Loose & Abstract: Watercolor Grid Art for Beginners

Hello everyone, welcome back. Today, I'm gonna do another grid painting of yummy little pieces. And I'm working on the Hahnemühle 100% cotton watercolor paper, because I like it, and the colors are really vibrant on it, and it's my favorite paper to work on, and the tape peels off of it without tearing your piece. And I'm gonna be using my Moshe's watercolors. So I do have a link to her Etsy shop in my favorites list, and you can find all my favorites list below the video. Instead of listing all the individual stuff to all the individual products, I made a page on my website with all my favorites, so that you can just refer back to that page, and it makes it a lot easier linking stuff under YouTube, because I can just say, check out all the favorites right here. And there's Blick links and Amazon links if you don't like to shop one or the other. So I'm gonna paint the whole page, maybe do some extra little dripping in there of some watercolor, and then we'll mark make on top, and I might even start this one off with some pencil marks, which is kind of fun to kind of just get some mark making underneath. It doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna show up, although this is watercolor, so I'm sure it probably will, but it'll just be another element in our piece that's perhaps delightful and unexpected. And this is just a black wing matte pencil. I like this as a drawing pencil, along with my pit matte graphite pencils. It's a nice dark pencil. And it's kind of fun to continue the whole thing as if it were one large piece of paper. So that's kind of what I've got going here. I'm treating this as one big piece of art, and then we'll get some little lovely, surprising compositions when we peel the tape. That's what I love about this. Kind of thinking that I wanna go with some browns and some indigo, so I'm kind of thinking, I don't know the names of the colors. I know they're listed in her shop, but this is the 36-piece sampler set that I've gotten out. And I wanna use like some dark browns and some maybe indigo, and then maybe a splash of some color that's like a lovely surprise. And so I'm not quite sure what the names of the shades are, but that's my intent and kind of where I'm thinking. And I'm just going to just paint away and see like, where can we go? And I'm just using my Princeton Neptune half-inch oval wash brush here with this, just kind of filling things in. I might throw in a little bit of this lighter blue and then come back in with the pop of something that I wanna pop it with like a bright pink or something. Okay, I'm thinking some pop of like hot pink or something. So get me a little piece of scrap paper I got over here and just see what are the, ooh, what about that color? Ooh, what about that color? Oh my goodness. Okay, that was, let's see what the second one is. It's a little brighter. And this third one is an orange. What are we thinking? Ooh, I'm kind of thinking this one up top, even though I just mixed orange with it. That's kind of what I was thinking in my mind is some vivid pink like that. All right, that's a lot of fun. I almost wanna do some wonky something, wonky circles. I mean, we got some wonkiness in there. I need to fill that right there in, don't I? Let's just fill that in with some brown. I kind of almost want like a little wonky something too. What could we do? There's a blue right here. Let's see what this blue is and just kind of rah, rah, rah, and just let it give us a different little addition there to our marks and see what we get when we've got it dry. So who knows? It might be fun. We'll see. Okay, so I'm gonna let this dry. I'm gonna kind of let it dry on its own and do its thing and see what these colors are gonna do. And then we'll come back and do some mark making. So I'll be back. All right, I have pulled out my Copic Acria markers and some of these little Thule Art acrylic pens for some mark making. I've got the Earth Tone set that I really like. So I've pulled these out to do some mark making on here. And at this point, it's just all about playing and having some fun. I've also got a Posca pen. I think I've got this Copic Acria in the white. I'd like a white one. Here's the white, I think. Yes, the white. We'll have the white ready, too. I needed that little piece of paper. And then we'll just, we'll have some fun with the Copics and the Thule Arts. How about that? And I like some of these a lot because of the color. Like, look how pretty this color is. I mean, that's basically this color right here that I love, love here in these little things. And so I thought we would just come back in, maybe do some mark making, just kind of add to what we've already got in here and have some fun. And, you know, what are some ideas that you could do with these? So these could be gift tags. They could be cut up and framed as little miniature pieces of art, which I particularly like that idea. You can cut these up into art prompt cards. So if you have, like, these are my Klimt art prompt cards from the Klimt prompt class I have, but you could write on the back of them and put little prompts on them. And so this is the perfect kind of project for experimenting with all of your supplies and getting creative with the different things that you've got on hand and making little samplers and then using them for prompt cards and testing out all your materials and figure out how your art supplies work. These little samplers for me are just super valuable in that I learn what the supplies do and don't do and what colors I like and don't like, and it's low commitment and it's low stress. That's why I like doing stuff like this because it's just fun. And sometimes you just need to have some fun at your art table. You need to let go of the expectations of making a masterpiece and doing a project like this, kind of lets you, gives you permission basically to let go and have fun. And so you leave feeling good, like it's a good paint day. Man, let me tell you, I love a good paint day, which is why most of the projects I do here on YouTube are projects that are low stress and you end up excited about your paint day. Okay, I really like the blue on top of the red, which teal and red are a particularly striking combo. And this is not necessarily teal, but it pops off that red, super cool. So I'm just going with it. Okay, that's fun. So the gold in this Copic Acria, I love, love. It's a very pretty shiny gold and it's a nice fine tip. So you can really get lovely mark making with it. And it's a good one. I like it. You can still see the pencil marks under our piece. Did you notice that? Definitely, I'm trying not to put my hand on anything wet. This is a paint stick, paint stir stick from the paint store that I can just keep my hand lifted off of the paper. I like that continuous line. I've decided even better sometimes than lines. So I like the, I like it. Can you see how pretty this gold is? I'm going to see if we can focus on how pretty that gold is. It's got a real pretty shimmer and a real nice fine line. If you're looking for like a really good gold, this is a good gold. And the Copic Acria has a silver also. So if you needed a good silver pen, the silver one is really nice also, if you wanted a good silver. I like this, I like this pen a lot. Okay, I like the little leafy patterns. That's a good, that's a good pattern. That's a very, that's a, a clumped throwback pattern from some of his painting studies. All right, so I don't know if they're done done, but they are super fun. And I thought it might be fun to go ahead and peel our tape and see what we got. Cause once you get to a point that you're like, am I done? I don't know. Then it might be time to peel the tape and evaluate what you've done and see what else does it need if it needs anything. You know what it could use maybe? A little bit of white dots possibly. We could judge that after we peel our tape now that I thought of that, but it could use maybe a tiny touch of white in some of these that might be an option later or we might just leave it like it is cause I do kind of love these colors. And I just taped this off as three inch squares. So three, six, nine, 12, three, six, nine, cause it's a nine by 12 piece of paper. So I just used a half inch painter's tape on this one to tape those off cause I wanted little squares in the big piece that I could then cut apart or I could leave like it is, or I could experiment. These could be collage pieces. If you end up wanting to use some of these for some collages, look at that. Oh my goodness. Look how fun this is. Oh my gosh. That was a lot of fun testing out, exploring, trying out different supplies, doing a different color palette than I might normally do. I like these little wonky square bits that I drew that are not perfect. They're a little wonky and those added like a touch of fun to the piece. I love those. So I did that quite a few times cause I really loved it. I love the bits of gold. You can really see how that gold is shining in there. So if you're looking for a good gold, definitely the Copic Acria Gold is a good one and it's got a good fine tip on it and it gives you a decent line. So I love that. Hope you enjoyed painting with me today and I'll see you guys next time.