Adding Detail to a watercolor painting with watercolor pencils. ✏️

Today I want to show you how I use watercolour pencil to add a lot of the detail onto this Galah painting that I did this week. I'm a bit of a bird watcher and I'm lucky that we live on 25 acres here because we get lots of different colourful birds that come and visit our garden. We get these crazy ones here. These are rainbow lorikeets and they're so funny to watch. We have our beautiful magpies that come and visit and these gorgeous black cockatoos and this is our family of beautiful kookaburras and we also get these pretty birds. These birds are called Galahs in Australia. That's the female on the right and her mate is on the left. The females have pink eyes and the males have black eyes. I'm often outside with my camera trying to get photos of them so that I can paint them which I did for this painting that I want to share with you today. I've been asked a few times if I'd do a tutorial using watercolour pencils so I thought I'd get them out for this painting. I've got more than one brand. I've got some Caran d'Ache pencils. I'm not sure if that's how you pronounce it. These are my favourite and I've got some Prismacolor pencils and I've also got a lot of Derwent pencils. I like the Caran d'Ache pencils because they're really soft but I can't tell you whether one brand is better than another because I rarely use them. I might sometimes use a lighter colour in an eye or I might use a light colour to add some highlights here and there on a painting but that's about it. They don't get used very often. I warn you in advance I'm no expert on using them but I decided to have a play with them and see if I could do more with them. I'll give you a quick rundown of my limited knowledge of them using a scrap piece of paper and then I'll show you how I use them on the Galah painting. You can use watercolour pencil directly on your painting and make marks with it that way. You can shade areas in. You can press light or you can press heavy depending on how dark you want the pigment to be and then you can take a wet brush that's got some water on it and you can activate that pigment with the water from the brush. What I found when I used it on the Galah was that if I put the pencil directly onto the paper some of the lines that the pencil makes will still be seen after it's been activated by the water like it has there. That's okay if that's the look that I was going for but I decided that I didn't want to see those marks on my painting. I wanted a softer look. This is a water brush that you can use for this sort of thing if you want to. You fill it with water and then you can paint with it like a normal brush. I didn't use this to do my painting with though. I prefer the bristles on my normal brushes rather than this one and here no matter how much I rub over that pencil line you can still see it. Another way you can use these watercolour pencils is to wipe your wet brush over the pigment and get some pigment on your brush that way and then you can paint with it. You can also wash the pigment out of your brush and use your damp brush to soften the edge away if you need to. What I discovered with this Galah painting was the way I like to use them is to make a little palette for myself on another piece of paper just by rubbing some of the pigment onto the paper and then I can wet that pigment there and use that that I pick up on my brush to do my painting with. That's the method that suited me the most so that's what I ended up doing with the Galah painting. When I painted the Galah I painted a wash all over with my watercolour paint and then I used the watercolour pencils on top of that wash to add some of the detail. I'll show you how I painted the wash first and then I'll start using the pencils. The first thing I did was paint a watercolour wash over the entire Galah. This is Winsor and Newton's Quinacridone Red that I've used and I've put that all over the pink feathers. I'll add detail over the top of this once it's dry. I painted some of the background in with a wash of Burnt Sienna and French Ultramarine and I held my board up so that the paint would drip down. This is a bit of the Quinacridone Red that I used on the bird and I just let that blend with the grey. Then I wet the white feathers on top of the head with some water and I'm dropping in some of the Quinacridone Red on here as well just randomly in a few places. I'm not using a lot of pigment here because I want the colour to be really pale. The paper I'm using too in case you're interested is Arches Hot Pressed watercolour paper. I also drop in some of that grey paint that I mixed up for the background. This is really pale as well. There's not much pigment there. I painted in the beak with the grey as well and I used that grey on the grey feathers on the back as well. I washed in the area around the eye with grey and now I'm dropping in some of the Quinacridone Red. Here it is all washed in. It's ready for me to start adding some detail over the top now. I quickly draw in that area around the eye and I'll paint that in first. I paint the eye in with some Lamp Black and then I use my water soluble graphite to start darkening some areas. When I finish doing that I use a wet brush to start activating that graphite. There's water on my brush and that softens all that graphite and then I darken the eye with another layer of black paint. Now I want to start using the watercolour pencils. This is a Caran d'Ache Supercolour watercolour pencil. This one doesn't have a name of the colour on it but it's got a number on it. It's 081. I'm going to use it to start to add some detail to the feathers on top of the head. I'm using it gently on the paper. I'm drawing it against my graphite pencil line where one feather touches the other. This is one way that I can use the watercolour pencil by applying it directly onto the paper like I would with a normal coloured pencil. Then I'm going to get my wet brush and start to activate that colour. That softens the pencil lines that I've made. I made sure I didn't press too hard with the pencil because I didn't want to leave those pencil lines behind after I'd activated it. I could do this with my watercolour paint if I wanted to but using a pencil like this just gives me more control than I would have if I was using the watercolour paint. As I said before I'm pressing really gently with the pencil so that I can try to avoid those lines still showing through once I wet it. That seems to be working okay there. Here's another supercolour pencil. This one is mouse grey and I'm going to use that on the top of the head as well. The same way I use the pink pencil I'm pressing softly because when I activate this with water I want to see a soft grey area of colour without seeing the lines that I've made with the pencil showing through. I'll get my brush with the water on it and then I activate the pencil like that. I can move that colour around now. Push it out further. I'll try it out on the beak as well. Put some colour here. Normally I would do this with watercolour paint but I just wanted to experiment and see what I could do with the pencil. This colour here is the same. It's the mouse grey and I'm drawing over the areas that I see that are darker on the reference photo. Then when I've got it where I want it I can use the water from my brush to activate it. After I did that I decided I didn't really like the look of it so I got my watercolour paint. This is Payne's grey and I'm painting over the top. Now I've gone back to the pink pencil and I'm starting to do some detail work around the cheek here. Then I take my brush and I activate it again with the water on the brush. When I saw that I decided that I wanted to do it a different way and I wanted a slightly darker colour. I've got another pencil here. This one's a Prismacolor watercolour pencil and the colour is crimson red and I decided to rub it onto the paper and I'll take it off with my paintbrush. I'll activate it on the paper. I felt that this would be a better way of doing these feathers here. That pink that I was using wasn't quite dark enough for this area. I think this is a better colour. Here is where I discovered that I could actually soften my paint edge with a damp brush the same way I do with my watercolour paints. I took the pigment out of the brush and then I can use the damp brush to soften that edge. I was pleased to discover that. I kept going with it and I resisted the urge to start using my watercolour paint. At this stage not only did I discover that I could soften paint edges with a damp brush but I also discovered that my preferred way of using watercolour pencils is to rub the pencil onto a paper palette like I've been doing and then using my brush to pick up the pigment. Here I'm softening the paint edge with the damp brush trying to. Over here I had a large area that I wanted to colour so I wasn't going to use the pencil there. I decided to get the watercolour paint out. My paper's wet here. I think this colour is quinacridone magenta if I remember rightly. Then I put another colour over the top. I can't remember what that colour was. I think it might have been permanent magenta or something like that. I also washed over this area of feathers here because it needed to be darker. Now I've got a Derwent watercolour pencil. This colour is Red Violet Lake. I'm going to put some of that on the white feathers on top of the head. This is a DaVinci Maestra brush that I'm using. It's a series 35 and it's a number five. It's got a really nice point on it and I can get right into nooks and crannies with it. Now I'm going to soften that paint edge. I've got to do this fairly quickly otherwise the pigment will dry and I won't be able to soften the edge. I've done a bit more with that colour and I'm trying to keep the colours quite pale on top of the head here. Here I'm layering the purple over that lighter pink colour that I put on earlier. I can take a damp brush and soften away the edge. I can use it just as I would watercolour paint but I've got a bit more control because I haven't got as much pigment on my brush. I'm back to the mouse grey colour and I'm starting to paint in the feathers at the back of the head. I'll soften the paint edge there. One thing I didn't realise too, I can also paint on wet paper so if I dampen the paper there with the water then I can pick the paint up like that and it acts in a similar way to the way watercolour paint would except I'm only using a tiny amount. I've wet that area again. This time I'll use the red. I need a bit more and then I run that pigment along the damp paper and it bleeds ever so slightly and I can soften it further with the brush. I'm going to draw a few more feathers in there. I'm using a negative painting technique to render these feathers where I paint around the outside edge of them to form the shape of them. I have a video here on YouTube that you can watch if you want to have a closer look at that. I've got a choice. I can put it on the dry paper and then soften the paint edges or I can dampen the paper and put the pigment on that way. I'm glad that I discovered that I prefer to take the pigment off the paper palette rather than use the pencil directly on the paper. I'm not keen on those lines that remain after I've activated it. This is another colour that I've got. It's a Caran d'Ache super colour and the colour is Granite Rose. I'm going to draw directly on the paper with it. I want to create some little feather flicks here and there. Because this is a light colour and the pencil is fairly soft I can draw over the top of the darker areas on the painting and you can see the marks that the pencil makes. If you make a mark that you don't like you can erase it with an eraser. As long as you haven't activated it it should remove okay. I'm not going to activate these marks with water. I'm just going to leave them as they are. I'll pull some of them onto the beak here and you can see them on top of that dark grey colour. I can make these marks anywhere I like and I can be comfortable doing it knowing that I can remove them with my eraser if I don't like them. Now I've got a white pencil and I'm doing the same thing. Sometimes I've got to go over the marks more than once just so that I can see them properly. Then I can stand back and have a look and any areas that I don't like I can take them off with the eraser. So there it is finished. I think I got a bit carried away with the detail but I enjoyed painting it. So there's an example of my experience using watercolour pencils. I can't see myself using them to paint an entire painting but I'd certainly use them again as I did here on the Galah painting just to help me add detail. I think they'd also be great to do small studies and sketches in a journal. If you're familiar with them and you've got any tips that you'd like to share let me know in the comments. I hope you enjoyed the video. Thank you for watching. Please hit the like button and make sure you subscribe if you haven't already and I'll be back soon with a new video. Here's my collection of watercolour pencils. Go away. There's a coffee maker downstairs. light colour for a few. I think they'd also be great to do small studies and schedules. Small studies and schedules. Have you ever done a schedule? I think they'd be great to use to do small studies in sketches. They'd be great to use to do small studies in sketches. If you're familiar with them and you've got any tips that you'd like to share let me know in the comments. Oh Louise.