Painting Abstract Portraits Using Watercolors

Hello! In this video I will review the eight watercolor techniques that we already learned and help you get started painting your portrait. When painting your portrait it's really important to move around to different areas of the painting so that the paint does not bleed from one area into another. Also make sure you use all eight different watercolor techniques somewhere in your painting. To get started you need clean water, a paint set, I'd say at least one size of paintbrush but possibly two, paper towel, and the kit of extra supplies. The first technique I'm going to review with you is adding crayons for a resist. Crayons are waxy and obviously your watercolor paint is watery and so the wax resists the watercolor paint. But you do need to apply a lot of crayon first for this to work and when you apply the paint you need your paint to be very watery. So watch as I use some very watered down orange paint. See when I put it on without a lot of water it covers up the crayon more. If I pull it out with more water it's going to show more of the crayon through. Next I want to review with you how to dilute your paint, thin it out, or change the value. So if you want your color to get lighter you need to add more water to it. Do that in the lid. That's what I just did with the blue. Now instead of using that blue paint though I'm going to do wet on wet. This is another technique we learned. So I'm adding some water with my paintbrush to the areas that I want to paint blue with the wet on wet technique. And then I just kind of dab a little bit of the blue paint into the wet paper and you can watch it bleed out. It's not bleeding into the orange and yellow sun rays because those areas are already dry. Very important to wait until an area is dry before painting next to it or the color will bleed just like you see happening in the wet on wet area. When you want to mix colors together remember to mix them up in the lid. So if I want to mix red and purple paint together I'm doing that in the lid not in the paint set itself. You don't want to contaminate the colors of the paint set for other people. To add in extra patterns and texture a great idea is to paint over dry areas with some details. You can use a more dry brush and paint in thin lines or shapes. You could dry brush textures anything you wish over top of an area that is already dry. In addition to layering paint to add patterns and details you could also layer other things like crayons, colored pencils, even markers or sharpie when the paper is dry. As you work with watercolor paint your water is going to get pretty dirty. You can see mine starting to look like grape Kool-Aid. Yummy! So at this point I need to clean my water to refresh it because if I want to use a color like yellow it's not going to look very pretty mixed with some purple water. So for my next area I'm going to demonstrate blending from one color into another color as well as wet on wet again. So nothing is wet around the area that I'm painting. That's important to know first of all. I'm mixing some water with my yellow and now I'm going to paint with the yellow in the left side of my face. I'm going to kind of pull the paint out. I don't want it to pool too much. That means I don't want too much water sitting on the surface of the paper. That is bad because it could run. Also I just noticed look I just got some paint on my hand so I turned my paper so that I could rest my hand on a clean surface. That is something that you might need to be careful of as you paint more and your painting gets more wet. Okay now I'm adding in some orange on the other side and I'm going to blend that orange paint up into the yellow paint as well as add some more water onto my paper so that I can experiment with some wet paint on wet paper. I'm going to grab some red next and I'm going to just put some of this red in the area that's really wet and just watch that red kind of explode out. This will get me some really cool effects. I'm using colors that are analogous to each other on the color wheel. I know they're going to blend well together because of that. My water is starting to pool on the paper a bit so you can see as I move the paper around the water can spread with the paint. So if it ever gets too wet just take your paper towel and blot some of that paint or water up. Now that you have been watching me paint for a little bit I'm sure you're getting really excited to work on your own painting but before you do let's just review a few things to do and a few things not to do. One common mistake that people make with watercolor paint is just using too much water or paint. So to control your paint if it ever starts to pool or puddle where it can run and get out of your control use your paper towel to blot some of that liquid or paint up. You can always add more and you can always take it away with your paper towel. Another thing not to do is don't press your brush down straight into your paper. It really ruins the bristles. You don't want the bristles to come out like a fan like this. It's really bad for the paintbrush. Also the more you rub aggressively on the paper the higher chance that a hole will occur. You can see I actually tore a hole through my paper there. All right another thing not to do is don't use too much paint from the paint set. Watercolor paint is supposed to be thinned out with plenty of water. If it's applied too thick without enough water it doesn't dry well. It kind of leaves the paper sticky and then your painting can get stuck to something else. It also kind of has a weird shine to it that doesn't look that great when everything is drying. So if you get too much paint on your paper again just wipe some of that off with a paper towel. Now some do's. If you make a mistake, if you drop your paintbrush, if something splatters on your paper immediately take clean water on the cleanest brush you can find and put it on the paper followed by your paper towel. If you can just quickly add some clean water and a paper towel to absorb that watery paint you can actually erase a painting mistake. Now finally to clean up. In review make sure you add some water to the paint set lid and then wipe out all of the paint from the lid. Your brushes should go bristles up into the cup and put all of your extra materials back into the pencil case. I really hope you enjoy being creative and playing with color with this project.