5 Easy & Essential Watercolor Techniques For Beginners

hi everyone my name is fineliner nerd and welcome to my top five easy and essential watercolor techniques for beginners okay so for this tutorial i'm gonna need some watercolor paper this is 300 gsm 100 cotton and it's cold pressed as well so it's got a really lovely texture see that there some watercolor paints this is my winsor and newton professional series it doesn't look like i'm being particularly professional because it's a mess two sizes of mop brush one is very large and this is going to be great for really even large washes and the second is medium and this is the one that i'll primarily be painting with mop brushes hold a lot of water and are really really great for covering large areas very quickly a synthetic round brush so these often have a little bit of spring to them they spring back like that they don't hold very much water but they are really really good for fine detail work and finally two glasses of clear water one to wash the paint off your brush and the second one to rinse it completely clean this avoids colors from getting muddy so all that was left to do was take down my paper and divide it into six squares get out a clean palette and start mixing some winsor red because we're going to be painting a puppy the first technique we're going to discuss is the wet and wet technique now this is one that you can control somewhat but you kind of have to let the paint do what it wants to do so i'm going to wet this first tile with a really even layer of clean water um i don't want any parts drying quicker than the others so i'm just going to make it really nice and glossy now the wet and wet technique is a bit of a waiting game the wetter the paper the further your paint will spread when you dip the paint into it the drier the paper the less far your paint will spread and this also will have an effect on how the edges blur now i'm going to wait for a few moments because i don't want the paper to be glossy and really wet i don't want the paint to spread really far i want a fairly self-contained shape for the poppy petals but i do want that blurring on the edge that is characteristic of the wet and wet technique right so the paper has absorbed most of the water and there's just a really lovely kind of sheen on top of the surface it's not glossy any longer so i'm going to take oh i'm going to swatch first make sure that's dark enough and surprise surprise it's not so i'm going to take a little bit more paint to make it richer and then i'm going to start painting the petals into the paper you can see that immediately starts bleeding into the paper while that's still wet i'm going to take a very concentrated mixture of payne's gray on my finer brush and i'm going to drop it into the red paint and this will blur as well and create a really beautiful impression of the black stamen in the center of a poppy the second technique is wet on dry so this is exactly what it says on the tin i'm going to paint the same shape of poppy but with wet paint on dry paper so i'm going to load up my brush you can see that's fat with paint um and i'm going to i want a really wet shape and i'm going to paint the same shape that i did before because i want it to look the same and show you the same techniques with the same shape there we go and i can wet that a little bit more by dabbing paint into the area the nice contrast with the outside of the poppy is to have a blurry impression of the stamen on the inside there we go and we'll just wait for that to dry and feather out as well now for an effect that is super easy and but super effective it's called glazing and you can use it in multiple different ways so i'm going to use it to create the effect of light coming in from behind the poppy so i'm going to paint each petal individually and let them dry individually before painting the next one and where they overlap they're going to create the sense of sunlight coming in but from behind the flower you can also use the glazing technique with multiple colors so for example if i put down some yellow paint and then put some blue over the top you can glaze a green color in between now this is how you can mix color with dry layers of paint rather than mixing directly on the paper or in the palette and it can be used really effectively i'm going to save this technique for another tutorial but for today i'm going to use it with just one color so back to the poppy i'm going to paint the first petal and i'm going to let this dry completely time for the second petals this is the one over on the left hand side here and you can see where that's overlapped that's created a darker tone right third petal and fourth petal and because this shape is crisp throughout i'm just going to use some really crisp mark making techniques for the statement just really little very fine dots all right next technique is charging so i'm going to use a similar technique that we did over here um with the glazing but this time i'm going to paint a paler color and then charge in with a darker color to create a very subtle gradient effect first petal then i'm going to take the richer mixture of paint and i'm gonna drop it in i forgot what i was saying because i was concentrating i'm gonna drop it into the petal the wet petal so that it bleeds from one end to the other okay this is the problem with not doing voiceovers here's the second petal and then very quickly and take my darker mixture and charge in from the bottom okay the third petal and some pretty edges on there see the nice thing about this is you get the organic flow of the dark paint into the lighter paint you also get hard edges and that collects some of the pigment as well and you get the overlapping from the glazing technique and it's just a really beautiful organic way of painting flowers okay so next up is dragging i'm going to take the richer mixture of paint and i'm going to put that along a very fine edge along oh i want some darker paint actually i'm gonna paint a very fine edge and this will form the top of that first petal and then i very quickly want to go in with clear water and paint the rest of the shape in oh no my paper was too dry the paint dried too quickly luckily i'm doing my five techniques and i've got a sixth space so i was prepared for making a mistake so let's go with dragging 2.0 okay this time i'm going to make my brush loaded with paint so i'm going to start with that line again and just make sure it's beading on the surface this will make sure that it doesn't dry too quickly then i'll take my clear water and fill in the rest of the shape and this pulls the paint away from the initial line and creates a very soft gradient time for the second petal and this time i'm going to start from the bottom of this petal and again use clear water from the opposite end i'm going to start painting the tip of that petal and then bring it down to meet the pigment remember i'm making sure that the paint is beading on the surface to make sure it doesn't get absorbed too quickly into the paper with clear water on my brush i'm going to define that the shape of the petal up at the top and then bring the water down to meet the paint what i like to do if it doesn't quite reach up to the other end is do the same thing but from the opposite side so i can create the edge of the petal just very subtly and then drag some clear water across that line and it just defines the shape a little bit better and then for the final petal again with the dark pigment down there and then clear water the final time define the edge of that petal and bring it down to meat so all of these techniques take a lot of practice and they're really intuitive skills such as charging dragging wet and wet these are a lot more controlled obviously these techniques and you can be a lot more precise um so my best advice to you is to get some scrap watercolor paper or a cheap pad of watercolor paper and soak it for wet and wet and test different drying times for how far the paint spreads test how much paint you can put in the charging method to get a really really defined bleed into the rest of the petal if you're painting flowers same with dragging how much water you bring to meet the paint and how far that paint then shoots off into the water if you would like to show me any of your attempts at doing these things send them to me over on instagram and i'll share them with my stories don't forget to subscribe and ring the bell for notifications and i'll be back with another video in about two weeks thanks for watching

Channel: Finelinernerd

Views: 293,263

Keywords: watercolor tutorial, watercolor painting, watercolor, watercolor techniques, top 5, top five, painting tutorial, art tutorial, simple watercolor techniques, basic watercolor technique, easy watercolor techniques

Id: aOSaQ50xeAM

Length: 10min 23sec (623 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020