Improve your watercolor paintings overnight with this 1 easy step

Hello! Thank you for being here today. In this video, I want to tell you the number one thing that can take your watercolor paintings from pretty good to great overnight, and that thing is paper. And maybe paper quality or paper type doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's actually the number one thing that contributes to how your watercolors look, more than even your paintbrush type or quality or your paint type and quality. It's paper. So there's two types of paper, student grade and artist grade. And student grade is wood-based, which makes it cheaper, and artist grade is 100% cotton, but the texture and the way that it flows lends itself to a more professional and quality look. I will say, though, before I show you some examples with the rest of this video, that you'll see that the student grade artwork is great, and if that is what you can afford at this time, that's fantastic. I don't want anybody to feel like they have to go out and spend a punch of money on artist grade papers now, but I would encourage you in the future to invest in your artwork and in yourself to get artist grade papers because it really will propel you forward in your improvement with watercolor. So in this video, I'm going to show you side by side with artist grade and student grade and show you different paintings and different techniques on the two types of paper, and we can see how they both look. So let's get into it. So for reference, throughout the whole video, I keep the student grade paper on the left and the artist grade paper on the right. And the artist grade paper is 100% cotton, and so it has more of this lovely texture that you see on the right. So for this first example, I am going through just some basic strokes and techniques on the two different types of paper. Now, I really wanted to do everything exactly the same so that we could really see how each paper reacts separately. So already in this experiment, I can tell that the rougher cotton paper on the right is soaking more of the paint in. There's less puddles and everything is blending at a more even rate. And on the left, it's more puddly and the red paint is not quite blending as evenly. Both of these papers are 140 pound cold press papers, but the student grade ends up acting more like hot press because it's so smooth and it doesn't soak things in. So when we are trying to get the look of cold press with the roughness and the texture, we really want the artist grade because it gives us that. Another thing I noticed in this experiment is that with the smooth paper on the left, my strokes slid around too easily. I didn't have as much control because there wasn't very much resistance. So when I was painting here on the right, I felt like I had more control over how much pressure I could put on my brush and where it went because the texture was giving me that resistance. So now that everything's dry, we can get a better idea of how it looks. And really, the painting on the left isn't bad. It's just there's something about the painting on the right with the texture and the more even blending and the different types of strokes that you can achieve with it that just make it feel better. So now that we've gone over the basic strokes, I wanted to put both papers into action and paint a peony flower. Now, to do the shape of the flower, I am doing these swoopy petals across the front with a darker wash and then I'm going behind them and doing a lighter wash again in that same swoopy motion. One of my favorite things to do when I'm painting in this loose style is to add little areas where color is blending up into the other areas of the flower. And so we're going to test that on this artist grade paper here on the right as well as the student grade paper on the left. Again, my goal with these experiments is I really wanted to keep everything the same as much as possible. So I tried to use the same colors, I tried to use the same water to pigment ratios with all of the washes, and I tried to apply everything in the same technique in the same way so that we could really get a feel for how everything looks if it's exactly the same, but the only difference is the paper. Something that I noticed in this painting experiment with the student grade paper was when I used less water, it dried really quickly. So that back petal area of the peony was already dry when I went in to add this yellow, and so it didn't blend quite as much as the one on the right did. And I noticed that the thicker cotton paper takes a little bit longer to dry, which I like because I like to blend and come back in while things are wet. And you can already see the difference in the blending of the colors. So on the left, the colors really aren't blending up into the flower, and on the right the colors have really blended together and it's very even looking. So same thing with the leaf, we can already tell that there's a lot of nice blending going on on the right, and on the left we're going to get deep dark puddles on the top and the bottom of that leaf. Another thing I noticed was that it was a lot easier to do fine details on the artist grade paper. Because of the texture and the resistance, I was able to do finer strokes. When I was doing small thin strokes for the stamen on the left, they kind of blobbed together and I was doing strokes that were thicker and longer than I anticipated, and it was just harder to get it to do exactly what I wanted it to do. For this next painting, I'm just creating circles that are going to barely touch on the edge so that we can see how the watercolors flow and bleed into each other. I'm skipping back and forth between each paper because I don't want the circles to dry. The longer you wait before adding something that's supposed to bleed, the less it will bleed into what you're wanting it to bleed into. And so I really just wanted to give both sides, both papers, an equal chance to bleed into each other without drying first. And you can tell with the left side, it doesn't stay as wet. It dries a little bit faster, so the bleed is not quite as strong into that orange. And you can see in this left purple bubble how everything just wants to pool up instead of blend evenly like on the right. For this painting, I am doing an all-over wash and I'm going to be dropping paint in using wet-on-wet technique. With this rough textured paper on the right, I had to grab more paint a couple of times because the paint just really soaked into the paper. The wet-on-wet technique is when you have a wet brush with pigment and you're dropping paint into a wet area. There are a lot of reasons why you should use this technique in your paintings and so I really wanted to see how each paper held up to this kind of a technique. And after all of these paintings dry, I'm going to show you a big reveal at the end how everything looks side by side. So now I'm going to be painting some watermelon slices. And when I'm painting, I like to leave white space because I think it adds dimension and avoids the appearance of it being flat. And when I was painting on this student grade paper on the left, it was really hard to create that white space. It didn't naturally just come. And you'll see when I'm painting here on the right with the artist grade paper that the white space kind of comes naturally because the brush and the texture just kind of work together to create it. So I did notice that white space was a little bit more easy to achieve with this artist grade paper. Once again, something I noticed when I was painting these lines for the rind of the watermelon was that it was really hard to get an accurate line because the paper doesn't have tension with the texture. I had to really be careful with how my line went. But here on the right, it's like the texture helped guide me in making more of a straight and accurate line. So kind of along the same vein as that, the seeds and the watermelon were really easy to paint tiny. The tiny details were really easy. But when I get over to the left, it was quite difficult to make them tiny. I felt like I didn't have as much control over the size and some of the seeds got away from me and were bigger than I wanted them to be. And so it took me a lot longer to really get those details down. The edges and the lines weren't as straight and neat as I wanted them to be either. For this next painting, I am painting lavender. And the reason I chose lavender for one of these little painting experiments was because I like to layer the petals and the flowers of lavender on top of each other. So I wanted to see how each paper would compare to a layering technique. Once again, with this paper on the right, I felt like my strokes had a little bit more control and followed more the shape of my brush. I was a lot more pleased with the shapes that were taking place on the right than the shapes that I was able to produce on the left. When I'm creating these petals on the left, I'm able to create petals that are really close to each other, but still have distinction. But when I was painting the petals on the left, because the surface is so smooth, a lot of them just really blobbed together and you can't really tell much of a difference between them. So I kind of went off frame here for a second, sorry about that. But once again, on the left side, because the paper is so smooth, I had a harder time forming really detailed straight lines. So for the stems of the flower, I like my lines to be a little thinner and it was hard to achieve that. So again, these lines are just a lot more thin, a lot more dainty, and I just really like the look of that better. It's just more appealing to me. I also really like the texture that's coming from this leaf and all of the dimension that we get there. Also, the blending is a lot more smooth and you don't get the same type of blooms that you get on the left side. When I'm creating these detailed strokes that's adding accent and dimension with the color, my goal is to produce smaller strokes and on the left, they just naturally come out bigger than I want them to. So I'm pleased with how small and detailed they look on the right. Okay, here's the final look. The circles are dry and as you can see, the blending and the texture is just so nice on the right side. I love that. The blending with this wet-on-wet technique is just so much more even without creating too many harsh lines. The lavender is a great example of how the left side looks really good, but I just think the right side just takes it up a notch and looks amazing. Same with the peony. It can all be about preference and I just like the way everything dries better on that more textured surface. The blending is just so much more even and pretty to me. And here's our cute little watermelons. And again, it's preference, but I just love the texture and the way everything has blended. I also like that the lines are able to be more fine and detailed. So that is the end of the video. I really hope you enjoyed seeing a side-by-side comparison of painting the exact same things on student grade paper and artist grade paper. If you would like more tips, tricks, and tutorials, follow me here on YouTube. And in the description down below, I will tell you exactly what artist grade and student grade paper I use and give you the link to both of those as well. I hope you guys have a fantastic day. We'll see you later.