5 watercolor hacks to take your paintings to the next level

If you are wanting to improve your watercolor paintings, in this video I'm going to show you five hacks or watercolor techniques that will take your watercolor paintings to the next level by adding so much interest. My name is Kristen Van Leeuwen. I am a watercolor artist and instructor and let's get started. The first hack is to add texture. Now this first swatch that I'm doing is just a regular wash of paint with my textured paper. That's the regular texture that it usually has, but there are ways that we can manipulate the paper or the paint to create even more texture in our watercolor. So the first way is one of my favorite ways and it's to add salt. Drop any salt onto your paint while it is still wet and then as it dries the salt is able to pull in the paint and the moisture creating this beautiful crystally pattern. Wait until your paint is completely dry before removing the salt so that it doesn't smear. One of my favorite ways to use this technique is when I want snow or water texture. The next texture that you can create is with saran wrap or cling film. You kind of bunch it up into a random shape and press it into the paint while it is still wet. Wait for it to completely dry before you remove it, but it makes the most beautiful sharp geometric shapes. I love using this when I need some kind of texture, usually a nature-ish type texture, but I don't want it to be crystally so I'll do this for rocks or I've done it for ice on the snow like if it's on the ground. So there's lots of different applications. And then this last one, I have painted a more concentrated swatch of color and I am just dropping in clean water. This makes a really nice subtle bloom which can be really fun if you're wanting to do more of a subtle snow or stars or something like that. So now we can remove our saran wrap, we can remove our salt, and these are three different ways you can create texture in your paintings. There are so many other ways but these are just a few. The next hack is layering or glazing. Now this is a basic watercolor technique but a lot of beginners don't really understand the principles of it so I included it in my hacks. So we're going to start with this strawberry shape in a light pink wash. This is going to be our kind of control so you can see how light this color really is in the first wash. We're going to paint three more and then layer on. So right now we have four strawberry shapes and they are all the same light pink wash. So we're going to leave that first strawberry alone, that's our base layer. We're going to add another layer in that same color and same wash as the base layer to the rest of our strawberries and you can see such a significant difference between the first and second strawberry just by layering the same color. And this is the beauty of watercolor, it is a layering medium, it is transparent, it is supposed to be layered upon. So we can keep some of our areas light like in that first wash and continue to layer more and more colors on top to create depth and dimension. So now for this third strawberry shape I'm actually doing a layer of vermilion so it's more of a orangey red color but since we have such a nice pink base it makes the perfect strawberry color by kind of mixing or glazing those two colors together. Also you want to make sure that you are doing all of these layering and glazing techniques while everything is dry, while your bottom layers are dry. Layering is the idea that you are creating darker tones by layering more colors on top of each other and glazing is more the idea that you are changing the color by layering another color on top. Here's what we have so far, one layer of pink, two layers of pink, two layers of pink with a layer glazed over of vermilion and now for this last one we are doing a second layer of vermilion and it's pretty crazy how deep and dark and red and strawberry that this color is compared to our initial light layer of pink. So this is two layers of pink and two layers of vermilion and I wanted to show you what one layer of vermilion looks like so you can get an idea of how significant this color is when we layer and glaze over the top of each other. In watercolor we need to start with our lightest colors first or we will lose them because we're kind of painting backward and so we can get to those darker, deeper, richer colors by layering. The next hack is to use unexpected materials. So we're painting a swatch of paint and while it is freshly wet we're going to use unexpected hard objects to create texture by manipulating the paper and thus the paint. So for the first one we are using the end of our brush to gently push into the paper to create lines. You can use this technique for the vein of a leaf, tree trunks, branches, things like that. You can also use the edge of a credit card or one of these paper separatey things that you get when you are separating your block that is glued together and you can scrape some of the paint completely off creating white areas. This technique is great for when you want to bring highlights and the white of the paper back you just have to make sure to do it really quickly before it's dry. So we're going to do the same thing again with this second swatch but I'm waiting for this swatch to dry a little bit more before I use the techniques. This is my preferred way to use the techniques when the paint is not as fresh because I feel like you're catching the paper and the paint right before it dries and you're still able to manipulate it and you can get it to do more of what you want without the paint flowing back in. So that was the end of my brush and now I'm going in with the paper separator using the tip to create lines but also using more of the flat end which you can do with a guitar pick or a credit card scraping large chunky areas out. This is my favorite way to create highlights on trees, on rocks, if you wait for the paper to be a little bit more dry like on the right versus when it's first wet on the left you'll get more of a distinct removal of the paint on the paper. And while you have your hard cards out like a credit card or a gift card one of my favorite techniques is dipping the side of the card into some Payne's gray or black and swiping it against the paper to create this beautiful texture that looks like an aspen tree. The next hack is blending with wet on wet. This is a basic watercolor technique but it can be tricky. So I like to start with a light color of wash and make that my highlight color. I don't want to lose my highlight color it's really hard to get it back but I want a really nice blend of other colors that add dimension or shadow so I can add my deeper reds my deeper pinks and then leave that color in the middle for the highlight and then it'll dry and have a nice soft blend. Same with this yellow green color that I've got going on here this could be like a pear. I want the pear or the apple to have a lighter color where there's a highlight and then you can add dimension by letting other colors blend and bleed while it is still wet. Another way to use this technique is to paint with clean water and then drop color in so I love to use this technique when I'm painting clouds. I'm negative painting the clouds so I'm painting the blue sky and leaving the white of the paper for the clouds. You don't always have to drop color straight into another color. For this rock I'm painting the highlighted top part of the rock and then right next to it painting the shadow letting them touch so that they have a natural gradient blend. I personally like when my colors blend and bleed together especially when I'm painting in a loose style. I do this all the time when I'm painting flowers even though colors like pink and green don't necessarily blend well together. I like when my greenery touches my flowers and they kind of blend they look like they're working together instead of just kind of being harsh and layering on top of each other. My last hack is to not forget that you can lift your paper, you can move your paper, you can have your paper upside down with paint on it. This is something I like to do when I'm painting a rainy stormy sky. Paint the paper with clean water, add my dark stormy colors and then lift the paper at an angle so that the paint drips down and looks so rainy and stormy. Now plein air painters everywhere will laugh at me because most of the time their papers are automatically at an angle but for us who sit at our desk sometimes it's hard to remember. I can lift my paper and move this paint physically. Also you can paint a swatch of color and then put clean water on your paper in a pattern and make that color drip into those drops of clean water too. Wherever there is water the paint will flow. So this technique is most often used when you want a really nice smooth gradient. You'll see this a lot of time when you are watching plein air painters paint. They will paint skylines, sunsets, they'll start with their lighter wash of color holding it at an angle. They will add their darker colors and let everything naturally blend and bleed together, continuing to add darker colors, more color and then they can pick up those little droplets that form with a thirsty brush which is just a dry brush. And then the more you continue to hold your paper at an angle the more the paint will continue to flow. If you want it to go in a different direction you can hold it sideways, you can hold it upside down, all kinds of different ways to produce this technique. So those are my five hacks for taking your watercolor paintings to the next level. Some of them are pretty basic watercolor techniques but I feel like they're very important techniques for everyone to remember, especially new watercolor painters. I hope you take these techniques and apply them to your own watercolor paintings and I'll see you all next time. Bye!