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
Putting it All Together
putting it all together okay now in this section I have some samples of work that are done by some other artists and I love this woman's work her name is aniline broken camp and at first I thought okay she must paint on you po but she doesn't this is not you poe paper she paints on a paper called fi brianna's soft press which is a paper that's in between hot press and cold press it's what they call a soft press I've never used it I had never even heard of it before until she mentioned it to me by the way everybody that I show in any of my presentations or people that I've gotten in contact with and asked their permission to show their work and nobody's turned me down I mean you know I'm only showing people whose work I think it's fabulous and I talk about it in glowing terms and I put their website at the end of the presentation but I just didn't want to I didn't want to I assume that they would be okay with it without asking them so I called this woman and we had a nice long chat and ...
she just has incredible line work and brush work and the way she handles her brush and and I just put that in because I wanted you to see something just a very unique approach to painting that's not on you poe paper I mean she could easily get this effect on you po without even having to work at it the fact that she gets this effect on a regular paper is pretty stunning to me now this is a woman that I is one of my new favorite painters her name is rebecca l fast then she is a swedish artist and her whole modus operandi and painting is to use his few brushstrokes it's possible and so I just want you to take a look at thie emotion and the mood that she was able to to create in this painting with what like eight brush strokes I mean it's just amazing to me and she and I have been exchanging emails and she's sent me links to her teachers and other artists that you think those are fabulous and so we've become friends and you know just and a magnificent painter look at this painting I look at this painting it's so rough there's hardly any detail in it at all but look what she was able to say in that painting I think she's amazing now this is stan miller he really is my new favorite painter I saw this painting and I just could not believe it he uses cold press paper and the various his brush strokes to get different interests but he shared his teaching technique with me he wrote me a long email and he said what he has his students do is he has them cut out a piece of paper like a one inch square one and a half inch square out of two pieces of paper one he puts down on top of the subject that he's painting and the other one he puts down on top of his painting where that subject is going to be painted and he tells them to paint that I say it's an eye with the greatest detail possible get it as photo realistic as they possibly can and then when they're done doing that he lifts the paper off and then they start painting where they go to bigger brush strokes they do this in several different areas where they want the focus of really fine detailed work and then they go in and they work their larger breast strokes and their other techniques around it so take a look at this I think this is just a magnificent painting he has wet into wet he has wet into dry see these areas right here these areas are negative painted see these areas in the beard whether white strands that you can see he didn't paint those white strands he painted everything around those white strands so that's negative painting this is very realistic and then up here he uses a look at the size of the brush that he uses to get this one big rough dry brush technique I mean he has everything in this painting everything is in here and I could just end the feeling and the emotion I could look at this for hours and try to figure out how he does it and it would be difficult yes quite so in those areas in his beard worried the negative painting you don't think that that's a result of using ms kid or anything like that just no I asked him he said no he went in with the small enough brush he probably he said he put his square of paper down over one area of the of the nose and I asked him I said well how do you do that I said how do you paint one square and then lifted up and it's dry and it's been painted and you paint a whole face around it and how do you get it to blend he said well he said I teach techniques about blending and all of that kind of stuff but and eventually it it it just people just know what to do he said eventually my students are just really good at it but what what's so interesting is that most artists start with their biggest areas and work down to their details he starts with his detailed areas and works out to his big ones so there's no right or wrong way folks it's just what you can think of what you can practice and what you can get good at and what you like I mean it's just there's just no wrong way okay I was going to do one more class exercise so let's do just take a plain old piece of paper doesn't have to have any marks or anything on it I'm going to take one of these that I worked on before and again wet one square okay now take probably around brush and get a really good thick paint you know make sure it's nice and thick not watery if its watery you'll just get a background on your on your painting because you wet your paper first and just start dropping in color this is called a very gated wash you can try to follow the one I did earlier or you can make up your own now I have a lot of water on here and that's doing some really interesting things I'm not even gonna take that paint out of that brush pick it up let it run together gonna use a dry brush and pick up some of the excess moisture down at the bottom you can add more paint I've got a lot of paint on this brush matter fact I didn't really get the paint even in the brush so I've got some areas that have almost total concentration of paint this is a great technique for doing skies I'm getting a back run in here because of the water that was uh on the on the paper was so much more water on the paper but that would make a very effective cloud in the sky can you see that comments online or it looks like you're distant galaxy or a nebula yeah yeah it does this it's this transparency of the paint with the wetness of the paper and what it does that's so fascinating to me so now create one other area they even wet also I'm painting on rough paper here I think pretty rest paper see if I got you I got the whole area gonna pick up this one you want to be multicolored so I would pick up your blue put that in one corner then I would pick up some red doesn't matter which red crimson scarlet doesn't matter put that in another corner then I mixed green last time so I'm just gonna go ahead and stick with green amen pick your paper up and start you know just kind of tilt it let some of these colors run together in the middle and but before they completely run going and pick up one of your yellows I'm going to use my oriole in and put it in the middle and watch which color becomes dominant the oriole and will push other paint out of the way because normally if you paint over a darker color with a lighter color the lighter color will get absorbed but I just painted over the ultra marine blue with the orioles and the oriole and pushed the ultra marine blue out of the way so that's a really good thing to remember yellows have a tendency to do that and it could be a very effective thing in your technique when you're doing your painting okay so that's that exercise here's the multiple colors one that I did before sorry I forgot to bring that up on screen here's where the yellow bled into the red push it out of the way bled into the green led down into the blue and I just put one big thick dab in the middle and it pushed everything else out of the way this was just a little exercise that I did with scum bling and dry brush this whole thing took about fifteen minutes and if you want to try something like this I would say go ahead I can keep on I can keep on working I can probably do that and keep on working at the same time actually you know what let's go through the rest of the presentation and then come back to that and then I can keep on painting while we do q and a afterwards this is an exercise that's in the exercise files now let me tell you something this is not easy this I took I did three tries on this myself until I got this one and felt happy enough to show it um run it out several times on several piece of paper because I could tell you the first time you do it it's not going to be easy it's going to be very very difficult and you have to figure out how much to let your shadow's dry before you go in and paint them you have to figure out where you put your darks where if you're going to put it on wet and went went into dry I'm gonna let you figure all that out just do the best you can and see if you can come up with something that closely approximates this and these are all the people on the left that I showed in this presentation here's the daniel smith link here's my information up at the top and I always like to give you some other artists to think about and to just go check out some websites so this is other artists that I've mentioned before or I haven't mentioned but I just love this joseph berry guy jaberi I'm not sure how you pronounce his name nicholas simmons paints huge six foot paintings and is very very well known tom fong watercolors air amazing and this one down at the bottom lacks holman dot or ge that was the painter that rebecca l fast told me she thought was the best swedish painter ever and check out that site his paintings are pretty amazing
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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