Layering with Watercolor

Remember like forever ago when I said I was gonna do "art lessons" on the blog? Then I did like 4 and forgot about the blog for a while...Well I'm sorry about that and I'm back with another "lesson" :)

If you follow my shop on Insta (@gracelangdonart) you've seen a good amount of new watercolors flooding the feed. I've been trying to branch my shop out to more "artistic" endeavors and watercolor is one of those love affairs I thought I would take to the next level. SO why not share some of my techniques I've been using with y'all!

I've been doing a good pit of animals, started with a portrait of a friends dog and then moved on to animals I just thought where cute. I wanted to take it in a direction that wasn't photorealistic but wasn't abstract either. So most of my pieces have a real fluid layering technique going on. 

Watercolor is great for layering because it can be very transparent while also very opaque. That may make no sense but I promise you, if you practice some you will see what I'm talking about. 

The best way to start any watercolor is with plenty of pale washes. Use a light (and I mean extremely light) sketch to help you with your bearings on the page but then add in your general washes. In my first picture you can see my first wash was a pale pink. I chose pink because I wanted the bunny to have a warm hue all over. Then I slowly added in other washes where I wanted the color to change on the bunny. These first 2 washes are great ways to fill space while making sure the subject remains loose and fluid.

Then I wanted to add in more details so I started adding small brush strokes as fur with similar tons to the first washes. Everything is still pretty light at this stage but it builds up over time so you can start seeing more definition in the bunny. You can change colors depending on the space you are working on. Look at the ears, the tops have a blue tint to them so I chose to use cooler colors up there and warmer colors in the face. This starts adding dimension. 

And for more dimension you need to start adding in your darks. With out some "dark darks" you will never feel like your piece is finished. For this piece the nose, tips of the ears, eyes, and mouth area had some real deep colors. With watercolor the best way to get a deep color is to NOT use much water. I usually mix a really saturated puddle (more color less water) or try and use paint straight from the tube. Just be sparing with this stage. It can get overwhelming really fast. Layer on your darks S L O W L Y!

Watercolor layering is a slow process. You will go through stages that look horrible. For a minute my bunny looked like he had some weird witch hairs growing but they eventually blended in to be variation in the fur coat. Just remember to go slow, and start off with very pale colors, remember, you get the pale colors by using very water downed color. The more water the less saturated your color will be. The less water the more saturated your colors will be and that comes in handy at the very end of your piece. 

Making Monday #59

Hello friends!

Welcome to Making Monday.

I'm officially fully immersed in fall! It's my favorite time of year and I love everything about it, but I'm not really into Halloween unless it's the cute Halloween stuff. I don't like anything scary & creepy. What about you, do you love fall? Halloween? It's time to party... Enjoy it and make some new friends!

 

This is a party where you can find fun new creative ideas and tasty recipes shared by amazingly talented people. Every Monday bloggers stop by to link up their posts and share with all you party goers. By joining in {both bloggers and non-bloggers} you will discover new blogs, be inspired to make something new, try a yummy new recipe, and most importantly make new friends!

This party is hosted by Gracie and me, and your projects will be shared on both of our blogs. We love that you're here and we love featuring you on our social media so be sure to follow us so you can see if your post gets shared!

Kitchen Table Art | Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter

A Bright and Beautiful Life | Facebook | Pinterest | Twitter

We also pin to our Making Monday Pinterest board and we'd love to have you follow along! This is a place you can find projects from all the previous parties, too, so it is like a party every day!

 

This is what your hostesses have been up to lately:

A Summer to Remember by Lori

 

These are the fabulous features for this week, chosen by Lori:

Better than Your Grandma's Brisket Recipe ~ Broward Saves

Halloween Lunchbox Jokes for Kids ~ Blooming Homestead

14 Halloween Handpring & Footprint Crafts ~ Spaceships and Laser Beams

Fennel Roasted Pork Tenderloin ~ Platter Talk

Rose Bangles from Scrap Fabric Strips ~ Artistic Endeavors 101

White Chocolate Pumpkin Cheesecake with Gingersnap Crust ~ Robyn's View

Honey and Date Syrup Roll with Cream Cheese Filling ~ Something Sweet, Winnie's Blog

If you were one of the features PLEASE grab a button and share it with some friends.

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If you didn't make it as a feature this week keep linking up because next week could be you!

 

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Don't forget to check out our Pinterest board where we pin plenty of projects from each party!

Thanks for joining us again this week. We're eager to see what you share.

An InLinkz Link-up

Wet on Wet Watercolor Technique

Goodness gracious, I've left y'all hanging on art lessons! 

I've been doing a lot of watercolors on my own this summer. Lots of babies gifts, shower invitations, and even some sweet pieces for friends. Basically, I've been really enjoying myself and not sharing with you (unless you've been on Instagram, then I'm over sharing)! So here we go with another lesson in watercolor, the wet on wet technique! 

The wet on wet technique gives you the fluidity that is so desired in watercolors. It is a much looser technique than other painting styles. What that means is that you have less control over the outcome, which is really a beautiful thing :)

So first off you need to wet your surface. I use a damp sponge and lightly wipe down my paper. (You don't want it wet enough that the paper has a sheen but damp enough that you can feel it.)

Then you simply take your colors mixed on your pallet and drop them in. Depending on how wet your paper is you will have different amounts of control with how the pigment reacts once laid down. You can see in the first photo that I was still able to create shapes but there are no real "edges". 

Once you get your base color down, don't wait for it to dry. Just start dropping in more pigment (image 3)! By not waiting for it to dry you are allowing the two colors to mix naturally together which creates a very soft variation. 

Now I recommend only doing this with colors in the same family, or you may start getting a bit muddy. So you can wait and let the paper dry a bit before adding in some more, if you do this you can start to make more definitive marks (last image compared to second to last image).

Like all techniques it is good to experiment so you can figure out how to use your brush correctly in these situations. You can go back to the post about Brush Strokes and do the same exercises but with wet paper, that will help you see how the pigment moves on the page for the wet on dry technique, and the wet on wet technique! 

 How are y'all getting along with these watercolor lessons? Is it something you are interested in learning more about, or are there other mediums you have questions about? Whatever it is let me know, I would love to help you figure out how to make art on your own!

Watercolor Washes

Woot woot 3rd art lesson is here!! And yep it is more on watercolor, geapers I never thought about how much went in to a watercolor before you could just make a painting. But writing these posts for you are sure helping me hone my techniques and create better end products! So thanks for the reminders ;)

Watercolor washes are used when you want to cover a large area with a single color. You typically use a large, flat brush that can hold lots of pigment. There are a couple different types of washes, including a flat wash, and a graded wash, which are the two I'm sharing with you now! 

I started off sketching a square for me to fill in with my pigment. It gave me an even starting and ending point, obviously, I didn't care to cut in the final edge but I still got the gist of covering a large surface. But you can always just wing it if you want :)

Once you are ready to start fill your large flat brush with a dark pigment. (Using a darker pigment allows you to see the variations in the wash easier). 

Line your brush edge up with the edge of your painting surface and pull across with your brush at an angle that allows most of your bristles to touch the paper. 

After your first line is laid, quickly refill your brush and start your second row by overlapping the first just a bit. By overlapping you are opening up the pigment from the first line to allowing it to blend smoothly with the new line. continue this until you fill your box!

Then allow your nicely painted box to dry. Once the pigment is dry you will be able to see how "flat" your wash is. If you had puddles of pigment or high spots you will see a variation, keep trying until you get a smooth service, sometimes it takes lots of practice! 

For the graded wash I started off the same, by drawing a box for myself to fill in with pigment. However, instead of loading up my brush and hitting the paper I first puddle 4 different variations of my color. You can create variations in your color by adding white or by simply changing the ration of pigment and water. The less water you have the darker/brighter your pigment will be, the more water you add the lighter and softer your color will be. 

Once you have your 4 colors puddled you can start just the same as when doing your flat wash. 

By pulling your pigment across your square and overlapping each line. Just remember to refill your brush from a different puddle each time. 

This will create an ombre affect down your square. You can use water to go in and help smooth out your edges if you can still see the transition from line to line.

Once your pigment is dry you will have a smooth gradient from light to dark to start your painting! 

So there you have it! 2 simple ways to cover large amounts of paper! Be sure to play around and see how your washes will butt up to other colors and how you can combined some of your strokes from the previous Brush Strokes post on top of these washes. Just remember if your pigment isn't fully dry before going over the top it will muddy up with other pigments! 

4 Basic Watercolor Brush Strokes

Hey friends! I'm back with another art lesson, it has been awhile and I'm sorry. I've been a bit busy and just waiting for a day to sit down and really think about some of the basics of watercolor to share with y'all. Last month I shared Basic Watercolor Supplies and now I'm gonna share some easy exercises to help in techniques that can be used to create stunning paintings. I've also finished up a few other posts to share next week with some other finishing technique exercises, so be sure to check back!

For these exercises you will see how many different brush strokes you can create with a single round #9 brush. These four exercises are things that help you understand your brushes and how your paint interacts with brush, paper, and each other.  

This first exercise, Color Bands, is to teach how to make even, consistent strokes. 

First, mix up a couple different puddles of color and fill your brush. (The larger the brush the larger amount of watercolor it can hold). 

Pull your brush across your page in any way that suits your fancy. Try and keep the color smooth, if you begin to run out of color simply refill your brush and pick up where you left off. 

This is where the challenge begins. Once your first line is down pick up a second color and follow that line as closely as possible. Learning to control your brush is extremely important, a trick for a design like this one is to focus on the white line you are creating between the two waves of color. 

Continue to do this across your entire page, try and test yourself to see how small you can make the white stripe between colors with out muddying them up. 

When working with a wet medium like watercolor if you slightly touch a recently wet service your colors will bleed in to each other. Some times this is desired and can create beautifully happy accidents. However, you need to learn to control this because this can often create a "muddy" look in your colorations. 

Above you can see where my red stripe began to puddle from excess water/color. Once beautiful thing about watercolor is that you can easily control the pigment. If you have too much of a color in a certain spot grab a clean, dry, brush and place it over the puddle. The dry hairs will wick up the excess moister and prevent dark spots, but be careful this can also create light spots in a wash. Just be sure to watch how much pigment you pick up and put down when looking to create a smooth wash. 

This second exercise is to familiarize you with brush pressure.
Simple put, the more pressure/weight you put on your brush the wider your stroke will be.
Play around with a similar technique as the first by creating waves but instead of moving your brush up and down or side to side simply change the amount of pressure you are applying to your brush.

Your different brushes will create different shapes so try it out with multiple brushes until you get the hang of it.

This final exercise is called the flick. This stroke is perfect for creating whimsical outdoor scenes and believable hair/fur/feathers. Be sure to practice this technique in varying weights and thickness to capture the depth when rendering grass/branches.

This stroke is easiest with a round brush that will allow you to move from a thick base to barely there tip.

For this flick you will want to start with your brush tip pointing back down towards your body, allowing for your wrist to flick upwards. To have better control over your flick you can rest your painting hand over your support hand, giving you height and stability to create unique strokes by simply moving your wrist.

Finally, to achieve a painterly stroke grab a large round brush and fill with paint. 

This technique works well with the brush pressure exercise because the different dabs you make will take unique shapes depending on the amount of pressure on your bristles.

Part of the beauty of painterly work is that it is all about seeing the strokes, and movement of color. So fill you brush up and start loosely moving your brush across your paper. Once you are family with the different, natural shapes your brushes can make you can start to form landscapes and other paintings. 

These 4 brush strokes are simple, yet can be used to create beautifully crafted paintings. Each of these exercises is important for control of your pigment, next week (hopefully) I will be sharing how to create washes that can be used as back grounds for these new strokes you've learned!! And don't forget to check out my basic watercolor supplies post that points you to some of the materials needed to start your own watercolor adventures :)

If you have any questions let me know! This is just a quick example of some of the things that help remind me how you watercolor works, and I would love to hear how your experience with liquid pigment goes! 

Basic Watercolor Supplies

Last week I shared some of what I've been going through as far as finding what I want to be doing, here. It has been a long process but basically it all boils down to me missing my artistic roots. I've been creative through out this year, but it's been fun little DIY projects around the house and nothing that I've really used my knowledge of art and design for.

So, to solve this issue I decided I wanted to pursue fine art and its techniques and history with YOU! I'm not sure how long this will last, or how good I will be at it but I do know that I will be doing what I enjoy and hope you enjoy it too!

For my first lesson (hahah yeah right) I figured I could chat with y'all about all these watercolors I've been sharing on my Instagram feed and adding to my shop. Watercolor is something that I've always LOOOVVVVEEEDDD but didn't get a chance to do much of in the past 4 years. Watercolor is so naturally pretty that sometimes the best pieces are when all you do is drop in color. It's amazing!

This post is going to be kinda boring. But if you are interested in pursuing watercolor these are a few basic things you need to know before you dive in. These tips should help you have a smoother transition between regular (acrylic) paint to the world of water color.

Lets talk about brushes. There are all kinds of brushes with all different purposes. The best brushes are pricey, so as a student I obviously went for middle of the line. The high end watercolor brushes are made of Red Sable (type of mink) hair, yep just like a fur coat. So these have become super expensive because of the nature of the material. There are other types of hair (like squirrel) that also make great brushes, but they still remain on the upper end of brushes. I have synthetic brushes. I am NO PRO but do enjoy my brushes. 

Something that is really important is that you keep your watercolor brushes separate from all your other brushes. Watercolor reacts to oil so once you mix brushes with other types of paint (or even just handle them too much with your hands) they can deteriorate quicker and give you not so pretty lines. 

Next up is obviously the paint. Well with watercolor you have lots of options. If you aren't confident in your painting ability (you don't need to be, and I will touch on this later!) then go for a watercolor crayon or pencil! This allows you to get the pigment down on the paper and then blend with water. It is a great way to introduce yourself to how watercolor will move on the paper and even better if you are really interested in details. 

But if you are interested in the most common form of watercolor then you probably have a pallet of paint with either tubes or cakes. I prefer tubes because I can lay out my pallet exactly the way I like. But that doesn't mean tubes are any better for beginners!
Obviously there are different brands of paints and as a beginner it is hard to tell what you need. So I would say stay with student grade paints until you decide if you really wanna pursue watercolor. These paints will give you everything you need to learn from watercolor while not breaking the bank.
I have 2 sets of tube paints one is Reeves and the other is Windsor Newton, I prefer my Windsor Newton pallet but that is because of the colors that came in the pallet pack.
When you purchase watercolors remember that it is better to buy the basic most natural colors possible so you can mix with out making muddy colors. My pallet consists of Yellow Ochre, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber, Alizarin Crimson, Cadmium Red, Cadmium yellow, Viridian green, ultramarine, ivory black, and Chinese white.

Finally, lets talk about paper! Paper is soooooo important with watercolor, it literally can make or break a painting. If you know you are going to be doing lots of washes then you need to find a thicker/ heavier weight paper. Similar to this Strathmore 140lb pad. The weight is important because the heavier the paper the less likely it is to warp when you add your washes.

But I also have a smaller pad that is only 90lb. This pad does warp when you use washes, but if you are interested in adding inks or other dry media lighter weight paper can be the way to go.  You can also have your personal opinion on paper, I really love paper that can rip nicely. I feel like watercolor is such a natural process that sometimes the edges need to be a bit natural too.

I know this was a lot of technical information packed in to one post. And if I'm honest this isn't even close to all the detail I could have shared with you. This is just the basic of the basic information. I hope this will give you a little help when you walk in the craft store and are overwhelmed with the selection of beginner paints, papers, and brushes. If y'all have any other questions about how to find your starter set let me know! 

Painting with out BLACK

A few weeks ago I shared how to use the  language of color (if you missed it check it out here) I talked about all kinds of terms and how the color wheel is set up. Now I didn't get a chance to go to deep in to color theory and I don't really think I'm qualified to go much deeper. BUT I did think I should share how all of those terms can be used in an actual painting. 

So today I decided to do a little pet portrait of a precious pup and show you how the knowledge of color can help create a really unique painting. 

Quickly I'll just share with you how I started. You can see that the board I was using had a painting on it before. So I just used some gesso (basically primer) to cover it up and start a quick drawing. I am so not good at sketching so I usually just do a real generic sketch (this one was based off of a photo) and then fill in the details with the paint. 

I then started with my high lights. Based from the image I took the lightest parts of the fur, where the light was reflecting, and chose my light colors. I didn't want to do a super realistic painting so I decided to go with yellow and a bright orange. And I left them straight out of the tube, no mixing. 

This puppy is a dark black with khaki/cream spots on his face, ears and paws. But like I said earlier, to avoid a flat and realistic style painting I decided not use black or white at all. I decided to use nothing but color to create this painting. So by using the knowledge that contrasting colors often create a muddy brown/black when mixed I started at it.  You can tell that there are lots of blues purples yellows and pinks. What you probably can't pick out are the greens. Green and red are one of the best combinations for getting a dark color with out using black. So the dark spots are mostly a forest green mixed with a red. You can see how different areas are shaded with different colors I used that to create the volume of the body and show how the light can cause different temperatures of color just by how it hits the object. 

Painting with out black and white is hard. But often creates a much better painting. By using other colors to create your darks you are actually painting much more realistically than if you only use black as your darkening agent. Just look at an object and really study it. You can see that the shadows are different shades or tones of a color like red, green blue, ect. It takes a minute to notice but once you see it its like light goes off and you will never see white as just white or black as just black again! 

I enjoyed this fun little painting. I wish I had paid more attention to my photography so I could have actually shared the process with you instead of just talking. But I just got caught up in my TV show and painting. Too many things I love happening at once for me to stop and photograph the process :) Sorry 

So this wasn't nearly as informative as the earlier post about color (here) but I hope it helps you get creative with the next little craft or painting you decide to make. Seeing that you can get real lights and real darks with out using black and white will make any project more interesting and dynamic!! 

*I have started some advertising with Passion Fruit Ads and need some lovely blogs to grace my side bar :) Please check out my advertising page and let me know if you are interested!! HERE