Watercolours For Beginners

1. Introduction: Hello. My name is China and I'm a watercolor artist and art teacher. I'm here to show you how to use your tools because maybe you've never picked up watercolors before, but you want to know how to use them. It's really important that we know how to use our palettes, how to use our brush, how to clean our brush, and how to mix our colors. I'm going to show you the fundamental things that we should know to paint exactly how we want to. In this class, I'm going to show you the equipment you should use, how to use your palette, how to make different tones, how to use wet on wet wet on dry. We're going to look at some gradients. I'm going to see how to use our brush and how to clean our paints. Now, this class isn't going to have you walking away with a masterpiece. There are other videos for that. Instead, this class is going to show you how to get familiar with your tools so you know how to approach your next painting in the right way. If you want to know how to be an expert in your tools, then grab your equipment and let's get started. 2. Step 1 - Your Equipment: Okay, folks, the most important thing before we begin our course is to make sure we got the right materials. So you might have them already, but I'm going to talk to you about why we need them, why they're important, the price range that we should be paying so that you are ready to go. Now, if you have them already, feel free to skip this video. I'll take a couple of minutes, but it is worth just sitting down and making sure we're ready. The most important thing are the watercolor palettes. This is the Derwent ink tens one. This palette is just under 20 pounds when I bought them, and it's really lightweight. It travels super easy. So if you want to do watercolors abroad, this is a great one to get. It also comes with a travel brush and a travel sponge, so you don't need to carry a brush and a rag if you don't want to. And the colors are really, really nice. We have all the primary colors, so yellow, red and blue. And then we have some darker virgins, so ultramarine, a purple, some lovely greens. Some earthy colors and a black. So this is all you need to make any painting that you want. The lid is nice and wide. You've got a few different sections. So if you just need a little mix of color, these are good for that. If you're making a lot of color, you can use this. But also, if you run out of space, you can use this little plastic bit under. The material is great because the water and the pigment isn't clumping together. Often with cheap sets, it's hard to actually spread the paint around. So I would really recommend this for beginners. It's affordable. It's it's good quality, and it's really easy to travel with. So Derwint ink tints one. Now, your brushes, there are thousands of different brushes you can get. In this class, we are just going to use two. We want to make life simple for us. This brush can do everything. It has a nice point. Some people ask me, Have you got thinner brush? You don't need it. See how thin that brush can get. And when it's wet, it can get a little bit thinner and a bit more accurate as well. So, this is a size six, and I'm going to link the different brushes in the comment section. So make sure you have a look. It's a round headed brush, really common to get. These can just cost you a couple of quid from Hobby Craft or Amazon. But these really should be able to do anything for your painting. Next one I like to use is a big flat head brush. So this is a size 14. It just means when we're covering the paper, if we need to do backgrounds or anything large, it saves us so much time. So please get yourself a big brush. Honestly, it pays for itself. Next, obviously, you need a pencil. Mine's got a pencil extender because I've used it so much. And I just like to use a tube because it doesn't harm the paper. And it is nice and light. So if you need to rub it out, it's super easy to remove. You will always need a watercolor jar, so you can just use a glass or an old jam jar, that's really good. Clean your brushes. And then we need watercolor paper. So there's a huge variety of watercolor paper. You can get sheets or you can get a sketchbook. Depends on how you maneuver them. So I'm often moving my paper around. I'm sticking it to the table, and then I peel it off, and then I put another one down. So having a loose paper for me is preferable, but you might want to have it in a sketchbook, then they're all together. So it just depends on what you want. Again, I will link some in the descriptions. You will also need an old rag, old pair of socks or kitchen towel. This is just some spare fabric I had. I don't know why. I actually don't like it. But this is really important to get rid of excess water from our brushes and also to clean the table when it's a bit messy. You will need masking tape. This is good for creating harsh edges, especially if you want to frame it. But also sometimes you might want to just tape your paper down if it's loose just to help the warping be under control. Finally, the last thing you'll need is an eraser, for where we make mistakes, and it will happen. It's absolutely fine. It's totally normal. So grab yourself, your eraser. Make sure you've got everything, paper, your paints, your brushes, and we'll be ready to start. Alright, Team, let's go. 3. Step 2 - How To Hold Your Brush: Team, let's look at how to use your brush. Now, bristles can be quite delicate. Depending on how expensive your brushes, you really need to pay attention to how we treat it and how we use it. A lot of my brushes are used by beginners, so I can often see people using them in a really dangerous way, and they're playing with it like four year olds might paint, but we want to be like adults, and we want to paint in the best way to preserve all of our paint. So when we use our brush, we first of all, want to hold it the right way. So I'm gonna get a little bit of water. And I'm going to show you how to not use your brush. We don't want our brush to be high in the sky. If we have it high in the sky, this is going to create loads of bubbles. Let me just show you what happens. I'll make sure I've got enough water and I'm just going to keep that high in the sky. You see these bubbles are forming right in the middle. So when I paint, there aren't a huge amount of bubbles in this one, but you can see. If I till it to the side, you can see all those bubbles there. And that's not ideal. What we actually want to do with our brush, I'll just clean in my water jar. We want to use the side of our brush. So you see the difference here. I'm just tickling it at the side, and then as I paint, there are less bubbles in my picture. And I'll just show you that from the side. It's a little bit of dust, clearly. I need to clean something. But there's no bubbles. This is drying with bubbles. And this is drying without. So it's really important how we use our brush to benefit the artwork that we're painting and also just to preserve the bristles to live a long and healthy life because we don't want to throw these away in the landfill. Another way that we can hold our brush to improve our artwork is trying to hold it like a pen. So you see I'm really close to the tip here. I'm just waking it up with little strokes that go towards my hand. It's not going away. It's not going around in circles, going towards my hand. And then when I come to my paper, I want to hold it like a pen, and it allows me to create nice thin lines. So, that was a bit tricky because I stupidly put my paletteunderneath me. But I want to get a comfortable position, and then I just want to kind of pull up to the top, and I can create really delicate thin lines. So always try and make your hand as easy as it can get yourself in a nice position. If I'm loose and my hand is in the air and I've got my brush far away, it's going to be really hard for me to get a nice thin line. So always get yourself comfortable. Hold your paint brush nice and strong, and then try and get yourself a little thin line. So hopefully, those little techniques will help you in your painting journey just to get a nice angle, and then hopefully your painting will be less frustrating and you'll have no bubbles. We don't want bubbles in our artwork. And we want to keep our paint brushes nice and forever. So I hope that was useful, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Step 3 - How To Clean Your Brush: Lot of people ask me, should I have one clean jaw and one dirty jaw? And my response is, why? So you might see on videos or someone saying, Yes, always have a dirty one to clean your brush in and then mix it again in the clean one. It's a bit pointless to me. The only time you really need super clean water is if you're doing wet on wet and you don't want to put a random mixture of colors on your paper first. So for me, I just tend to use one tub, and it lasts me for a while. And then after a while, I'll just go and get a fresh one. But there's no harm in having a slightly dirty jar. If people say this is what you should do, I think they're just trying to make a point and look like an expert they probably are, but what's the point? Let's make life easy for ourselves. Let's not make it hard. So I'm going to show you how to clean your brush because it's really not hard, but I have seen some crazy things in my career. So, first of all, let me pick up some paint. I'm gonna wake up this nice bread. It's a bit thick and there's loads of paint on my brush. What you don't want to do is lick the top of the water. I have seen it many a time where someone just did it a little lick, and then they start painting again. I'm going to show you what happens when I put my brush on the paper. So you see, it's full fold to the brim of pigment. What I want to do instead is I want to bash the bottom of the jar. Just three or four times, and that gets everything off. Then usually I just stroke the excess water off. So three or four strokes on the excess, and that should give you the perfect amount of water ready to go again. Beautiful. But you see, I went straight from the pigment. Bad habit. This was just for cleaning perhaps. So when you clean your brush, you want to go dab dab, dab, tap, tap, tap. And let's just test it. Clean. And that can last for a very long time. When you want to pick up water and you're going to paint on here. Ooh, then you're gonna paint on here. If that becomes a little bit dirty, that's when you need to clean your dar. So just take it to the sink, pour it out, little swish and then refill it again. So cleaning your brush super easy. Dab, dab, dab, tap, tap, tap. What's more like a stroke. Stroke, stroke, stroke. And then you're done. Okay, team, I hope that was useful, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Step 4 - How To Use Your Palette: Team. It may seem daft, but I'm going to show you how to use your palette. This isn't just a lid to close your paints away in. This usually in most, I would say, 99% of watercolor palettes, this is where you mix your colors. You can have a separate one, of course. Sometimes they're not great. Sometimes you'll find this clumpiness. So usually what they give you in the palette is very, very good. Now, some of them are separated. Some of them are just smooth. It doesn't matter which one's good, which one's bad. A separated one definitely means that your paints won't slip into different sections. And also, you can keep color themes in each pocket. So this is a really good kit. I would highly recommend, as I've said, in a previous video, that this kind of ticks all the boxes. Now, when we use our lid, we should use this for pure colors and for mixing colors as well. When I want to choose a color, I want to pick my pigment, just a couple of strokes and pop it straight in my lid. This will help me to see how much pigment I have. If I want a dark color, I'm going to keep wiggling on my pigment, and then I'm going to go in the lid, and that's going to make it nice and thick. It's going to give me exactly what I want. But when I go onto my paper, I've seen and I've watched the journey to make sure I can get the colour that I'm after. What we shouldn't do is we shouldn't keep our pockets really small. So I sometimes see people do this. That is not gonna last you very long at all. So when we mix our colors, we want to be nice and big. We want to see how far this paint's going to go and we want to make it last for a long time because most likely you are going to paint something much bigger than a dot. If you want to do a background, you want to really take up as much space as possible, add loads of water, so just keep dipping my brush in the water and picking it up. And this is pretty much going to last you a full page, depending on your brush size, but don't be afraid to make too much. I have mixed loads of paints with this palette, and it barely goes down. This is a wonderful thing about watercolors. They last for so long. So if you make a little bit too much, all you do is wipe it up with your rag and then start anew. So make sure you make too much paint. I always want to see it juicy. Nature is going to try and dry it because, well, that's what it's about. So make sure you just got enough. Don't make too little. The next thing we want to do in our palette is just think about mixing. So if I want to mix two colors together, let's go with some red. And then let's mix some of this blue. I can either go from my pigment pure or I can go from my watercolors in here. If I pick that up, yeah, it's mixed a tiny bit there. But to be honest, it gives you the same amount of ratio. So I have seen how much water I've put in this one. I've seen how much water I've put in this one, and I know roughly this is going to be 50%, 50%. If I went straight from my pigment, so I'll just make a nice mixture there. And then I just wake this up. You see already that that is a little bit darker. So because I'm going from a pure pigment, which is highly saturated with the pigment rather than the water, it's going to be a much stronger mix there. But I can balance it out. I can pick up a little bit from the red, a little bit more and obviously add more water because I've added loads of pigment. Notice that I just dipped straight onto them. I didn't clean my brush in between because that's okay. We'll spend ages here, otherwise, trying to clean every single one, but it's not going to make a huge amount of difference if I just take straight from here and pop it in the red. Well, sorry, try and make a red pile up there. It's still red. It has a tiny bit of blue, but it's not drastically changed the composition. So always use your lid to mix your colors, dip from one color to another, or you can dip straight from your pigment into there, but just be aware of how much pigment you're going to have on the brush from the direct paint source, and just be aware of what you're doing. So have a play around with mixing colors, mix them all in the lid, have a play with your paper and pop them on your paper, and then you'll soon get to know and get to familiarize yourself with how much one dip takes and how much a dip from another pile takes. I hope that was useful, and I'll see you in the next. 6. Step 5 - Learn To Paint Different Tones: When it comes to painting, our most important job is to get as many tones as possible. As an artist, a drawer, a sculptor, we're looking to give the audience high contrast, and that means dark and all the way down to light with some shades in between. So our first job with our watercolors is to see if we can get some different tones. It's all about how we clean our paints, how we clean our brush, and how we use our palette lid to bring those techniques together. So first of all, we're going to wet our brush. Then I'm going to choose a colour. I have lots of dark colors, so I'm going to use a dark color to wake it up. And then this will give me a nice bigger contrast because we're working from dark all the way down to light. So I keep wiggling in my palette so you see, I'm just doing a little wiggle and then popping it in my lid, making sure it's nice and thick. It's almost like acrylic. And my first job is to do a dark square. So you can see that is the same tone as a pure pigment. It's nice and dark, and this pretty much looks like black. But actually, this is surprisingly a green. Go to clean my brush, and hopefully you remember dab dab, jab, stroke, stroke, stroke. Then I go back to my paints, and most importantly, I don't go in the middle. I'm pulling some pigment to the side, mixing it with my brush, which is already wet, and then just trying to control how much pigment, how much water I have on there. When I'm ready, I'm going to do another square. So this is my medium tone. Clean my brush, dab off the excess, and then do that one again. So I'm pulling from the side, making a nice new little pile, and there I have three tones. If you want to, you could try and make more than three. Maybe you want to try five, six or seven. It's very difficult when you get to high numbers. And you can try with a few different colors. Maybe you want to try with a light color just to see the difference. So again, get yourself a nice thick pigment, paint yourself a square, clean that brush. Pull the pigment to the side, get that medium tone. Pull that pigment to the side once more, and then you have that light tone. So even light tones are naturally really light on the scale. They can go down in tone as well. So try and practice a bunch of colors with this. It's really important to see how the pigment changes. And also just as an aesthetic effect, trying to get as many tones in our painting as possible. I will change your painting career. So have a practice with these and I'll see you in the next session. 7. Step 6 - Learn Wet-On-Wet: Wet on wet. This is one of my favorite techniques. You can do so much with wet and wet on your paper. It means that you can create soft edges, that you can blend colors without seeing a sharp line in between. And you can do lots of different textures with it, too. So wet on wet is all about having your paper wet and then adding wet paint onto it, as well. So let me show you the difference between different amounts of wet on your paper and then different amounts of wet with your paint, as well. If I dip my brush in the water and go straight for it, you should see that there is quite a wet surface. If I just scoot over there, you can see the difference there. If I then just try and get rid of some of that excess paint, and we see it. I want to hear. Let me tilt this up. You can see the difference between my first drop, my second drop, my third drop is pretty much dry already. So we need to think about how much water and how much paint we put on our paper. So let me just try that again so we can have a fresher look. I'm just getting them all over, trying to stretch the paint or the water appropriately. And then we're going to pick up a color. So I'm just going to do a few dots so you can see what happens to the paint. There's three different types of control. I like to call this one chaos. This one is a bit more medium, and this one is super tight. So imagine your friends you got chaos, normal tight we've all got them. So it depends on what you're painting, what you might want to do with them. If we try and mix a few colors together, let me turn my paper around. We want to think about what type of wetness we're going to have underneath. Most of the time, it's going to be this medium one. So it's not like a puddle. It's something a bit more controllable, and it gives you more time to make sure that you can soften the edges. So I'm going to do the little area here. So I'm painting up and down, trying to make sure it goes nice and even across the paper. And then I'm going to choose two colors. So as you know, we mix these in our lid, and this is going to be wet too. So I have to think about applying wet che wet. Is it going to turn into chaos or will it stay medium? I'm going left to right until the end. Don't worry about this for now. I'm going to pick that up in a second. And then I'm going to pick up another color. So I'll pick up blue. And then I'm going for the bottom, left to right. In the middle, I'm overlapping ever so slightly and just going left to right a few times. I can go all the way down, and then I'm just going to leave that. So in that time, when I went to get more paint, you can see that this pedal that was here disappeared, so that's great. And it now is starting to blend nice and soft. If I go back into it with a dry brush, it's going to start picking up the paint. So the best thing to do is to let it dry and see what happens. So let me go wet on dry so you can see the difference. Now, bear in mind, I've been painting for years, so I might be able to do it first time. I might not be able to do it first time, but I'm going to try and blend it with wet on dry. So my paper is dry, my brush is wet. And I'm going to paint this color first. You can see already the middle has a dry edge or sorry, a hard line. And then because I've worked quickly, let's see if I can blend them. Yes, just. But there was a risk there was a risk that this had dried by the time I got up there, and then that would be really frustrating. It's always good practice to have a bit of damp paper underneath, even if it's a small amount, it's going to help and just to make sure you can blend the middle. Now, there are pros and cons to both of them. This one is a little bit more vibrant because we're not mixing it with water again. It has some nice edges on the side if I wanted a contrast of hard edge and soft edge. But it does mean it has to happen really quick. So unless you're confident you know what you're doing, it is much, much harder, but definitely definitely try it. This one gets a bit lighter because you've got water underneath, and sometimes you can end up adding too much water and then you end up with these puddles. There's is downsize, but it does give you more time to make sure you have a soft edge, and it's nice to blend the paints with. It does come out really, really well. Now, another thing we can do if I just rotate this paper is we can be more playful with it. So I'm going to add a damp sploge in that middle. I think my water is ready to be changed. And then I'm just going to pick up pigment straight from the palate. So I'm going to go for a thick pigment. It's not going to be too wet. And I can just add a few dots just some random dots. It's so satisfying to watch. I'll clean my brush, and then I'm going to pick up that red again. Straight from the pigment, as well. Add those in. Look how magical that is. When it dries, it will look a little bit different. Sadly, because sometimes it's like, Ah, this would be so cool if you try like that. But the different amounts of water can affect how it dries. So let's try a really, really wet section here. I'm actually going to add a base. So I'm just going to add a little bit of purple. Move that all around, try and get it nice and even. But because it got loads of water on it, it's warping the paper. We're creating puddles. But I'm just going to try that technique again. See what happens. So is there a difference? A little bit, it's harder for the paint to move because there is so much water in there. When it dries, it will eventually pull it out, but it is quite tricky just to get that paint to move. Up here, as it's drying, it's looking a little bit more, like, chalky. And that's because I didn't mix it in my palette. So I wanted to play around. Play around with wet on wet, dabbing the paint in, stroking the paint in. Also, what happens? Let's say you've got an edge. What happens when you paint one line across as opposed to doing little lines in that same area. It gives you a totally different result. So I will show a little clip of this after it's dry so you can see the differences in all of them, but have a play around, see what you enjoy, see what you think could work well with paintings, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Step 7 - Painting Hard Edges: Okay, folks, let's start to apply what we've been learning into some simple shapes. There is no point in us going straight for some difficult things, so bear weathers and let's just practice getting some curvatures, getting some nice flat surfaces, and then we can apply them to bigger things. Grab your pencil. We're going to start with some simple shapes, some simple three D shapes and we want to make them look realistic and interesting. We're going to start with the cube. I am going to do a vertical line here, a vertical line on the right hand side. Horizontal line on the bottom and one on the top. I've drawn a square. In order to make this three D, I want to go angle, angle, angle. All three of these are exactly the same angle. Then I'm just going to draw upwards, try and make sure that they match, and that has to be parallel with the left side. Final one is a horizontal line. This one is parallel with this and this. Essentially, you've got one, two, three, which are identical. Then you've got one, two, three, they're also identical, and then you've got one, two, three. All of those little pairs are matching and parallel. I've just broke my eraser. Okay, let me rub these little fellas out. We do not need them. Okay. What we're going to try and do first is just paint three different tones. I want to paint them so that they're not taking ages to dry. I'm going to get a thicker paint, and I'm going to use the same color. My light sauce is coming from the top. Let's say it goes from the top left. I'm going to go light because it's closest to the bulb or the sun. Then I'm going to go medium and then I'm going to have my shadow here. I'll start with my shadow because if it's too dark, then it's absolutely fine for it to be too dark in this box. Just try and get it nice and even. Try and be a bit careful as you're going round. And then we're going to let that dry. Give it a minute or so. We'll have a look at the edge, see if it's dry, and then we'll come back and do the medium tones. Check the edge is dry. You want to touch it, make sure it doesn't come off on your fingers and make sure that it's not cold. If it's cold, that means it needs another 30 seconds, another minute. If it's the same temperature as the rest of the paper, then you know it's ready to go. I'm going to pick some of this pigment over to the side. I'm running out of space, you might have a slightly more spacious palate than I. But as I'm painting this, I'm trying to see, is it medium? Is it light or is it dark? I can probably go a little bit darker actually. Let's spread that around. Maybe a little bit more whilst it's still wet. A can make sure I'm adding a bit more pigment. Good. Let that dry, give it another minute, and then let's do the top. Folks, a final one, just a little bit pigment. If I spread that around, it should become lighter. I've just made sure my medium was dry. I'm spreading around to make sure that it's lighter than the medium. Fab. This looks like a three D cube. We can push it even further and get a nice thick thick pigment, I might even add a touch of black just a little bit. Then I'm just going to suggest a shadow. I'm going over to the left because our light sauce is over on the right. It has to be darker than the face I'm just going to add that over there. There we have a lovely, easy three D cube. Now, in our next lesson, we're going to apply that to a cylinder, so we're looking at a round surface, seeing if we can push that and make that three D as well. I hope that was useful. I hope you got a good cube and I'll see you in the next. 9. Step 8 - Learn To Paint Gradients: Before we start the cylinder, it would be good for us to just practice a little bit of gradients. Gradients are when you've got paint that is dark, then it goes to medium, then it goes to light, and then it disappears into white. We can do that a number of ways. We can do wet on dry or we can do wet on wet. Let's try both. Wet on dry will do first and I'm going to choose red, to have that ready. If my pigment is dark, it's going to be a little bit harder to blend the edge because the paper will absorb that pigment very quickly. What I want to do and I would just advise you to watch for a second before you do anything, I would add my pigment clean my brush very quickly, scrape off the excess water and try and drag that down. You see that if I just move that pigment away, you can see a bit of a harsh line. But if you're very, very quick, you should be able to just catch that. Now, in order to blend it, I have to clean my brush at different stages. I'm just going to try that again so you can watch it one more time. I'm going to add the paint clean my brush, stroke off the excess, wiggle around to the middle, clean the brush, stroke off the excess, wiggle down, clean the brush, everything's attached, wiggle down. You got to keep going until it becomes white. This is a lot easier than a small gradient. This is really long. To get a small gradient, you want to make sure your pigment is a little bit wetter. It gives you more time, and you don't want it to be super dark either because you'll avoid getting any harsh edges. So I'm going to do my paint, clean my brush, and then I just want to dry a little bit. I'm just pushing that on my rag, and then I'm just gently trying to stroke it, clean it again. Dry it again, and then just use that dampness of the water to blend that through. I can go back up and just scoop up a little bit of that pigment. You see there, we've made a really short gradient. It is very, very tricky, so I would imagine all your paper is going to be filled with this. Another thing we could try is wet on wet. This gives you more time, but it does mean that your pigment will be lighter because you've got water underneath. I'm just going to add a medium amount of water here, make sure it's even, and then I'm going to choose a color. I'm just going to give a different color, spice it up a bit. I want to go nice and thick and then I'm going to start at the top, clean my brush. I could just dry it because there's already water there, and then I could go left and right. Then it's not my favorite method, to be honest because we've got it's drying and it's wet in different places. So I think maybe I should just add a little bit more pigment. Basically just do it over again. There we go. That's better. Actually, the brush, I'll make it a little bit damp. There we go. Sometimes when you have a wet brush and you go over it, it's going to push those colors in different directions. So we don't want to overwork it that much. Give that a go. Wet on dry with a really thick pigment at the top. Then we're going to go wet on dry with a medium pigment. Try and blend that. Try and do a short gradient and then try and do wet on wet and see if you can blend that as well. See what they look like at the end. Now let's apply all of that to a cylinder.