So today I thought it would be fun to practice my watercolors
*i've got paper coming out of my wazu*
Oh, okay, and I saw some videos on YouTube where people used one paint. So like one color of watercolor and practice like a monochromatic
You know illustration painting thingamajig
I thought that'd be a really good study for me because I think one of my biggest fights with watercolor is trying to mix
Colors, that look good together
and so I was like
Why don't I try to teach myself to actually use the watercolors properly without having to worry about that?
I'm going to pick one color and then I'm going to practice
Painting from like the darkest tone to the lightest tone by adding more water and practicing that so I'm gonna make some swatches
then once I've got that down I'm going to
actually paint something
This piece will work pretty good for that, maybe they just do it in the line I've got water
So these are my colors. I
Like never use green, so I'm thinking I'm gonna go towards one of these and these are really bright and gorgeous
I'm leaning towards this one, but I also really like that one
And then this one too, like how am i supposed to pick? I mean I could always do more than one
I think I'm gonna go with emerald mmm yellow
hmm
Which one did you guys pick yellowish green? Emerald green or green?
Gotta pick pick pick. Well, it looks like greens one of the colors I use the least so, you know what let's do that
Let's take advantage of using green. Yellow green. No, we're going with green. I've already made the decision first
I'm just gonna try and get it as much on here as possible
draw a nice little cube
Then we try to add a little bit of water to that and see if I can get it a little lighter
This is my first time ever doing this I assume if you ever learn watercolors they make you do this
So this seems like something I should do
Hmm, is it actually getting lighter? So I feel like some of these look darker than the ones up there
Mmm, if anyone has experience with this do leave me some tips. This is a really pretty color though. I'm diggin it
Let's try to add more water. I'm definitely not seeing a nice gradient
But this is my first time ever doing this so I'm gonna cut myself a little slack. I
Am seeing a difference in color from the very beginning to the here
So I'm not doing too terrible the job maybe if I can figure out what I'm doing
Let's practice here if I can figure it out, then I can do a better one next
Okay, I think I'm getting a little better as I go, huh
Still not sure this one's any lighter than like that one and they might all be kind of equal
I think I'm gonna give it another shot actually while I try again here and see if I can do better than this one
So start with try getting the most
pigment to water ratio
Nice dark, super tone green. see, I'm learning here
See that is significantly lighter than that one
So when you use the paper towel, it seems to adjust the water
I think it seems to suck more water out of the brush before sucking more paint out of the brush. Does that make sense?
Am I getting somewhere with this? It's like you could just go like this and slowly
Take it out of the brush
And you'd still get a very similar effect Oh
We'll see if I have my water then
and then still continue to
See that sort of works. That's the way you could do it. I don't know if that's really the proper way to do it.
You probably need to learn how to
Play with it on the palette and try and get like a proper ratio
Definitely having a little trouble understanding
that ratio
How did I get it all over me already? What the heck?
Why was there purple on me?
I'm not sure how many I suppose a more experienced painter would be able to get more swatches and have a nice more
Steady gradient, whereas a more beginner has less swatches
And a less even gradient, so I guess that shows which side I am on that spectrum
at the point where you can barley see it anymore
And that's the cool thing about watercolors is the fact that you have so many tones oopsies come back
You have so many tones with one color so you can get like a lot of cool effects that way
Well, yeah, why don't we tape down some paper and prepare for an actual painting of something?
that's not just little cubies tape that down so that we can apply a lot of water and hopefully not get a ton of the
What's that called? Buckling buckling? That's
Like a belt buckle, huh? I'm giving a new definition to the term struggling artist
oh come on seriously there we go hehe
Did you hear that, that was a beautiful sound
Since I'm not willing to take too many chances
I'm gonna find myself a reference to try and
copy because I I know my limits the kind I wanted to do a landscape and I'm definitely
Avoiding using any sort of line art because the line art can be a bit of a crutch for me
Since the point of this exercise is to try and use tones to separate the different
You know
the subject from the background and things like that and line art you can kind of use that to
Use very similar tones next to each other
So I'm gonna try and avoid it all costs using any kind of line art and go just for tones
something with not too many straight lines because
That's not my jam. Something Simple since I have no idea what I'm doing. This is kind of cool
I don't know if you can see that. It's not got a lot of different tones, but I think I could play with this. I
Kind of don't like keeping my phone in frame cause my camera just doesn't pick it up very well
But I'll put the picture here so you can see it with watercolors
You want to start with the lightest to the darkest? So definitely need a bigger paint brush honestly
got a bigger one i
Don't know if I've ever really use this for anything. It's three quarters of an inch flat brush. Well actually
How do you do this in watercolor? - So it's like a sunset kind of
like that and the lightest part is right here and then there's like dark trees
so oh and then there's like a lake so I think
What we want to do
is have a dark gradient that goes down so
Let's just add some water first
Some "wet-on-wet" kind of thing. And then they're just a smidgest the smidgest amount of green. I
Feel like Bob Ross with this giant brush
Just a bit more than that maybe
Just work our way down
Is that working? is it working? I want it to slowly get darker. There's a lot of water here
So and I have the water that's I've already applied to the paper and I've heard
Canson XL watercolor paper is not the best for adding a lot of water. We'll see what happens
I shoulda need to go a little bit further down because there's nothing it it actually needs to go
Dark to light and then a little bit too dark again. Yeah that make sense
And I think since I put the water down first, it should smooth out a lot of the strokes
I'm hoping is anybody drawing with me? You got your sketchbooks out?
This brush is like grabbing too much of the pigment and dragging it. Just throw a bunch of paint up here
And pull it down
No, I don't like that
I'm already getting a lot of buckling with this paper. It can't seem to hold this water
So I added a little too much water
My bad. Problem is: the paper is like
buckling.
your gonna be very familiar with that word by the time I done with this but I think I'm just gonna let this dry
Hope for the best
And then start adding another
darker tone
On top of that because this was supposed to be the lightest point and now the lights points up here because of the buckling
Can I hold that down
No, come on I think the paper is fighting me. Okay gonna let it go- come back when it's dry
Okay, it's dry now, but it looks so much worse
I'm hoping I can kind of hide the *yuughhh*
With like the trees that are gonna be in here. So let's go in with the next darkest
Thing which is.... I wish I had like some masking fluid like that stuff where you can do dots and then you rub it off
Afterwards and then it'll look like stars but I do have a white gel pen. So I'll probably end up using something like that
[in the distance off camera] oh wait--i found something!
It's masking liquid in a marker so I can do like the stars that are in my reference here
I don't know how to prep this i havent
used this in years. Oh, you can't really get too fine with this, but
So cool that I have this thing this came from a Scrawlrbox like a long long time ago
I don't get a little finer spots, but I'm not sure a little bit of work. We have to wait for that to dry
Thats the thing about painting. It's a lot like sitting around waiting
And I'm an impatient person. I'm gonna let that dry
But I can just use this brush. I can work on darkening up this
basically, it's
kind of like here-ish
comes across
That way
Add some more pigment to that
with this pretty dark
Yeah trees back there so you can probably have some weird bumpy's to the top
Make it look like some trees
Back there and then here there's gonna be trees
So that's gonna block off this so that's not that important, but this continues around to here
There's like a lake see!
and then the trees are more obvious
here
Darken that up maybe a bit. Actually. I think it'd be kind of cool if this like
jetted out that way a bit
Guess that's not really a tree. It's more like some kind of plant
Tree would be a lot bigger than that.
It's dry now
I am now adding in some more paint to the top here to try and create the gradient
Like a darker gradient. The biggest problem is just the
Beveling of the paper and the buckling so I'm having sections that are like raised the lightest part shouldn't really be there
That's stupid
boom boom keep working my way down maybe
♪ "walking fast, faces pass, and I'm home bound" ♪
That is so streaky though, how do I get it to be more?
Like a smooth gradient. Is that more water or less water do more of this sort of a texture?
No, I don't like that either. I kind of prefer the lineys
. I think a lot of my problems are coming from this paper
But yeah, let's let that sit and dry
tree trees
So I'm gonna do a ton of pigment cause
these need to be really dark that's like the darkest part
of the drawing but it's basically just some
splotchy shapes around here
Comes down like this farther to
Work on the outside shape later. I need to get the base shapes. So there's actually a tree here
Like a pine or something
well, that needs to be darker see look its blending in with that background so I need a lot more pigment. Oh, yeah, that's better
we need to be able to block out that other section that
Comes all the way down
Fill that in get a little bit more water sorta blend that out
This tree actually probably should come out a little bit farther
Just looking at the reference. It's still wet. So I have time to work on them but imitate the shapes of leaves
Actually, I think I'm gonna blend these things together a bit more
just like that...maybe
darken the edge of it
I want this to look a little bit more like leaves
Well... I could grab a smaller paintbrush I suppose
But are we gonna do that?
This is a different kind of tree. I don't want it to look like this
Spruce or evergreen or whatever definitely having a difficult time doing like an even wash?
That's probably something that comes with you know
practice I
Think what's missing in this tree is like spaces cause looking at the reference
there's like some spaces we could see the sky behind it and then
Okay, and then there's also a tree that's like right here. Oh, it's wet down here. Why is it wet down there?
What have I done in that area recently? I don't remember
huh its really wet over here--did i do something?why would it still be wet over here?
Yeah, I'm just doing like really quick strokes kind of trying to imitate
Leafs
Leafy's leaf shapeys Oh, that's a really dark color i like that
Some sorta leaf shapes up there
I like the texture of like the way it's spread with the wood because it was so wet--
im trying my best
ill play with this but im having a lot of fun so..
Build up some shape. I like sitting on waiting for things to dry. Then the thing. I don't want to dry dries super fast....
Wow. I see which side you're on
Dang...i kind of just ruined this. This was one of the best parts of the painting and i just ruined it
can try and lift it yeah, I lost the whatever gradient I had down there
I dunno...that's in the reference
there we go, I gotta wait for that to dry before I can do anything else, okay
It's not quite dry yet, but I think I don't had like a little row boat
In the lake where to put it maybe here
Yeah, this isnt working at all
, it's a bit bigger
It just kinda looks like a blob
Anyway, I have a small brush out. I should try and add some finer details around here
Could be cool. Maybe some sticks
It was more like a tree yeah, I
Feel like I failed. I don't know. I guess it's not a total failure
You're like the goal was to play with tones. And I kind of feel like there's only two here. There's dark and light
When but that's also kind of the trouble I was having with this so it's kind of like: "go figure" like you're having trouble with
This you're gonna have trouble with that so
Guess that makes sense, you know, just darken up this top section again
im gonna add a reflection thats dragging down--That kind of actually worked
heyyy looks kinda cool
i like that
Okay, I feel like for never drawing backgrounds
This isn't that bad and I definitely noticing that I lean on line art as a crutch to separate colors more than I should
so this is definitely something I need to continue doing until I can get good at it because I
Feel like it's not only -- it's actually really really fun for one. So like...
Do it, but it's good for you. So
It's like finding out that ice cream like leads to a healthy BMI or something. I
Think I've reached that point where I'm just gonna make it worse
So I'm gonna wait for it to dry and then remove that masking fluid
That'll be kind of fun hopefully I can do it without removing all of the other paint as well
So, it's just about dry we're gonna start attempting to remove the
Masking fluid to show the stars this is cramping my hand more than drawing does I think
40 percent of my struggles are just from the paper. The other 60% is from an experience
so if I could fix that 40 percent of struggles, do you realize how much like
Better this couldve turned out. So yeah, I'm gonna try and try out some new papers next
Because I'd like to see how this would turn out if the paper didn't buckle and like ruin the gradient and the paper wasn't
chewing away
And I've heard like the better the paper the better you can build up more
Pigment like on top of each other and create some pretty cool effects. So
Definitely gonna look into that this parts a little tedious
Let's try some white stuff here
add something between the trees-- the tree holes
Looks like all of them. I think I got it all okay lets add some final stars. It's a little
Janky up here. but
There we go, there's my
Monochrome why don't we peel these?
Look at that clean line YUM
That's actually quite pretty oh not quite a straight line there see me did better on this side
ooo pretty, I forgot what the color white was cause like this was sort of like my white but that is way whiter
Yeah, look at that
Okay for my first attempt, I'm definitely gonna give this another go this was really really fun
If you want to see closer see the mistakes up the close
Was actually really really fun I'm gonna have to do more studies like this if I do what color should I do next?
Should I go to one of those other greens?
Mmmmmm
Yeah, I need to practice doing this again and this again and maybe a different subject. It's more references would be fun
This is really really fun. Oh good
Anyway, thank you guys for watching. I had a lot of fun playing with my watercolors. Um, I still think
This paper though. I think was like the biggest struggle like that with my inexperience felt
insurpassable using this paper the canson XL watercolor paper
I've heard pretty terrible things about this but also good things about this like I've heard it's like really good for beginners
But maybe I'm at a point where I'm trying to do techniques that you can't do
With this paper. I don't know because I'm such a beginner
I don't even know so maybe I should still keep using this paper. This is definitely fun
Like I enjoy just taking a paper and blobbing
You know, that's just really really fun to me blobbing out a tree blocking out a little rowboat
You know, I just enjoy that like process of applying the paint and it just being so blobular you know
because like sketching you like you take your pencil and you like get you sketch count details and
This is so much more freeing and like no, it's fun. Yeah, I definitely wanna get better at it stuff. Yeah
thank you guys for watching
♪ Have a delicious evening full of waffles! ♪
BYE!!!
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