EASY Waterdrops ANYONE Can Paint in Watercolor: Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

Water drops are a fun and beautiful way to add sparkle to your watercolor florals. Welcome to Sunlit Brushstrokes, my name is Jessica and today I'm going to be sharing with you some simple techniques that you can use to create these beautiful water drops. Plus I'll share a quick demo on how to do it in watercolor pencil. Let's go ahead and get started. All right, so what I'm going to do is show you a couple of different ways that you can go ahead and paint water drops depending on whether you've already painted your leaf or your petal or whatever it is and then also how you can approach it if you already know beforehand you want to have a water drop in there. So I'm just going to paint a very, very simple petal and a very simple leaf. So this is going to be sloppy. I'm not doing anything special. I'm going to use just quinacridone rose for my petal and I'm just going to go really, really loose. You can imagine you're doing a nicer petal than this but I'm just taking just some really basic artistic license and I'm not even that good at painting loose but I'm going to just quickly kind of do a petal. You don't even have to do a petal. You could just go ahead and just paint yourself like a swatch, like just a flat little swatch of a pink circle, pink square, whatever. I'm just going to put a little extra color in here and just pretend we've got a beautiful little petal here. But like I say, most of the time when I paint, I do paint a little tighter. So this is a little bit of a loose, loose little example today. I'm just going to soak a little bit of excess water out of here, drying it on a paper towel to show you what I mean. So just soak the excess out. So that's a really, really loose, simple petal. You're going to have more detail probably if you're doing a more ornate painting than that. But there's a basic petal and let's do a basic leaf. So I'm going to start with a little bit of light green and maybe drop a little bit of dark green. So I'll do the center vein and then again, just super loose, going to go thinner at the top and bottom of the leaf. So I'm just going to fill that in with this nice light green. And I am using arched watercolor paper right now. You probably could get away with cheaper paper since this is just kind of a fun little practice. But there's a basic leaf and maybe I'll drop a little bit of darkness around the edges. We don't want to go too fancy here. The purpose of today's project is just to show you how to do the water drop. So there's a basic petal and a basic leaf and we're going to let them dry because what I'm doing here is I'm going to show you how to approach this if that's what's happened. You've already done your painting and you decide, you know what, I want to add a water drop, maybe when you're getting closer to the end or you've already laid down at least one layer of pigment. That's what I'm going to show you here. Over here, I'm going to show you as if you planned out from the beginning where you're going to add your water drop and I'll show you what you can do for that as well. So let's just kind of draw a very, very basic petal again, nothing fancy and a very, very basic leaf. Again, nothing fancy. I don't want to get lost in the weeds and the details, although you definitely could if you're having fun with this. So let's go ahead and just draw maybe here is where we want to put a water drop. You can do whatever size you want. This is a huge water drop and do what works for you. And then you're going to have just a really tiny little highlight over on one side or the other. Now, to know where you want to place your highlight side of your water drop, you're going to want to go with the light source of the rest of your painting. So, for instance, this flower, when I painted it here, the light source is over here. Let's just say we wanted to put a water drop on the petal here. We would want to draw that drop in and then we're going to think, OK, the light source is over here. That means the highlight has to be over on the side, kind of facing the light. That's obvious, right? But that's just something to keep in mind. And it's actually going to get a little bit. There's a little trick to this that you're going to see in a minute. And so, yes, you want to plan it where your highlight is, but we're going to have kind of a bit of a reverse thing happening with our lights and darks right in the water drop. So we'll move that out of the way and we'll finish this up quick. We'll do the same thing. So, like I say, just keep in mind where your light source is on your painting before you decide where you're going to place your highlight. Oh, and you can tell where the light source is on this painting because you can see the shadows are more towards the right, the lower right. And so that means the light is coming from the upper left side of this painting. And so that's why I chose to put the highlight here. I did reverse over here. I've got this one with the highlight on the upper right, this one with the highlight more on the upper left. I don't have a rhyme or reason for where I place those here because we don't have a light source. This isn't in the context of a painting, but just keep that in mind when you are doing your painting. You want to think about where you put your highlight. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and paint these as well, and then we'll dry everything. I'm going to take my kneadable eraser and just lightly lift the pencil a bit because, as you know, once you get your pencil wet, it becomes permanent. I still want to see where things are, the highlights and the water drop itself, but I don't want to have intensely dark pencil here. And now you have two options for how you want to take care of your highlights. Because this is a pretty simple process, I'm just going to paint around the highlight and leave it white. But you can use masking fluid just on that tiny little highlight and that tiny little highlight. That's your other option. But let's just keep it simple and paint around them. We'll see how we do. You know what I'm going to do? I'm used to painting wet on wet, so I'm just going to put a bit of water in my shape. I'm not touching my highlight. Putting a bit of water in my shape and then I'll drop the pigment in. That's just kind of the way that I tend to paint the most is wet on wet. So let's just go ahead, get that water on there and then the paint. And I'm going to just put more paint around the outside of this little petal. And you're going to see, I'm going to use a firmer brush here too, you're going to see that highlight in the middle is going to stay, I'm just washing and drying my brush, is going to stay white because I have not put water on it. Let's just paint around that. You can use a tinier brush if you want to. And you can see we have our beautiful highlight there. And then I'll drop a bit of green into this one. Again, go on the outside edges. This is just my personal preference for painting. I like the wet on wet technique. There we go, we left the highlight, we left the highlight dry. And let's go ahead and fill this in and do the little stem as well. The tip of my brush and then I'll just drop a little bit of, maybe a little bit of darker green around the outside again. I like that effect on my leaves. I'm using the Artegria brush today just because it's, it lends itself well to loose painting techniques, but you can use whatever, whatever brush you want. So all of these are now wet and so we need to dry everything before we do the next step of our little highlights. Okay, so everything is fully dry and I'm going to go ahead and add the next step. So with these ones, I'm just going to quickly draw in a nice little circle shape or oval for where we want our water droplet to be. And you most definitely don't have to do them this big. I'm doing them this big just so you can see them easier on the camera. Sometimes water drops are really, really small. Let's go ahead and put one here and they don't have to be always perfectly round. They will kind of look a little bit more of an oval shape if they're kind of side profile, like this is maybe like a three quarters or something, right? But you can do them perfectly round. You can do them a little bit more oblong like I did this one. I'm kind of almost losing it here, but you can see it slightly. Anyways, so I'm just going to use a smaller brush. This is the Simply Simmons. It's number six, so it's nice and small and it'll make it easier to do some of these details. So what I'm going to do now is I will keep the highlights, so the same way I'm doing the little water drop on this one, I'll do it the same way on this one. And then I'll kind of repeat that for the leaves, right? So I'll use right side highlight here, left side highlight down here. So let's just kind of repeat what we did. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to wet. Don't dip in the paint first, dip in my water first. Again, I like working wet on wet, so that's the way I work. If you prefer to work wet on dry and soften edges, that's your other option. Put a little water in there and then I'm going to drop my quinacridone rose and maybe even a little bit of a shadow color over here. So first I'm going to drop my rose in, get it nice and deep and dark. So this is where it gets reverse because you're going, what? The light source is over here. How come you're going dark? This is where the lights and darks sort of go a little reverse in a water drop. So I'm just going to put a little bit of pink along the edges as well. So that's dark. I'm going to put a little bit of a darker color. I have some mixtures that have quinacridone magenta here as well. And maybe even a little phthalo blue, basically some kind of purpley pinks. And I'm going to use them just to make my shadow just a little bit deeper and richer and darker. The closer I am to the right. OK, I'm going to add a little water and blend that around because it's clearly, clearly too dry, right? So I'm just dropping a bit of clear water in there and just kind of letting things move around a little bit. We want a nice, smooth gradation. We don't want to have things where they're too outlined looking or coloring look like, right? So a little more pink. I just want to get that nice and smooth and a nice transition from dark to light. And you can see I put a little bit around the edges of the water drop as well, but the darkest part is over here. I'm going to put just a tiny bit more of it. I need that dark color to move around a little bit for us too. OK, so there's that one. And then we're going to come over here and do the same thing here, except for again, we're going to leave that highlight dry. So I'll just work around it. That's where it's helpful to have that tiny brush. And I'm going to drop this dark, this is right now, this is quinacridone rose. I'm going to put it around the highlight, just leave the highlight alone. And like I say, you can even just dab my brush off. It's quite wet, but a little bit kind of along the outside of this, just a little bit. And then we want some of that dark color again. I really like that beautiful dark color. So dip into it. It's like dry in my palette. So I'm just using my wet brush and just moistening it just a tiny bit. So I get just a little on my brush. And again, dropping it over here. OK, that's enough. And I'll just wash and dry my brush and just guide it ever so slightly around. If I'm not happy with where it's going, I'm pretty happy. I'm working fairly dry and with this tiny brush, it's not introducing too much water, which is nice. And just lift a little bit here and just get a smoother, smoother transition right there. All right, so we're going to do the same thing down here. I'm going to wet the shape. But of course, we're going to use green this time. So just going to dab off my brush. I don't want to have things like super, super wet. And I'm going to use a darker green for my shadow. And like I say, we're reversing. So this is going to be the darker side over here this time. You know what I might do? I might take another brush to kind of guide it around so I don't keep washing my brush. So let's just do this. And again, I'm going to put a little bit. Whoops, went over the line. I'm changing this shape a little bit. Just bring it down here a little bit like so. OK, I think I'm actually happy with that. That's I think good enough as it is. Let's do the same thing over here. So water first. And then the pigment. And we're working around that highlight again. And this is a nice deep dark green. So I'm thinking I'm happy with just the color as it is. I saw one artist put a little bit of yellow in the lighter side of her water drops. And I thought that was so gorgeous. But we're keeping it simple today. And we're just using like dark, dark shadow colors. We're not throwing any extra color in the light side. Overdoing it. Lift it out a little bit. As you can see, I'm kind of my shape. My shapes are changing a little bit because I'm going over the lines. OK, good enough. So we've got our dark side. Same same sort of thing. The dark is where the highlight is. And now what we're going to do is take the hairdryer and dry everything. And then we'll come back and do the final touches. All right, so I have dried these now. And sorry about that. I realized the green that I have here was kind of running out of the camera view. But I will just wet it. You can see what my dark green looks like. It was just a nice, deep, dark green. But any colors work for this. We're just playing here. OK, so final step is the shadow now. So we have it's hard to imagine. But this is the light side on this particular petal. The light is coming from here. We're going to lift a highlight here in a minute. But we're going to put a cast shadow around here. So we're going to do that next. And so I still have my tinier brush. This is the number six. And I will use the same colors that I used for the shadow here. It's a combination of quinacridone rose. And then some of this mixture that I have in my palette. That's kind of mostly quinacridone magenta. But it does have a little bit of phthalo blue. So I'll just show you what I mean. We're basically just going for kind of a purpley color. So use a nice tiny brush. And you're going to do a C-shaped shadow here. I'm too dry. So I'm going to dip into my water again. Just the tip of my water is getting pretty dirty. The tip of my brush. And we're just going to just gently kind of draw in this little C-shaped shadow. If you want an even smaller brush, you could. I almost feel like I could have a smaller brush right now. Okay, so there's our little shadow with the quinacridone rose. And then I will drop a little bit of this darker color in here as well. This was the, let's bring it into the camera. So this is my magenta phthalo blue blend. I'll just put it really dark. Bring it really close to that little drop there. So there's our shadow. So we'll go repeat that over here. And you can see I kind of messed up the shape of this anyway. So we can fix that with our shadow. And this one's come to life already, right? Because we have that nice beautiful highlight there. Because we preserved our white by not painting it. Because we had that one planned from the beginning. But we don't always know. Maybe at the beginning we're going to add a water drop. We haven't planned that. So that's where I'm going to show you how to lift. Okay, so there's our little highlight. This is a blend of pigment. You can probably tell that on my brush. I'm a little on the purple, lighter purple side. So my brush wasn't fully clean. But that's okay. So there's the initial part of the shadow. I'm going to just put a little more of the darker color in here. Just get it nice and deep and dark. Let's come close to the water drop. Maybe a little bit more of the rose. Just drop it in there carefully and gently. All right. And you can see the reason it gets... It's almost like the light is piercing through the light side. So the light is coming from over here. It's like shining right through the drop. And it's hitting the petal like inside the drop in the water there. It's creating that light area. Kind of almost like reverse, right? So it's the highlights here. And then the reverse of the highlight. You see the light kind of just... Almost like penetrating through that clear water drop and landing right there. So I'll show you how to lift this one. Just any small firm brush is good for this. So we're going to do a little bit of lifting. So over here, we're going to come into... And you can... If you feel more confident drying everything first, you can. But I think we're okay to just come into this. I might even need a smaller brush. But we'll see. See if we can lift a little highlight. Scrub it out right here. So I'm going to wet my brush. I'm going to scrub. And then blot with a paper towel. This is where you might want to dry your little shadow first. So you don't lift the shadow out. I think I need a smaller brush almost. Blot. I need a smaller brush. This one is another cheap one. Super cheap. It was a Michael's, like, in the kids section kind of brush. Let's see if we can scrub a little bit. It's a little bit tinier. So I can scrub a little more. So I'm just kind of going a little bit like... I guess I'm just scrubbing in this section. And then blotting with my paper towel until I get it light enough. And if I still am not happy with how it looks, I can take a light watercolor pencil or a tiny drop of gouache or anything that's a white paint and just cover this up. But I want to see if I can scrub it out or not. So I'll just try this. I'm blotting it on my paper towel. It's getting there, but it's not as light as clearly this one over here. Yeah, that's not lifting very well. So this is actually how I would handle that in the future if I was going to add a drop of water is I would add the drop. This is in the case that you haven't planned ahead of time, right? You can draw that drop in, draw your highlight in like we did over here. But then what I would go ahead and do is wet this area with some water and then scrub it out right now before we've added the dark. So start scrubbing it and lightening things off at this stage before you've added any of your shadowy colors in here. See how much you can lift. And it does lift easier when you have less here, right? Then we're going to dry it. So you can see you've already kind of got your highlight in place and then you're going to work around it. So that's what I would do if I was doing this on top of a petal. So let's do that. So I'm going to let that dry and we'll finish up these ones and then we'll come back. And I'm going to show you with this one a different technique too. So with this one, before we add the little shadow, we still have to do the cast shadow, right? And the light's coming from the opposite way down here. Light's coming from the left, shining right through. So it's going to have a highlight here. Hit the highlight and then come and lighten this area over here. You can see it's clearly already doing that over here. But another way to lift the highlight, you can do this before you have added any water. So this is 100% dry right now. And this is scary. I'm not usually the type to use a blade knife, but you can use a blade knife and just scratch a highlight into something. Some artists do that. You can do it at the very end of your painting. When you don't want to add any more water to something, you can just take a little knife and just be scratching it very gently. I'm trying to be really careful. I'm just removing some of the paint so you can see the paper. You can see that works beautifully for adding a highlight. So that's your other option. And then you add a shadow. So let's bring that green into here. You could even add a little more blue into this dark green color for our shadow as well. I'm just going to go ahead, drop this in. I almost need a tinier brush. I'm feeling a little bit like this one is just still a bit big for this tiny little shape. There is our shadow, our cast shadow. And we'll do the same thing over here. Drop our cast shadow in. I'm going to actually try softening the edge of this one. So I'm just going to use a damp brush. I'm just going to soften the outside of this little cast shadow. I'm not 100% happy with the shape of this. I'm going to tweak it a little bit too. Want to make sure that I drag enough of it kind of towards the right side of this painting. So let's put a little bit more of the green in here. Wrap it around, wrap it around the water drop just a little bit more. That's better. Yeah, I like that better. I'm not really too fond of the way I did this shadow shape here. I'm going to lift a little bit down here. I just feel like it kind of made a wonky shape there. Okay, I'll go something like that. I don't quite like what I'm doing. I feel like I kind of botched that shape a little bit with this one. I don't, I don't quite like it. I think it's a bit dark. I think it works that dark, that darker shadow would have been really nice. Had this leaf been a bit darker, but this leaf isn't as dark. So you could always, you know, fussy your leaf a little bit if you want to put a little more darkness in there. This is, again, this is more the idea and where to place your highlights, your shadows on a leaf. This isn't an example of how to paint a leaf. Let me assure you this was a really simple leaf. And I'm happier with how that one looks. This one just kind of, kind of got a little bit mushy there. We could put a little bit more dark, let's put a little more dark in our leaf just to kind of balance things. And again, like I say, this isn't, this is not an example of how to paint a leaf. Okay, I'll just speed the video up as I faucet this for a quick sec. Just lift a little bit of that pigment out. We don't want to make it like completely dark, but it just seemed like it needed more green on here to kind of, to kind of balance out the colors that I put into my, my little water droplet there. All right, I'll just lift a little bit, getting super picky. And again, like I say, this is not about the leaf. Okay, so last thing I was going to show you is this is dry enough that I think I can go ahead and show you how I would paint this if you wanted to do the technique here where you lift it beforehand, before you go ahead and put all of the shadow colors in here. What we're going to do is paint around that. So we're going to put, if you want, even if you want to see where my water is going, I'll put a little pigment on my brush. You could do this with just clear water, but I'm going to use really light pink. And I'm going to paint everything but the highlights. So we're going to get a little more water. That's not quite light pink. I'm going to paint this whole water drop except for the highlight. So you can see now we've preserved our lights there, right? Then I'm going to drop in. We have to still follow the same light dark areas. So we have to get it dark over here. And we're just working around it, but you can see we managed to pull out a pretty nice bright white there by lifting it before the shadow shapes. So just drop that in there and then a little bit of our nice dark shadow color as well. Drop it in here a little bit more. A little bit more water. And I'm going to wrap it around, wrap it around the outside of this a little bit. So just around the edges. Like so. Okay, make sure that I haven't lost my light area here. Just lift a little bit. So clean, thirsty brush, dab it off on my paper towel. And then I'll let that dry. Let's fix this one because I really don't like the way it looks. So I can just go ahead, wet this shape except not the highlight. So remember the highlight that I tried lifting wasn't really lifting very well. It'll show up better when I drop this dark in. So let's go back in with our rose. You can see now the highlights. Highlight's working better. Blend the rose out a little bit with some clear water. Like so. Then a little bit of our dark color if you want more of that dark in here. And of course, the other option is the knife method. And I actually don't mind the knife method. I really like how it worked there. When you're just lifting a tiny, tiny little bit of a highlight out of something. That's scary if you want to do a lot of lifting with a knife. But I didn't mind it on there. So there is that one. That one is basically done. The highlight's not amazing, but it worked okay. I'm going to drop a little more dark over here because as it's drying, I'm losing my darks. So a little bit more over there. Okay, I'm going to let that dry before I add in the final shadow. Let me just put a little more darkness over here. Dab it off. So you can see I keep kind of dipping into my water and then out of my paper towel. So what I have right now, I'm just wanting clear water to kind of blend things around. I feel like it's a little bit, I guess I lost my darks a little bit over there. Clear water and keep dabbing on my brush off so I don't end up bringing dark colors where I don't want them. Trying to control it by just getting the dark on there. Washing, drying my brush and then doing a little bit, bring a little bit dark down there. Tiny little bit. And then again, make sure I haven't lost my lights. It's really important to keep those lights on the reverse of your highlight so that it looks believable. Like the light is kind of shining through that highlight and hitting the light side down here of your water drop. So when that dries, then I'll just add that little shadow like I did everywhere else. So finally, I have dried everything so that I can come in and just do that final little shadow there. So I'll do the same thing I did before. Put a little bit of my rose and then a little bit of the other darker colors like the Quinacridone Magenta and Viva Blue. That little C-shaped shadow for our cast shadow. And then I'll go ahead and drop in a little darker. I'm looking quite dry, just wet enough to kind of let those shapes get on there and look smooth. And there you have our final cast shadow. And that's how I would go about doing it in watercolor. I'm also going to take a minute and demonstrate these water drops in watercolor pencil because I think it's kind of a fun variation from doing it in watercolor. In general, watercolor pencil can be an easier medium for beginners to start with. Some of you asked me about it. It was the thing that kind of unlocked watercolor for me. So I'm going to be doing some more teaching. I've got a class in mind for the fall for watercolor pencils. But I thought in the meantime, I'll just share with you how to do this in watercolor pencil and you can see how it works for you if it's something that is of interest or maybe you already do watercolor pencils and you would like to see me do it that way. So I'm going to just draw a simple petal, nothing fancy. Just imagine that this is just, I don't know, maybe on a wild rose or something. And then we'll go ahead and put our water drop here, maybe a little more circular because this one feels like it's maybe facing us a little bit more. So that would make the drop a little more circular. And then I will go ahead and draw in where my highlight is. This is just kind of a pinky color, reddish pink watercolor pencil. Then I'm going to go ahead and just color the whole thing except for that little highlight. I'm going to leave that plain or white. I've almost got a little color on there, but that's okay. I'm not going to wet it, so it's going to be okay. I'm just going to go ahead, fill this whole thing very lightly. I'm just almost scribbling at this stage. Super easy to do watercolor pencil. The early stages really, you don't have to have any coloring skills really. Just fill it in and then we're going to take our water and we will actually, before we add the water, I said we'd add everything. So we've got our water drop here. So what I'm going to do is the same way that I added the shadows and all the highlights and everything, I'm just repeating that over here. So we're going to color in our darker areas. So again, this side where the light's hitting is actually darker when it's on the water drop because the light is going to hit that highlight, penetrate through and create the lightest area over in here. So we want the darker area to be on the light side. Then we're going to draw in this little shadow shape and you can do this in layers like the watercolor, but I'm showing you it all in kind of one shot. And then I do have some pinky or not pinky, purple-y colors we can add to the shadow, just like we added some purple colors in this one. We're going to add a little bit of a purple-y color into our shadow area. So this is kind of a purple, purple-pink. And then I'm going to go ahead and wet things. So I got my water and just a basic Simply Simmons brush just to give us a nice layer of water here. And this is where it's super easy to blend. You can get away with less water with watercolor pencils, which makes it easier to control the water. So I'm just going around. I'm trying to avoid getting much of the shadow shapes wet right now. I'm just trying to wet this basic petal shape and just blend it around with my wet brush. So that's what I'm doing right now. Trying to avoid the drop for now. It's okay if it gets a little wet, but a few little crumbs here I'll just lift. Okay, so that's all we're going to do at this stage. Then I'm going to take the hair dryer and just dry it quickly. Then I'll come in and do our little water drop. All right, so I've dried this. And if you've watched my watercolor pencil videos at all on my channel, you know I do like to add in a little bit more variety and depth, dimension, detail in the second layers or third layers. But for now, I'm not going to worry about details because this is more about the water drop. Definitely check out my other videos. I have other information coming on watercolor pencils. So the actual watercolor pencil techniques for getting more detail is available on some of my other videos. So what I'm going to do now is take my water brush. This is slightly smaller, but I'm just wet the paintbrush. It's just a paintbrush. I'm just wetting it. And I'm going to fill in the lightest section of my water drop, which is down here. Then I'm going to work my way up into the darker section gradually. So work from light to dark and wet that dark shape. You can see it's almost automatically blending. We can lift a little bit if it starts to leak down too much. But that's as simple as that is. Then we're going to dry it and come in and just wet that last little shape. So I've dried it and I'm going to just repeat that. So I've wet my brush. And you will notice I do have a paper towel here where I am blotting because with watercolor pencil, especially as we get into these nice, dark details like this shadow, we want to be fairly dry. My brush is not super wet. It's wet enough to create this amount of blending. So I'm moving the paint, just blending it around ever so slightly. I should say the watercolor pencil. You want to be able to blend. Oh, just watch that shape. Sorry, everybody. A little bit awkward shape there. I just kind of went out of the lines. Stay in the lines if you can help it. But anyway, you can see it's so forgiving. You just use a little bit of water. You can create that shadow shape. Super simple. And as I said, you can add more details to your petal as well. You know what? I decided I'm going to go in here and just soften the edges of this shadow. I feel like my shadow is too big. Didn't notice it at the time I painted it. I'm just going to soften the edge of this and kind of shrink that little shadow shape down a little bit. So I'm just using a wet brush and just blending it out a little bit. Just shrinking it down just a smidgen. If you're interested in learning more about watercolor pencil, you'll want to sign up to my newsletter to find out about my watercolor pencil course when it comes out. But you can also check out my watercolor pencil playlist where you can find more videos on watercolor pencil. Some are perfect for beginners, but I also have some intermediate watercolor pencil videos on there as well. In the meantime, I hope this tutorial has brought a little taste of God's beauty and peace into your everyday life and that it's inspired you to continue enjoying your own creative journey. See you again soon. Bye!