IMPORTANT Watercolor Technique Tip for Beginners

Know the enemy and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. Well, in this house we know the enemy by several names. Backgrounds, blooms, broccolis, uh, cauliflowers. Seriously, we have come up with so many aliases for this thing that we hate and love. This effect that happens when excess water is added to a watercolor painting that has not fully dried. As a beginner and as someone who is not a watercolor wizard with preternatural talent, it's me, hi, it can be an absolute pain to deal with. Because here you are trying to paint a nice flat sky and the water drops come in and ruin your day. Ah, water. Only in watercolor is the best friend standing beside you on the battlefield also your greatest nemesis. But let me tell you something. Backgrounds don't need to be this annoyance that you fear every time you start the painting. And with this series I'll explore with you some of the different ways you can use the blooms to your advantage because you can get a lot of cool and useful effects. If you know the time and place to use them. You can control water, not completely. It's a strong and independent element. Ancient as this floating rock and it will not bend to any mortal's commands. But we can work with it. We can maneuver it closer to a finished art piece that is more in line with what we want. Okay, so with this one I'm just gonna keep it simple. We're gonna do two flowers. One is a rose. The other one is a blue iris. With the rose I made an orange reddish mixture using perylene red and also raw sienna. And I'm just painting it over the flower. Just a flower. Now before it dries completely I'm gonna make sure to scrape off some of the highlights using a damp brush. So wipe off some of the excess moisture from the brush and then just scrape off the parts you want to be highlights on the paper. Now I'm going to add a drop of water to the right side of the rose. Now this is the side where the light is hitting the subject from. So I kind of want this area to be an explosion of lightness. And you're gonna get a little bit of texture from that. Just a little bit. Nothing too intense. Now while that dries I'm going to work on the rest of the flower. I'm painting in the stem in the same kind of orangish reddish color but I'm adding a bit of ultramarine to it to tone it down to this reddish brown. And then I'm dropping in bits of ultramarine onto the stem wet on wet. For the leaves, again I'm starting out with that mixture of reddish orange plus ultramarine. And then while it's still wet I'm gonna add in bits of red and ultramarine and then just let the colors mix on the paper. Just mingle and scatter and do what they want to do. Let them be wild. Now after the first layer dries I'm just gonna build up the rose with very thin mixture of the same colors. Making sure to add ultramarine to the shadow areas and also taking care to preserve some of the highlights and the light areas. So you can see the bloom we added in the beginning has been covered up somewhat. You can still see the texture of the blooms, the crooked edges, showing through all those colors. So it's a very subtle effect but it still kind of adds a bit of variety to the painting. Something for your eyes to kind of look over and be like, oh this is something new. Now with the iris, this is a mixture of naples yellow, french ultramarine, and quinacridone rose. So I'm laying down the naples yellow first and then adding the ultramarine rose mixture on top of it wet on wet. So I'm just letting the blue purple mixture flow through the petals. The mixture is still wet but has dried a little bit. The sheen has kind of disappeared but not fully. Add in a drop of water on the top of the iris and also the left petal. I didn't plan these blooms beforehand. I'm just adding them in places where I think they could create areas of interest. And I'm not worrying too much about, oh is this going to look good? Because I know that I can always cover it up with more paint. So I'm not backing myself into a corner like, oh I have to keep this, I have to keep this area in this little broccoli state. Nope, I do not. So each bloom is like a branching possibility. I could choose to follow that route and see where it leads me or I could block it off, cover it up with paint and pretend like it never existed. It always puts you in a positive mind space to allow yourself those options when you're painting. So I think this technique adds a lovely subtle effect to your painting. It prevents it from being too smooth and too structured, which you can get with watercolor. And you can have these little areas where things aren't perfect, which is great as a beginner because it gives yourself so much freedom and leeway and just a peace of mind to do whatever you want to explore and see where the paint takes you.