-Start Painting_ Watercolour Basics - PART 2 Edges and Layers

Hello, welcome to artutorialsonline.com. My name is Paul Priestley and this is the second of my watercolour basics series. What I'm going to be looking at today is how you can lay a layer of water on a piece of paper. You can then drop paint on top and watch the paint bleed just to the edge of the water and create some wonderful effects. Let's make a start! Now for this time I'm going to show you how to lay in a large wash and then to layer washes on top of it and create edges. This is how it works. I'm going to just block in first of all a very large area. I'm just using lots of wet paint. You see just might even just use a little bit more water in my brush. You see what I'm doing just blending it in just so I can get a nice wash coming down here. Okay very very simple sky. I'm just using water here you see and I'm blending it in so I've got that nice soft subtle effect. Right I'm going to leave that there let it dry and I just want to draw a little line along here as though it's hills in the background against this sky. So I'm just going to draw a very very little curve comes up and over there. Okay now this is the trick. If you just get plain water paint up to that line and then just put water in below. If I then mix up a green I'll just add a little bit of yellow to my blue here so I can create a nice green tone. What I'm going to do is just drop my colour along here and just block the green in and the nice thing is that the green will only flow as far as the water that I've put in and it will create an edge along the water. Now I'm just going to bring this green down further because we're just going to keep repeating this technique on top. So we're just going to let that dry. When we painted the plain water on here the colour bleeds to the edge and forms that nice sharp line which is really quite useful. This mark here has been caused by a puddle in the water. I'll cover all that sort of thing later on but we'll not worry about that for the moment. Imagine I am now going to do the same sort of thing. I'm just going to do a layer. You can build up layers in watercolour by just putting one layer of colour on top of another. It's the same colour. You always work from light to dark so don't put the dark tones on first. Always put the light tones on first. I am going to simply paint another hill. I'm just painting it in plain water. The hill comes across there this time. I'm just going to put another layer of colour on. You'll notice the colour can't bleed over the line so all I'm doing is tapping the colour in. There we go. You see how I've now created that nice effect with my landscape. You see how that line comes across there. Very sharp edge and it's just done by putting plain water on first of all which creates a wonderful effect. Well let's let that dry. Now that layer is complete I'm just going to lay on another layer of water. Just plain water and just stroke it across. I am then going to just drop in colour just as I did before and you'll notice that it will just bleed along the edge and create that wonderful sharp edge. You can just keep repeating this as many times as you like building layers upon layers upon layers until you've got the effect that you really want. So I hope you can see how we can build up layers simply by using water to create edges. Thank you for watching artututorialsonline.com. I hope you've enjoyed my video. If you have enjoyed the video then perhaps you could subscribe to my channel and if you really enjoyed the video then perhaps you could share it with your friends and get them to subscribe as well. That would be wonderful. Thank you very much.