Watercolor Techniques

Hello! In this video I'm going to show you how to do many different kinds of watercolor techniques. First, take your watercolor paper and fold it in half, then in half again so that you create four sections, and then fold the top and the bottom into the center so that in total you have eight separate sections. Once finished with this, put your name on the back and then begin labeling each of the eight sections using a thin sharpie as you see on the board. Just write small so that you have plenty of room to paint. So to begin, just remember watercolor paints are dry until you add water to them. The more water you add to the paint, the lighter it becomes. You want to do all of your color mixing in the lid of the paint set. When creating a wash from dark to light, you're going to use more true color from the cake in the side that you want to be dark and apply more paint that's been thinned out with water in the other side. I like to just pull the dark color with just clean water on my paintbrush. When I finish with this wash, I'm going to skip down to the wet on wet section. To do wet on wet, I'm first just going to wet my paintbrush and put clean water in that square. Then I'm going to begin applying some color, and you'll see how the color bleeds out into the area of the paper that is wet. You can try blending in some other colors this way and just watch what happens. It's a little bit magical and experimental and a lot of fun. The reason why I skipped to the wash is because you don't want to ever paint two areas right next to each other at the same time that are both wet because then they can bleed out. Okay, so now I'm doing blotting. All you do is take a paper towel and blot up some of the paint. It creates a really cool texture. Now I'm skipping down to the part that says add salt or paper towel, but first before painting, I'm going to mix up a new color. I'm mixing blue and green together in the lid. I do it in the lid so I don't contaminate the paint in the paint set. Once I'm done filling in this color, you'll see I'll take a little bit of salt and just sprinkle that on. With salt, you leave the salt until it dries. Same with the plastic wrap. I'm just going to put a little bit of plastic wrap down, and I'm just going to leave it there until the paint dries, and then you'll see the magic that happens later. Next, I'm going to skip up to dry brush. This one is pretty self-explanatory. Dry your brush on a paper towel and then dip it into the color you wish to use and just paint some lines. This is a great way to show texture and create patterns. Now I'm skipping over to a wash from one color into another color. So I'm applying some red in one half of the area, and then I'm going to use orange in the other half of the area, and I'm going to blend the two together with horizontal strokes in the center. I'll skip down to crayon resist next. This one's lots of fun. Using any colors you choose, create some patterns, lines, or any kinds of marks using different colors of crayons. When you're finished with that, paint a solid color on top of your crayon area, and you'll see how the wax resists, and so you see both the crayon lines and the paint in the background. Next, I'm going to demonstrate using watercolor pencils. These are great. They're lots of fun. They look just like regular colored pencils except for they are water soluble. They'll say the words watercolor pencils on them, so make sure you double check that you're using watercolor pencils and not regular colored pencils. So what happens with them is you can draw whatever kinds of lines and designs you wish, and then with a clean paintbrush, you're actually going to paint on the watercolor pencil areas with water, and it's going to blend the colors. It's going to move the colors around on your paper. It'll allow them to mix, so with control, you can get some really interesting designs using these pencils. Something to keep in mind with watercolor pencils is that you really have to pay attention to where you are moving the colors because since the colors will mix, you can get really dirty looking appearances. It can look really brown and and just get kind of muted and muddled if you aren't, you know, controlling where the colors are going. But that is it. I am finished. Those are the eight watercolor techniques I want you to demonstrate before painting your project. Now to clean up today, it's very simple. You just apply a little more water to the lid of your paint set, and then you're going to wipe that up with your towel. Please wipe off your table and throw away all your trash, too.