The BEST Watercolor Practice to Improve Quickly

hey friend in this video i'm going to be teaching you the best practices to improve your your watercolor quickly so i i'm going to be covering four different paintings in this video if you're a beginner or you're feeling stuck with watercolor and you need to get back to basics and focus on some technical stuff then this video is for you i'm going to cover four different paintings waves a landscape flowers and simple bubbles using many many many different techniques that are just absolutely essential to understanding watercolor and getting a good grip on the foundations of watercolor before you start improving or if you are maybe an experienced watercolor painter and you just need to get back to the basics to really get some practice in then this video is for you so if you're ready let's dive in alright so in this tutorial i'm going to be using a variety of colors from my mary it's an italian watercolor paint brand that i've been loving recently so i've got this my mary blue which is like a rich kind of ultramarine uh blue and then a magenta e color and these ceramic palettes i have i also got from amazon we'll link to all of the products that i'm using in the description below um to get started i'm going to be covering a polling technique using one pigment so it's going to be monochromatic so just starting with a really rich kind of creamy or buttery consistency of paint and water ratio uh using my mottler brush from princeton which is great at holding a lot of water and pigment which is perfect for big washes like this so a really good technique to practice as a beginner is getting used to how much these motler brushes hold in terms of water and pigment but then also spreading color using what using wet and wet technique so i'm basically dragging this color up the sheet of paper which is a st cuthbert's mill uh sanders block um cold pressed paper and i'm just punching in the darker color at the base and gradually making it get lighter and lighter lighter a value gradient of this ultramarine blue color and just dragging it up with water and then i'm using the top edge of the mottler brush and some pigment just dragging across these straight lines not going all the way across but just kind of streaking them in um across the paper and then smoothing it out with the flat edge of the brush this is gonna be a uh an ocean just a very simple basic ocean you're gonna practice wet and dry technique once that dries so while that's drying i'm gonna move on to my second sheet i just separated these the top and bottom sections of my paper with some 3m blue painters tape so i'm applying the same color in the same thickness or consistency um at the base of the second sheet and dragging it up with water and then once i cross over the middle i'm going to go on the opposite side the top side and add in the magenta color so we're going to give it this like two tone color gradient so it's going to get really saturated and thick in consistency on both the top and the bottom edge and then really light and almost watery as they meet in the middle so this magenta color from my mary is extremely pungent and strong and will obviously blend or bloom into the blue color and so i'm going to just strengthen the color a little bit because every time watercolor dries it does try dry a little less saturated and a little more dark so now i'm ready to paint in my dark streaks on my ocean so this is going to be practicing wet and dry technique we practiced wet and wet technique with the color gradient and the value gradients for our first two paintings but now we're going to practice wet and dry these are the two most foundational techniques that you will need to grasp as a beginner or anybody grasping watercolor so i've got my size six brush and a creamy or buttery consistency of that my mary blue and i'm now also practicing compound stroke so i'm using a vertical hold with my brush so my brush handle is pointed pretty much straight up and down and i'm going between pressure and release of pressure to get that like wide and then skinny look to my stroke so that's called a compound stroke when you are going between pressure and release instead of just doing a thin stroke or a thin stroke so we've got both thick and thin kind of creating this like s shape for these waves we're not going to do any sort of blending or shading or making these waves look any more realistic the further away you step from the painting the more realistic it's going to look but i am getting less saturated and more transparent with my color as i go higher up on the sheet of paper so i'm just adding more water to the blue color so that the color becomes faded so if you don't know how to lighten your colors or how to darken your colors make sure to check out my tea to butter ratio or consistency video on youtube that's a super informative video that will help you understand how watercolor works in terms of value scale and consistency of pigment and water so now i'm using a really thick amount of that blue that same my mary blue and just painting in a mountain or cliff range on the horizon where the pink and the blue gradient meet each other and making sure that i'm using a buttery consistency so that the watercolor or a color that i'm laying down is opaque so another thing that most beginners or people who are just getting started with watercolor don't realize is with watercolor that you can get some of your colors really thick and really opaque almost like a gouache and most beginners and even intermediate painters don't ever really access that consistency they're afraid to use that much paint or afraid or just not digging around their palette or their dishes in their palette as much as they can to really pull up a lot of that thicker richer pigment i don't paint super often with the buttery consistency i'm mostly in the cream and then anywhere between tea or coffee and cream consistency but it is really fun for details and mixing in with colors all right so now we're moving on to our third painting that's going to help you advance your watercolor quickly and we're just going to be using a different hold with our brush so the previous painting we used a modler brush and then we also used compound strokes for the waves but for this practice i want you just to practice using a slanted hold so i've got an angle hold on my brush it's pointed off to the side and it's about 45 to 35 degrees away from the paper so i'm using the belly of the brush instead of the tip of the brush and just basically painting in marigolds that are just the shape of a fluffy cloud so i'm just getting used to dragging the hair of my brush across the paper like this and using the fatness or the philly the filly or the belly of the brush to give me these shapes it's a really simple arrangement that i'm going to be doing with some of my favorite flowers which is marigolds we have them in our garden here in california i love marigold so much they're bright bright orange and i'm using a creamy consistency of pigment and water for most of these and then when i want a super light more transparent orange i'm obviously going to go down to the tea or coffee consistency ratio i'm adding a touch of that my merry bright magenta color to some of the oranges too to get more of that brown red undertone orange the darker orange and i'm just creating a little a little arrangement that would be in a bud vase or something a small porcelain like blue and white porcelain like you'd see in lamoge uh style porcelain um and so i'm just doing a little clump or cluster i'm not getting too spaced out with the heads of my flowers because that's going to make your arrangement feel a little bit more spacious like a little bit too much negative space if you don't do it properly so now i'm going to use just basically dirty water um that i have in my water cups and lay down like an off-white or if you have like a shade of a little tint of blue in your water that works so i'm just gonna be painting in a vase with basically just that tinted water um i do have a little bit of this like creamy gouache um that i grabbed on my mottler brush a little bit here and there to also just paint in an off-white color but basically you're just painting in an off-white color if you don't have gouache that's totally fine um that's not a part of the technical stuff the technical stuff we're practicing is obviously using the slanted hold and wet and dry once we get to the base so i've got the ultramarine or the my mary blue color and i've got i'm just going to outline the rim or edge of that base and apply a thicker color on the top edge of the vase and we'll just see how that blends it doesn't take over and blend as much as if i would have had like a tea or coffee ratio and now i've got this green gold color which i absolutely love this color from my merry it's a very different color than like sap green or some of your more average not average but regular greens that you would see more regularly um it's got that gold undertone and i just love it so i'm just painting in some stems um and a little like some leaves and whatnot around these flowers that kind of just point to these flowers but as you can see the overall cluster shape i have is just kind of like a ball and that makes it feel a little more cohesive and then now that the vase is dried i'm just going to do a very simple porcelain pattern it's not even a pattern it's just a couple variations of swatches and lines using this darker blue color to just give it the essence of being hand painted pottery um you could paint in smaller ditzy flowers or patterns on here but i just wanted i didn't want to take away from the orange marigolds um and i wanted to accentuate that orange by using its contrasting color which is blue for the vase so doing a simple floral arrangement like this practicing a slanted hold is a great technique to practice but then you're also practicing basic color theory principles so you could do pink flowers and a green vase or you could do red flowers in a green base pink is a variety of red or you could do purple flowers and a yellow base and just see how or different shifts that you can make to improve the painting so if you're using too much orange versus blue or the other way around or what kind of accent color for the stems could we incorporate for example the green that i'm using is very close to orange because of all the yellow undertones in the gold uh shade the green gold shade so having that is kind of like accentuating the heaviness on the orange because there is a lot of blue going on but because of the orangey yellow undertone in the green we win that competition in the orange category or the warm color category but if i were to use a blue green then i would be leaning more towards the blue the shades of blue in my porcelain base and see how that shifts the overall feel and aesthetic of the painting just by making one color decision so it's pretty crazy how much color can shift the overall vibe and feel of a painting so you could even just practice a bunch of those floral based paintings over and over again and just make color shifts so next technique we're going to be using or working through is kind of a combination of both wet and wet painting color theory and then using one of my favorite holds on the brush brush which is just the vertical hold and a swirl so i'm using a really good amount of water and pigment for all of these circles all i'm doing is painting bubbles or circles um cezanne and sineak and a bunch of very famous masters in the early 1900s used to paint bubbles like this abstract art similar to this all the time and you would look at the paintings for the colors that they use they would use that rich cobalt blue a bright orange or just the color arrangements and uh color palettes they used in a very big shift in contemporary in art moving towards contemporary art in the late 1800s early 1900s so with these bubble paintings you're mostly focusing on color and how to incorporate color and balance with negative space and positive space and then also composition so as i'm getting started i always start these bubble pieces in the top left i'm right handed so top left just feels most natural and then work my way down in those top two quadrants so if you were to split your painting into four quadrants with one vertical line and one horizontal line in the perfect center intersecting in center you would have four separate planes or quadrants on your paper so i start in the left quadrant and i start working toward my right and as i'm working in this way i'm treating each individual quadrant as its own separate painting so within each quadrant i want to make sure i have a good balance of color so i don't have all of my magentas in the top left quadrant and then all of my green golds in the bottom right quadrant i'm making sure to have a nice balance i don't have to have every single color that i'm using in the entire piece in every single one of my quadrants but i do want to make sure that it's creating some sort of some sort of even balance between each quadrant so think about and if you're wondering or scratching your head what does she mean by balance think about tipping points so if each one of these bubbles or circles was weighted and they grew and obviously grew in the amount or the uh the amount that they weighed by how heavy they felt so they could feel heavy if they are really thick and dense with color they could feel heavy like a darker color can feel heavier than a more transparent color um or obviously they could feel more heavy if the size of the bubble is really large compared to a super small one so think about tipping point on your sheet of paper that big bright blue up there is creating a tipping point toward the top right quadrant so i need to incorporate that bright blue somewhere else that's going to counteract or counter balance that blues tipping point so i'm going to probably bring that and drag it down in the bottom left quadrant so now i'm focusing right now i'm focusing on the green gold color and trying to create balance with that color i also love putting this green gold color next to a more purpley tone um because it's very yellow green gold and the purple and yellow contrasting color situation is super nice so i've already got this uh second bright blue i pulled in the left so that's creating a nice counter counter balance back to my tipping point analogy and i'm just trying to uh create balance or be aware of that tipping point in abstract paintings um as best as i can you're not gonna get it perfect you're gonna have things that look off and that's the whole point with abstract art it's not supposed to be a formula or you know you're breaking the rules with abstract art for the most part so don't think about it too much but painting something abstract like these bubble pieces and just focusing on tipping point balance and color is really going to help you grasp this for everything that you paint whether it's a floral composition piece a landscape you know even portraits and animals so abstract art bubbles in particular are a really great piece and technique to focus on with balance and composition and tipping point [Music] thank you so much for watching i hope that was helpful for you and fun uh sometimes it's really fun to just get back to the basics and paint some bubbles for an afternoon or simple strokes so we covered a lot of technical stuff wet and wet for sweat and dry um abstract composition tips and all this different stuff so if you need to watch this multiple times i'm not going to stop you also make sure you write some notes down too so you can always easily access the tips that i gave the brilliant tips that i gave in this video so thanks so much for watching please check out all the free resources that i have for you we'll link to them in the description i also have two watercolor books a third on the way in summer 2023 so if you need deeper knowledge and grasp on technical stuff and beyond make sure you check out my watercolor books they're called everyday watercolor and everyday watercolor flowers and then i have an oceans one coming out in 2023. we'll link to those they're on amazon also if you want more in-depth art watercolor tutorials like this one join my patreon that's basically my art school i have a lot of backlog on my youtube so so free tutorials on my youtube still but the in-depth more nitty gritty stuff for my art tutorials is covered now on my patreon it's my art school i treat it like my art school there's a whole community that comes with it where i'm sharing my own work some tips and feedback to people who are asking questions and commenting in this community and then there's also live art classes and live q and a's with yours truly every single month so if you want more in-depth focus on watercolor and art stuff join my patreon and then as always thank you so much for commenting engaging and watching these videos every little bit of engagement counts and helps us spread the gospel and the good news of these watercolor videos so thank you so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Jenna Rainey

Views: 240,846

Keywords: watercolor, watercolor tutorial, watercolor basics, watercolor techniques, watercolor practice, watercolor practice exercises, watercolor practice for beginners, watercolor practice techniques, watercolor practice ideas, daily watercolor practice, easy watercolor practice, jenna rainey, jenna rainey watercolor, jenna rainey watercolor tutorial, best watercolor practice, best watercolor tutorials, best watercolor tutorials for beginners, how to improve watercolor painting

Id: FmpIu6um508

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 17 2022