Watercolor Pet Portrait: Tips for mixing and using black paint

Hi everyone, I'm going to give you a few tips for mixing and painting with black and I'll use this watercolour painting to demonstrate. I'd also like to thank Skillshare for sponsoring this video but more about them later. OK, mixing black watercolour paint. I needed a black subject to paint to demonstrate to you and I didn't have to go very far to find one. This big boy is one of our neighbour's dogs. He's a big friendly goofball. Because all the properties around here are acreages we don't have closed in fenced yards and he often roams around spreading his love to all the neighbours up and down the street. A few weeks ago Don was cleaning the deck so that we could oil it and of course like most Labradors this big boy loves water. As soon as he heard the water pressure machine he came running. Hi buddy, good to see you. When he calmed down I took a few photos of him and this is the one I chose for the painting I'm going to show you. Here's my first tip about painting a black subject. If I'm working from a photo I like to take that photo out in daylight. Black can be very flat so I find it easier to paint if I can see a variety of tonal variations and taking a photo of the subject in daylight gives me that variation that I need. You can see this more clearly when you compare the photo I took outside with a photo I downloaded from Pixabay that I'm pretty sure was taken inside. For me there's not enough tonal variation there to work with. Okay I'm going to share a few tips about mixing and painting with black as soon as I tell you about Skillshare. If you haven't heard of Skillshare before it's a fabulous online platform that has classes on a whole heap of different topics from creative writing and film editing to cooking, photography and sewing. You name it they've got a class on it. There are thousands of art related classes as well. I've been teaching on Skillshare since 2015 and I have 13 watercolor classes on there myself that you can join completely for free with the Skillshare free trial. If you want to start your own creative career Skillshare has a fabulous class called Make Creativity Your Career Six Exercises to Create a Successful Side Project. Andy J Pizza will inspire you and help you to craft a simple strategy to achieve your goals. All of the classes are on demand so you can learn at your own pace in your own time. Whether you want to learn the basics of watercolor painting or learn how to cook Skillshare has classes to inspire you. If you've never used Skillshare and you'd like to try it I'm happy to let you know that you can access all my classes and many more for free. The first 500 people to click the link can get one month free trial of Skillshare. The link is in the description below. Thanks again to Skillshare for sponsoring this video. Okay mixing black and I've talked about this before. You can buy pre-mixed black paint but it tends to look a bit flat and uninspiring. This is Winsor & Newton's Lamp Black and I don't think it has any life to it. I used to use it because I thought it was easier than mixing my own but now I know better. To mix black you can use all three primaries red, yellow and blue. Complementary colours will also mix together to create black so yellow and violet, red and green, blue and orange. The colours I like to use to mix black are burnt sienna and french ultramarine. I'll demonstrate how I use those colours while I paint our friendly neighborhood black Labrador. When I mix dark colours like black I like to use a generous amount of freshly squeezed pigment. When you've got your paints squeezed out onto your palette they harden and you have to soften them with water and a wet brush in order to use them. In doing that you dilute the colour and make it paler. When I use freshly squeezed pigment it's wet and I don't have to add water to it to mix it. I can use a brush that is just slightly damp. When I mix the colours together they stay at their full intensity. I've just added a bit of water to this mixture because the first layer of paint that I paint on the dog I don't want it to be too dark. The beauty of mixing your own black allows you to adjust the temperature of your black by adjusting the ratios of the colours that you're using. If you want a cool black mix more of the cool colour into the mixture. If you want a warm black increase the amount of the warm colour that you're using. With the dog I painted some masking fluid onto the white highlights in the eyes and when that was dry I wet the paper with some water. When the dog was wet all over I took some of that dark colour and I placed it on the mixing palette and I mixed some water with it. To begin the painting I don't want a really dark colour so it needs to be diluted with water and then I start to wash some of that colour straight onto the wet paper. I use a large brush so that I can get the paint on there fairly quickly. When you mix colours the colours will separate on the wet paper. I used to panic about that but now I know that the colour separation adds to the beauty of the painting. It makes it more visually interesting. This colour that I'm painting on now is the lightest value that I see in the fur. While the paint was wet I took my small zero brush and I pulled some of that colour out onto the dry area just to create some loose hair here and there. Here you can see I've got a lot of variation in the colour that I'm painting on and that's not something I'm doing deliberately. It happens when I pick the paint up from the paint puddle and here I loaded my little zero brush in the black paint and I decided to pull a few whiskers off the edge while it was still wet. I've even got some variation in the colour there. I can see some burnt sienna showing and I took that first wash of colour all the way down to the bottom. When this wash dried I started adding the darker values. To do that I needed darker paint. I also wanted the paint to be thicker this time. I was going to work on wet paper to keep paint edges soft but I didn't want the paint to spread too far. I wanted it to stay in place on the wet paper so I go back into my paint mixture but this time I don't add water to it. Then I wet the area where I was going to work. In this case around the left eye and then I picked up the black pigment. I made sure my brush wasn't too wet when I picked it up and then keeping an eye on the reference photo I start to paint on the wet paper. I paint the darker areas that I see and I avoid the lighter areas and that under wash that I painted on first, that's what I will see in the lighter areas. You can see because the paint is quite thick it stays in place more or less. It bleeds slightly but it's not spreading all over the place. Because I'm on the wet paper it's giving me the soft edges that I want and I use the brush to push the paint where I want it to sit. Up here I'm starting to work out on the dry paper and before it starts to dry completely, if I think it's not going to be dark enough I put a bit more paint there. I spread that out on the damp paper and here you can see how dark Burnt Sienna and French Ultramarine can go when you use the pigment at its full intensity. I wet this area above the eye as well and again I use that thick dark sticky pigment and I paint that on the wet paper and that gives me that darker area beside the eye. I want soft edges on this shape as well so when I wet the paper I wet a larger area than where the paint will sit. I don't want the paint to drift to the edge of the water because if it does I'll get a hard edge where the water stops. I'll show you what I mean by that here. I want to paint the dark shape on the side of the head so the area that I wet is larger than where the paint will sit. To begin this dark area I want to use black that has a bit of water mixed with it. I don't want it to be too dark just yet and then I paint that colour roughly where that shadow sits on the side of the face, the dark area. I blur my eyes when I'm painting so that I can see the shape more clearly. I use big brushes to get the paint on there fairly quickly trying to leave that lighter spot there that I can see. Now I need darker and thicker pigment so I've made myself a new dish palette of Burnt Sienna and French Ultramarine because the other palette was starting to get a bit wet. Again I mix the two colours together and then I start to paint in the darker areas so where I can see that it's even darker. I go straight onto the wet paper. That layer that I just painted is still wet. Again I blur my eyes. It helps me to see the shape more easily. Because this paint is thicker it stays in place. Sometimes I might pick it up and there's a bit too much Burnt Sienna. Other times there might be a bit too much French Ultramarine. I quickly go back into the mixture and give it a swoosh with the brush and keep going but I'm not too concerned about the colours separating. I wet the paper before I started this section because I want to have the time to do this. I don't want it to dry before I get finished and I need to make sure this is as dark as I want it before I finish because I can't come back and re-wet this area and paint another layer on top because if I do I will disturb this pigment and make a mess. I did the same thing with the neck area. I wet it with water. I used the black mixture that had water mixed into it to paint in the middle tones and then before it dried I go back in with the creamy black paint mixture to add the darkest areas and right at the end when I'd finished everything else I used some white gouache to paint in the whiskers and there he is finished. Just to recap if you are painting from a reference photo choose it wisely. Look for one that shows lots of variations in the values or tones. Mixing your own black is to your benefit because the colour has more life in it and you can adjust the temperature of the mixture. I like to use freshly squeezed pigment because I don't have to dilute it to mix it. If I need to dilute it I pull some of the thick mixture away from the main bubble and then I add water to it. Using the fresh pigment also allows me to adjust the consistency of the paint which is helpful when you're working on wet paper. I hope these tips help you next time you paint a black subject. I've written a blog post about working with black watercolour paint. I've linked to it in the description if you'd like to read it. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time. Good. Roll in. Yeah this one is a watercolour pet portrait. He is a big friendly because all the properties we don't have here's my first tip about painting a black subject. I can't get that up. Let me try again. And finally dark colours lift.