Dot Painting for Beginners __ What you NEED to know to start DOT ART

Hey everybody, welcome into Rock Painting 101. Today we are going to talk about dot painting. And dot painting does not have to be mandala art. There's quite a few different things you can do with it. We are going to touch on a few different things through this video. We're going to start with talking about dotting tools. We're going to talk about paint consistency and then some design options for you. So if at any time in the video if you're looking for one of those nuggets, you can skip forward to the section below that you would like to see. Otherwise, let's get started. The first thing we're going to talk about is dotting tools. Now if you get into dotting and you really enjoy it, you can get yourself a pair of dotting tools like this. They come with lots of different sizes. They're all double-ended, so it gives you lots of options as far as the size of your dots that you'll be placing on your art. However, if you're brand new and you're not sure if this is something that you really are going to get into or not, there are lots of things around your home that you can use for dotting tools. Now if you are a painter by trade or by hobby, you most likely have paintbrushes around your house. The ends of your paintbrushes are going to allow you a lot of different sizes. You can use those for dotting. Another thing you can use are pencil erasers. Now if you have a brand new pencil, it gives you a really good large size dot. Then you can actually take a pencil sharpener and sharpen your eraser end. Let's bring this in here and see if it can focus. We're going to sharpen our eraser end like so. It will actually give you a smaller size dot. See how it's doing that? You can't shove it in too far. You've just got to put it just enough that you can get an angle on the eraser and sharpen your eraser. You'll end up with a smaller size dot. Then you can also use pencil end for even smaller dots. Other things around the house, bobby pins, nails, literally anything that comes to a point can be used as a dotting tool. The next thing we're going to talk about is paint consistency. You can buy lots of different styles of acrylic paints in the store. They don't all work the same, especially when it comes to laying down your dots. I'm going to switch camera angles here and show you kind of how they look when they first come out of the bottle. How to adjust them so you can start placing your dots properly. Most of your paints that come in these containers are going to be a decent consistency right out the gate. I often will work right in the lid of these containers. You want to load up your dotting tool, best way I can show you guys this, right into that big blob of paint. You want it almost like the paint is hanging off of your dotting tool. See how we got this little droop happening here? That way when you go to place it, you're actually placing that drop down to your paper and you don't actually touch your dotting tool. Then you leave that nice little dot. Now you can create more than one dot off that same little bit of paint, but they're going to get smaller and smaller. This paint is pretty much ready to go right from the bottle. The tube style paints are going to be a little bit thicker when you purchase them, which is going to cause a problem when it comes to placing dots. We're acrylic paint. I'll show you right off the bat what happens if you use this paint straight out of the bottle. You can load it up onto your dotting tool, but see right there, see how it makes a peak even when you're just pulling it up? That's going to leave that same kind of mark when you place your dots down on your project. See how it leaves those little points? That is not what you want when you're doing your dots. So all you need to do is add the smallest bit of water to your paint. I'm just going to add, I mean, we're talking very minimal. You can always add more. You can't take it back out. So I'm just going to add, this is not very much paint. I'm just going to do two little drops of water there. I'm just going to take this tool and just kind of stir it in there. You could do this with acrylic paints because they are water-based paint. So it might take a second to get it kind of gelling together there. Still have a little bit of a peak happening. So see when I lift my paint or my dotting tool out, it still leaves a little bit of a peak there. So we know we need just a smidge more water. See, I just added one drop. So see now when we pull up, we're not left with that peak. It kind of settles back in. All right, so we'll go back and grab that same dotting tool. Load that paint up on our dotting tool. We'll put it right next to this other one. See how it settles in? Just like that. And I'll get you a little bit closer here at the end. You can compare them. Now you're going to have the same thing happening with any of the two paints that you get. They're usually just a little bit thicker. So I'm going to take you out of here. So that's focused in there. See the main difference between those two dots of the same color there? The black one comes out automatically just fine. But as you can see, if you've got thicker paints, you can definitely work with them. Just again, add that water slowly. You don't want your paint to be watery. That is not the goal. Now I'm going to keep this angle here so you can also see the placement of a dot. All right, so I've got my camera really low here because I want you to see from the side, placing these dots because we're not going to actually touch all the way down. See how that dot is kind of drooping off? You let it kind of grab from the tool. You see that? How it kind of grabs the paint? And that's how you're going to get the circles. And if you don't have any paint dripping off, get some more paint. Now if you're doing dot designs where you need your dots to be consistent size-wise, you're going to get fresh paint each time because then they'll stay the same. See how we're just kind of letting that come down off in this direction? So I know a lot people have issues with their dots aren't like circles. If your dot's not a circle, it's because you're possibly pressing. And I'll do a couple. If you take and you actually press all the way down to the paper, and you'll see that dot. We'll compare them here in just a second. I'll do a couple more like that, where if you actually take and press all the way down to the paper, okay? And then also when you're loading your paint, if you don't have enough paint on your dotting tool, it won't leave a very good dot. So I'm going to put all my dots. See how you can hear me touching the table? So I know you can kind of see they're a little wonky from the side angle here, but I'm going to lift you up so you can see overhead, and then we're going to start talking designs. So as you can see, these are the ones that we placed where we were letting the paint kind of pull off. And then here on the left hand side, these are the ones where we were touching. See how they just they leave kind of an oval shape? The paint can kind of bulge off to one side over another. So just make sure you consistently have your dotting tool, whatever it may be, nice and loaded up so that that paint is kind of coming down off of your dotting tool. So we've talked dotting tools and paints, and now it's time to talk about designs. Now I know if you're in the rock painting community or even the painting community in general, when you hear about dot painting, a lot of people do dotted mandalas, and these are gorgeous and beautiful. I'm going to show a few examples over here on this side of guest posts that we have on our website because I am not experienced enough to say that I can teach others how to do really good dot mandalas as an instructor. So we've had a few guest posts. One is more of how to lay out your mandala, and then another one here, this one is actually brush painting and just techniques on how to improve your mandala painting experience. Now I have done a mandala on here. It is on the page. I'll link to it above. It is for beginners by a beginner. I kind of touch on just building. It's my second mandala, and I just happen to record it to share with you all on the channel. But there are a lot of other designs that you can create using your dotting tools and these dotting methods where you can really practice placing your dots, getting the consistency right, getting the shapes right, without having this mandala pattern to try to follow or to keep those dots perfect for such a big design. So I'm going to start sharing some photos here over on the side of some designs that we have on the channel. I will link to all of these videos down below. We have a playlist for designs we've used our dotting tools for for you to try out. And some of these are just like I said, they're really great for you to practice your technique as far as dot painting. And then once you really get that down, then you can dive into the mandalas and all sorts of amazing designs. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. I hope it answered some of your questions as beginners using dotting tools and just dotting in general. If you have more questions about it, feel free to leave them in the comments below. Or if you're more experienced and you have a fun tip you'd like to share with us here on the channel and all of the followers as well, leave that in the comments below. We will be back soon with another rock painting tutorial. And don't forget to subscribe. And also, we'll leave a playlist here at the end of all sorts of fun inspiration for you guys to follow. Bye bye.