Turn Simple Watercolor Shapes Into Cute Owl Doodles

In today's art tutorial we're illustrating owls. Hey friends my name is Shada Campbell and around here we make art and it's fun not scary. Today we are going to start our owl illustrations with watercolor and then add colored pencil on top. It's a simple way to illustrate something and I'm using my little Shada Campbell watercolor set as well as my Ardex notebook. And you can see I've just made this little shape for the owl's body. I lifted a little bit of color for his face so just using paper towel or a q-tip to lift and then you can work out the shape of wings. So we're keeping it pretty simple and we're just going to make a whole bunch of sort of messy owl shapes with watercolor and then we'll add most of the details with those colored pencils. This is how I approach illustrations in my new book Whimsical Watercolor Doodles. Pre-orders are available now or open now. I will say more at the end of the video but please go pre-order if you like my teaching style. This little cutie I started with a cream color for the face and body and then I sort of surrounded it with a gray brown and then did the wings and the tail. And then of course you can add some little watercolor details as well but optionally you could just save that step. Let's do kind of a sideways teardrop shape for this guy and then we'll put the wings up on top. I mean you can see my wings are messy they're not always equal size and shape. We're keeping it very whimsical very very perfectly imperfect today. For this fellow I did a circle for the head and then just a line for the wings and then I sort of worked out the shape of the wings added the body sort of tail slash body in the back darkened up the color ever so slightly and then I was like you know that body kind of looks too big so I tried to lift it a bit and and I honestly think that worked out fine. Over here we're going to do a very simple owl he's kind of an almond shape and the wings are just at at his sides. Owl shapes are now in place I'm simply adding a few kind of just little hits of the brush basic brush marks to give the look of feathers and to add some coloration and then this fellow over here I'm going to go around his perimeter and create a darker wing sort of shape his face ever so slightly and I'll add a really light brown to give the look of feathers on his chest and tail. You can finish up the watercolor portion of your owl illustrations by experimenting with making some brush marks or even lifting some color and then leave it to dry completely before we start adding those colored pencils. One thing I love about illustrating this way is that once those major shapes are in place it becomes really fun and playful. I think for a lot of us that stressful element of feeling like we need to draw the owls well is now out of the way we've made these cute little owl shapes and now we get to be quite fun and playful. For example I've drawn two large circles on this guy and then I put two little black c shapes right in the center a black beak and then I'm just creating the look of eyes of course and then I'm playing around with doing marks all kinds of different marks for feathers so I've done little scalloped lines around his eyes and on his wings I'm doing little v shapes on his chest I'm just doing some messy shading you get to be very very playful and you don't have to do nearly as many marks as I am doing here to create some really cute owls so you can be quite minimal about it or you can have a lot of fun and just layer layer layer. For this guy I've done two large yellow circles with the little c shapes in the center or actually I did kind of o shapes using a c or an o in black gives you a bit of a highlight on the eye and I gave him cheeks and I gave him big scary eyebrows and a little curved beak and then I'm layering in some different grays and browns kind of working through some shading and mark making I really try to have fun with this and as someone who is a recovering perfectionist I just try to loosen up and try things you know some videos I will practice everything beforehand this is one where I was like I'm just going to get in there and see what I come up with and it's gonna have to be you know fine because it's supposed to be experimental and playful this one this corner owl I was like his cheeks look like are giving like saw the the horror movies with the like swirlies I ended up erasing a bit that's the nice thing about colored pencil you can always erase and make sure to also keep those pencils nice and sharp you want to be working with a nice fine point so that you can get beautiful little details even when you're just doing messy marks and my favorite marks for these owls were just things like dots lines little v shapes and little curving lines that's really all there was to it um as I said you can be a little more minimal than I was I got like crazy and just put all the lines and x's and dots and I think that's actually not a bad approach either if you would like a it's just three bucks a month to sign up and become a patron you can sign up for as long or short as you like and you get instant access to the huge backlog of content so lots of extra worksheets coloring pages and of course bonus videos if you have a white pastel or a little bit of white gouache or gel pen you can layer on I mean the name of the game today was really layering I just kept going and going trying new things layering in some more pencil a little bit of pastel whatever more lines more dots and I love the way they turned out thank you so much for watching head over to patreon to get the worksheet sign up now to support this channel for just three dollars a month and keep that free content coming and finally friends my first book is available this fall you can pre-order now and it would mean so much to me if you did click the QR code and go check it out thanks I'll see you soon with a new tutorial