Watercolor Pencils - Orangutan

Hey everyone, Matt here with thevirtualinstructor.com and in this video, we're going to walk through the process of using watercolor pencils to create a drawing slash painting of an orangutan. Now this video is basically a breakdown of the entire process. Now this process took me around 10 hours to complete and it was recorded live for members at thevirtualinstructor.com. Now that complete 10 hour lesson series is available for replay for folks who are members at thevirtualinstructor.com. The membership program also includes a variety of drawing and painting courses on a variety of subject matter and media, weekly live lessons, which are all recorded and stored in our vault, weekly critiques as part of the members' minute and a year-long curriculum for visual arts teachers. If you want to learn more about the membership program and, of course, access this complete 10-part lesson series, there's a link in the description below. You can check it out. Everyone starts out with a week-long trial for free, so you can see if the program's right for you. and if you want to just kind of mess around a little bit and take a look at three of our course videos and ebooks for free you can do that as well i'll leave a link in the description below for that as well now in this video as i said this is kind of a breakdown of the entire process now again this process took me 10 hours to complete this particular image this video of course is not 10 hours long so i'm just walking you through each part of the process right there so you can pick up a couple of things about using watercolor pencils. With that being said, here's a look at the entire process. We begin here on 300-pound rough watercolor paper. And you can see here that I've used the grid technique to ensure accuracy. This is a relatively larger drawing. And the grid technique, of course, allows me to make comparisons between the gridded reference, as you see on the left, and then the grid that I've created on the larger watercolor paper. And essentially what I'm doing is just drawing the visual information, basically just the line information, that I see in each corresponding square on the gridded photo reference, and transferring that information into the corresponding square on the drawing paper. Now, once I've got my graphite sketch in place, I'm using a kneaded eraser here just to lift up some of the graphite so we have a very faint depiction of our animal in place on the surface. Now, since we're gonna be using watercolor and watercolor pencils, I'm gonna paint the background with washes of watercolor instead of using watercolor pencils that of course will save time and of course make the background consistent in color. You can see here that I'm adding a material called Liquid Frisket. This of course goes on wet and then dries with a rubbery consistency. Now allow me to apply the watercolor without that watercolor paint going in into any of the areas of the drawing. So you can see I've basically outlined the animal with the Liquid Frisket and then applied my watercolor wash of Ultramarine in the background using a larger flat brush. Now, once my watercolor background has dried completely, I can remove the liquid frisket here just using my finger and just rub it right off the surface there. For any tough spots, you can always use an eraser to help remove that liquid frisket. Now, I'm ready to start making my watercolor pencil applications here. And with watercolor pencils, there is basically a two-step process. you apply the watercolor pencil first to the surface, and then you activate the material that you've applied to the surface with a bit of water. So you can see here that I've used a very simple mixture of watercolor pencils initially, and then I'm activating that area with water. And then of course, the result is that the surface looks like it's been applied with watercolor, traditional watercolor. Of course, the watercolor pencil gives you a little bit more control, but you do sacrifice a little bit of the unknown, let's say, because you're layering watercolor pencils on the surface, but you're not entirely sure what that mixture's going to result in until you apply a bit of water. So when you're working with watercolor pencils, it's a good idea to be a little bit cautious and work a little bit cautiously. And just like we would with watercolor, traditional watercolor, we're gonna go through a layering process. So you can see on the face, that area has been allowed to dry. Now I'm going back in with additional applications for watercolor pencils, and slowly I'm gonna build up the complexity and the color by adding additional layers and also building up the contrast in value. So we're gonna start making the darks a little bit darker so they contrast some of the lighter areas. Of course, this is a patient process. Of course, you can use watercolor pencils in any method or any manner that you wish, of course, so we all have different styles. This approach is definitely more of a controlled approach. We still have that watercolor look, but with the pencils, again, it is kind of a slow process because you do have to apply the pencils initially, then activate the applications that you've made with the pencil, then allow that to dry, then reassess where you are according to the values and the colors, and whether or not you need to add additional layers of material. Now, for this particular series of lessons, I started with face and then worked outward from there. I typically like to start with what is going to be the focal point within the composition and then work my way outward. When I'm using a medium where the order really doesn't matter, if we were using an opaque medium like acrylics or oils or even pastels, I would start with the background and then work to the middle ground and the foreground if we were dealing with a landscape. But with this particular case, with the watercolor pencils, it really doesn't matter where you start because watercolor pencils are transparent and translucent. once they're activated to a certain degree. And we of course can't layer over the top of applications that we already have in place and have complete opacity like we can with acrylics and oils. So we do have to kind of think about the colors that we're adding and keep in mind that we can't really cover over the top of applications that we already have in place. That's why it's important, again, to kind of be cautious with your applications and slowly build up your layers of applications so that you create that depth and color and that necessary contrast and value. And here you can see on the face, speaking of contrast and value, I've started adding some blacks to create some of those dark shadows that we see, again, to create that contrast. Now, initially here, when we make these values dark, they seem very strong because a large percentage of the paper is still white. And value is relative, meaning that we understand value based on the values that are around it. So because we don't have a lot of value in place on the surface, some of our initial values are gonna seem pretty dark and bold. But we wanna be cautious again and start with lighter applications and progressively get darker. So you can see here I'm working outward from the face, getting some of those golden yellows and reds in place. I even used a bit of purple in areas as well. And initially the reasoning for adding that purple was just because some of the colors of the red did lean a little bit towards purple. But as we go through the process, I start to discover that maybe I can incorporate some greens in there as well. And then we've got some oranges, some purples and greens. And of course, that is a secondary color scheme. Of course, the background's blue here, but we get into those greens in the stump, the log or whatever that thing is that the animal is sitting on later in the process. So just like we did on the face, of course, it's a process of layering colors and then adjusting the values by adding some of those darker tones. Now, I used a dark brown to make the values darker for the most part. I reserved the black for the really, really dark areas. Now, at this point in the process, I have a good idea of what colors I'm using for the coat of the animal. So I feel pretty confident about the ordering of layering the colors. initially in the early parts of the drawing, you might find yourself experimenting when you're working with watercolor pencils to kind of find the colors that you need for the bulk of the subject that you're doing. A lot of times we don't know that from the beginning. I get a lot of people asking me what colors I'm going to use for a particular live lesson series. And the honest answer is I really don't know until I get into the process. But then once I'm in the process, I have a good idea of what colors I'm going to use throughout the piece. But initially you have to work a little bit slowly to find those colors. Now, one trick that I do, and it may seem like an obvious trick, but it might be helpful to you, is when I'm doing an image like this where I'm using multiple colors, I will take those colors out of the tin or out of the container where I'm holding that material, and I'll just keep up with it separately. So that will ensure that I'm using the same colors over and over again, and I don't have to go hunt for them again in the tin later in the process. So in this particular image, the light source is originating from the left side, and this is, of course, producing shadows on the right side of the body of the animal. And you can see that I'm darkening up some of these shadows here. Now, of course, texture is incredibly important. Texture is one of the seven elements of art. But texture in a two-dimensional image is heavily influenced by value. Value is one of the other seven elements of art. Value is the darkness or lightness of a color and value not only tells us about the light within the scene the intensity of the light and the form of the subject but it also tells us a lot about the texture of the subject as well so you can see here as I'm altering the value and creating a little bit more contrast in these areas the texture is starting to make a little bit more sense now at this point I decide to go back and soften up some of the areas and lighten up some of the areas that I've already addressed and just like with traditional watercolor you can just add a bit of water to the surface and then lift it up with a paper towel. So just like with traditional watercolors where we can lift up some of the material by reactivating it with water, we can do the same with watercolor pencils. Now you can't remove the material completely, but you can lift up quite a bit of it if you need to make an area a little bit lighter in value. Now of course at this point we worked our way down and just to begin addressing the back end of the animal and of course, some of those initial applications for the foot that is awkwardly holding the animal up on this stump. And then, of course, we see a lot of the same colors in the hands and the arms. So it's just a continuation of the colors that I used before. Here you can really see some of those purples that I incorporated in the mixture. And then while that back end of the body dry, that's when we addressed the hands initially. Once that area was dry, we could go back and make some of values a little bit darker, of course, increasing the contrast, creating the illusion of texture, and also communicating the form. Since this area was fairly dark, this is the area where I used some of the darkest tones in the entire painting. Now, of course, one of the great things that you can do with watercolor pencils is that you can move the material around on the surface once you've applied it. So you can see in some areas where we have some of the edges of the fur that extend into the background. I'm just simply using the brush to pull some of those strokes out instead of using the watercolor pencil initially before activating with the water. So you don't have to use the watercolor pencils to make some of those precise marks. You can actually rely on the brush loaded up with a little bit of water to handle that for you. And then as we work our way down the picture plane, the next area to be addressed, of course, were the hands and the fingers. And we had some grays in this particular area. So I used a little bit more of the black and I also used a couple of different grays here to try to capture some of those neutral tones. I also tried to pull out a little bit more of the purple than is that might be evident in the image. There really isn't a whole lot of purple there, but I tried to inject a little bit of purple to make the colors a little bit more interesting. And of course, at this point in the process, I had the idea of maybe pulling out some of the greens in the stump that are very subtly there, of course, to create that color triad. Now, of course, you can use the pencil alone without any activation. As you can see there, I've pulled out a few extra stray hairs on the hands before moving down to the stump. For the stump, I just applied a base color and then I started adding some of the darker values. Again, this may look like a black, but it's actually a dark neutral brown. I added a few oranges in there as well. And then here's the application of some of the greens. Now, of course, we don't really know exactly how this combination of colors is going to behave to a certain degree until they are activated. So you can see once water's applied and once the activation has taken place, you can see how those colors blend and mix together. And then, of course, turn into the appearance of traditional watercolor. With watercolor pencils, though, you do still see a little bit of the texture that's made by the marks of the pencil, depending on the paper that you're working on. Of course, this is rough watercolor paper, so the texture is really heavily pronounced. So you have to activate a little bit more of the material to get rid of some of those textural marks left by the pencil. But this rough watercolor paper, of course, is very rigid and strong, and it provides a wonderful surface for using at this particular medium. You can see in the stomp that I also pulled out some additional purples there as well. These purples aren't really clear in the reference, but again, this is me taking a little bit of artistic license to kind of pull out a little bit of a color scheme or at least make the colors more interesting. And then just like we did on the body of the animal, I'm going back into the stump and pushing those relationships of values to create additional contrast of course make the necessary contrast. Now this stump initially looks pretty flat but as we go through the process I start to add some of the darker values on the edges of the stump to make it appear a little bit more rounded and of course since the light source is coming from the left side the values that I made a little bit darker were a little bit stronger on the right side. Now of course it's important to note that the directional stroking that you make with a pencil is just as important as the strokes that you make as you activate the material as well so for this stump of course most of the strokes were vertical to to make sure that we created that necessary texture and then the painting was finished and we could remove the tape of course and we were left with our drawing slash painting of an orangutan thanks so much for watching this video hope you enjoyed it i hope you're able to pick up a couple of things here and there. Remember, if you like this video, make sure that you give it a like, of course. And if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe to the channel and click on the notification bell so you're notified when new videos like this one are uploaded. Thanks again for watching. And as always, I wish you all the very best in your artistic success.