Lessons
Day 1
1Class Overview
1:05:57 2Q&A
47:19Day 2
3Paint Properties
25:46 4Understanding Color
11:06 5The Color Wheel
22:18 6Other Color Terms
21:35Mixing Colors
10:27 8Light & Shadow
13:11 9Q&A
21:36Day 3
10Paper & Brushes - Introduction
05:12 11Papers & Manufacturers
41:35 12Watercolor Brushes
45:21 13Putting it All Together
14:13 14Q&A
23:24Day 4
15Drawing & Compostion - Introduction
04:09 16Drawing for Painting
50:40 17Proportion and Perspective
29:47 18Supplies for Next Week
48:09Day 5
19Additional Fundamentals (The Fun Stuff!) - Intro
05:00 20Creating Textures
11:57 21Reserving Whites & Lifting
29:11 22Wax Resist
07:00 23Other Techniques
25:37 24Things to Remember
10:57Lesson Info
Creating Textures
okay so we're going to go on to creating textures first now one of the things that you do in creating textures and a lot of people do it but it they do it because it's very effective is you use salt and this is a little exercise and I encourage you to do exercises like this on your own where you draw little squares of color and then you put salt in at various times and like this top row it was all cerulean blue this middle row was halo blue and this bottom row was the color called ver deter blue that I mixed in some quinn burnt scarlett just to see what happened when I put two colors in there so these air different kinds of salt there's sea salt margarita salt kosher salt and table sought now I only brought what david yeah yeah I don't think there are there's so many different times assault there's even a black hawaiian salt that I did once that leaves the little kernel of black on the paper when you scrape it off so if you're looking for that effect this black table salt works great I...
should have brought a sample of that we're only going to work with table salt and kosher salt today so I want to show you this next slide first this was salt in combination with drips on a piece of paper this is a just a detail of a very sort of abstract floral type of design that I was doing one time so let's do let's do an exercise let's get a piece of paper out and get your salt and their two little packets of salt on the table one of them is table salt and one of the miss kosher salt and let's mix up but good you know use your one inch square so we get a good area covered pretty quickly and I would do let's do a nice purple mixture let's mix ultra marine with our lizard in crimson get a nice deep rich purple there are cool colors you're in our cool pal no you do it dry because the paint will wet the paper as much as you needed to and just do a block of color and do two of them while you're at it side by side and if you have too much paint paint remember get your thirsty brush and just soak it up down at the bottom of the area okay so actually you know what do one more two more I mean I have a slightly different color here because we're going to use both kinds of salt now the trick about salt is to put it down when the sheen of the color is just leaving the paper if you put it down too soon it won't work as well the weather the paper the more the salt will soak up and if you have salt grains real close to each other and it soaks up more and more and more of the color you could end up just getting just like an area that's doesn't have enough variation in it and enough texture in it so you might want to blow on your paper to try to get some of the sheen off so whichever one has the xin moving off of it faster my two bottom one's air thinner so I think I'm going to start with those I'm going to take my table salt and drop it in the first one and take my kosher salt and drop it in the second one and you know what I think I let the sheen go too far that one dried too much so I'm going to start putting the kosher salt in the one up above because it's still a little bit wet and I'm going to put the table salt in that one too yeah I let mine dry too fast so I'm going to do another one see what I mean about timing it is a uh major issue and watercolor I'm going to put one on while it's just really wet and let the other one dry just a little bit so this one's really wet and I'm gonna put that on now the best thing to do with thes is just to set this aside now because it needs time to do its thing so if you can just take that piece of paper and set it aside and we'll go back and look at it in a in a few minutes yeah you want to scrape it off the end but it has to be absolutely dry before you scrape it off but you'll still be able to see the effect of the salt on the paper while it's still on there if the papers not completely dry yeah I let two of them dry they just dried so fast it must be oh you know what it is it's the lights the lights or making things drive pretty fast in here okay so that's our salt so far and you'll I suggest just playing around with that get different kinds of salt put it on when it's soaking wet put it on when the xin has left the paper put it on when machine has completely left the paper and you'll see all the different variations that you'll get based on where you put the salt on in the process what time in the process okay now this is splattering with negative painting and someone asked me to explain negative painting before and if you take a look at the tree branches in this image the they're not defined they're not actually painted it's the spaces around them that have been painted and so the tree branches themselves are not our unpainted and the spaces around them are painted that's negative painting and that's how you do it fine um object in your painting without actually painting the object yourself you're painting the space around it and that's how you define it so let's take that same piece of paper I'm sorry I had you move it I guess you didn't really have to um and you have a uh take out your twelve inch paintbrush you're number twelve sorry twelve inch says some pretty big brush take out your number twelve brush and pick up a good amount of paint on your brush doesn't matter what color we're just playing here and what I do is I strike against my hand and there's your splatters now if you wet the paper first and go back and it's platter I'm going to move back because it see what it does paint will bleed out onto the wetness of the paper and that effect will be also be determined by how much water you have on the paper if I had left this water dry back a little bit before I did that then you wouldn't get these amazing blooms around the edge let me lift this up so you can see what's happening here see that you got the paint just bleeding out in all kinds of directions and getting very very soft edged and then up the top you have just the plain splatter on dry paper which just keeps its splatter like qualities and doesn't fan out in any way now if I wanted to I could spritz that but I don't have my spritzer available here's my spirit sir I found it if I spritzed this that I had already uh splattered see what happens that is a great effect because you get the hard edge look as well as some of the splattering and some of the soft edge look so this is really great I mean think about it doing a beach scene and you've got cem cem just texture you just want to get some kind of texture in on your beach this would be a good way to do it the surface of a rock would be this would be a great way to do it trees in the background you know that you want to be sort of soft and hard edged and things like that this is a good way to do it so that is splattering and that's a lot of fun splattering is a lot of fun but again a lot of these things they're not very controllable so you have to be willing to take what you get you can't always control what's going to happen okay now this is a dry brush texture which this is a painting of a cat that I did my cat cindy and we've talked about dry brush before so we're not goingto actually demo that here in class but dr rush is where you use the side of your brush and you get dry paint on it you don't load it with a lot of water you just have mostly pure pigment on it and you scrape it along the side of your painting you don't hold the brush upright although you can because once the paint ruts out of the brush you're going to get a dry brush technique anyway but this is really really great for doing like pieces of wood and fences and things like that it just gives you the kind of texture you're looking for without having to do much to get it I mean this whole thing that that cindy's pause arresting on that that's not the whole image but that whole thing took just minutes to do
Class Materials
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Ratings and Reviews
Susan Mueller
Absolutely loved this class! I've been fiddling with watercolor for the last year, but have never really taken any art classes. This was the perfect intro level class in so many ways, covering basic principles of color, composition, etc. - and always in a warm, encouraging atmosphere. I learned so much about watercolor as a medium, and I would recommend this to anyone interested in getting involved with it. Would love to take a class with Molly again!
a Creativelive Student
I absolutely love this medium and have owned the material for about 5 or so years now, afraid to waste them. I've bought books but realizing I am both a visual and audio learner, this is the format for me. It is so important for me to be able to replay and review the information that taking a local course is just not as convenient as this has been for me. Molly is a delight to watch and listen to, she is such a wealth of knowledge. Thank you Molly and thank you CreativeLive!!! I am in love with this site.
Linda Berg
Molly is captivating! Her soothing voice exudes her love of watercolour painting! She is very organized and knows how to paint with watercolours and how to teach it as well. Not all painters can teach... I was drawn into her 'teachings', loved listening to her wealth of knowledge, and signed up for her course. Oh, I recommend it totally!
Student Work
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