How To Use Watercolor Pencils for REALISM | Beginners Guide to Watercolor Pencils

Hey everybody, welcome back to my channel and to another video. In this one we are going to be going through how you can draw realistically with your watercolor pencils and so I'm going to demonstrate this technique using a lovely close-up of a tiger and I'm going to first take you through how you can block in all of the colors and get your first layer of shading down and then we'll blend it all out with water and add some great details on top and build up that fur texture. So I'm without further ado let's get into it. Let's start off by talking through the materials that I'll be using in this video. For the watercolor pencils I'm going to be using the Albrecht Dürer watercolor pencils and all of the materials that I'll be mentioning will be listed in the description if you want to check them out and I'm using the set of 6D. I've used these before and they're really good quality. They are the ones by Faber-Castell which is a really good brand. For the paper I'm going to be using the Arteza cold pressed watercolor paper and I thought this would be a great choice because I want to do a lot of detailed work in this piece so I wanted a paper that wasn't too textured but also could handle watercolors. So that's why I've picked this paper. When I first got my set of watercolor pencils the first thing that I did was create a color chart and swatched all of the colors that I had and I'm going to use that color chart for this drawing to help pick the colors that I want to use for this tiger study and I'm mainly going to be looking at the section of all of the really neutral natural looking yellows oranges and browns because these are the colors that are going to be most accurate to the color of the tiger's fur. Once I've done that first step of identifying all of the colors that might work with this reference image I took them out of my watercolor pencil set and I laid them all out and then I started testing them out and sort of selecting them and narrowing them down to just a couple of each color that I wanted to use for this piece because we don't need to use all of them. I started off by testing the different yellows and I basically swatched out all the browns as well that were very similar and I just picked the one that matched with the reference the most and by the end of picking out all of the colors I only had nine colors that I was using for this entire piece and here you can see the ones that I've picked. I just picked a range of some nice yellow tones, orange tones and browns and of course white and black and because the tiger has white fur I picked a grey in there as well for the shadows. Now let's get into the study and I started off with my black pencil and used this to first get in all of the black markings for the tiger's fur as well as getting in the shadows for the eyes like the pupil and I really like blocking in my darkest colors first. I really think that it helps judge all of the other values and I know that a common problem that beginners have is that they're scared to go too dark and scared to get in those darker values so if you do it as your first thing I feel like that takes away a lot of the fear because you're just getting straight in there jumping at the deep end and blocking in all of those dark values and then once I blocked in all of the black areas and the black markings I started to work on the yellowy orange fur. I started off with a light base layer of the yellow color that I picked and this was the dark naples ochre from the watercolor set and I basically just added a base layer of this to all of the areas of yellowy orange fur. Basically adding it everywhere but the sections of white fur. I also added this for the areas of the eyes that were that more yellow tone and that tended to be around the outer edge of the iris. Once you've got a base layer down with your lightest color it's time to go and build up the mid-tones and I did this using the raw umber. I started working on the nose and I basically marked out on my reference the area that was a bit darker and had shadow on the nose and I just filled that in with that raw umber and a tip that I have for you guys is that you don't need to apply a lot of pressure when you're doing this step. We are going to blend all of this out with water so it's going to stop being grainy it's going to remove all of that graininess and give us a really smooth vibrant result and all of the colors will get a lot darker and more vibrant so don't worry if yours is looking grainy and a bit light at this stage because everything will become a lot darker and more pigmented when we blend it with water. At the moment as well we're not working on building up lots of details we're just sort of blocking in those main colors for each area. Once I'd got in the shadows within that warmer areas of fur the orange yellow areas of fur I'm going in and using that grey color that I picked out to actually create some shadows within the white areas of fur. It's really important that if you're drawing an animal that has white fur that you do add in some grays for the shadows it's not all bright white. I finished off this layer by going in with some more saturated colors like the burnt ochre and burnt sienna to bring a bit more vibrancy and create some different colors so it looks a bit more interesting by creating those warmer oranges and getting in those reddish tones with the burnt sienna because if you just layer more and more colors over the top of each other it will just bring more richness to your drawing. And once you've finished getting in a base layer across your whole drawing with your watercolor pencils it's time to move on to blending it all out using water. Now just before we move on to the next part of the video I just want to let you guys know that you can follow along with this tiger demonstration in real time the full nearly four hour tutorial is available over on my patreon as well as over 300 other real-time tutorials that you can access for just a small amount per month. I have got lots of tutorials for watercolor, colored pencil, charcoal, pastels and much more so if you want loads of fun art projects to give a go then I recommend checking out my patreon. I'll leave a link in the description and a link to the website that I created where you can just go and see the library of tutorials that I currently have available over on my patreon. So I'll leave a link check it out and let's get back to the video. Now it's time to blend all of this out using water and I recommend using a few different size brushes for this. I use a really small round brush a size 4 round brush to blend out all of the details like in the eyes and then I've got a larger round brush for example size 8 which is better for blending out large areas such as the fur and I'm also going to be using a flat brush which is a half an inch brush which is just a bit bigger as well for the areas of that nose that middle area which is a large area and so it's more efficient to blend it out with a larger brush and my biggest tip that I have for you guys when blending out your watercolor pencils with the water is to go from your lightest areas into your darker areas and be very careful what areas you're blending out because it can be really easy to accidentally blend that black watercolor into those lovely yellow highlights and muddy up all of your colors. So make sure that you're frequently washing out your paint brushes before changing and blending a new color so wash out your brushes between blending different colors and also work from the lighter areas to the darker areas. You can see that I've switched to that larger paintbrush to blend out the middle area of the nose here because it's just more efficient it's faster it gets the job done better and using the appropriate size brush means that you won't have any patchiness if I was to use a really tiny paintbrush to blend out a large area you'll have a lot more streaks and patches and harsh edges where the watercolors are drying at different times. So you can see when I'm blending out these areas of fur that I normally start with the yellow and brown tones and then work towards the black markings next to those areas and I wash out my brush so much to make sure that I'm avoiding making the colors all muddy. Before moving on to adding details to your painting make sure that you wait for it to completely dry. I wait for about half an hour an hour just to make sure that it's completely dry because if you don't wait for it to dry then your paper is still going to be really vulnerable and it's going to be wet so if you add pencils over the top it'll be really easy to damage that paper. The great thing about watercolor pencils is that they seem to work very similar to colored pencils like when you're blending with solvent with colored pencils they work in a similar way because I found that it's really easy to layer the white pencil over the top of the first layer of black watercolor and so you can layer lighter colors over darker colors and the second layer of watercolor pencil just sticks really well to the paper so I was able to achieve these lovely details very easily and so once you've waited for your paper to dry you can start building up the details. I'm using my white and black pencil first to first establish all of the highlights especially within those black markings any bits of white fur that are overlapping onto the black markings I'm getting them in first and then I can work in between those highlights and add the black details and black bits of fur and whenever you're getting in details it's really important that you make sure that you're keeping your pencil really sharp so that you don't get any fuzzy lines you get really crisp details. Just like how I started off adding the black markings in first when we did our base layer I'm actually getting in the details for the black markings first as well and it's important when you're drawing fur that you try and transition in and out of different areas of fur you don't want it to look like a really harsh cut off point where the black fur goes into the yellowy orange fur you want it to look gradual and natural so make sure that you're adding some black details going over onto the warmer toned areas of fur and over onto the white areas of fur so that it's more of a transition and it looks really natural. Then once I've got in all of those black details I'm going in and working on building up details within the warmer toned areas of fur within those orangey stripes using the same colours that we used for the base layer and I make sure that I'm doing lots of short little pencil strokes that are going with the direction that the fur is going in. Make sure that whenever you're doing a realistic drawing that you're looking frequently at your reference image to make sure that you're staying on the right track especially if you are drawing something like fur because the direction the fur is going in for each section can be different so make sure that you frequently look at your reference image. Now that I've finished this drawing the last thing to do is to remove the tape. If you did give this drawing a go then make sure to tag me on Instagram at kirstiesart and show me what you created. Show me as well whatever you're working on at the moment tag me in that because I frequently check my Instagram and add what you're doing to my story to show off all of your amazing talent but I really hope you enjoyed the video. If you did please give it a thumbs up and subscribe if you're new around here and even tick that bell icon so you do get notified on my future videos but that is it from me and I'll see you guys in the next video bye everybody