Watercolor Pencils Tutorial (7 Mistakes Beginners Make!)

Watercolor pencils tutorial. In today's video I'm going to tell you about seven mistakes I see beginners make time and time again so that you can avoid them. Welcome back to my channel. If you are new here my name is Michelle and on this channel you'll find all things watercolor and a little bit of mixed media too. Please do consider subscribing. If you click the bell icon you can get notified every time I have a video for you. I make one free video a week here on YouTube on a Thursday with extra content on Saturdays for my Patreon subscribers. Now watercolor pencils are very popular on my channel. You all love watercolor pencils and I think I know why now. Over the years of teaching beginners I have found that they're very attracted to watercolor pencils. Of course it seems a little bit easier, it's a little bit easier to control a pencil than a brush and you can get in less mess with watercolor pencils. However I do feel that some of you are limiting yourself a little bit and making the same mistakes over and over again. So in this video I'm going to go through seven mistakes I see people making a lot and also going to encourage you just to expand your practice a little bit more so you get better results from your watercolor pencils work. So mistake number one that you can make with watercolor pencils is not using the right paper. So I'm going to point the camera downwards in a minute and give you some examples but there are three types of paper that you shouldn't be using. One would be too smooth, one would be too rough and one will be too thin. So let's have a look at all of those types of paper and look at what you should be using instead. So let's look at this idea of paper. So I've got here this is just some printer paper. Now one of the things that's wrong with it of course is that it's so thin that I'll probably pick up almost like a wax tracing of the thing that's behind it. So that's one problem but the main problem with this sort of paper is that it's just going to wrinkle as soon as I get water onto it. Now most of you wouldn't paint on printer paper unless you were very short of supplies but there you can see already you know as soon as you get water on this sort of paper it wrinkles up. Now cartridge paper which is for drawing is a little bit better but you're still going to get an awful lot of this goes on and if it's quite thin cartridge paper you can easily just go through the paper so you definitely want watercolor paper. So the rule is with watercolor paper if you're going to wet the paper you need watercolor paper if you're going to work on dry paper if it's a dry medium you're not putting a wet paintbrush on it then you can use cartridge paper or pastel paper for that sort of thing but always with watercolor pencils you want to be on proper watercolor paper. So this stuff is too thin cartridge paper not as bad as this but also too thin. The next problem can come when the paper is too rough. Now this actually isn't that rough because I have just moved house so I can't find any of my rough paper at the moment but I just want to give you an idea this is sort of the roughest paper I've got here and can you see how much of the the grain shows through on that paper. Now that can be okay if you've got a really good brand of watercolor pencils it may be that when the water hits this it just turns completely to paint and it's fine but with a lot of brands of watercolor pencils you're going to find that you're getting a bit of that grain left behind and it just doesn't give a very clean effect. Now we've got some really smooth paper so now we've got some hot press paper. Now this is much better for applying the pencil but the problem with hot press paper is that it's not great for painting on except for very specific uses like botanical work. When you have hot press smooth paper the paint tends to puddle and so you tend to get an awful lot of drying lines so whilst this is easier to apply the pencils to you may find that when you actually come to apply the water to it you get really loads of hard edges very very easily. So my recommendation when using watercolor pencils is that you use a standard knot surface or cold press surface they both mean the same thing of watercolor paper so if you've got a pad of watercolor paper it doesn't really mention what it is that'll just be your standard cold pressed or sometimes called knot surface and that's really the best one because it gives you that ease of applying the watercolor pencils but you should also get a nice blended effect because those tiny little dips in the paper will allow you to spread the water and the pigment nice and easily. So mistake number two with watercolor pencils would be not using a good brand. Now it's not in my nature to sort of you know stand here on youtube and have a go at brands and basically you get what you pay for so I'm not going to have a go at the cheaper brands because basically you're just paying for what you get which is slightly less pigment and I'm not going to suggest that you throw all your watercolor pencils away and it's really tempting isn't it because they're very expensive and if you see that set for 140 and they're very nice price you get lots of colors you think oh that would be fantastic but I'm going to point the camera downwards in a second I'm just going to show you the difference between the cheaper pencils and the more expensive pencils. Now exactly the same goes for paint if you're buying cheaper stuff what you're paying for rather what you're losing is the pigment so it's always always the pigment so you might end up with beautiful looking pencils you might end up with a lovely tin you know you might end up with a nice case that comes with them the wood might look nice they might have very pretty patterns on the outside or gold writing you know it might be lovely but the most expensive thing is always the pigment and it's always the pigment that you lose so I'm going to show you the difference now between expensive ones and cheap ones as I said I'm not going to be too specific about brands if you want to know very good brands you can't go wrong with Derwent and Faber-Castell they tend to be the top brands so Derwent is British and Faber-Castell is German and you know you really can't go wrong with those brands but beyond that I'm not going to you know have a go at cheap brands or promote particularly expensive brands I'm just going to show you the difference and I want you to consider that if you do have those cheaper pencils perhaps you might want to add a few more expensive ones because you can generally buy pencils individually you do not have to buy a whole set you go into an art shop or an online art retailer you can just buy single colors so think about the colors that you use most often and consider whether you might not want a few more expensive pencils let me show you the difference it makes so let's look at the difference quality makes and quality is huge so this pencil here is a Derwent Inktense these regularly get top reviews for watercolor pencils and this one here is just one that I got in a mixed set it's so cheap that it isn't even really branded now this is the sort of set that you might buy in a stationers or a drugstore and you know people give them to you for Christmas I don't know about you but I find that since I've been working as an artist or you know since I've been starting to paint and draw people will always find supplies at home and give them to me which is lovely of them but certain ones I just set aside either to give them to other people's children or just for some of my students to use if there's no other supplies available so let's look at the difference between the pigment levels both of these are a green color not the exact same green so let's lay the cheaper one on here and let's put the more expensive one on here we'll try and put roughly the same amount of pencil on the paper this one's a little bit of a darker color and let's see the difference when we add water to these so here's our cheaper one now it's not too bad it's dissolved and we've got some paint there now what about the more expensive one now can you see the difference in color strength and this was actually one of the better ones in the set some of the redder colors just literally I mean you could barely get any pigment out of them at all but you can see the difference that you get how much stronger how much more vibrant how much more beautiful is the Derwent Inktense than this unlabeled brand now this is not an advert for Derwent Inktense there are lots of good brands of watercolor pencils out there but all I'm explaining to you is that you do absolutely get what you pay for when it comes to watercolor pencils so mistake number three is a really simple one but it's going to make a lot of difference to your watercolor pencil work and this is blending from the wrong direction I'm going to show you what I mean in a minute so don't worry if you don't understand but beginners tend to get a lot of hard edges in their work and not necessarily where they want hard edges and if you've ever seen those effects where you get this lovely sort of blended out effect on paints or on watercolor pencils and you don't know how to achieve it let me show you what I mean and how you can easily correct this to get much much better results so what do I mean by blending in the wrong direction now let's imagine maybe some kind of petal and we've got some color at one end and we want to get that effect where it blends out from strong dark color and blends out to nothing now what people often do is they start on the pencil area and they take the water outwards let me show you how that looks so there we're dragging that paint outwards well I mean that looks okay doesn't it but it's not really giving us that blended outwards look that we're looking for it's not fading out so that we get a graduated effect that goes out to clean water so let me show you a different way of doing it so I'm going to take exactly the same pencil and we'll make the start of our little petal and I'm going to wet the paintbrush again but this time instead of working outwards I'm going to work inwards so we're starting up here with clean water and coming in I'm going to clean my brush again just dry it slightly and again starting out here on the clean water and coming in we could spread that up a little bit but I'm being careful not to take this strong pigment here and blend it right up this end and whenever I've got too much paint on my brush I can just rinse my brush dry it slowly so it's not dripping and just drag it back in and just adjust that as much as I want I can if I want to just take a little blush of that pigment around the edge there and you can see we can get this beautiful blended out effect so if you ever want an effect like this don't start at the pigment area and drag downwards because that pigment if it's a good brand it will just go on forever you want to start away from the pigment and come in and then just blend a little bit where the two areas meet until you get the results that you need and don't forget to rinse and take the excess liquid out of your brush every time you take it back up the other end so you're not dragging this pigment down where you don't want it at this point if you're enjoying this video and getting some value from it could I ask you quickly just to click the thumbs up just to click the like button youtube rewards channels with audience interaction so if you like share subscribe or leave me a comment it helps my channel to grow at the moment we're in the midst of the pandemic I'm on lockdown here again in the UK and I can't teach my regular classes so what I get from youtube is so so important you're literally keeping a roof over my head I'm so grateful to all of you please click like so for mistake number four we have not controlling the point of your watercolor pencil now often people want those crisp edges and they just don't sharpen the pencils often enough but also there are times when actually a blunt pencil works better for certain effects so I'm going to show you when it's good to have a sharp point on your pencil and when it's good to have a much blunter point on your pencil so that you keep on top of this always good to have a so it's really important with your watercolor pencils that you consider the point that you have on them and that you adjust as you go through your watercolor pencil painting if you've got a sharp point like this one that's going to be really good for getting you those neat edges one of the things that can make watercolor pencil work look slightly amateurish is there's always scruffy edges involved now if you've got a sharp edge like this sharp point you will be able to get a really really nice crisp edge like this one however a sharp point like this may not be as good for filling in a large area you can in fact end up getting far too many lines that way so that's when you want a bit of a blunter point like this when you're doing the filling in part maybe as well you actually want some marks I'm thinking of things like flowers where you want sort of you know spots spots on leaves things like that much better and much easier to have a big stubby pencil like this than be trying to do it with something like this so it's not the one's right or one's wrong but do adjust as you go through your painting and do make sure that if you need a sharp edge you take the time to stop and sharpen your pencil and when you've got blunter pencils like this those are great for shading large areas look how easily that shades across much better than this one where you might get some straight lines appearing and now you've been neat with your pencil line you can get that lovely neat edge that you want so mistake number five is shared across all pencil work so that's graphite pencil colored pencil and watercolor pencils and that's pressing too hard now when you press really hard on any type of paper whether that's cartridge paper or watercolor paper you dent it you flatten it and you flatten the grain and although you can't see the grain it's really important in dragging color from your medium onto your paper and also it can just lead to really really sketchy looking scruffy looking results so I'm going to show you now what happens if you press too hard with watercolor pencils and how you can correct this problem so when we press too hard we make it impossible to get any more pigment physically on the paper you can't see the grain of the paper not very easily anyway but it's there and it's what's grabbing on to the color in your watercolor pencil so if you press really hard if you burnish the paper if you push and push and push it can become physically impossible to layer any color over the top of this and also if you press really hard and dent the paper it can be impossible to get a smooth wash once you put your water on you find there's always something of the underneath marks remaining so mistake number six is not combining your watercolor pencils with watercolor and I understand that as a beginner paint can be a little bit scary and you feel much much safer working with watercolor pencils but it's actually a great way of combining them both so you get the best of both worlds and so you still have a lot of control over your work so a few years ago I was teaching at a local art studios and the owner of the studio had noticed that polychromos pencils had become a really big thing now polychromos are not watercolor pencils these are standard colored pencils and all of a sudden Faber-Castell launched these pencils and they were so popular everyone was talking about them because they just had such a great color payoff so the owner of the studio came to me and said Michelle I need a course on polychromos you can teach that you can teach that can't you I'll book you in and I was just like um yeah I guess so I had to learn to use colored pencils and one of the things I did was I decided to um for my mother I decided that I would draw a picture of her dog in colored pencils if I can find if I can find it on my computer I'll drop it here so you can have a look at it and it went quite well I'm usually quite good at picking up new mediums and I learn a lot you know and I watched some tutorials and I got to grips with colored pencils but the background took me forever I was coloring and coloring and coloring and it took so long and you know later on I thought oh that was lovely but it took so long I don't know how anyone's got the patience for this if you've ever worked in standard colored pencils you know how long they take and then I spoke to a professional artist who used colored pencils all the time and she said oh she said you should have put soft pastels in the background she said we all do that and I thought oh what an idiot I am and I realized then that a lot of colored pencil artists when they have to put a background in will smudge it in in soft pastel because it hardly notices it looks really good and it's just a trick that they've learned and it's the same really with watercolor pencils and watercolor if you're wondering what the point is to this story and the point is that watercolor can just speed up your watercolor pencil work so much particularly in backgrounds and particularly areas where you need a larger amount of pigment and you just need the paint to spread more easily so I'm going to show you a couple of ways that you can use watercolor in combination with your watercolor pencils to get a much better result and don't be scared of it I think you'll love the effects so let's go back to our petal shapes and let's say we want even stronger color so we could start off like this and then maybe we want to go into some yellow and we could spend ages shading in the rest of that petal in yellow but really when paint is available why go to the trouble of spending ages with watercolor pencil you've got the neatness that you want around here now you can just take some color in to meet it so this color is diary light yellow this is from my essential set which is a collaboration with jackman's art materials here in the uk if you're interested in those paints it's a beginner set i will put a link in the video description for you and look at this beautiful effortless effect we're getting by mixing watercolor paint with watercolor pencils so you've got the ability to be neat with the watercolor pencils and then you can just fill in with the watercolor paint another time when it's a really great idea to use watercolor paint is if you've got something sat in the middle of a background don't worry about it you can put the background in first with watercolor paint be as loose and splashy as you like just leave things fairly light in the center and then you've got a ready-made background to work on top of with your watercolor pencils so mistake number seven with watercolor pencils is not working them onto wet paper so as a professional artist i rarely use watercolor pencils as a medium in their own right because i tend to work on very large paintings and they just take too long most professional artists will prefer to work with paint it's generally beginners that like watercolor pencils but i do use watercolor pencils all the time and what i use them for is to add details to my watercolor paintings now if you haven't used watercolor pencils onto wet paper or onto wet paint you're really missing a trick they release so much more pigment you can get some fantastic results let me show you how it's done so rather than work with watercolor pencil always onto dry paper and then add the water afterwards you can work onto wet paper or paint and the pencils will release a lot more pigment so i'm going to put some clean water on here and we're going to draw straight in and what we'll get is we'll get a much softer outline and more pigment release so you could do this for things like backgrounds anywhere that you want a much softer effect and look how much pigment that is releasing and i'll use the cheaper brand that we tried earlier as well won't be quite as vibrant but really still not that bad there we get those lovely soft effects from working directly into water the other thing we can do is work directly onto paint so i've got some pink paint some permanent rose and i'm going to apply a nice large petal shape now if you're at the stage where you are just starting to learn to use watercolor paints and you're really not too sure how to get good effects without lots of drawing lines to get these nice smooth effects i do have a beginner's course i've just launched it's actually being built at the moment and i have just opened the doors for pre-sales so if you're just watching this video it's just come out you've got about two weeks to get that at the pre-sale price once the course is launched it'll go up to standard price still very good value and you get 10 complete beginners techniques and i take you through them step by step so it's a fantastic course if you're just starting out learning to paint or if you've been painting watercolors for a little while you really don't feel like you've got any control over the medium that's a great course for you too so i've applied this nice and smoothly let's work in now with some watercolor pencil so this might be a lily petal we could get some spots on like this and in this case it's actually better to have a blunter point so we've released more pigment but maybe i want to go around the outside a little bit and just like i mentioned before i'm going to go in with a sharper edge there so you can see that these watercolor pencils aren't only for working alone with they're actually a really really fabulous addition to your watercolor paints and this is how i use them in my own work most often so do let me know in the comments if you found this video helpful if you've made any of these mistakes yourself if you want to share any other mistakes you've made and how you solve those mistakes feel free to do that as well if you would like some more watercolor pencils tuition i've got another great video for you you can watch that one right now