How to Paint a MODERN WATERCOLOR Painting

Hi there, welcome to Elkie Art. Today I wanted to do a watercolor exercise that is great to create some modern watercolor art. It also is a wonderful way to practice your control of how wet or dry your paper is and the places where you are adding water or paint. So it's kind of a good experimental activity that you can use to improve your watercolor techniques and has a really nice result. So this is what it looks like. As you can see it's just lots and lots of circles. They vary in size and placement and mine are very close together but you could make yours very far apart too as long as maybe some of them touch. So it's kind of playing with this idea of letting some of the colors bleed into some of the other colors. Notice that my color scheme is all blues and greens with a little bit of grays in there too but you could pick something completely different. So play around with this one, maybe try it a couple different ways and see what you think. It's a very calming therapeutic activity for me at least so see what you think about that too. And then another thing that you could do that I didn't do in this tutorial is you could also play around with adding things like salt or rubbing alcohol by little drops of that and see what those things do to impact how this turns out. So a lot of things you can do with this you can try it a lot of different ways and a lot of different times and it really I think every time will have kind of a cool result just because it's kind of a more abstract painting and creates a great piece of modern art. So enjoy this one and please comment down below if you have any questions for me. Hit that like and subscribe as well so that you can see more of my videos when they pop up on YouTube. All right thanks so much for watching guys! For this project I am using watercolor paper. This one is by Master's Touch. It's 140 pound. It's not my top quality watercolor paper but it's great for practicing little exercises and as you can see I'm going to tape it with masking tape all the way around the edges to make sure that it doesn't ripple or wrinkle during my activity. I'm getting a yogurt cup filled with water. I'm going to wipe down some of my watercolor palette because it gets quite interesting in the middle so I like to kind of clean that out. So I start off with a nice clean slate for mixing, adding more paints and I am ready to begin. So I'm starting with a round brush. I believe this is a size six or eight. Use whatever is comfortable for you and I'm making a nice wet circle on my page. I'm trying to make sure that it has plenty of water in it so it's more like a nice little puddle. You can see that I've used a little bit of blue paint and I'm going to go ahead and make another circle right next to it. Now these circles do not need to be the same size. It's okay if they're not perfectly round too. They could look more lopsided and it won't impact the picture at all. In fact it might make it look more like stones or pebbles. Now I'm adding another one and you see they actually touch here and I'm going to encourage some touching with these two as well so that the colors can kind of bleed into each other. One of the things that people avoid usually in watercolor are their colors bleeding. I say to my students all the time, do not let your colors bleed. It's better to jump around your painting and wait for that area to dry. Here we're doing exactly the opposite and we are letting our colors, in fact wanting our colors to bleed into each other just to see the impact. I'm starting off with some light color. It's definitely more of a watery mixture and less of paint and I'm adding in, dropping in some more water and some more paint as I go. You kind of have to work a little quickly on this one so that things don't dry too quickly especially as you kind of span out adding circles in different directions because if they do dry then you won't have that bleeding effect from one color into the next. So I do encourage you to use quite a bit of water in this activity even adding more kind of going back in to some of my other ones adding more drops of water so that you can see how they all bleed together. Now I'm trying to kind of jump back and forth between colors as well as you can see so I've mostly been using blues and greens and here I'm going to throw in a gray. I believe this is a Payne's gray and it doesn't really matter what colors you use and you can even try using colors that don't blend and mix well to kind of see what happens and give a different effect. I'm just kind of adding dots of water. I'm also getting what we call a backwash and a lot of those are sometimes things that we avoid as watercolor artists but when you know how to use them they can create some really neat effects and that's happening in my gray circle down there on the right. So I'm going to continue to jump around trying to make sure that my circles are touching in the different edges here and I am content to using this brush the whole time. Oh it's at size 10. Now I saw the the number there a Grumbacher size 10 round brush. I do tend to try to use a larger brush if possible so that you're not taking so long to fill some of these in. I'm dabbing extra colors in, extra water to try to keep these circles nice and wet. Again this is where in my opinion it gets very therapeutic. You're just kind of bouncing around from one circle to the next filling them in with a nice watery mixture of water and paint and then adding some dabs of brighter richer colors as you continue. There are a lot of different ways that you can practice this technique not just with circles. I hope to do another tutorial soon maybe with horizontal lines and letting those kind of bleed and blend together as well. There's a lot of ways that you can just play with the paint and still have a nice result at the end not just something that you throw in the garbage. This one although is just kind of random circles it would be a very nice painting to add maybe some text over the top with like a marker or something like that or you could even add just a white piece of paper maybe cut it out as a rectangle or a circle and glue that to the top and then add some text over that. This would be great if you put a picture in the middle like a photograph and then use this almost as a frame or a mat and then frame that. So there's a lot of different things you can do with this to make use of it so it's not feeling wasteful. I think I like this one enough that I would just put it in a nice crisp white mat and frame and consider it a modern piece of artwork. This color scheme these blues and greens are some of my favorites. I find them very calming relaxing so looking at some art like this hanging up on my wall definitely would not be a bad thing. As you can see I'm continuing adding some smaller circles some larger circles some medium-sized circles and again just bouncing back and forth between the blues and the grays and the greens. And like I mentioned earlier if you wanted to try adding some salt to this project or some rubbing alcohol usually I wait until I have an area that's wet maybe a couple areas and then while it's still damp on the paper you can drop in or sprinkle in some salt or I use an eyedropper or you could just maybe dip the back of your paintbrush in some rubbing alcohol and add a couple drops of that to your still semi-wet circles and see what happens. There's a lot of fun effects that you can do with watercolor and those are two of them that are fun to play around with so if you wanted to experiment a little bit with some of these techniques you this would be an excellent chance to do that as well. I do go over eight different techniques that you can use with watercolors in an egg painting tutorial on my channel it is you type in watercolor egg I believe and then L key it should pop up and in that one I do eight different eggs where I experiment with eight different watercolor techniques you can kind of see a variety of techniques and how to use them and what effects they have all while decorating some eggs. All right and you can see as I get closer to the edges here that I do just have my circles go right off the edge and letting them go right over the tape so that it looks like they continue off the edge of the paper and this is another great reason why I like taping around my paper is so that when I am finished and all of my circles are dry and I remove that tape it will give me a nice crisp white border around my painting and man that white edge just really gives it a nice finishing touch. Now you can see since I haven't been up here that these two circles that I'm trying to connect this one with have already dried so I'm not getting that bleeding effect and that's okay but that's kind of where you want to try to work fast so that you do get some bleeding happening. I'm going to zoom in here so you can see the bleeding going from one circle to the next just adding a tiny bit of extra color in there just to make it interesting. Notice when I add color I just kind of dot it in and leave it alone I'm not brushing it very much because I want the color just to kind of mix and spread in that water on its own so I don't want it to be too brushed in. The more water you have in some of these circles and the more they'll kind of bleed and mix and play so don't be afraid to have fun with it have it nice and wet. The paint will only go where the water is. Another fun exercise would be to go back in and in between all these circles where you see these white patches to go back in and paint that or color that in with maybe a black or something to really accentuate the circles that might be a fun exercise as well. Jumping around adding little dots of color dots of water and continuing to fill in my circles. I really like the gray tones added in just because they remind me of stones it's almost like we're looking at the bed of a river down into the water at the little rocks playing underneath. Zoom back out here so you can see my progress we're almost finished filling up the paper. I do recommend starting on the left and working your way right if you are right-handed so that you're not you know dragging your hand through the wet paint that does make it easier and I also paint on a board so that I can turn my board so that would be another helpful thing if you tape your painting down to a board instead of a table then you can move it around as you need to so that you can get to all the different angles of your painting. I hope you enjoyed this painting technique. I'm now going to remove my tape now that it is dry so that you can see those nice crisp edges I was talking about. Thank you so much for watching and please let me know how this goes. It's such a fun relaxing technique and I hope you enjoy doing it as much as I do. Again if you enjoyed this video and you actually made it to the end here please hit that like and subscribe button down below. Thanks so much for watching guys and I hope to see you again soon!