Advanced Watercolor Techniques 🌹 You Must Try!

Let me ask you a question. Do you think this watercolor looks good? Now what if I add some shadows on the flower? Maybe just a little bit of violet here and there to accentuate the petals? Looks a little better now and typically I would stop and call it a day but for this rose I decided to take it a step further and add a background. Just a few layers of color and a few blending tricks that change the mood completely so my entire painting looks very different now. And in this video I will show you exactly how I did it and the colors I used. One of the more interesting advanced watercolor techniques I will demonstrate is called softening the edges. I will literally cover the petals with another layer of color extending it all the way into the background. A step that is quite often overlooked by beginners but is really essential for creating a sense of atmospheric depth and avoiding this effect where your subject is sort of floating in space. So a much more natural way of building your watercolor layers. As always if you want to paint along in real time with me the slow step-by-step version with commentary is available on my Patreon channel. But first let's go back to the beginning because I know you want to see how I painted the first layers to get all that glowing light and pretty shadows before we paint the background. The beautiful reference photo I used is from Nancy Waldock and I will leave a link to her page in the description below so you can try it yourself. And the first the most important part is what's called an underpainting. You can see I'm covering the center of the rose with a light yellow color and it's going to remain there shining through all the subsequent layers of color creating this very subtle glowing light effect. You may have seen me use it on many subjects from grapes to seashells and it works beautifully for any composition so don't be afraid to try it on your favorite fruit or flower. I used Hansa Yellow Deep from Daniel Smith and as an option you can also introduce additional variation by adding any orangey pigments you have on hand. Maybe some Scarlet Lake or Windsor Orange Redshade. I will leave a full list of watercolor supplies I used in the video description below. In step two we work with the main petal color, something that will serve as a foundation on which we will build our shadows and texture. Keep in mind that this layer has to be super light, very watered down, so stick to maybe step three or four on the value scale. If you go any darker your shadows will be lost in the next layer and you won't have any room to build on. A little trick that I want to point out here is instead of covering everything with your color mix you want to leave the highlights completely dry. Leaving just a few white spots goes a long way to help you create a sense of realistic form. So don't rush, slow down, take a closer look at the reference photo and paint around those bright spots with the tip of your brush. They will remain white for the most part and until the very end and this will go a long way to help us build a sense of volume on the rose. In terms of the colors I would recommend using a very watered down mixture of your transparent red, something like quinacridone fuchsia or quinacridone rose, if you want to use one pigment for simplicity. Or if you want to try a more nuanced approach you can mix two pigments. I'm using a mix of warmer quinacridone coral from Daniel Smith and a much cooler quinacridone violet from Winsor & Newton. Having two pigments on your palette allows you some flexibility. You can see I'm dipping into warmer side of the mix for those areas that are closer to the center of the flower and into the cooler violet side of the mix for my shadow areas. Now in step three we can add the shadows using a bit of a darker version of our background petal color with maybe some extra Dioxazine purple in the mix. Don't worry about getting these shapes exactly right, just the general placement. You will notice as you paint the highlights are concentrated for the most part around the edges of each petal and the part that's turned towards the sun and is catching the most sunlight. The shadows on the other hand are almost always on the bottom left. These three petals all the way down will remain almost completely in the shadow all the way through and will play an important role in this exercise later on when we add our background color and connect it to the rose using what's called a softening the edge technique. More on that in a minute but notice how the entire flower starts glowing at this point. The shadows help us create a sense of form and dimension and the first yellow layer is shining through because watercolors are transparent and your initial layers are always adding an extra boost of color which is why i teach slow gradual glazing in all my classes. It goes a long way to help you build a three-dimensional form on paper and create a sense of realistic depth which is why by the end of the step we have a pretty good and almost fully realized rose and as i mentioned in the beginning you can actually stop at this point if you're happy but of course in this video we will take it a step further and add a background. I will mostly use Indothrone blue because blues always look further away compared to other pigments so it's a natural choice for a background color but you can use some dark greens or even a variety of colors if you like. The key thing about the step is creating an even coverage and the trick is pre-wetting the paper around the edges with clear water so that when you put down your background color closer to the rose the particles of the paint can spread and travel freely in all directions. I described this technique in detail in the recent Skillshare class on watercolor backgrounds but here we have a chance to put it into practice and really test it on the larger scale. You can add some details wet on wet and i'm using the same purple i applied on the petals to create some organic shapes using wet into wet technique. Don't worry too much if you get some uneven patches of paint, we will have a chance to smooth it out with another layer of blue towards the end. Now we have a blue backdrop and while it's drying it's a good opportunity to add some additional shadow accents. I absolutely love this step because it offers us a chance to really meditate on the intricate shadow shapes that light creates on the petals, maybe capturing some darker moodier colors in those areas that are pointing away from the light and adding some additional boost of warm coral in the center. I realize i'm exaggerating my colors quite a bit but this is what attracted me to this rose in the first place. This gorgeous variation in lights and darks and intricate shadow accents, everything pointing towards the glowing center right in the middle of the composition. Remember how i said blue always recedes into the background? Well the reds, in this case my coral, always appear closer drawing the most attention so this is a wonderful very logical arrangement of colors where i can accentuate the center of the rose with my warm coral capturing even the smallest veins with the tip of my brush. I'm using Escoda Kronos, it's 90% synthetic brush and i've been using them non-stop since last year. Absolutely amazing quality and very affordable too compared to real sable. I will leave my darkest purples and violets for the shadows at the bottom and remember i told you these petals are very important we can finally soften the edges between the rose and the background by extending our shadows from the petals down and into the first layer of blue. Notice that i will only do this at the bottom left the area that is the furthest away from our source of light. I'm basically removing this unnatural border we've created around the rose so all attention can be directed towards the top right and the center of the glowing rose. Try this on any subject you paint whether it's a landscape or portrait. Don't be afraid to extend your background shadows over the main subject and into the background and you will be amazed at how much more depth you can achieve this way. You can see now that i'm adding one more layer of blue to build more value and smooth out some of those uneven areas of color capturing some additional shadows and veins on the petals. I also want to finally add those stamens in the center of the rose. I was waiting all the way until the end of the painting to add these because with watercolors we always work from light to dark. It's been four hours of work total not counting the drying time in between the steps and as most of my patreon subscribers can tell you i always spend a few minutes at the end of each painting adding some intricate details and balancing out my values. This is not a requirement just something i really enjoy doing and knowing that your first layers were planned well you can always be confident that you have a good foundation and can play around and finesse the details later on. If you want to learn more about creating a sense of glow in your watercolors check out this video above. Special thanks for my patreon subscribers who support this channel. Thank you for watching and painting with me and i will see you next week with more watercolor magic.