Improve Your Watercolours Using Chinese Techniques - Part One

Hi, welcome. I am Len Zhang. First, I learn Chinese painting, and later move on to watercolors. Today, I want to show you how to introduce Chinese painting techniques into your watercolor. The reason for that, it is to allow you to paint more freely and to make beautiful, spontaneous paintings. We're only going to use traditional watercolor brushes, pigments, and papers. The first thing I want to show you is the side brush painting techniques. I'm going to use two brushes to show you this technique. The first brush I'm using is the flat brush. This is about 1 and 1⁄2 inch. Get some water, and load the red color. I'm going to use single color, and paint one brush stroke holding the brush sideways. Another one, a little bit more water. Now I'm going to use a round brush using the blue color. This one has more water. As you can see, the side brush strokes create some loft texture, like this. Now I'm going to use this flat brush to paint side brush strokes to paint a tree trunk. The one side has more water and more color. The other side has more loft texture. Here, the trunk. Next thing I'm going to show you is the center brush. I'm going to use the same brushes I showed you to do the side brush strokes. So hold your brush straight, paint center brush, couple strokes. As you can see, you don't see the loft texture I had before. Another brush, round brush. Again, you don't see the loft texture on the brush strokes. Now we apply the center brush strokes to create branches on this trunk. We can also use the side brush strokes to paint a simple fish. Now I am using the flat brush to load multi-colors. Red first on one side, and then a little yellow in the middle, and then blue on this side. And also combine the red and the blue a little bit on one side. So my brush right now has darker red and red and yellow, and a little blue. So paint one brush stroke, tilt your brush. This is a side brush stroke. Another one. That's the body of a fish. So if you add a little bit detail, get more blue on this side, a little bit red, and a little bit yellow on the other side. And you hold your brush this way. You can paint the torso thin, and then more thin, and give a little texture to the tail. Now what we left is the head. Use another small brush, get very dark color to paint the eye. Dark color means a lot of blue, a little red. OK, to have fun, you can spread some texture spots on the fish. This looks like a rainbow trout. And add a gill. Here we go. We get a fish. Now let's have fun to paint an onion, kind of purple onion. I load my brush here with more color. On this side, less color. No color, actually. So red and blue. Don't miss the color perfect on here before you put on your brush stroke. OK, here we go. One brush stroke, you get the shape of the onion. And here's the tip of the onion. Leave white here. Another brush stroke, indicating the peel off of the onion. Now we need to use a smaller brush, touch the texture. Two colors so far. A little bit darker here on the bottom, indicating the root. And then a little bit darker here. See, from dark to light. There's a little change in the value. Here we go. We finish an onion. After the onion, let's paint a banana with a round brush. Similarly, I'm going to load my brush with a couple of colors. The first one is yellow, a little bit more water. Yellow almost all to the end, to the peel of the brush. And then a little bit of red at the tip area, a little blue. One brush stroke, I'm going to paint one side of the banana. I need a little bit more water in order to move it. We add a little more blue here. And another side of banana to save a little bit. Here we go, we got a banana. Next, I want to show you how to use a split brush to paint some texture. First, I use this flat brush to load three colors together. The red, yellow on one side. And then at this edge, on the red edge, I get a little blue. One brush stroke, I paint one wood panel. Or you go from this way. Let's say we try to paint a fence. So those wood panels, after it dries a little bit, we are going to use this fence brush or a split tip brush to paint the texture. Let's use the fence brush to paint one. Use colors a little bit darker than the wood panel itself. See, here's the texture of the wood. Now, you can use a different one. This one, you can use your finger. If you don't have a fence brush, you can use your finger to split a little bit. Get the color, don't get too much water. You can do a similar effect like that. And then put a little nail here. So here's the foot fence.