An introduction to water colours! - Artem Art Tutorials

HELLO, MY FELLOW HOMO SAPINES OF THIS COMMUNITY

#ArtemTutorial

It is me, the amazing Snowy Avis who totally has the best equipment to make this tutorial and is sooooooo professional.

(Imma kms of how bad the light is at my home. I'm sorry for the shitty quality of the photos, but you'll have to bear with me hehe)

As a part of Artem`s Tutorial team, I bring you my first art tutorial, and it's about water colours! I haven't seen many water colour artists around here, so I assumed I should start from the basics of the basics of the basics of the beginner knowledge.

Water colours are a very flexible and experimental style, and I can only show you some things that I wish I had known when I was starting out. (I was a helpless beginner who learned the most of it on her own)

I must it that it was hard to explain things which I couldn't show in motion. That's why you should check out this post of mine where I linked my speedpaint :triumph:

http://aminoapps.vertvonline.info/p/mvkmq4

(shameless self ment)

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:sparkle: Materials you need :sparkle:

✪ Water colours ✪ (I guess...)

Obviously, you'll have to start from the supplies that you'll need for a water colour drawing. I doubt you can watercolour if you don't have the water colours themselves ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I use St. Petersburg water colours (the water colour set on the right) for the most if my artworks. The other ones I use is Lefranc & Bourgeois.

Both oh these are professional water colours, so they can be kind of pricey (although way cheaper than some other brands).

Honestly, you can take those water colours from the closest shop which cost 3$ (the ones bellow on the photo) if you want to see how it goes for a start. The difference between these and professional ones is in the colour intensity and blending (you can never get as intense and saturated colours and they blend and mix way harder), but essentially they work the same way and are perfect for someone who still isn't sure if they want to tackle water colours more seriously.

Yes, let my Olive as a child show you the artistic stuff

✪ Paper ✪

There are plenty of different types of paper that you can use for water colouring, however, as the water. colours are a medium that uses a lot of water (duh...), the paper you should use has to be THICC :ok_hand: :eyes:

Paper thickness is defined by g/㎡. Normal printing paper is usually 80 g/㎡, whereas for water colouring, you'll need at least 150 g/㎡ (they can be used on lighter paper too, but I don't recommend it). I personally go with 300 g/㎡ or 200g/㎡.

I recommend Fabriano (my favourite), but if that is too pricey, you would be amazed how good water colour paper you can find among less known brands. Since I am assuming that you want to fuck around and experiment, just get any cheap 200 g/㎡ paper for now.

✪ Brushes ✪

Usually, the round brushes (on the right of the picture) are considered to be water colour brushes, and I use those 95% of the time, but as long as a brush can pick up enough water and isn't too rough, any brush would work. I also have those brushes with a little container for water (on the left), which are pretty good and practical too.

✪ Other things you'll need ✪

A jar with water. A LOT OF WATER IN FACT. Some people use even two jars at the same time, one for cleaning the brushes and one for taking the water that you wet the paper with.

Secondly, you'll need some cloth, tissues or a simple toilet paper. This is used for picking up the water from the paper if you placed too much of it, for trying out your colours before applying them or for some fancy effects.

Do not forget a pallet to mix your colours on. The best ones are plastic, white pallets. DON'T USE WOODEN PALLETS AND PALLETS IN OTHER COLOURS. Water colours are transparent and so they need white background behind them if you want to see what colour you made.

You might need some art tape too (you know, the yellow one that doesn't rip the paper apart when you take it off). This is used to tape down your paper to the table or whatever surface you are drawing on, especially if you are using a paper of less than 200 g/㎡. Make sure the paper is stretched out nicely, because otherwise you will end up with a wavy paper once the colour dries out.

(but you won't see that from me. I am a lazy ass who doesn't tape her paper down, which is why I prefer thicker paper anyway.)

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:sparkle: Let us begin :sparkle: (finally, I'm wondering if anybody has been reading so far)

✪ Try out your water colours! ✪

(please don't be a moron like me, who destroyed a drawing just because I didn't want to try out my colours on a separate paper when I first grabbed them)

Take a piece if paper and try your stuff in different ways. Your brush should obviously be wet if you want any colour to stick on it.

Water colours are either applied on wet or dry paper. Applying to wet paper gives the effects as seen on the left, the colour spreads and gives interesting shapes which you can use for all kinds of textures and effects. If you apply it on a dry paper, the colour won't spread or blend, as seen on the right. This is perfect for small details and precision. You can always use some combination between these two as well, experiment a bit before you take your first painting.

✪ Blending ✪

Note that water colours blend together only when they are wet. If you want to use two colours and blend them, they must be on a wet surface (left), otherwise you'll end up with strict lines between them (right).

You can also apply two colour next to each other, and while they are still wet, ads water between them. That way you'll blend them even if you forgot to wet the paper before applying the colours.

✪ Watch out for the colour intensity! ✪

An important thing to is that the colour intensity is directly affected by the amount of water you mix it with. On the picture above, you'll see the exact same colour used with varied amounts of water, from the most (left) to the least (right). With water colours, it's always better to start out with lots of water, as you can always add more colour over it for a better intensity and lightness. If you add a ton of dry colour from the start, well... you won't be able to fix it if it's too much.

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:sparkle: Let's make a scrib drawing! :sparkle: (Get it, scrib drawing? Hehe... I'll shut up now)

I wanted to start with something simple. A Scribby!

What I did first is applying a base colour. This colour should be really light, which means you need to use more water for your colours. You can, of course, use more or less light colours, depending on how intense or dark the final thing you want to be (like flat black surfaces, which I really love but they aren't a characteristic of water colour technique).

Now, the next step is pretty easy if you have some experience with shading. Basically, you determine where light source would be coming from, and the opposite of that would be where the shadow of an object is falling.

When you know where light and shadow are, you should apply the light first. Natural light we see is actually white, but it appears yellowish, and so the parts that are directly under sunlight should be covered with yellow.

If your base colour is still wet, you can try the wet blending I told you about, but even if it dried out by now, it's still okay and should look good if you add yellow over the gray.

You can also use pretty much any other colour for the light depending on the atmosphere of your painting. Yellow is most natural, but light can appear in other colours too (example, if you are painting something under the lights if Blackreach, their light would be green/blue)

Next thing is shadow. If you have some experience with shading in colours, you are probably aware of the fact that you should not shade with black. I'm adding that you shouldn't shade with gray or brown either (I used to shade with brown long ago, and all my stuff looked dull and dead). Instead, mix the colour with dark blue or purple and use that as the shadow! And if you are shading a surface that is coloured in some cold colour, you should mix it with red.

(Warm colours are shaded with blue, cold colours are shred with red, although there are plenty of exceptions here). I used mostly purple to shade my scribby.

The basic shading should be the lightest shade, but would also cover the biggest surface. Think about what kind of shadow object's shape would give out. The scribby here is obviously roundish, so his shadows should go smoother, but if you were doing something like a cube, it would have much straighter shadows.

Next thing is applying another layer of shading, darker than the previous one but also covering a smaller surface. Since I don't want my shadings to blend too much, I wait for the previous layer to dry out before I put the next one.

I ALWAYS go by at least two levels of shading, often way more than that. Next picture is another level of shading I did. In this painting I did only three shades, but like I said, it can be way more. My shades go from the lightest to the darkest, and the bigger the difference between them, the better the contrast of the painitng is.

And here is what the finished, scanned version looks like! (Added some white gel pen and such, but I am not talking about that in this tutorial)

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:sparkle: Another, more complex example :sparkle:

I did another little painting, this time a portrait of my bitchy Thalmor OC, Awelin. I won't explain each of them in details like the previous one, but the steps are the same.

An important note here is that I usually start with the skin, as it's the lightest part of a drawing. However, Awelin`s skin is slightly darker than her hair, so I started with he hair. With water colours, you should always start with the lightest parts of your drawing and advance to the darkest!

On the shading pictures bellow, you can see how I followed the texture of her hair. Again, the shadow follows the shape and texture of its surface!

On the next one I added another level of skin shading, a blush, and I coloured in the eyes.

And here is the finished, scanned version. I used some gel pens as well, I always use them.

#curatorreview