Painting Modern ART NOUVEAU Watercolor Color Pencils Tutorial

Hello everyone, how are you doing? Those of you who know me a bit longer know that I adore the art of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha very much. In the 1900s his style was so original and different from everything else that existed that it was called Art Nouveau. Mucha's work became incredibly popular and has been imitated by generations of artists to this day. I was lucky enough to have visited one of his exhibitions in Prague myself and having seen his work for the first time in real life and learning about his background just made me admire his passion and dedication to art even more. So whenever I get the chance and feel confident enough to attempt another Art Nouveau inspired artwork I do my best to do justice to my inspiration. So today I show you the painting process from the sketch to the final painting and you can paint along with me if you like. I paint with watercolors and color pencils and you can find all materials in the video description. Just so you know I always work with a digital collage on which my painting is based up on and you can do that for your own artwork too. I used free stock graphics for the Art Nouveau elements and I put pictures of flowers, haircuts, faces and clothing together in Photoshop to create a concept which I just trace onto my watercolor paper. And by the way the beautiful model that I paint today is as funra on Instagram. So create your own collage or work with the one I use in this video. Okay are you ready? Let's start! The very first step is to fill in all elements of the painting with the base color. Mix a light beige tone for the skin and light blue and pink shades for the flowers. For the dress, the Art Nouveau background design and the crown you can use various golden metallic paints. Paint everything with a light first layer but leave the hair white for now. And whenever you fill an area in with watercolors think about how the watercolor will dry. Would it look prettier if you'd add a little bit of a different shade instead of just keeping it one plain color? Or would an abstract effect look good here too? If that's the case add another color or just water while you paint. This way you will get abstractions. For the blue flowers for example I mixed different shades of blue and purple to spice them up. Depending on the paper you use you will get rougher abstract effects when doing this technique. Therefore when you paint skin be careful and don't apply too many different colors or water to avoid getting abstract effects somewhere you don't want them. Moving on to the next step of this painting. Once we have filled in all shapes with a base layer we can now apply the second layer. Let's mix some light grays and reds for her skin tone. I try to limit myself to a maximum of about three layers. Watercolors can get very dull quickly and especially flowers and skin need to look bright and vibrant so having dull colors is something I want to avoid in any case. Now the trick to get vibrant colors but still get the right values with only a few layers is to simplify the shapes of your object. Try to distinguish two shadow layers and stick to them. Keep your edges crisp and clean. Having a soft blending in a small detail like a flower petal won't be noticed at all and will only make your piece look fake. Following this technique not only makes your watercolor look fresh and vibrant but it also saves time because you don't have to think about applying countless layers. After shading the flowers let's move on with adding those signature contours that are an essential style element in many of Muras paintings and designs. Here I added a thick dark pink contour around the lily and thinner blue contours around the delphinium flowers. Play around with the thickness and color and experiment with what looks best with your design. Next we want to work on her dress again. We laid down a simple first layer but on our reference photo the dress has a lot more detail and looks like a velvety golden fabric. Here again let's simplify it and just add one darker layer for the shadows and leave gaps to indicate highlights. Then use a detail brush and refine the dress by adding a few sharper contours and shades. A little bit of cell shading on the leaves before we move on with the next part. But first let me thank today's sponsor Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people like you and me on topics including illustration, design, fine art, video, freelancing and so much more. Members get unlimited access to thousands of inspiring classes with hands-on projects and feedback from a community of millions. 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The first thousand people get a two month of premium membership for free. Let's move on with the painting. Let's continue with the face actually. It's easy to get too dark too quickly and this portrait in particular has a very light complexion. So I only add some of the darkest details like lashes and nostrils with watercolors and save the softer gradients to the color pencils part. Let's start with a light gray color and apply a thin layer of pigments around the edges of the face, her nose and on her chin. Continue this process with pink, beige and light blue tones. When you work with color pencils on your watercolor paper keep your pencil sharp and start with the lightest pressure possible to be able to connect the color pencils area with the watercolor only areas. Vary your color pencils and exaggerate the colors that you see in your reference. I always use opposite colors like orange tones and greens or reds and blues for skin tones. With this kind of juxtaposition the colors appear vibrant and more lively. Now let's fill in the lips with carmine red and pink. The darker the underlying color is the more pressure you can apply. For the vibrant red lips we need to press the pencil more than for the light colors of her complexion for example. Let's continue with refining the eye section. Painting even eyes with watercolors is quite difficult to say the least because this medium is so uncontrollable. This is why I use color pencils here. Now we can define the shape of the eyes properly and work out any problems. Make sure the irises are of the same size and the white of the eyes is even in both eyes as well. The makeup too has to be symmetrical. Take your time and work as long as you need to And now let's match the neck area to the face. We don't need to pay this section as much attention as we did to the face so we can just add a little bit of cross hatching here and there with the same color pencil shades we used before in the face. Now comes the last and most exciting part my friends. We left the shape where her hair belongs white in the beginning and that has a reason. Now we can place it on top of everything. And it will look super crisp and neat. Although the hair is black let's add browns and blues to get some variation. With a medium sized brush indicate larger hair strands and with a smaller brush paint the details and tiny strands of hair. Make sure to leave a couple of white gaps for the highlights. If you like you can use a bit of white gouache or acrylic to add highlights on the lips the nose and the crown. And tada we are done. We just created a brand new modern art nouveau painting. Congratulations! In this artwork I combined a lot of things that I'm passionate about like ancient Egypt, beautiful flowers, beautiful jewelry, beautiful girls, like just all the things that I really like. And making this kind of art makes me really happy and I hope I could spread a little bit of that joy with you. If you like you can support me over on Patreon. I have over a hundred painting tutorials there, work in progress pictures, original artwork, prints, merch, just a lot of wonderful things. And you can find a link down in the video description to follow me there and in fact if you liked this video I have something for you because I made a three hour long step-by-step tutorial out of this painting where you can follow me even better than in this short video. So if you like check out my Patreon site and if you haven't already subscribe to my channel that really helps me out. Leave a comment and like my video if you liked it of course. And yeah as always I hope I see you in the next one and have a wonderful day. Bye bye!