Transcripts
1. Intro: In this watercolors
with confidence video, we're going to paint
a glass heart. First, I'm going to introduce
you to a technique, then I'll demonstrate how to apply that technique
to our project. Then I'll show you another
technique, and so on. As you can see from
this collage of hearts, they look pretty
complicated and beautiful. However, I assure you, once you finish painting one or two hearts
using the simple, step by step process, you'll be painting hearts using your own
color combinations. They look absolutely
gorgeous on greeting cards. I'm available for questions
as you progress and I always love to see
photos of your creations. So we do hope you'll share. Are you ready to get started?
2. Materials: In watercolor painting, the materials you use make
a huge difference. If you have additional
questions after watching this materials video,
please message me. Or if you've not
already done so, I encourage you to check out my introductory course,
Watercolors With Confidence. Because a large portion
of that course is devoted to providing
as much detail as I can about
watercolor materials, I hope you'll paint
many glass hearts. Experimenting with many
different colors and materials. Here is a list of the supplies that I
used for the course. Example for the paint, I've got thalo green, spring green, and permanent
brown by Daniel Smith. I've got Windsor blue
and Windsor purple by Windsor and Newton. My paper is arches, 300 pounds. My brush, this is by a
company called Silver Brush. They're black velvet series. This one is a size eight. Here is a gold sable size four. This one is a tiny
little synthetic brush. It's a triple zero and I'm using it for applying
my masking fluid. For the masking fluid, I'm using a Windsor and Newton. This one is tinted. Make sure that it is removable
liquid masking fluid. Along with that, I use a
masking fluid remover tool. I use brush cleaner
to coat my brush. You may be interested in
using an eraser shield. We're definitely going to
need something to put water in a palette with wells
to put the paint in. Up in the corner, I have a
Mr. clean magic eraser brick. I also have a Sharpie marker, a pencil, and some scissors. Are you ready to get
started? Let's go.
3. Line drawing: Techniques. Line drawing. My paintings begin
with a line drawing. Sometimes it takes
a little while for me to work out the drawing. I like to do this on
tracing paper first. I then use a light box to copy the image onto
my watercolor paper. Here are a few samples
of templates that I've made now, Glass heart project. Because the glass heart is
going to be a simple shape. Instead of using a light box, I cut a heart out. And this I used to
trace onto my paper. Another good reason for drawing
my images first and then transferring them to
my watercolor paper is so that I can get them centered
right where I want them. I look forward to see
you in the next section.
4. Masking Fluid: All right, welcome back. Now that you've had some
practice with masking fluid, let's apply some masking fluid to our glass heart project. I'm going to use a
brush to do this. I'm going to use some
tinted masking fluid. Fortunately, we don't
need very much because I have hardly any left
in the bottle at all. It will only take a few drops. But as I mentioned, make sure you wape the
neck of the bottle. This paint, this masking fluid really
sticks to the sides. I like to have that
nice and clean. Otherwise it's so
difficult to open again. I'm going to use
a brush to apply. We dip it in the water
and tap most of that off, then we coat it with
the brush cleaner. Then you can just
dip the tip into the masking fluid
for this heart. We're going to presume that our light source is coming
from this direction. The largest high light will be quite close to the edge where the light source
is coming from. It's not right on the edge, but it's quite close to
the edge on this sphere. It needs to mimic the same
light source to be consistent. So I won't put it on
the opposite side, I'll put it on the
matching side. I want lots of nice
sparkles and glitter. I'm going to make a
few little highlights going around the heart, radiating out a bit
in a random pattern, but still towards the top. And the right hand side
match on the bottom because the same lights would be
sparkling on this heart as well. They might be smaller
because we're slightly more away
from the light source. There may be slightly
fewer of them, but the patterns
would be similar because the lights
would be coming down in the same way the light will be hitting up here and traveling through the
transparent object. And it will actually appear
to have a lighter area, near the opposite side. Once again, I'm not
going right to the edge, I'm going almost to the edge. Some of the paint color will be between the high light and
the edge of the shape. In this case, a heart. I'm going to make more than one. I'd just like to
break that shape up. I don't want to do a
complete outline around it. I'm also tapering it. It's thicker in the center of the highlight and it's getting
thinner towards the edges. Now to wash my brush out, I use water because
it's got soap on it. It will come off
nice and easily. But don't use this water that you've used for masking
fluid for your paint later. You can just clean that
off. There you have it. Our heart has some nice
areas that will remain weight because they're protected
from the masking fluid. Give that a try and we'll
see you in the next section.
5. Graded wash: Hello, everyone. Welcome back. Now, what I want to talk
about is a graduated, also known as graded wash.
What the graded wash is, is it's a dark at one end
and then it gradually steps down in value until it gets lighter
at the other end. Like my Swatch card here. The color that I'm going to use for this example is purple. Because purple is one of the darkest value
colors in my palette, it makes it the most
challenging I figure. If you can do a nice smooth
graded wash with purple, all the other colors are going
to be much easier for you. So the first thing
that we're going to do is mix up some of the color. We're going to mix up some of
the paint with just water. I do this so that there's not any little clumps
of paint in there. I'm not going to get any
surprises as we're going along. Now, what I also want
you to be thinking about is use the largest size
brush that you can. For this example, larger brushes help to make smoother washes. It is absolutely possible
for someone with a lot of precision and skill to
get a nice smooth wash, even if they're using
a tiny little brush you want to go quickly, just continue to keep
everything juicy. That's also going to aid you in keeping it nice and smooth. We're going to start
at the top with a really dark strength of paint, then we wash out the brush and take out
some of the water. Come back in, mix that back. I'm going to go all the
way back up to the top, pushing the pigment up there. And now I'm pulling it down. Don't go too far down, because if it gets really dry, it stops being juicy. Then you end up with a situation where you have a
wet area against a dry area. When that happens, you
get uneven drying, which can result in blooms a little bit more
of the paint out, coming back up into my mixture, and then pulling down again. Don't go so far down
that it's all dry. Keep it nice and juicy. Coming back up again. As you can see, each time I
go farther down the page, it's getting a little lighter. Keep washing my brush out and taking some
of the water out, come up and push some of
that pigment back up. But everything is still
really wet at this point. Now for this last pass, I'm going to really
clean my brush out, take out some of the water. I'll start below my wash and
just come right up into it, pushing some of
that pigment out. Come back down and
soften those edges. There you have it. There's our graduated wash. I encourage you to do a few of these before you move
on to the next step, which is where we're
going to apply it to our heart project. I'll see you in
the next section.
6. Graded wash on Heart: Hello, welcome back. I hope you've got those
graded washes looking great. I really look forward
to seeing some samples. What we're going
to do now is use the idea of graded washes. And we're going to create
the background areas. I've got some nice
spring green here in my palette and some nice
thalo green blue shade. Both of these colors
are by Daniel Smith. What we'll do for this
example in the prior section, we put the graded wash
onto a dry paper. This time I'm going
to wet my paper at the top, I'll
place spring green. It will be darkest
near the edge, and it will get lighter and lighter as it comes
to the center. Then I'll put the dark
green near the bottom. Now, I don't want any
puddles of water left. I just remove the water
from the side of my brush. I'm using it as a thirsty brush to suck up any of the puddles. I like to use a synthetic brush to mix
up my color and water, add a little bit
more water to that. But I want it to
be a graded wash. I don't want it too thin because I've wet the
surface already. It will already be a bit lighter than it is in my palette. I find it more natural to do a graded wash on dark at the top and get lighter
and lighter as I go down. What I'll do is I'll put the spring green
wash on the top. Then I will actually
flip my page around to put the thalo green wash
on the bottom graded wash. It would be darker
at the top and I'm going to add more water
through the center. And I'm going right
through the heart, about the mid mark, I'll stop. You can have it come
travel farther down with the light green or you can have it farther up
with the dark green. If you want to enhance
that idea of graduation. You can dry it on an angle
if this is all new for you. What you can also
do is do one side first and let it dry and
then do the other side. I'm actually going to go right ahead while the paper
is still somewhat damp. And do the thalo
green once again. We'll mix it up with
a synthetic brush. Get it all ready,
nice and juicy. Then come in with my
brush, a softer brush. This one is a blend of natural
hair and synthetic hair. Put it on thickly near the top. My paper is starting
to dry already, cleaning out my brush
and drying it on the cloth that I
have right here to make sure it's really
clean of the pigment. Then bringing the water
below where that green is, allowing it to feather out into the dry area which is now been activated with
a little bit of water. Now you can play with
us as much as you want. However, once it starts to dry, once it's drying is really a good idea to
stay out of there. Because if you get
uneven drawing, you'll end up with
some blossoms. When I can do is I'm just
tipping my page a little bit and letting gravity pull some of the color farther down
into the center area. I'm getting more of a
nice feathered effect. This also helps to balance. If I have an uneven
distribution of water, this will help to
even things out. I'm less likely to
get blossoms in here, but if you do see some puddles, you can pull them out with a thirsty brush while
everything is still juicy. You could add more color if you felt like
it was too light. But I'm going to
stop right here, because when it's partially dry and you pop a
drop of water in, it can just create
these blossoms in it. Let's dry that up and we'll
go on to the next technique. I'll see you in
the next section.
7. Dry on Dry: Hello, welcome back. Now it's time to talk
about another technique. This one is a dry on dry method. What that means, the first dry refers to how thick
or thin the paint is. This paint is going
to be a little bit thicker than the paint
we used last time. It's going to be on dry paper. What we're going to
be doing is making some twigs that are coming
through the hearts. The twigs are there
so that we can just really enhance that
illusion of transparency. You can see something behind it. Now I am right handed. What that means is
it's easier for me to make an arc with my
hand in this direction, sweeping from the
bottom to the top. It's trickier for me to make an arc in the
opposite direction. Let's make our twigs the way
that my hand naturally goes. Now what you could do is turn your paper around if you want
to get a different angle. We're going to sweep
these twigs from the bottom of the page
up through the top. They'll be thicker at the
bottom so you can press with, apply more pressure and
let them get thinner and thinner as they come around until they taper to
a nice fine point. You can reinforce the thickness by coming back with
a second pass. But let's leave the tip alone
and leave it nice and thin. Now I also like as an
element of design, where my twigs
cross one another, I'll start a little
farther out on the page. This time a little bit above
where the first twig was. But I'll go in the same
direction and I'll cross over and make
that a little shorter. These are twigs, you can
make them in any shape. You want to observe the
twigs around your home. I'm going to thicken up the base of this. There you have it. What we'll also do, what you can do if you like, is use a darker color, maybe a blue or purple. This one is a Windsor blue. My light source was
from the top right. Things that are down near the bottom can have some shadow. I don't have to go all the way, just wanting that to touch in. If my paint is very wet, it will blend a lot
where my paint is drier. I'll have more of
two separate shapes. But I like that to give the illusion that there's a
darker edge on the bottom. You can reinforce that
even farther if you like. I'm going to add
purple, which on my palette is even
darker than the blue. Just to give the idea of some lighter on the top and coming
darker as you come around. You can go over that as
many times as you want. Just the benefit of using dry on dry is you have much more
crisp, precise lines. Let's apply that to our glass hard example
when you're ready. And it will use pretty much the same process but where it's on the
outside of the heart, I will have darker lines
and more crispallines. Where it's on the
inside of the heart. I'm going to use a
softer line and leave a little gap by the edges just again so we can really
reinforce that idea. The illusion of it going
through a transparent object. We'll start as we did
when we were just making dry brush marks with
the permanent brown. I'm going to make my arc
in the same direction, so it'll come out of the bottom up to the edge of my glass heart. Now where it meets the edge of the glass
heart on the outside, it is very crisp. The line matches it exactly. Then I skip over the heart, but as though I was making that shape come out the
other side of the heart, it tapers off here. Let's make the
second twig shape. This time I'm going to
come a little higher, but once again it's
thicker near the bottom. It meets up with that heart
shape, perfectly nice. Follows the edge of the
heart in a really crisp way. Then I cross as though I
was painting the shape. I'm going to turn
my paper slightly, it will come out the bottom. This one I'm going to
make nice and thin. You may decide that
you want a fork in your branch and that
would be perfectly okay. I just want single lines, there's no mistaking
where they're crossing. I'm just adding a little
bit more pigment. It was getting a
little bit too light. Now what I'll do is
come to another, well in my palette and add even more water when
it nice and thin. A lighter color, less
pigment and more water. Going to brush some of that
water out on the side. Start with my first twig. What I'm going to do is actually start below my line is here. If it wasn't going through
a transparent object, it would travel along
in a straight line, but it actually is
going to be broken. I'm going to leave a
little bit of a space. I'm going to start
the twig slightly below the area where it was, and I'm going to end it slightly above the exit on the
other side where it exits. But again, I'm going to leave
a bit of a space between where my shape is and the
tip of it on the other side. That helps to enforce
the illusion of there being a transparent object in between the two
sides of the twig. I'm going to do the same
thing with the second twig. I'll start below
where this line ends, and I'll cross over the twig, and it's going to get narrower as it comes to the other side. This time I'll bring it slightly below where the twig exits. Now there are two things
that are happening here to give the illusion that this twig is behind a
transparent object. One of them is the
pigment that I'm using is lighter than the
pigment on the outside edges. Also, there's an area where there's some
refraction happening. The light slows as it
goes into the glass. It actually bends the
light as it's exiting. It makes it look
like curves to us. Now, I'm just going to add
a little bit of shadow. With the blue, the
shadow on the outside, we'll be darker than the
shadows on the inside. I'll thin out my blue
paint when very watery, and then I can just
come along the bottom. Now, I want those to be less crisp than the twigs
that are on the outside. Where the twigs are
on the outside, I've just wet my
brush so that I can soften that shadow
area ever so slightly. It still looks a lot lighter in the center here than the
outside. There you have it. That is our nice, crisp lines for the twigs. I hope you enjoyed
creating that with me, and I'll see you in
the next section.
8. Blending: The next techniques that
we're going to talk about are two different ways that
I like to do blending. This would be blending
in smaller areas. We've already talked
about a graduated wash. This is a very similar process. The first way that we can
do this is pick a color, we'll use purple again this
time and mix a little up. What you do is you apply your color to a dry
piece of paper. Then while it's still wet, you clean out your brush
and you get some water. And I apply the water
below the area where my pigment is, just clean water. Then I creep into
the area that's wet, and I allow those
two to converge, and that creates
a nice soft edge. The other way to do this is you actually create a wet area. The whole thing, your whole
shape, You make it we. Then you take your color. You can apply the color more to one side
or the other side. This will give you
a much softer look. Sometimes I want
more of a hard edge, sometimes I want
more of a soft edge. In fact, I could take it and crisp up the
outside as well. But you see, because we
put water down first, this technique is going
to be much softer. It dilutes the pigment. You can run that back and
forth as much as you want. I usually enjoy this when there is some nice
white left over. It's water color at its finest. We don't want to leave any excess water on there if you're finding
you still have puddles. I have cleaned out
my brush and I dried off my brush on my cloth here. Then I can touch the tip into that puddle and
it will lift it right out. You can see both effects
give us a nice soft edge. This one is a little hard. I would have softened
that out farther and farther until it
disappeared entirely, and we didn't get a hard edge. If I'm wanting a shape
with no edges at all, I make sure that the
water that I put on there is carried out farther beyond where I really
want the pigment to go. That creates some
nice smooth blending. Give that a try. I hope you
enjoy these two techniques. And next what we're
going to do is apply it to the glass heart.
9. Blending on Heart: Welcome back. I hope you have
your blending down. And we're going to put it into practice what we'll
do with this heart. If you can see the
other examples that I have where we have the
strongest highlights, we're going to give
it the most contrast. We'll put some dark
blending up near the top, and it will gradually
get lighter as it comes into the
center of the heart. We'll do that on both
sides of the sphere, because I want a
nice smooth blend. We'll start with one pass where we wet the whole heart shape. If I wet it and
then stopped here, I might end up with a line the same as I did in my
practice example. I'm going to choose
the method where I wet the whole heart instead. That way I'll avoid
getting any hard lines. You still need to work quite quickly and I'm going
to go right over top of my twigs that are inside the center of
the transparent heart. It may bleed a little bit. The color may loosen
and become quite fuzzy, which would be perfectly fine
for this little project. Everything is quite wet. Now I can take a little
bit of my thalo green, which was the darker green
of the two that I was using, thalo green, blue shade. I'm mixing it quite thick, but remember because
my paper is wet, it's going to lighten
up when I add it in. I'll just draw along the
side of the heart and allow that color to softly
come into the heart. You can decide how much
darkness you want there. I'm tipping it back because
I was finding the color was coming too far along the
side from where I wanted it. I'll just tickle the edge to bring it a little bit
more into the water, but it'll be a softer version. Now, we'll do the same
thing on the opposite side. I'm going to use slightly
less paint on the side, it's come farther
into the sphere. The first sphere I created when I can do is
using a clean brush. I can pull some of that out, just blended it
down, redirected it. I think that's a
lovely color there. Now what I'm going to do is
use some of the spring green. We had a second area of
highlight along the bottom here. I'm just going to
come ever so gently. My color is starting
to dry up so I can add some water and feather the color out into the
rest of the heart shape. You do need to work
quite quickly or you may end up getting some
water marks in there. But I think we've
got it just in time. We've got some beautiful
blending in there.
10. Masking: We are the masking here. We'll just lift it gently with the masking tool remover and our little highlights
will come back out. You want to be
careful not to just scrub really hard or pull straight up on
the masking fluid. It's a gentle motion so that you don't tear
the paper underneath. And you want to make sure that your paper is completely dry. There you have it all the
masking has been removed.
11. Polish: The next techniques
that we're going to use are some techniques
for clean up. I got really lucky and the edges of my masking fluid came
out pretty cleanly. But it doesn't always
happen that way. Sometimes I get a
lot of jagged edges. One of the easiest things to
do is to take a brush with just some water and run it
along the edge of your shape. It will pick up some
of the pigment that's there and just starts to
smooth out those lines. Especially where the
pigment is pretty thick, you can end up getting
some much crisper lines. You also may find that maybe the high light is a bit
bolder than you wanted at. This is a great way to
tone those back as well, but don't use a lot of water. I still encourage you to
feather out the edges, otherwise you could end up
getting a hard line After all that work that
we went through to keep everything nice and smooth, we want to keep it
soft and flowy. I'm just thinning up the amount of highlight
that was left on the side. I'm also going to do is using my lighter green is take out
some of these highlights. If everything is white, then we don't really
get as much sparkle. What we can do is cover over
some of these highlights with a darker color and all of a sudden the highlights that are left there will pop out more. I'm just blending the green out once again so I don't get
those really strong marks. I can even cut into some of the large
highlight that was there. I'm just softening and blending
the pigment that I had. Just feathering it so I
don't have any hard lines. I'll do the same to the
highlights on this top section, placing the color down, wetting my brush,
drying my brush. And then I'll just
feather that out. This is fairly delicate work, very small sections, and just blending the
areas into one another. Now if it turned out that I
actually wanted more weight, then I would use this
Mr. clean magic eraser. This should be used
under adult supervision. We want to make sure that
children don't ingest, thus this is what one of the
pads looks like, this brick. And I've cut them down
into smaller shapes. I like to use it with
an eraser shield, but you can actually
put on some pieces of masking tape and work on
the sections in between. That also what I find, if I use a big open
shape like this, what will happen is
I'll get some of these little sections in
places that I don't want them. It's better if I tape off the sections that I'm left with just what
I was looking for. Let's isolate a circle, for example, then we
can pop this down. Let's say I want it up
here In this section, what you do is you take the
Mr. clean magic eraser, You dunk it in the water, and you squeeze out
most of the water. Then you can scrub
it over the area. Now, I like to blot it out with a paper towel after
I've removed that. You can also use this if you want to regain an area
along your heart. You isolate out the section
that you want to lighten. It's not a perfect fit, but it's still going to give
us roughly the same shape. Now these, I don't use them. I use them once and
then I dispose of them. This was the edge
we used before. Now I'm going to come down
and use the clean edge. Squeeze it out again, I can scrub into that section. Suddenly it's light again. I hope you'll give these
two techniques a try, and it will help to polish
up your heart project. I will see you in
the next section.
12. Outro: Thank you for watching.
I do hope you enjoyed this project and
I look forward to painting alongside
you again real soon. Here's the screen where you
go to ask any questions. Here is the screen where you can go to upload images
of your paintings. I would love to see
your interpretations of this project,
keep those brushes.
Wendy Framst, Passionate about Watercolours!
