Extreme Beginners - Painting Square and Rectangle shaped Color Swatches for Brushwork Mastery

Hello everyone. Again, this is Watercolor in 5. I'm glad you came today and we're going to have some fun. We're going to actually get into our paints and our palette and do some practicing up on some swatches. This just ties into my new series with watercolor palettes, watercolor paints, choosing paints, what paints to use, how to keep them fresh and soft and moist in your palettes. This is a new channel, Watercolor in 5. I welcome you. I also have another channel on YouTube. I've been on YouTube for four years now, approximately. You can just type in my name, Chris, C-H-R-I-S, last name Petri, P-E-T-R-I. I have about 250 watercolor videos there, all types of styles of watercolor, paintings, just a whole gamut of interesting information there. That's another resource for you. This channel I just started, Watercolor in 5, is just to do quick little vignettes of great tips and tricks and interesting tidbits of information on watercolor, because sometimes when we're doing full one-hour videos on creating paintings and so forth, it's hard to just get in all of this information there. This is my second channel, and this way I can just do a quick 5-10 minute video every once in a while. Maybe I hope to do it once a week, and this way I can put out some other information for everyone that's going to be helpful, whether you're a new artist or you've been painting watercolor for some years now, or maybe you're even a pro at it. All the information is good information. Maybe some of it you're not going to be interested in, some you will. That's fine. We're just here to all learn together and get better. That's really the main focus of being a watercolor artist. We as artists, we're just always looking to create better paintings and do more beautiful work, and that's what we're here for. So let's get into it. Okay, so this is the watercolor palette I use. I suggest this one. It's a great one for everyone that's in the beginner stage or intermediate stage, and you maybe have different palettes, and you're not sure which one is the best one. I think this one is commercially available. You can get this pretty much at all art stores, online, easy to find. It's by Holbein, and basically it's an aluminum palette. Metal, which I really prefer metal. It cleans up real nice and easy when you're done painting, and it's got plenty of spaces for your colors, plenty of wells, and it also, you can use double stick tape and buy these extra plastic wells online to add different colors if you think you want to add a few extras. So that being said, since we're always, you know, in the beginning now we're talking about palettes and colors, let's get into doing some swatches. If you are a beginner, let's say, then this is the perfect time that you would start to create your talent and your techniques with your pencil and drawing and painting, and so I would, you know, suggest I use a regular office pencil many times when I draw and paint, and they work great. You can keep them sharp real easy. They have an eraser in case you need, and we'll do some swatches here, and then I just have a simple travel brush by DaVinci Maestro, which is a really good watercolor brush, and I always say just buy the best art supplies you can afford. So if you're on a budget and things are sometimes tight with money, you just try to buy the best you can. You do some research, and you figure out what are the best materials and things you can buy, and we'll also do a video on different brushes and different things like that, and there's also great information on YouTube regarding reviews on brushes and pencils and so forth. So just another thing we're going to touch upon as we go forward here on this channel. So here we'll just do a couple quick swatches. Let's do just, you know, rectangles or squares just like this. We space them a little bit apart from one another, and we just practice our drawing skills at the same time. We just start in one spot and draw and get our rectangle in like this, and we draw little dots. If we're stopping to check an angle, we just stop with our dot, check, stop with a dot, go across, stop, and then we go up, dot. So we're kind of moving fast and slow, fast, and we slow up at the end here just to get our proper level point from here to here, and we go across, and then we stop here for a second and go, okay, now we're going up this way, straight up this way, maybe a little tiny dot, and then we go left, kind of like a jogger running in place. Sometimes you see people running and jogging on the street. They sometimes come to a street corner, and they just jog in place while the light changes, and then once it's safe to go, they're on their happy way. We'll do the same thing with our drawing. We're drawing our squares here, our rectangles, and we stop and run in place with our pencil so we can prepare to go upwards vertically like this, and we can stop there, and then run in place, and then go across, level, parallel, and we meet up with the other line. Okay, and we'll just do that, and we'll just create a series of these, and we'll put the paints in our palette onto swatches, and this is a great thing to do. Practicing again our drawing skills, you know, so we go as slow as you need to go to get your square or your rectangle is fine. When you first start out doing this, it's a slower process, and that's fine. I've been doing this for 15 years now, so now I can go real fast, and it's easy for me, but if you're starting out drawing, you know, it's going to take you some time. No big deal at all. Everyone starts at the same place. When we all start, we're all starting on the same starting point. When we're first in learning to draw and drawing, learning to paint, it takes time. There's, people say that some people are gifted. I don't think so. I think it's just your, however many hours you practice is, that's how well, good you're going to do. If you practice a lot, you're going to get really good. If you don't practice all that often, you're not going to make a lot of progress. It's as simple as that. And so here, we're continuing on, practicing our squares, rectangles, having fun. We're just enjoying it. You know, we can do little lines like this, you know, have fun with it. Create your own little fun excursions when you're doing your drawings and paintings, especially in the beginning when it's a little more tough, and you don't feel like you're making great progress. That's okay. You just keep going and keep going. Okay, there we go. Let's see how many paints we can fill in now. With our paint brush here, we got a simple round brush. It's a Kolinsky Sable brush. It's the best water color brush you can buy with the Kolinsky Sable hairs. You can use a synthetic brush, that works fine. Especially when you're a beginner in watercolor, it's probably good to have a synthetic brush to use because it doesn't have as much water. When you dip it into water, it doesn't hold as much water in the hairs, which means you'll have less water flooding out onto your paper when you're practicing your swatches or your paintings. So let's start out. We'll use our first color here. Now this palette here, let me mention this. This is a palette that's been in my studio, and I haven't used it in about probably six or eight months. So these paints were all dry, and all I did was I just used a spritzer bottle, and I spritzed all the paints for the last 15-20 minutes to try to revive them a little bit. And as I do that, they'll get softer and softer. And then you can go back to my other videos on this channel, and you'll see how putting a little paper towel with some water on it, moist paper towel, and putting this in a plastic bag. I have a plastic bag for this palette that fits in perfect in the Ziploc bag. And then if I do this for a couple, two, three days, all these paints will be all perfectly moist again. So no wasting paints. Okay, this is Yellow Ochre. Notice I'm switching my brush around, different angles, vertical, horizontal. You can do angles. Key is to practice all different strokes. I'll do another video on different brush stroke techniques. Here we can do them just to have fun. And since we're painting anyway, you know, we can do a Z stroke, which is basically the letter Z in the English language. A Z stroke, and then one up, and two up, and then a touch up there and there. And that's a Z stroke. And then we can do an H stroke. H stroke is once. We go up again, another stroke across the middle, and then we touch up on the top and the bottom. And that's an H stroke. We can do a S stroke like that. And then just touch up the tops with the very tippy point of the brush. And I have my hand resting on the paper at all times like this. So my hand is always resting on the paper, stabilizing my brush strokes. Okay, and then we can just have, we can do another Z stroke. Make the letter Z or an S. And then we just fill in the burnt umber. Then we're going to go into some olive green. Maybe we'll do just an S stroke, just continuous S stroke. And we just touch up the edges if we need a little bit. And we'll do chromium oxide. So I'm going through my palette colors again. I just did a video on palette colors. You can check that out on this channel. And in here I'll just do some random work with the brush. I'm not going to be as disciplined right now. I'm just going to go in there and fill in the square. And then we have some sap green. Maybe we'll do an H stroke. And I push the brush all the way down like that, and then lift up like that, and then fill in. Okay, and then we're going to zip over to the Viridian. And we'll do another, and then we do a vertical up stroke this way, and a vertical up stroke this way. And then we just touch up a couple spots we need to. Okay, and then we're going to go to cerulean blue. Cerulean, great color. One of my favorites. And I'll just free flow here. Change my brush strokes different ways here. Maybe we'll do a down stroke like this. That one's a little more difficult doing a down stroke because you lose track of the bottom side of your brush. So it's always good to keep a real good eye on the very, very tippy point of your brush. This way you can always see what the brush is doing and where it's painting. If you're painting like this, and you're going downwards, you can see how you can go way over a place on your watercolor paper you might not want to. So that is just something to keep in mind when you're painting. So we're going to do some cobalt blue. I'm going to pick up the pace a little bit. We're trying to keep this watercolor in five and I notice a lot of my videos are going over five minutes. So hopefully you like going over five minutes sometimes here and there. And we're going to do some French ultramarine blue. Again, I'm always stabilizing my hand resting on the paper. Then we have some peacock blue, which is a very intense blue. Very dark in color in a sense. And then we have some purple, which is mineral violet. And again, I'm picking up the pace. And then here we have one of my favorites too, Prussian blue. Actually, that might even be something different. Some of my colors in this palette, I did not do exactly as I normally do. This is actually Payne's gray and this would be ivory black. So we'll use ivory black here. And then let's shift over to... I should have started over here. I always try to work from warm to cool. Somehow I skipped over these. No big deal. Let's try some... This is rose madder, a very beautiful flower color. Very light in tonal value. Very transparent. Then we're going to do some alizarin crimson, another beautiful flower color. This is great for just a general purpose red. Then we're going to go into cadmium red, another great red. Very opaque. Okay, let's split this here so we can get the rest of them in. That's cadmium red. Let's do cadmium orange. We'll leave a little space there. Cadmium orange, cadmium yellow, and finally cadmium lemon yellow. Okay, that's practicing swatches. I would practice these a lot, especially if you're just starting out or you're just a couple years of watercolor painting. This really helps your skills with your painting, with your brush. Helps tremendously because you're controlling your brush strokes to create these swatches of color and at the same time you're memorizing the colors by name, which you need to do. You also need to have your eyes focused in on the colors and learning the colors so that eventually after maybe took me, I would say, about five years, approximately five years after I was painting with this same palette of colors, the same palette all the time, eventually I could look out into nature when I'm driving down the highway and the roads. I could say, oh, I can see the yellow ochre in the fields and I can see the cerulean blue and cobalt blue and French ultramarine in the sky, and so on so forth, and the reds and the oranges and yellows in the trees and the leaves. So all these different colors, you'll recognize them and see them actually out in your world that you live in. Wherever you live, you'll see these colors eventually starting to appear for you when you look out into the landscape and into the cityscapes. And if you live around water, you'll see the blue colors a lot more familiar. You'll see them, they'll become familiar to you, and you'll see the different shades and different intensities of color and the actual hue of the colors. You'll see that in nature, actually, if you work with the same palette all the time. And you can also use different colors. You might like certain blues different than I might choose here. So you can choose your own colors, but this is a real standard mainstream, I would call it, palette where most professional watercolor artists out there today are using pretty much a close, they use pretty much most of these same colors. You'll see them, if you do a study on it, you'll see that most of the, you know, top professionals today are using most of these colors. Some will have different variations of a few of the colors, but most times, most artists will be using these. You'll see a lot of these familiar colors all the time, and you can check out my other videos on this channel and you'll see all the different colors. I've listed them out and shown them so you can write them down or I can also send them to you if you send out an email. Okay, everyone, we went a little bit over this time. I understand five minute watercolors is turning into another 15-20 minute video, but hey, I know you, all of you artists out there, you really enjoy your art tremendously. So I know you'll have fun with this and you won't really mind doing a little bit extra time on your paints and swatches and colors. And we'll see on the next video. Oh, and please, by the way, if you haven't subscribed, consider subscribing. This way, you'll get my videos once a week or so when I create a new video. You can hit the subscribe, the actual notification bell when you subscribe. That bell will let you know when my video comes out. It's the exact minute. And also, too, if you like this video, please thumbs up and we'll see you on the next video. Okay. Happy painting, everyone. Bye.