have on the top, so let's do that now. Okay, our color has now dried out perfectly, so we can finish off by adding in some color to our final elements on the top half of this illustration. What I've decided is, I'm going to keep this nice and warm over here, and then in this bottom area, we're going to go really with cool colors, deep, contrasting cool colors. We'll stick to the similar color palette. What we'll do is, we'll grab hold of my favorite color, is burnt sienna, so I'm going to get some burnt sienna now. With the burnt sienna, I'm going to literally just go in straight with the burnt sienna, but this time, what I'm going to do is, I'm not going to do the wet-on-dry. Let's do the wet-on-wet with just normal water, so we just need some plain water. All I'm going to do is, little bit of water, and I'm just going to start covering the areas that I want to color in. Okay, we've just added in some plain water, just into these little four peaks. What I'm going to do is, now I'm just going to switch to my beautiful burnt sienna and just literally drop the burnt sienna into these little peaky areas like we did in the wet-on-wet technique exercise. Just like that, just drop it in. Okay, and now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to actually add in another color, so let's get our small brush and give that a nice little rinse. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to go straight in with my small brush into my crimson, so let's go into the crimson. Give that a nice little bit of crimson, and then I'm just going to start adding in that crimson on the bottom parts of these little peaks here. Just dropping in that crimson. We did something similar like this in the other exercises, so you'll know one I'm doing here. Just again, just dropping in a bit of crimson into the base of these little peaky areas. So you've got a nice little blend of wet-on-wet color going on over here. Okay, what we're going to do now is, with our small brush, just give your a small brush a nice rinse. What I'm going to do is, let's just gets a zoom in on this area, so you can see a little bit more clearly. What we're going to do is, we're just going to maneuver this into that water area, so that we can have a nice little spread of color. The color will not move in any other area apart from where there is water, as we went through in the previous exercises. Just that brilliant nature of watercolor, isn't it? Okay, now I'm just going to rinse out my brush, so that I don't lose my burnt sienna color. I'm going to do exactly the same with the burnt sienna part, just keep adding and pushing it to the edges, so that it covers it up and it creates that nice little blend of vibrant color in these little peaky areas. Just like that, just wherever you see the white gaps, just push that color in those white gaps. Try not going over the crimson. Just like that, key pushing it in and you'll have yourself a nice blend of color. We've got quite a sharp difference between the crimson and the burnt sienna here. That's easily solvable, just dip your brush into a bit of water and just dab that water onto those harsh edges, and what that'll do is, it'll start melting away that color. So again, just keep going in wherever you see any areas of harsh color separation, dab a little bit of water into it and that should soften it up. Just like that, keep maneuvering that color, keep adding droplets of water to it with your brush until you're happy with how it looks. I'm happy with how that's looking right now, so let's just get a zoom back. Fantastic. What we're going to do now is, I'm just going to wait until this dries out, so that we can finally finish up with the top area of this illustration, and we can just add in maybe some textured spots on that one. Let's dry this out with a hair. Okay, our little peaky areas have dried out and you can see they look quite nice with this lovely little colorful texture going on there. You can see now, just with painting maybe two-thirds of this sketch, we've got a nice difference between some smooth areas of color, some nice bit of marbling, wet-on-wet textures and a bit of mixture of both on the background, it gives it that visual variant. What we're going to do now is, just go in on this circle area down here, and all I'm going to do for that one is, go in directly with my brush and color. 50. Single Flat Colour: I'm just going to use my yellow. So I'm just going to go in with the yellow. Let's just get as much out of there as we can, and that should be enough for what we need. Just like we've been doing before, just go in directly with that beautiful color, and you can see how nice and vibrant that is. So I'm just going to go as far as this brush will let me go, and then I'm going to move in with the smaller brush. We're ready to move in with the smaller one, and just like that, we can just move the paint across the edges to give it a nice clean finish. Take your time with this, try not to let it over spill in the other areas. You can use a different yellow if you have a different yellow. If you don't have this, maybe use a lemon yellow or whichever yellow you have in your palate. As long as you have a nice, bold flat color that will look a little bit different from the other colors, and that's what we're aiming for. There you go, nice, warm yellow there. Carry on with that. Don't worry if you have gaps of white popping here and there, if you haven't perfectly colored it in, like you can see over here. My water color just dried up before that white area was closed. Not to worry about that because we're going to go in and do some glazing over all of this, which will cover all them little gaps up. So let's leave that as it is, because we've got a nice bit of contrast. We can add in some more effects and details in the second or third layer of color. Let's just leave that to dry and then we'll come back to it and have a quick little analysis. Okay, so now all my color is nice and dry on this little strip of illustration. You can see we've got a nice difference and variation of color. We've got some earthy greens, we've got browns, we've got some nice vibrant orangey reds over here. We've got a nice heavy yellow circle bang hard in the middle to really bring your attention to the center. So what we're gonna do now is we're going to move on to this area and start adding in the more cooler colors over here. So let's move on to that next. 51. Masking: Welcome back. Let's now move on to the next step and let's introduce a new item. What we're going to do is this little boat area that we've drawn, we're going to mask that out with some masking fluid. Now, if you don't have masking fluid, then not to worry, don't skip this step and go on to the next step. But if you do have this, then you can follow along or just watch to see how masking fluid is applied and how we can get these results. Now, masking fluid is a great option to mask out big spaces where you don't want the painter touch over and you want to produce a nice, consistent flow of color around that area. Basically, what it does is it's a plasticky fluid that dries over the area that you want some mask, and after it's completely dried off, you can go over with your watercolor and it will miss all those areas that the masking fluid has touched. Make sure that when you apply this, you use an old brush that you don't really use for your watercolors. I've got this old, cheap brush that I've been using just the masking fluid, which works great. You just want something that you can easily dispose of, and that's not cost lots of money because it will clog up your brushes and damage them. Absolutely do not use your watercolor brushes for this. Use a cheap brush that's got some nice bristles on it that will be able to maneuver the masking fluid on the area that you want to mask out. Before you start applying this, just give this a little spin. You can see at the bottom you've got this collection of this yellow stuff, it's like this oily, yellow stuff. We just want to get that nicely mixed up. But what you don't want to do is shake this. If you shake this, you're going to get loads of little bubbles in there, and what happens is when you try applying it, all you're going to do is have loads of bubbles popping on the application. Don't shake it, just lightly turn it around like this so that this sediment area at the bottom mixes in with the fluid. But generally, you do not need to shake it at all. I've just given that a little swivel around to make sure that the contents have not clogged up on the inside. One thing you have to make sure is that when you do open this, you apply this fairly quickly because it does tend to dry. When it starts drying in its first stages, and if you end up putting the same brush back in, then you're going to get lumps of that masking fluid because it doesn't melt away. Once it's dried, it's completely dried. Let's give this a little open. Just open up the bottle. There it is. It's a very opaque, thick liquid just like that. All you need to do is make sure your brush is clean, you've washed your brush out, and it's dry. Ensure that your brush is dry, don't put a wet brush inside this. All you need to do is, just going to bring this closer to the camera, just do a little dab in your brush, twist it around, and you've got that nice coating. Now, as soon as you've done this, cover your bottle. Close your bottle and make sure it's completely sealed and it's got no drips on the edges so that it doesn't dry away. We can put that on the side. Basically what we're going to do now is, let's just get a zoom in on that, we're just going to paint into this area now that we want to mask. So just very carefully, just mask out this area. Now, you can see my brush is quite thick and it's like a bit wonky, but that's fine for this. That's all you really need, which is why I kept this shape quite simple. Again, if you don't have masking fluid or if you feel like you don't want to do this part, then skip this part and just watch me do it so you know what it's like to actually apply masking fluid. You don't have to do this, it's just something that I thought it's good for beginners to actually have. So like that, I've just maneuvered it around. Another tip is that you can use the back of your brush. If you've got a thin brush, you can use that to maneuver that masking fluid if you want it to get into tighter areas. You can see like I've got over here, I'm just maneuvering that into those tighter areas. If there's areas that you feel that you can't reach with the brush that you have, and maybe use a thinner brush. But I'm not really too bothered about that for me as long as I've got the main part of this boat covered up, it's fine. Now, you can see that it's already started gunking up and I've only been using it for a few seconds now. So that's basically it. I'm just going to cover that up like that with that one film of masking fluid, and make sure that the brush you're using, even if you're using an old brush, make sure you rinse it completely out. You have to wash it completely out. Wash it out in water to get rid of all that masking fluid because it's going to seal around those bristles and your brush is just going to become unusable. Now, there is another apparatus that you can use to apply masking fluid. It's like a masking fluid applicator. It's just a piece of metal which has this opening like a clip. I wouldn't worry too much about that because you don't want to really be using masking fluid that much at this stage. This class is really for you to get used to your watercolors. If you have masking fluid, great. If you don't have it, it's not a problem. Now, if you remember right at the beginning, you can also use a masking fluid pen. But I would stay away from the pen because the thing with the pen is that it tends to dry and it's a bit difficult to peel away without the paper ripping, and especially if you're not using a cotton paper, then you can end up messing up your painting. So I'd say avoid that, and if you really want to try it, go for the masking fluid, this one down here. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to let this dry, and it still dries pretty quickly, and we'll come back once it's completely dried out. Now by masking fluid has dried out. You can see it's come fairly translucent, so you can see that it's going a little bit more clear than initially was. To test out to see if it's dry, just give it a little dab with your finger and it shouldn't maneuver away or come off. Now we're ready to now apply our paint. 52. Painting Over : Now, for our paints, I'm going to create a nice bluish turquoise greenish type of color. Let's go ahead and do that. I'm going to get a little bit of sale blue, add it to my palette, get a nice little bit of phthalo blue there, clean up my brush, and then I'm going to add in a little bit of ultramarine blue to that same mixture to make it really nice and intense. Then let's go in with maybe a little bit of soft green, and you can see we've got that lovely turquoise aqua blue color. It's a gorgeous color that. I'm happy with that color. What I'm going to do is move my paints to the side. Let's get our spray and maybe do about four or five sprays in there to really make that solution fluid. That's about enough. Let's have a look at what this looks like. Let's just get out our swatch guard, and yeah, that's exactly what I'm after. You can see that's a nice sharp aqua blue. What we're going to do now is, we're just going to go in straight over this and over that boat area with this color as a front wash. Just with my round brush, I'm just going to go straight over this. I work fairly quickly because I want to keep this nice and wet. You can see it's not going over that masking fluid, you can see it's just bubbling off there, and that's exactly what we want. It's just such a quick and easy way to mask out area instead of having to paint around it, which will take a lot more longer. However, you can easily paint around objects. There's no issue on that, it's just a nice thing to have masking fluid, especially if you've got tiny, tiny areas of detail that you want to just have masked out. It just avoids you having to really have to work really hard to just get your brush in those tight areas. Again, just make sure that your masking fluid brush that you use is washed straight away and it's always a good idea just to keep a cheap brush for your masking fluid. Let's continue with this. With your masking fluid, there are other brushes that work pretty well. It's the ones that are more synthetic and fiber-based brushes. But generally speaking, you can use any brush that will just apply it. Let's carry on with this. What I want to do now is, I want to create a nice pattern wet-on-wet wash in this little water areas. Just going to clean my brush and I'm going to go in with some ultramarine blue, just go directly into it, and we're going to slowly just add it on in the wet-on-wet technique method. Just keep doing this, adding it on. If you've got these colors by all means, go ahead and use similar colors that I'm doing or just mix up some blues to come up with a nice hue. Adding a bit of ultramarine there, clean the brush. Let's go in with this phthalo blue, make this nice and sharp in this area on the end. That gorgeous, isn't? Just add in that phthalo blue and you can see it's now going over the boats. You may have some going over the edge there, where we missed the masking fluid, but that's not a problem. We're going to be painting that boat anyway. Let's just go in with these nice little water bubbles, and now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to add in some phthalo green. Let's go in with a phthalo green, add a little bit of water to it just to get that going. Then get a good amount of phthalo green and let's just go directly into this. Just like that as we did in the wet-on-wet technique, just tapping it on, and you've got that beautiful, gorgeous color coming out. Now, what I'm going to do is use my brush, clean it up, and just spread this color along. Let's just ease that color in, just like that so we have a nice unified spread of color going across this lovely little illustration that we're doing, and it's not touching that boat. See how see that is, where you don't have to worry about, I need to put a bit here, you may have too much green on one one and not enough on the other, and it just makes that job so much easier. That's it for that, I'm happy with that. I like the sharp contrast going on over there. I'm just going to neaten up these edges where I've got a bit of white and then we're pretty much done. That's about it for that one, get a little bit more there, and a little bit more here. Now, let's just give this a quick dry. Now, our water area is nice and dry. You can see we've got some gorgeous little textures and bubbling ups going on over there, just the way I wanted it, and it creates a nice contrast with this smooth, like I said before, we've got the bubbly areas here with a cauliflower bumbles coming out, and we've got some nice smooth areas here and some more textures down here. 53. Remove Masking: So, what we need to do now is we need to remove this masking. You should usually be able to remove this just by rubbing your finger against it, and you can see that comes off really easily. However, you can see now my paper slightly ripping from there, so just be very, very gentle with this very gentile. I'm going to start from this side, I'm going to go upwards, I'm going to slowly keep moving that along. As you can see, just like that, it's coming off, I'll just get a zoom in on that. You can see what I did was I pressed a little bit too hard there and it started taking some of that paper off, and that's what you don't want to do. Just take your time with this, push it with the tip of your finger from the edges, and it'll come off really easily. Now, if you use a hairdryer like I have just done, sometimes what can happen is, it can stick to the paper a bit more because of the heat, so just be mindful of that. Sometimes it's better just to let this masking tape, just let it air dry rather than using a hairdryer, so you can see it's just coming off easily. Don't be impatient with this, don't have the urge to just rip this off, because you will tear your paper and especially if you're not using cotton paper. I'm using my [inaudible] paper like I mentioned before. You've got to be a little bit more careful with the [inaudible] , with the normal paper mode paper. You can see I'm just pushing that way and what it's doing, it's taking off my actual line, that's not a problem, those lines are just for the outline as a guide and you can see some of my paper is coming off with that as well, just a little bit of my paper is safe. We just drag that back, there we go. Then we've got a little bit more paper coming off there. You can see it's pulled off a little bit of paper, but not to worry if that happens, don't get disappointed, because that's what this is all about, it's about practicing. Usually I don't use masking fluid on backing fun paper, I usually use it on my arches paper and it comes off a lot easier on arches, purely because it's thick and the surface has more texture on it. However, it will still work, you just have to be really careful, and if you do get a tear here and there, it's not the end of the world. Let's just get a zoom back on that and let's have a look at this picture. You can see now that we've got a nice little scene going on, some gorgeous colors going on here, and we've got this lovely bits of whites of the paper left that we can play with. Next what we're going to do is, we're going to start now adding in some details and then we'll do the boats right at the end with a fineliner and then go in with some paints. But what we can start doing now is, we can start building in some details over hear on these little hilly areas. 54. Adding Mid-Details: Let's now create a mixture to start adding in the details. I've got my palettes over here. What I'm going to do is I want a mixture that is a little bit more darker than this green that we created. It's always a good idea to keep the mixtures that you've got. But if you run out of palette space, not a problem, just go in and start creating that mixture again. I've actually already got this blue that we created for this watery area. I'm going to use a bit of that to create a darker green. Let's just keep that one side here. Let's just go in with the sap green. Let's get going with the raw sap green dry. Just pure sap green there, carry out your pen. Now, what I want to do is I'm just going to use the same brush, and I'm going to just dab a little bit of that blue mixture that we created. A bit of that blue mixture there. You can see, that started darkening that sap green, so we've got a nice darker shade of green there. Let's just have a look on our swatch card, see what that looks like. Yeah. I'm happy with that. Well, I might add in a little bit of yellow lemon in that just to brighten it up, make it a little bit warmer. Let's just go in with a bit of lemon yellow, and you can see that warmed the color up quite a bit. Let's just see what that looks like on the swatch. Again, just test your swatches out before you put them on to your actual painting, and that's much better so I'm happy with that. Give it a good mix, get those pigments mixed up in there, and let's add in some sprays; 1, 2, 3, 4. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add in one more of this blue. One more dots of that blue, and I think we're ready to go on that one. Now, I'm going to switch to my smaller brush, just clean that little dotty dot from there. Let's go into the smaller brush, take a bit of the mixture that we've created, and now let's start adding in these details. I'm going to start on this side, let's get a bit of a zoom in, and let's start creating a midtone area. I'm just going to slowly put this in here just like this. Follow me like this if you want to. If you want to color the exact same way that I'm using the watercolors here, absolutely, go for it. If you don't, that's not a problem. Just watch what I'm doing, and then try it out with your own sets of colors. But just like that, all I'm doing is just bringing in that color to slightly separate this. You've got this light area on top, and now we're going into like a mid color over here. Just like that, all I'm going to do is I'm going to repeat this for all these little round areas that I've got so that we can create some different values and hues on the painting using that on the painting color that we've done. Effectively, we're just blazing the color in layers like we did before. Just follow this method, and that's what we basically do. With watercolor, we just add one color to start off an ice light watch, we go in with a midtone, we go in with a darker tone, and then we touch up with some fine detail work. That's basically the basic steps of watercolors sketching, especially in this illustration style. I mean, this isn't a loose watercolor painting or anything like that. This is just pure water color illustration sketching, very detailed, very straight lines, but you can apply the methods almost any type of painting that you do. Even if you're doing expressive loose work, you can apply it in anything. Just add the lights, go and add your medium value, and then go in with the dark. I've nearly finished doing this now. What we're going to do next is we're going to start adding in a bit of dark. We've got a nice bit of range there, so let's now further darken our color. I'm going to go into that, couple more swivels of this, straight into that, and let's add in another color. Let's go to our palette, clean you brush, and let's use some ground. We've got this gorgeous burnt umber, have that to the mixture, that'll darken up that green. Use our bigger brush for this, so a bit more of that burnt umber into the green. We've got that nice dark olive tone right there. That's bits of dark, a little bit more of the burnt umber, and I think we're good to go. Just like before, I'm just going to go in with a small brush, and I'm just going to add in a dot to this color on that base. Just like that, just adding a dot of color on the base, so it's semi wet-on-wet because the color before the one that we just laid on has nearly dried out because it was a very thin film of color. Just like that, I'm going to repeat this for all these areas here. You can see, it creates a nice little variation of color from dark going to midtone and then going to light. Just like that, I'm just going to build this up and continue with the rest of them. There we go, so you can see now we've got a nice bits of color change going on from a dark to a light. What we can do is we can go in further with this and dark and this color even more. I may just do that, I may add in a little bit of ultramarine blue to the mixture, so just a little bit of ultramarine blue. What that'll do is that'll darken the color even further and make it a bit more intense. We could drop in a bit of philo blue to this mixture, but that may be a bit too overpowering. Just have a play around with your colors, have a look at the color chart that you produce where you are mixing the colors, so that you have just a little idea of what colors to expect when you mix the colors. We've got a nice dark color now over here, it's got a bit more of a blue hue to it, so let's just test this out on our card. You can see that's a very much blue, so we don't really want that. What we can do is, we could just go in and add in a bit of yellow to balance that out and warm the color. If we add in our yellow to this mixture, you can see it's brought it back to that warmy color. Now, it won't be pure green here, and that's not what I'm looking for. I want a color to darken, to really add a dark edge to the [inaudible]. If we have a look at the color swatch, there we go. That's more like it, it's that mixture. Let's just go in with this and get to zoom in again. You can see, while we're doing this, the color is semi drying out, so you've got a nice bit of room to play with this. I'm just going to add a little dot just at the base, and let it melts into that wet-on-wet. Again, just a little dot in the base, and it will drag up with the solution that we have. All I'm going to do is just continue doing that. Let's now give these a little dry, and you can see it's added that extra layer of depth to it. Don't worry if some of your colors are moving around a bit randomly, not to worry at all. We're going to go in with fineliners to darken and get out a bit more of this detail. Let's get this another dry. Our little round, horizon line, circle objects are now complete, they dry, and now we can do another glaze on them. 55. Glazing Over: For this glaze, what I want you to do is, I want you to get yourself a nice mid-tone brownish yellow color. Over hear in my palette, I've got a great color that is used to glaze, especially when you're doing a light glaze. You can see that's quite a thick pigment that is. I think this is a color that's a little bit opaque so it may be semi-transparent and semi-opaque. Let's have a look and add in a bit more water, a couple of sprays of water. Let's go in and let's add in that water and give it a good mix. We're not going to glaze just with this. What we're going to do is, we're going to use our mixture that we created before so that turquiosy-greeny mixture that we had, just take a little bit of that, and adding to this beautiful color. You can see we're getting a murky olivy type color. Again, go into this mixture here, add it in there, a bit more, add it in there, and that's the color that we're after. It's like an olive color, a very yellowish olive color. Again, what do we do? We test this on our swatch so let's just have a look on our sample card. Let's just go in and see what that looks like. Perfect. That's exactly what I'm after. So we've got this lovely golden olive color. We can move that to the side. Now let's go in and start doing a nice glaze. I'm just going to load up my brush. What we can do is, we can just go straight into these little circle areas. Let's just get a zoom in on that. Now make sure when you do this, it's completely dry as we said before. Just like that, just want to add in a nice glaze over the entire thing. I'm just going to bring that across. Make sure it's glazed over, and you'll be able to see once it's dry, it's going to look absolutely beautiful. As you can see, that nice bit of glaze, it's going to melt the colors together. Carry on just like that with our round brush. Gorgeous. Look how beautiful and rich that color is. You might be thinking, that's just covering up all the color that we had underneath. But once it's completely dry, you'll be able to see through that, because again, that's the advantage of watercolor and glazing. Again, we're just using this to go across. Because our watercolor solution has got quiet a lot of water in it, so it will dry fairly transparent. Because the property of this color is that it does have some opacity to it, it is a slightly opaque color. It will really work well with this. Try this out with these colors that I've done. Your shades may be slightly different from mine but you should be able to achieve very similar result. You can see now, we've just glazed over, and once it's drying, it's coming out with a beautiful tinge of color. All I'm going to do now is, I'm just going to use my small brush now, give it a good rinse and just get it all the way to the edges like we were doing with the other exercises. Just push that to the edge over there. Push that one to the edge. Just to make sure that glaze covers all the area. We've just created a beautiful bit of color. Just like that, go in with the glaze a bit more on the brush. Just go in and cover it up. You can see that we're working in layers and glazing over our undertone, our underpainting. The colors just work fantastically well. You've got this beautiful olivy green color. Once it's completely dried out, it should look absolutely brilliant. Zoom back on that, you can see now, we don't have no stark difference between the colors melting. Again, we've got the glazes effectively gelled those colors. We've got the lighter on the top and then we've got the darker on the bottom. Let's just give that a good dry. Everything is nice and dry and you can see how beautiful these have turned out. It's a really nice deep olive shade of green. We've got this nice bits of dark underneath like a shadowy area and nice bit of mid-tone lights on the top of these little round, peaky things that we just designed. Let's now move on to these main four peaks. What we're going to do is, we're going to do something similar. We're going to go build in the lights of mid-tone and then we're going to go in with the dark and then we're going to glaze over with a nice warm color. Let's move on to that next. 56. Colour Dots: Welcome back. Let's now start adding in some details in these four bumpy areas, these for a hilly areas. What we're going to do is we're going to create a solution like we did before with these smaller ones, and let's go a little bit warm. With my palette, my yellow was actually running out. My cad yellow and my lemon yellow and my sap green. These are the three colors I'm going to use mainly for this mid section. I've just got them replenished and added in new pans, given them a little sock with spray. Let's start making up a bit of a solution. What I want to do is let's just move this a little bit higher. What we're going to do is use our round brush, and let's just go in with some pure sap green like we did before. Just take a bit of that sap green, gorgeous sap green, great color that one, especially when you want to just try creating different greens. I mean, on it own, it's just such a beautiful color. When you want to try darkening greens or creating variants of greens, it's just such a great quality. I'm going to get myself a little bit more pigment there and maybe make up four different wells of color so that we don't have to keep taking out of the pan. There's my sap green, happy with that, clean my brush. It's going to them light yellow. This one is cadmium yellow, so let's add in some nice cadmium yellow. It's a great yellow, this is like a midtone yellow, and you can create some beautiful colors even straight out of the pan. The pure pigment is just absolutely gorgeous, and that's what we did on this circle element. If you remember, we used that cad yellow hue straight onto there, and it's just so nice and vibrant. Let's just take out some more of this cad yellow, so just add in a bit more of that cad yellow, and then we've got our lovely light lemon yellow over here. Just clean the brush. Make sure you clean your brush when you taking out, especially from these lighter hues over here like yellows, and maybe like the oranges because they do tend to get contaminated very quickly, and then they're difficult to clean out. Let's get bits of that yellow there. Thalo green like that color there. Once it starts dipping into this lemon yellow in all sorts of problems, you've got to take the pan out and then you got to clean it with a wet tissue or a wipe to completely get it contamination free. It's probably a good idea to keep the yellow colors far away from this thalo colors. I've just took to the orientation of how this actual set came in, so I've not really move the colors around. But in my professional color set, I have the colors lined up exactly how I want them. You'll be able to do this as well once you start getting a bit more experience at watercolor and building up your own pans and sets of color. That's enough for the lemon yellow. We've got ourselves a nice three tier warm color range there. Now, what we can do is we can start doing some color mixing. Let's get ourselves some sap green, put some sap green there. I'm going to go in with midtones, I'm going to do something slightly different. Whereas over here, we just added in the midtone and went in dark and we did a nice thick glaze of olive. We're going to end up using more of a speckled lock rather than a flat look. You'll understand what I'm saying when I consider it. I'm just adding in that sap green and I want this mixture to be nice and light, not so heavy, so couple of sprays of water, get that sap green in there. Now, let's clean the brush. Now, let's add in our cad yellow. I was going to say yellow ocher again, no gold so we know it's cad yellow. I need to put labels on these. We've got ourselves that nice warm green that we've got on the right here, that's about enough for that. Then just a hint of the lemon yellow. Just a hint, not so much. Just a hint of the lemon yellow in there, and we've got our self and nice lime green color. What I want to do now is I want to go in and slightly darken this. What we can do is use the color straight from the pan. We're going to use that brown again, that burnt umber. Just take a bit of burnt umber or whichever darkish tone of brown that you have, and just drop it directly into there. You can see, we've got that nice brown earthy tone. We've got this greenish, earthy tone. What we're going to do is we're going to make this a little bit more on the green side by literally just adding this to the sap green that we had. Can you see that now? See how that mixture is turning instead of that nice olive color? It's the similar color that we used on these small peaks here. I'm happy with that. We've added in, mixed it, and gone back into the sap green, and that's the color that I'm after. Let's just do a quick little swatch to see why it looks like. Yeah, there we go. This is a nice golden, olive green color. I'm happy with that. What I'm going to do is now, I'm not going to use my big brush, I'm going to go straight to the small one. With the small brush, I'm going to do this as speckled effect. We'll just get the things out of the way, and let's get a zoom in on this. What I'm going to do here is I'm just going to add little dots to these areas so that we have some of that light that we've also got underneath. Just like that, I'm just going to keep adding more to the brush and just speckle this in. It's just basically like a stippling effect. I just want to really add that mid olivey tone to this area. What it does is it adds a nice bit of variant to your illustration. If you have everything that looks the same, then it tends to look a little bit boring. Why not try creating different textures, especially in your class project and really experiment with how you can use watercolor to literally illustrate with. That's what we're doing, we're illustrating with watercolor, we're not illustrating with a pen, we're illustrating with these beautiful colors. You can see, I'm just adding random dots, just covering that whole area, and it looks rather nice. There's quite a bit of contrast there, but not to worry because we're going to go over and glaze the whole thing like we did in the smaller peaks. That's all I'm going to do. I'm going to carry on doing that same process, with those dots across all of these four pics. Let's continue with that. Now, I've completed my little dot effects with this nice olive color. On the edges where we get this little overlap, what I've done is I've join some of the dots off then as we go further away from the corner, we start spreading them dots out so you have much less on the edges that meet the other hills. We're continuing this patterns, very concentrated close dots here and then it spreads out as you go towards the end of that particular peak, and then repeat that pattern there. Again, the more random you have this, the better the effects will be. You can see just by adding those dots, you've got a nice little texture that's just popped up. What we're going to do now is we're just going to let this dry and I'm going to get the hairdryer, I'll give this a dry. It shouldn't take too long to dry, and then we're going to go in again. Basically, what we're going to do is we're going to add in some more dots using a more lighter shade. Let's do that now. We've got our nice little stippled olivey dots dried off and it's looking good. 57. Lighter Dots: What we're going to do now is we're going to go in with a lighter mixture. Again, get our pallet. I'll just move this to the side so you can see. Let's go in with a little bit of cad yellow and start adding it to that mixture that we were using. We've got cad yellow and you can see with cad yellow, it lightens it up immediately so you got a really nice lighter solution there. Clean the brush and let's add in just a hint of cad red here. This one is actually called cad red pale, it's like an orangey type of shade. Just a little bit like that just to further warm that color. You can see it's become really warm, that color, great little tinge to it. So let's just test it out to make sure it looks bright. Yeah, that's what I'm after. Let's just go in with our small brush now, and start adding more dots to those areas where we have a little bit more of a highlight. So let's lighten up these areas. Here, all I'm going to do is get a zoom back on there. I'm going to have this area in the lighter part. You can see it's more brownish, orangey color, nice yellowy, and then what we're going to do is we're going to go in really dark in this area with a even darker solution. What will happen is, once all these dots have dried out, you can see some are overlapping. You'll be able to see this running texture that goes right through the paint. Once we've completed doing all this little stippling work, then we're going to cover the entire thing with a nice light glaze, and that'll basically gel it altogether. Just on this side, some of these nice or warmer dots. Just drop them in, don't press too hard on your brush, and let's just fill it halfway through. We've done our lighter color on the right-hand side. Now, we don't need to dry this with the hair dryer because what we're going to do is we're going to create an even darker mixture to go on the left, so let's go ahead and do that now. What we're going to do is, this mixture that we've already been using, this color for the lighter tone, we're going to go in with a collated darkness. Let's just go in with a little bit of ultramarine blue add that to the mixture, and you can see it's completely darken that mixture to a very grayish blue color. Now, what we want to do is we want to add back in some sap green to that mixture, to really bring out the earthy green tone. So going in with the sap green. Get yourself a nice bit of sap green, add it to that mixture, and you can see it's slowly turning that mixture into a green shade. Just like that, work in that sap green as much of it as you can on the brush, build into that color, and you can see you've got yourself a nice shade of green there. That's what I'm looking for. Let's give this a couple of sprays of water. Now, we should have a nice dark value of green. Let's go into our swatch card and see. Perfect, that's exactly what I'm after. Let's go in now with our small brush, and start adding in these darks into the left-hand side and that will complete the stippling stage. Let's go in with the dark. You can see I'm adding in loads and loads of little dots, medium-sized dots, and that's what I want to do. I want to cover up this left-hand area were we've got a bit of shadow showing, just to create a nice variance. Just be careful not to smudge the wet dots that you put on before, so just keep your hand underneath for this stage. Even if you want to dry out those lighter dots that we did, then by all means, dry that out with a hair dryer just to avoid them smudging, and then add in these darker ones. But I'm just going to go straight in with these dark, and then I will dry out the whole thing all in one go, so just like that. Now you can see, we've got a nice little stippling effect going from dark, midtone, to the lighter warmer tone. It just adds that extra dimension to your water color illustrations. What I'm going to do now is just give that a quick dry with the hair dryer, and then we'll add in our final glaze, so let's do that now. Our nice stippling effect with our water colors has completely dried and it's looking really good. 58. Glazing Over Dots: Final stage is to add a glaze. You don't need to add a glaze if you don't want. But I'm just going to show you that adding a glaze, what that will do is, it will slightly mute these dots. If you don't want the dots to really stand out, then you can mute them down with a glaze. Because we've got a nice dark theme going on here, it would be a bit more appropriate to have these hilly areas match to the similar tone of this painting. Let's start creating our glaze. For the glaze, all I want to do is have a little bit of sap green added to this lemon yellow. Let's go in with our brush and let's add in our sap green, add it straight to the lemon yellow there. There is bring that, open the screen a little bit, you can see better. You've got a nice little glaze of sap green and lemon yellow. Just to darken that a little bit, what we can do is, we can add in just a little bit of the brown. We've got the brown there, slightly darken that so just a tad bit with the burnt umber. Clean the brush. Let's go in with a bit more of the sap green to intensify a little bit more. That's about it. I'm happy with that. What I'm going to do now is, I'm going to water this down because I want to have a really nice light value. Let's get this really watered down. Now let's have a look at what that looks like on the swatch card just to have an idea on this glaze. You can see that's a very light glaze. What we can do is, actually let's darken that up just a little bit more. Let's make it a slight olive tinge and all we need to do that is just add a bit of that brown, just a tap of that brown, and you've got it a little bit darker. We could possibly even add just a dot of ultramarine blue. Just that little dot of ultramarine blue. What that will do is, that will balance it out a little bit. Let's see how this is looking. That's a lot better. Let's go in with a nice little wash with this color and we may need to do maybe another wash. We'll see how it turns out. That's another thing with watercolors, tryout, do a glaze, and if it's too light, you need to darken, just wait until it dries and add in another one. Let's go directly onto this with our glaze just like that. Make sure that everything is completely dry before you start adding this glaze. Last thing you want is for your beautiful dark pattern to just melt away into this glaze. You can see that's added a nice tinge of green. Just move out the areas if they overlap on your smaller little hilly areas down here and that's all good. Going in again with that glaze, that we've just created, that light green brown tone glaze, and it's looking good. I'm happy with that. Let's see how it looks once we've completed the whole painting. We may need to add in another one, but you can only truly tell once the paint is dry because the paint will always look nice and glossy and rich when it's wet or when it's just applied. Then once it dries out, it will create a matte finish and it will desaturate on the drying process. Always go in with something a little bit more shinier or more saturated than what you want it to really turn out to be. That's another tip. Always go in a bit more brighter than what you really want. Naturally, it's just going to dry out to be a little bit on the darker tone or darker value. Let's just go in with that. That's about it. Let's give this a nice little dry and then we'll see if we need to add another layer for the glaze or not. Our first glaze has worked really well. The colors nicely blend into one another. We've got a nice tonal balance going on over there, little bit of contrast. We can add another layer, but I'm not going to, because I'm actually quite happy with that. If you find that you need to add another glaze, go ahead and do it. Just make sure that you don't make your glaze too dark. Keep it at a similar value that I had, completely dilute it down and just go over with it with maybe a little bit of the brown color or green color. Just avoid using any phthalo colors for the glaze because we want this to be a nice earthy tone where we've got more of a phthalo sharp color hair and that way the colors are nicely separated and it balances out and looks like a complete colorful illustration. Let's now move on to the next one. 59. White Details: Welcome back. Now, we're going to go through some detail to add in into this blue area over here. Before we actually go on with the paints, we're going to introduce first time now our white markers. If you remember earlier on in the class where we went through the highlights and how it's white in highlights and the various materials that you can use for highlights, what we're going to do is we're going to actually add in some details using our white pens over here. I've got my standard Jelly Roll pen which dries out to a matte finish, and I've got my paint pens which are more vibrant and opaque. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use the thin one that I've got for the paint pen, and I'm going to use the standard Jelly Roll pen. I'm not going to use the white ink because I don't really need to use it in this. I may use white ink my class project when I go ahead and do that. If you haven't got these, don't worry at all, you can leave this step out, but I just thought it's quite good to actually show you how these work, not just for highlights but how you can integrate using these pens in your watercolor. That's what we're going to do. For the first step, let's go in with the Jelly Roll pen. I'm just going to open this up. But before you open this up, if you don't use it for a while, just give it a little shake, it's not going to make much difference but it'll just get the flow of that jelly liquid that's inside there. Let's just open that pen up and it's a nice fine tip at the end that we have there. What we're going to do is we're going to just add in some nice lines of whites using this Jelly Roll pen. Let's go ahead and do that now. All I'm going to do is I'm just going to draw in some horizontal lines very lightly across this area and leave a slight gap in between each line. Sometimes with the Jelly Roll pen, you need to give it a couple of swipes before it actually starts letting that ink roll out, just like that. I'm just going to add in these really, really thin lines. If you can see that on the camera, I'll zoom in on that. Let's just get a zoom in over here. You can see, it's very matte, it's very dope, it's not 100 percent opaque. You get a transparency through this. But just to add that additional texture to this watery area that we have. Now, I'm not pressing down so hard, I just want it to be very, very faint so that you can see it. Then we're going to go in with our paint pencil. Just going to go in a little bit more with broader strokes here. You can see, it's very, very faint. You can hardly make it out. I'm not sure if you can see this 100 percent on the camera because of the lights, but all I'm doing is just drawing in these light lines and just going across just to add a bit of texture, a bit of flow to the actual illustration. Again, if you don't have this Jelly Roll pen, not to worry, just skip this step out so you don't have to complete the step. But if you do have it, then just give it a go. What we're going to do is I'm just going to wait until all this area just has a couple of these long lines going across. That's about it for that. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in with the paint pen. This is the thin nib paint pen, this is not 0.7 millimeter one that I've got down here. With this, what you've got to do is you've got to give it a bit of a shake, so just move the camera back so you can see. A bit of a shake on this before you start. Then just get some scratch paper and then just give it a little pump up and down, it's that pump action and that will release the paint from there. This is beautiful and opaque, just what we want to add in some lovely highlights. But we're not actually adding in highlights at this stage, all we're doing is adding in some undertone detail. Just like that. I go in with that and can see how sharp and opaque that is compared to the actual Jelly Roll. You'd hardly see the Jelly Roll but it does make a difference once we go over it with some pain and that's what we're going to do. We're just going in with this white pen, just adding in a couple of dots near the boats area, around that area here. Just like that, add these horizontal lines going in, it just adds a bit more interest and a bit more texture to the overall painting. Just like that, I'm just going to go in, add a little bit more towards the bottom half of this, so go in with a few more lines. I'm not adding in completely flat lines. Like I said before, I'm just breaking these lines up adding in a couple at dots. When we go in to the actual highlights, we can add in some flat lines and you'll see how much of a difference it makes. That's about it for now, I don't want to overdo it. Let's close that paint pen. Let's get a zoom back. You can see, it's added a nice little dotted line effect in this entire area. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to mute this out by adding in a layer of paint. Before we do that, we need to wait for this to dry. It usually just takes a couple of minutes for this to dry out, but do make sure it's completely dry before you do the next step. Let's wait for it to dry. Now, my white lines have been nicely dried out so I just quickly dry them out with a hair dryer. You can see, they're not smudging over, so now, we're ready to do the next step. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to add in some water to one of my little holder sections in my palette. Couple of sprays to get a nice little mixture. Get myself a clean brush, and I'm going to go straight into the ultramarine. Now, my paint has pretty much went out on this little pan here, but it will be enough for what I want to do next. I'm just going to add in the ultramarine blue. Nice. Very, very light value solution there, and that should be enough. What I want is I want that to go even lighter. Let's add in maybe another three or four sprays of just plain water. You can see there, we've got ourselves a really nice solution. If we get ourselves some scratch card again, we can just test this out on some scratch card, so there we go. I want something nice and light like that to add as a glaze, and that's exactly what I'm going to do. What I might do is I might add in another color to slightly brighten it up a little bit. I'm just going to add in just a dab of thalo green. Just a dab of thalo green into that blue mixture just to get that greenness out of the value. That's about it. I think that looks a lot better. See what that looks like on the card. Let's just dab that on, and there you go, we've got a more paler blue, slightly more warmer hue there, and that's what I'm after. What I want to do now, we'll just add in maybe another few sprays of water. Really likes in the value of that. What we're going to do now is we're just going to go over this entire area, and you can actually even go over the boat if you like. I'm going over the boats because it's quite a value and it's just going to bring out a nice sheen of blue. I just zoom back here, what we'll do is we'll just go over this really nice and thin, so you can see. Just like that. What's happening is the white highlights that we've just put in, those wide dotted lines, they're just slightly getting covered with the blue. It's just adding muteness to those lines so that they don't stick out too much, because they're not highlight lines, these are just undertone lines that we're adding in just to bring out some textures, some extra data. You can see with this glaze, it's going in, cover the entire area off so we have a nice even glaze, and we're looking good. Just like that, get that boat covered up if you're going to cover it up, make sure it's completely covered because you're going to go into it with more saturated paints once it's all dry. That's about it. You can see that's nice and wet. Let's wait for this to dry so we can move on to the next step. Now, my little blue area is nicely dry and you can just see the little speckles of whites coming in from the undertone of the actual painting. It's looking really nice and subtle and very muted, but we've not lost any of the vibrancy of that bluey turquoisey color. The next step, what we're going to do now is we're going to start working a little bit on the boat area. But before we do that, let's just go in and maybe add in some darker lines across that watery area. 60. Darker Details: What we're going to do is we're going to go back into our mixture, and let's get our brush, and let's create ourself a nice darker blue solution. With that, let's go in with the phtalo blue into this well here. What we can do is you can start adding this into the phtalo blue mixture just to get it nicely saturated with the ultramarine blue. Clean your brush, and now let's go in with a little bit of the crimson. Just go in with a little bit of that crimson. You can see, we've got ourself a nice purplish, bluish hue there. What we want is, we want to mute that down so that we don't get pure purple, but we get a little bit of a greenish blue shade. Just to add back a bit of sap green into that. So just go straight into the sap green, pull out some sap green and into that solution there. As you can see, we've got a nice grayish, dark bluish tone. Keep adding from this little well down here into this to maintain a bit more of the blue color, and there you go. You can see, we've got a nice dark tone of bluish turquoise. Let's just test this out on the swatch card. That's looking good, but I think we can actually go a bit more darker than that so all we need to do is, let's just add in maybe some brown, let's go for this burnt umber. Get that burnt umber in their though darken it a little more. What you don't really want to do is add blacked darkened because if you add too much blackened and we don't even have black in our palette. But if you do, don't immediately go to black to darken your colors because what will happen is the black will literally overpower everything and you'll just get a black gray color. Let's now just add in a little bit more of that blue solution here, and this will give us an even darker shade stuff. Bring the card out, have a look, and we've got a slightly darker shade there, so I'm happy with that. What we're going to do is we're going to go in with our thin brush. Let's just get our thin brush, give that a little wet with clean water, and let's now start adding in some detail. What I'm going to do is move this to the side. What I want to do is, I want to go in horizontal line fashion all the way across. We're going to start off here. Just go in like this, draw in these lines to have that extra layer of texture. You can see already just did that wet paint, it adds another dimension, and it adds another level of detail to what we already have. I mean, it's just very subtle once it's dry, this can be really, really nice and subtle. It's not going to be something that stick to right out. It's not something that you're just going to be staring out while you'll cannot base actual painting, and that's what it's really about just adding in subtle details to your watercolor, glazing over using that glazing technique just to add in the details. We did the same for these little areas here, on these little hilly areas with the dots. We're doing pretty much the same now for this watery area that we have. This is effectively our mid tone value that we've created. We will be creating an even darker tone value but we don't really need to go in too dark because we're going to be doing a lot of the dark work with our ink fineliners, and that's when we come to actually doing the final details for this illustration. Just like that, just keep adding in them lines, vary lines make some longer than the others try not making everything the same. Otherwise, it looks a little bit too technically robotic just looks like it's just being made from a factory. Let's just vary and have it nice and random. A big one here. Make your strokes a broader and thinner, if you can just to vary that little design that goes in the background of this painting. Just look at that. We'll just carry on doing this. That's about enough for that mid tone value. Now, let's go really dark with our paint. What I'm going to do is I'm going to get the big brush again, smooth that so you can see. Now, let's just add more of that blue into the paint that we had already, so that we're adding more darker tones to this value. While that dries up, we can start creating our darker tone. Now, let's go in with the crimson again, adding good amounts of crimson into that solution, and then let's go in with the sap green. You can see now we've got more of that, all of the color that we had for these little peaks. But what we're going to do with that now is, we're going to add the blue solution to this. You can see over here, that's becoming more and more blue as we add more blue to it. Gorgeous. We've got a nice dark greenish shade. Now, let's make that a bit more blue. To do that, all we need to do is add in our phtalo blue, and there's that turquoise color. Look at that, gorgeous dark turquoise there. Let's just test this out, see how dark we've got this one on our swatch card. That looks quite nice. You can see it's a bit more vibrant than the first one. The first one was a little bit dull. This one's a bit more vibrant. What we can do is, let's add in a little bit of my favorite color, the burnt sienna. If we add in a bear bit of that burnt sienna, that will give it a bit more of a rawness, a raw darkness in there. You can see that we've got a nice bits of burnt sienna there. We've got that nice dark olive color. That's going with the phtalo blue again. Going with that phtalo blue, lovely. Look at that, for a gorgeous color that, so we've got ourself a beautiful turquoise color there. Let's see what that looks like on the swatch. Wow, beautiful. Now, we'll get that for a dark color. Bring it closer to the camera. You can see, gorgeous shade. Look at that. I'm a bit excited there. I get excited with my colors in my art. What we're going to do is use our small brush again. Now, we're going to go in and start adding in our dark lines with our darker colors. Let's start doing that now. Just scatter them in-between the ones that you did before. If they merge in to the ones that you did before, that's fine as well, it will add a nice effect. Nice thin lines, with the darker color. That's about it for that. Let's just do a zoom back. You can see what I have done. As you can see, we've created this nice wavy pattern, just using these horizontal lines, breaking them off. We've got the mid tone coming out. Now, we've got this darker tone on the top. All we need to do is basically just fill in where you don't have too much texture with just a couple of dots going across just like this underneath them, hilly areas. What that does is it creates this nice pattern defect to look like a flowing bit of aqua going across this bottom area, and it just looks really nice. Again, what we're going to do is, we're going to go in with our markers right at the end and then with the white highlights appends to really add that extra depth to it. You can see, just like that, it's looking really good. All we're going to do is we're going to let this dry out now. When it's completely dry, we can start working on the boat. There we have it, our little lines have dried out now completely, and you can see there is such a nice variants. I'll bring it closer to the camera. You can see, it just looks gorgeous. That doesn't say what a great bit of texture, just created with a few color mixes, and just adding in and layering, effectively glazing lines on top of the wash that we already had. What we're going to do now is we're going to actually start working on the boat area. We've [inaudible] on the tone of blue, which is great, it gives us a base to work on, but we're going to go in with a little bit more detail, so let's move into this one. 61. Boat Details: Welcome back. Let's now do our detailed work for our little boat. What I want to do is, let's just get a quick little zoom in with my lovely burnt sienna. First, make a nice little base tonal color. I like that nice and sharp, you know how I feel about my burnt sienna, one of my favorite colors, I like all colors really. Who doesn't? It's so horrible. This is one of my top colors this. Quickly rinse on the brush. Now, let's go in with the cad yellow. Just like that. We've got ourselves a nice mixture there. Last bit of yellowish orange hue going on there, little rinse, and let's further lighten this up with our lemon yellow. Like you can see, I'm not using too much water, I'm taking as much of that pigment out that I can, and it's looking quite nice. Let's just do a little testy testing on the swatch card. We've got blue here. Actually we can see how it's going to look with the blue undertone. Just like that, you can see what's happening is we're getting a green shade, because we've got yellow going over that blue. To eliminate that, all we need to do is, it needs adding a little bit of brown. We can do this with our nice, lovely dark brown here, our burnt umber. Put a bit of brown over here, and we just slowly start adding our orange mixture into this. It shouldn't get a green tinge. It should become more of a grayish tinge. If we go in over there, you can see beautiful tinge of gray, so you've got no green in this. We don't want to have that greenish shade going on there. We want a nice grayish, bluish shade. Let's start laying down this color. Let's add in a bit more pigment to get a bit more of the brown, add in that brown, nicely does it, and clean the brush. Actually what we can do is we can add in just little bits of ultramarine just to that mixture there, just to darken it off a bit. Because what I want to do is I want to have this mixture a little bit dark not light. I want it darker and then what we're going to do is we're going to start building in the details with our white pens. Let's go in with this straight onto the actual boat. Let's go in as close as we can. Good stuff. We're going to do the wet and dry so you can see going in there. What I'm doing is, if you can see the little bumps down here, there was a reason I didn't outline that bottom part. This gives it that natural look that we've got some flowing areas going outside of that boat, so I'm not going to cover them up, I'm going to just go around them. It just gives you a bit more of a natural look. Not that would have been anything realistic here. We don't really doing realistic work, we're just doing illustration line drawings basically, just to practice our watercolor technique. You can see we've got that nice dark color going on there, and you can see this area where we have that slight tear of the paper. I leave that as it is, because I'm just going to build in some details with my white pen. That's no problem at all. Again, going in with the thick mixture just like this over the area, and what you can do is if you have like a light area like I've got here, or if you haven't gone over it and you've just got pure whites in the paper, you can leave some areas out just to show as highlights. You don't only need to go in with the wide gel pens or the painting pens, you can just leave in some details like this. If we just leave in maybe some cut out details here, get a bit more on that brush, and we can just literally build in some details with the undertone. We got a nice light undertone there, and that will look our pretty nice. All I'm doing here is drawing some little lines going down and it's like as if we've got a nice little row of windows. There you go, how easy was that? What I'm going to do is for the top part there, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make that a little bit different, just to vary it a little, and let's maybe add in some crimson. So just go into some crimson there. Nice and thick. Let's add that to our mixture. You got a nice crimson mixture there, just maybe add a little bit of moisture from this pan down here, just to loosen it up a bit, and you got yourself a beautiful nice shade of maroon, and that's what I want there. Just like that, you're just going to paint this in. It just varies it slightly all the way across there. Don't need to worry too much about the water flowing from one place to another because the solution is really thick. You're going in with maximum thickness. There you go, we've got ourselves a nice little initial covering. What we're going to do is we're going to wait that to dry out, and then we can start adding in some details. We've got a nice dry bits of paints going on over there and you can see it's like a bit of a silhouette with a slight tinge of red on top and a nice bit of dark brown for the main parts of the boat. The next step now is to add in some details and I'm going to do this with my fine liner, my graphic 1 fine liner, and my jelly roll pen. Let's move on to that. 62. Finer Boat Details: What we're going to do now is I'm just going to go and firstly with my graphic number 1, fine liner. I'm just going to go in and outline the boats area again, just so that it's nice and crisp. Just going to go over the outline just like this, so that we have a lovely crisp line to follow from the top. Because with thicker paint that tends to go over the lines, and you lose the lines, especially if you're using a nice dark tone. Just like that, the top of the boat. Lovely. With these windows what I'm going to do is I'm going to outline the actual windows as well to make them a little bit more square. Go ahead and doing that. I mean, you might not have this many windows on your little drawing that you're doing. That's fine. Try putting in a couple of these cut out windows if you can. If you can't, don't worry about it at all, you can add whatever details you like on this little boaty. That's enough that for the black. Now, let's go in with the Gelly Roll pen. Now, we want to use a Gelly Roll pen on this stage because I don't want the highlights to be too bright. What I want to do is just going to tilt my page just to make it easy for myself and that's another tip. Tilt the page just to make the inside job easy for you. With my Gelly Roll pen, I'm just going to lightly draw in some detail lines just to give an indication of the grain of this boats, this panels, maybe some wood panels going across, whatever you like. You don't have to do this step if you don't want to, you can draw in any patterns you like. If you've got a Gelly Roll pen or if you've got paint marker pen, absolutely fine. I'm just going to go in like that, and then on this side of the top part of the boat, the kind likely a roof area, I'm just going to make nice straight line there, and that's about it for that. What we're going to do is do the same on this side. Just adding a couple of lines. Just to differentiate that shape a little bit, and there we go. I'm going to leave that as it is, and these little wavy areas here, what we can do is we can start adding some details with the Gel pen on there. Because what that'll do is that'll give you an effect that we've got this flowy we area on the outside. All I'm doing is with the Gelly Roll pen is going over creating these curly rarely lines just as an edge, and maybe couple of dots on underneath just to add a little bit more detail, and then tail it off at the end with a couple of dots. Super bright. What we're going to do next is we're going to leave this area for now, because we're going to come back to it when we do our final details. Let's now move on to our little housey houses. Let's just draw in some windows just to make it complete. We can carry on doing that with our graphic liner. If you want too, you can draw your window details in with your paint brush if you like, with your thin paint brush. I'm just going to go ahead and do it with my waterproof markers. I'm just going to roughly just draw in some windows. If you don't want to pay them free-handed like this, then just do it with a pencil first and then go over, but do it could be very lightly with the pencil. It doesn't really make that much of a difference because we're just looking at just making this a little bit more interesting and just completing this picture and it pretty much nearly complete. Now, all we're doing is this final touches, final bit of details and we're ready to go on that. I just added and dropped in a couple of windows there, over here. Maybe I might just drop in a little door. Easy-peasy, just drawing in these rectangles and then maybe just a little window here, following the shape of that sharp point of the roof. Nothing too complicated, so just too straight and it's going over the top. Maybe some just straight lines going up on that little mini door. You don't have to do it like I'm doing it, adding as many doors and windows as you wants, it makes no difference. What we're going to do next is we're going to get a thinner liner. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to use a thin tip liner. Well, it's not very thing, it's 0.8 mill point at the end there, whereas with the previous one, I had a nice bullet nip over there. I'm just going to use something that's a little bit more thin just to add in maybe some render lines for these houses just so that they don't look too plain. Again, you can do this with your brush if you like. I'm just going to do with my fine liner. Just like this. Adding in some very light jagged lines going across. What that will do is it will just give an impression or some panels that have been made, some panels that this house has got on the front sage part. Again over here, again, just going in, doing very rough lines from left to right. You don't need to do this. Leave yours as it is, whatever that color is, a texture is. I'm just doing this for completeness. Then what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to let that ink dry because it is waterproof. I will give it a couple of minutes for it to dry. Once it's dry, will go in with a little bit of pain just to paint the doors and windows, and then the painting stage will be pretty much done. Then we're going to go in and start adding in some final highlights and maybe a little bit of cross hatching. Let's just wait for this one to dry. Now my ink lines are pretty much dry. You can test them by just giving them a little tap and we shouldn't get any residue going on to your thing. Give them a little rub. Not too hard, just swipe your finger around and it shouldn't be smudging. As long as it's waterproof ink, then it will not smudge or dissolve away with watercolor. Let's just quickly get a bit of color on. Just move our palette here, and I'm just going to add in a bit of lemon yellow. Just a bit of lemon yellow there, little bit of water, a bit more of the lemon yellow. Let's get it nice and translucent and maybe just a tiny bit of the cad red, just a little bit of the cad red. That's a bit too much. Let's hon it back a little bit. A bit more of the lemon yellow here, and just put that lemon yellow to the side and all I want is a little on top of that cad red just to make it a little bit warmer. That's what I'm looking for. Let's just go in with that. I'm not going to bother with the structure on this, I pretty much know that this is the color that I'm after. What I'll do is I'll take some of that color and I'll move it into this clean palette here. Take a bit more of that color, back into the clean palette, get the spray out. Two sprays, and that I'll give it a nice watery, translucent, transparent look and that's all we need because we just going to have fill in these window area. I'm just going to go over window. That yellow and you can say is looking good. You can see that the actual ink is not fading or melting away into that yellow because it's waterproof, and that's just such a huge advantage of using waterproof ink and water colors. So much you can do so quickly. For the door, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to maybe use that orange color that day before. See that? That'll work nice. Let's just water that down a little bit, maybe two sprays in there. Let's go in and just use this nice little shade of orange. Don't need too much of the water color. Just go in like that. You can see it's just added a nice little hints of orange. Maybe just go in with a little bit more. Just drop it in in the middle and it'll spread around that water area. That's about it for the details. We're not going to do anymore with the details on the house, let's just give this a little dry. Our little window areas and our little mini door has dried out nicely. You can see, as I just going to zoom back on that, it's looking really good. Simple steps, just as bit a simple watercolor, bits of ink work and it's looking great. 63. Highlight Details: What we're going to do now for the final step is get our paint and pen now and we're going to start adding in some nice bright white highlights. Let's get our paint pen now and again, I'm going to be using my smaller nib pen, the note 0.7, the one that I used before. Let's go in and start doing this. Give this a quick shape. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go in and I'm going to start drawing in a nice horizon highlights over here. Just to separate this area, so just very lightly, I'm just going to tap with the pen. Now, I'm going to draw in a complete hardline. Still broken line just adding these little dots. If you remember, what we did was before we went in and then we glazed over. But now what we doing is, we going to use this now as pure highlights. You can see that should add in a nice little line of whites. It's just such a great tool. This isn't it that you can so easily add in those white highlights, you could never do this with whites watercolor paint. That's one of the main reasons I don't really bother using the white too much. I mean, you can make your paint colors a lot whiter if you mix in the whites, but I've just never really done that. I used to do that when I first started watercolors but I just found that using lighter values by just diluting your color to a lighter tone works a lot better, looks a lot more natural, and it doesn't interfere with the overall look of the painting. That line is done. What I'm going to do next is I'm going to go in. Let's get zoom in over here. Where I've got these dark lines here, I'm just going to effectively outline the edges of those dark lines. I'm just going to go in like this, just add in a line on the bottom parts of it, just like that. What that does is, it just adds that visual interest by giving you a bit of stuff, contrast between dark and light, as if these are just little elements floating around in this little fluid area. Again, just down here. Just wherever I've got something that's really dark, I'm just going to add that effectively a little highlight to it by just going in with the pen. Maybe on some of them, just on top like this. Just do it as you feel looks good to yourself, no right or wrong way of doing this. Again, this is just personal preference. This is what I like to do in a lot of my illustrations. I like to go with adding a bit of contrast, just to make it look interesting. Again, following these little bumps, these natural bumps that we've got and maybe on the top of this one. Then on this one I maybe go at the bottom just to give it that visual interest. We've got a few more here. Let's just continue with that. Maybe one more down there. Looking good. So if you just do a zoom back on that, you can see, it's added that visual element to it. Little bit of highlight going on there. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to add in some random dots just behind the boat area and underneath it. What that will do is that will give the sparkle to this fluid area that's around the boat. It will give it a bit more of a movement type of look if you like. Just moving these dots around this area, just to show that we've got some sorts of movement going on here. That's looking good and maybe just a couple of thin lines. Just do what you think looks good. On here, you don't have to do these dots and lines. Absolutely not. Just a nice little idea or a way to practice adding in some highlights with your white pencil. There you go. Leave it at that. We don't want to overdo it. What we're going to do next is we're going to move in these little hilly areas and just add a touch of highlight to the top areas where we're getting a bit of light. We've got some light coming in this area, so I'll just zoom in. Just very, very gently, just with the pen underneath, the black line is going do this, adding these little curvy lines. Couple of dots here, couple of dots there, and then just a couple of dots on this one. I'm just going to repeat that pattern, so just with the white couple of dots over there. This just makes all the difference. It's like a finishing touch. Basically, like a cherry on top of your watercolor painting. It will just really make it pop out and look that much more better. But again, like I said, you don't need to do this if you don't want to. If you want to leave it as it is, absolutely fine. Its your art. It's your illustration. There are no rules of rights and wrongs in art. You do whatever you want, whatever makes you feel good. That's what it's all about, making you feel good. Art is all about relaxation. So just relax, don't get frustrated. I'm just going to add a line here. Then what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to add in some shiny spots here, so just thicker shiny spots where I feel I'm going to get some light just randomly. Not all the same size, keeping them different sizes, and not on all of them. Maybe just a couple of dots there, maybe just one or two dots here, just one or two here or three, and then just a couple here, and then maybe just a few down there. There you go. You can see, when we zoom back, it's looking good. What we can do is, you can work in as many highlights as you want. You can go in with your darker pens and start adding in some more shadows and do some cross hatching. What I'm going to do is I'm going to leave it at that. For the final, absolutely last stage, if you really want to add in some shadows, you can go ahead and add in some shadows. What we'll do is, we'll actually create a little shadow mixture. Before we seal the deal with this one, let's just create a shadow mixture. 64. Basic Shadow: I've got my pallet over here. Let's just move the painting out of the way, just in case we get some spillages. To create a shadow solution, it's a great idea to get some clean water. Now let's add in, and let's start creating a bit of a shadow solution. So great idea to add a cast shadow solution just to darken up some overall areas of your painting, it's always a good idea. I do this a lot in my paintings. It's just again, another technique that you can do. For this, what we want is we want a bit of ultramarine. Add in a bit of ultramarine, we're keeping things nice and light over here. A bit of ultramarine there, clean the brush, and then we want a bit of brown. Let's go in with the dark brown, and what that does is it creates a nice bluish tone. We just want to keep adding the brown until we get a gray tone. Just like this. Let's test this out on the card. I've got the card there and we can actually go over the colors and you'll be able to see what that does. You can see that that's darkening this color here and when it dries off, it looks like a shadow. If we do the same for this over here, you can see it's just darkening that color. It's just a very nice light, very, very subtle shadow color. It's always a good idea to add some shadows just to give you an overall illustration of a depth, but you might be thinking, I don't want to add this horrible dark color to my beautiful painting. That's fine. If you don't want to do that, don't do that. I don't want you to feel that you've gone and ruined your painting, but with experience once you've started doing watercolors a lot more and started doing a lot more paintings, you realize that you can really add some depth with this technique of just creating a bit shadow color like this and just going in very lightly. What I'm going to do is, with the shadow I'm just going to add in a shadow color in these areas here, just very, very lightly, just to emphasize that we have some dark going on down here, just like that, and when this dries off, it will be really nice. It won't be too overpowering, it will just be right because we've got a really nice thin solution, and you can also add some shadows onto your house areas. What we'll do is we'll just go in, add a little bit of shadow. Because this is a beginners class, I'm not going to go into too much details of creating shadow, realistic tones and things like that. Just a good idea to just give you a bit of an idea of an additional thing that you can do just to really enhance your experience. Then once you've got experience in this medium, you'll be able to do some amazing things. Just like that. I've just added that shadow tone, I'm going to do the same for the houses and just for these little areas here. I'm just going to add in that nice bit of gray tone that I've just created. Again, on this area, a nice bit of gray tone just to darken that area. Get some water, put some clean water in your pan, and then just go in with a clean brush, so like with a clean brush like this, just a small brush and just feather it out. If you just feather it out, you won't be able to see too much of a dark impact. You just feather this out just like this, spread it out, and it will make it look even better. That's basically a smoothing out technique. We're just smoothing out that watercolor that we added. Don't get too many harsh lines and it just blends it in a lot better. All we're doing is adding water to that little bit of layer that we created, we're just moving that across and it's looking good. You can see how nice that looks. It just gives it that extra depth, and you can keep moving it, spreading it out. If you don't like it at all, you can just use a dry damp cloth or a tissue to just place over it and it will remove it, but again, don't do this. If you don't want to test this thing out on your illustration, maybe just test it out on a smaller illustration, once you've done that and then maybe try this technique out in your class project, but again I don't want you to worry too much about this because again this is a beginners class, I'm not going to get you all worked up over having cast shadows and things like that. That's for a more of a intermediate class to an advanced class. Just like that, we've just added some shadow areas there. Looking good. Once that's dry, it's going to look really nice. Let's just wait for this to dry up. Our little gray areas have now dried out and you can see how good that looks. It's just brought out that extra dimension just given our little illustration a bit more depth. Now you can go in with your white pens and your gel pens and you black fine liners to really bring out some more texture if you want. Don't just stop at this stage, but I'm going to leave it at this stage for now because we've used up all the main techniques that we've done in the class to bring it into a nice little illustration like this, but by all means, go ahead and keep adding more details if you want. Maybe add some more white details on your boats or maybe do another glaze on this background here. Just do a light glaze, test it out, give it a go and we can now move on to the next one. 65. Class Project: Welcome back. Now it's time for you to do your amazing class project. Up until this stage, you would have done some exercises like we did in that class with the lessons and you would have collected a nice reference point of samples of your color swatches, of mixing colors, creating color values, and also looking at the different techniques of watercolor, the wet on wet techniques like we practiced here and we did the wet on dry techniques with little bit of monochrome and transparency exercises. We also looked at how to create smooth gradients using wet on wet, wet on dry and we also did so many sketches using the wet on dry technique and also the wet on wet technique. So you've got yourself a nice range of exercise material and references to look at and again, because we did the step-by-step false sketch like we did over here, where we utilized all of our techniques and our knowledge that we built up over the lessons. You've got yourself a nice reference point to look at, to build into your class project. Now, for your class project, you can either do an illustrated painting like we did in this whole sketch where we pencil. We went over with a waterproof marker, then we added the techniques with watercolor in different stages. Or you can do a complete abstract paint. You don't need to use your ink markers. You don't even need to use pencil. It's entirely up to you. Another alternative is that you can do a couple of painting. Maybe give yourself two or three different paintings to do, a wet on wet, wet on dry or a combination of both, trying out different colors because that's what it's really all about. The more you try out, the more you're going to get used to this medium and then the more you'll find that you'll be able to mix and match the techniques to produce something really beautiful. Do this, give it a go, make sure that you've done all the lessons. If you have to refer back to the lessons for the techniques, do check the lessons out again. This was a step-by-step class. So all the steps are available in the class description with the reference points of the time maps that you can refer back to. Do try this out, get yourself completely immersed in this amazing medium of watercolor, and create a beautiful sketch for your class project. Don't forget, once you've completed your class project, do post it in the class project gallery under this class, and leave some comments and share your experience of how you went through this process, how you found it, and then we can all share and learn from each other and it will just make it a rich experience. So hopefully, I'll see you for some final thoughts after your class project. 66. Final Thoughts: Let's just go through some final thoughts now, hopefully at this stage you would have completed all or most of the exercises and gone through some of the sketching steps that we did to produce our full sketch, and you've got yourself a nice collection as a resource for you to go back on and work your way through to create further project and again hopefully you would have completed your class project and posted it. If you haven't, then make sure you do give it a go and post it on the course project gallery for all of us to have a look at and see this is an amazing medium, a wonderful medium. Once you really get yourself immersed into it, you will start creating some wonderful, wonderful pieces of watercolor artwork. So I hope you've enjoyed this journey with me in this beginners course in watercolor sketching. Do check out my other classes on other class materials like colored pencils, pen and ink. There's going to be a lot more classes that I will be publishing in the future, so do follow me on Skillshare. Also check out my other social media channels. Checkout my Instagram where I post daily sketches, watercolor, paneling, also share your experience so that we can learn from each other and enjoy this wonderful world of watercolor and wonderful world of arts. Thank you so much for your time, thank you for taking the class, take care of yourself, keep sketching, keep doing watercolor, and I'll see you on the next one. Take care of yourself and peace.