 Hello and welcome to Monet Cafe and Watercolor 101. In this tutorial you're going to learn some basic principles of watercolor painting and we're even going to have some fun painting watercolor caterpillars. And these simple principles will be foundational to your watercolor success. In part 2 we're going to be creating a landscape painting using only three colors. So get ready to learn and have some fun. As with any medium it's first a good idea to learn more about the products. So join me now as we talk about some of the product choices and the different watercolor products available. Hello artists and welcome to Monet Cafe. Today we're actually working in watercolor. I know I combine watercolor a lot with soft pastels and I do some mixed media paintings. But today we're specifically working with just watercolor. There are so many advantages to watercolor painting. It's probably become my second favorite medium. And you know really all mediums have their benefits and some of their drawbacks. So let's talk about watercolor painting today. I'm going to give you some of my favorite watercolor choices as to colors and combinations. Also we'll be doing a little simple painting. And I'll be giving you also some beginner tips and advantages to watercolor painting. So let's get started. This should be fun educational and really great for the beginner watercolor artist. Let's first talk about watercolor paint in general. Now you're probably if you're a beginner watercolor artist more used to seeing them in sets like this that you might have used in school or at home with your mom and dad painting. And these are watercolors of course but they're dry. They've been put into their little palette here and they're already dry which works great for watercolor. But before it dries it starts as a wet medium such as you can find in these tubes. And the color is definitely more vibrant when you use it from this stage rather than letting it dry. Now I often work from a dry type of watercolor palette when I do my videos and often it's just for pure convenience. Now I'll show you some of my watercolor sets that can either be purchased with watercolor already in them or you can add your own colors. This is one by Windsor Newton. I apologize. All of my supplies are really dirty. I mean I use my watercolor palettes here. I don't clean them very good sometimes either. This one came with 24 colors but and Windsor Newton makes a nice watercolor. The neat thing is these can be moved. Mine are kind of stuck in here but you can move these. You can buy new ones or put in your own color if you like. So that's handy. Now one of the advantages to buying palettes that are empty is that you can add your own colors to them. Some of us end up having our own favorite colors and I'm going to show you some of mine. We're going to have a little watercolor fun here. Many of you may have seen in my videos when I combine watercolor and pastel that I use this little Arteza set and I like this one for multiple reasons. First of all, it was free. Arteza was nice enough to send me some product to put in my videos and I had grown fond of this little 36 watercolor set. It is a half pan set reusable paint when dried on palette. Again, you can use watercolor from wet or a dry state and these came already dried in the palette and I actually really like their color selections in here. I have added some acrylic ink accidentally to some of this so that's why it's so dirty looking but this is a handy little palette as well with some great colors. So there are so many choices. Also too, I mentioned a lot that watercolor looks very different in its dried state versus its applied state and that's why it's a good idea like this Arteza set sends you a little color chart that you can fill in the colors. They look so much more vibrant when they're applied rather than when they are dry in their dried state. You can really see this. So that's why it's a good idea. If you buy a set, go ahead and do this. You can see the difference here. I mean look at that purple in the upper left there. It looks almost black when it's dry and it's so vibrant when it's applied to your watercolor paper. So it's a good idea to go ahead and make your own color chart even if one is not provided in the set that you buy or purchase. Now watercolor in the tube state is going to be wet and I do believe that it is its most pure color and most vibrant when you work from this method or this way. Don't let that deter you from working from watercolors that are already dried. I do it all the time but if you ever got really serious about watercolor painting it's really good to go ahead and apply what colors you want to use and work from the tube versus from the dried palette that you're using. But I'm going to use these today really just to show you some of my favorite colors and explain to you some of the reasons I love watercolor and also give you some little tips as beginners as to I think probably some of the easiest and best tips that you can learn when you're first starting out with watercolor. Things that I learned the hard way. All right, here we go. Here you can see some of my tube watercolors and two of my favorite brands are DaVinci and Mgram and Company. Probably Mgram are my favorites. I just love their colors. Now I particularly like colors that are translucent. That means you can see through them very easy versus opaque colors and that's something you can learn more later but many of the colors I'll be using for this demonstration are quite translucent. That's another one of the beautiful benefits of watercolor is it's just so luminous and translucent on the white paper. Now as stated before one of the beautiful benefits of watercolor is this might look like a lot of watercolors here but really with just three colors you can create a virtual rainbow of colors. We always can add more colors to come up with more creative and unique colors but it's really nice that we can work from the three basics which is red, yellow and blue or something similar to that. Okay, so you may not have some of the exact colors that I'm using but if you have a version of red, yellow and blue, man you've got a lot of color potential already. Okay, so let's talk about some of my favorites. This is a typical red favorite for watercolor artists or oil or acrylic is Alizarin Crimson. It's a red that leans a little bit towards cool, a little more towards purple than towards like brick red or fire engine red and I've loved this color for years. I have a new favorite red though and I'll share that with you. This Indian yellow is one that I do like. I like a nice warm yellow like this one here and this is the typical I would say on most artist palette who do any wet media paintings such as acrylic oil or watercolor, ultramarine blue. It's a blue that leans a little more towards cool also a little more towards purple rather than a warm blue. And now I'll combine these colors that are I would say probably more of the traditional colors and here's another benefit of watercolor. You can get a lot of watercolor supplies pretty inexpensively. This is just a little watercolor plastic palette from the dollar store. Now again if you want to get more serious into your watercolor there are more expensive types of things you can use for your watercolor palette and this watercolor paper that I'm using is I believe it's just a kansen yes a kansen watercolor pad that will suffice for most watercolor painting. It is 140 pound cold pressed watercolor paper and this happens to be a nine by 12 pad. So and it wasn't all that expensive. You can get many more expensive papers if you get more serious about this. All right so let's go ahead and mix up the more traditional colors. In this example I'm obviously just working with three colors but just so you know if I was laying out my colors on a general color palette I would work from warm to cool with all of the variations in between red on one end blue on the other. And I don't need much because this is just for a little example. You can turn it this way so you can see it better. Normally if I was laying this out to have more colors I would put my blue over here okay but this is just for this little example and then I'll clean it out for each little example. All right here's an Indian yellow. This one actually broke off. I need to fix that and here is the ultra marine blue. This one got a little dried up on me. Of course we'll need brushes and water. I like to use kind of a larger dish for water because I don't have to change my water as often and having clean water is very important for having your colors look really pure and fresh and crisp. For my brushes I'm using some watercolor brushes that I really like from the Princeton Art and Brush Company. These are all 40 50. The R stands for round and they're just different sizes. This one has rubbed off. I'm not sure that size but 16 and 12 and this one's a little bit smaller. So for this example it's better to use a little bit larger brush. I want you to be able to see these colors. So let's go ahead and have some fun. This is the fun part. Here we go. So one of the things I'll talk about too I'll maybe make a little list of some of the things that a beginner watercolor artist should know or keep in mind is don't be afraid of the water okay because water is your friend with watercolor painting. When I first started I was so scrumpy with the water and I got a teeny brush. Also don't be afraid of big brushes. I would get like a little teeny brush and I felt like I just had to mix and paint in little areas and that's the beauty of watercolor is it's freedom and it's expression. So let's just embrace that. All right here we go. Color mixing time. Now I'm going to start with this Indian yellow and put it in the center all right and I do want to get enough water. I probably don't have enough water right now. Get my brush pretty wet here. All right there we go. See that water just playing around. Let it to where the water can just play and have fun. I'm going to zoom in a little more on this. All right you see that this is a very warm almost an orange yellow and when we put the yellow down and combine colors let's go ahead with this pretty traditional blue. This blue was a little dry in my tube anyway so I'm probably going to have to wet it quite a bit but I'm going to get a little bit down and then I'll probably add more water. Let's put it right here first so you can see it okay. It's a nice cool blue isn't that pretty? Let's go ahead and combine it with the more traditional Indian yellow. You see kind of a darker green that it makes. Can you see that? It's usually not my favorite to mix ultramarine blue. Let's add a little more yellow to it to see if we can get more of a green. You see that green? It almost becomes kind of muddied looking which is why I'm going to show you in a minute a blue that is more of a favorite blue of mine for mixing. Now let's go ahead and add the more traditional alizarin crimson okay. It is a really pretty red but I have another red that's a favorite red okay. This is kind of a cool red. This is a cool blue. This is a cool red. Let's put this pretty red down here. I just love putting watercolor down and just watching the color. I am such a color nut. Okay here we go to get the orange. All right you see that little bit of combination there and a little bit more of this yellow to the red so we'll get a little bit more orange and I definitely recommend that you play like this. Play with your colors okay. You can see how that's making an orange now. It's so fun isn't that fun? Okay so that's a color caterpillar okay. That's what we'll be making or you'll be making if you'd like to follow along with this and it's one of the best ways to just learn about color, color combinations and to learn to work with what colors you have okay. So now on this palette or I'm going to zoom out again and show you my alternatives to colors that I like better and you can use whatever you have even if you're just working from something like this. Basically you're going to go with a yellow blue. This one's kind of a blue green here. It's almost a prussian blue and a red okay. So work with what you have. Now here are my preferred blue and red choices. This is prussian blue. It leans more towards a blue green or an aqua. It's very translucent and I also love quinacridone red. Now that's a mouthful right that word quinacridone. These are some of my favorite colors though. It's also very translucent. It's more of a warm red versus the cool red of alizarin crimson and also I love some of the other quinacridone colors. This quinacridone gold oh my goodness I love that. I know I'm going I'm digressing here but it almost looks brown in the tube but it's the most beautiful gold color. Some of you on my that watch my pastel videos know I love this color to add as an underpainting. It's beautiful. They also make a quinacridone violet okay. So quinacridone is not exclusive to red but I'm going to use the prussian blue and the quinacridone red to check out the color combinations first with just the Indian yellow. So let's get that a try. Okay I'm going to do it right underneath this first color caterpillar. I'm going to start with the Indian yellow. Got it a little contaminated. Not too bad though. And let's get some Indian. Let's do it over here. Okay again water is your friend. Add a little more water here so it just see how that just flows around so lovely. All right now let's go ahead and do the blue like we did over here and see what kind of a different green we get. I get my brush really clean and I use paper towels just to dab. I really am left handed. I should have had my water over here but you can't believe how I set things up sometimes for filming. I have stuff everywhere. All right let's look at this lovely prussian blue. It was quite dry in the tube. I hadn't used it in a while. You see that? Oh my goodness isn't that just gorgeous? Oh I love it. I love it. So pretty. Okay let's add some of this here. Oh my goodness look at that color. Now let's see what kind of green combo we get here. Wow can you see that difference? Look at that. That is just beautiful. Now I can add even more yellow to get a little bit of a lighter green and it's a strong color. This prussian blue it's quite strong so sometimes if you use a lot of it you may want to wash your water out a bit. Let me grab a little bit more of this yellow so you can see that pretty green. It leans almost towards another green that I'm going to show you in just a minute and it's a good idea to do this because you see the color variations. That's another thing that I love about watercolor and even other wet mediums is to allow your colors to mix on the palette. Rather than me taking like this yellow let's say we take the yellow I'm going to do a little bit up here and we take the prussian blue and we just mix mix mix mix mix mix mix mix and say we did that in a little palette and then we added that color to our landscape or to whatever we're working on. It's so much less interesting than letting the colors blend themselves on the palette. So that's another lovely thing I love about watercolor. All right now let's play with this beautiful quinacridone red. Let's see if I got this that's pretty clean. Now I am going to clean my water before the next one but this should be okay for now and again the big brush another benefit to that is it holds so much water. If I was trying to do this with one of the smaller brushes the brush wouldn't hold nearly enough water. Oh look at that red. You see the difference warmer versus cooler. I usually really love cooler colors but in this case I don't know they're just so now look at that orange. Can you see the difference? This orange versus that orange isn't that just beautiful. So here's our second to color caterpillar and now like I said I think you might see why these are my favorite colors. Let me pull it up to you or more preferred colors I should say. I just think they look more translucent and vibrant. Let's look at the first color caterpillar. Okay typical ultramarine blue indian yellow and elizurine crimson and now we've got prussian blue indian yellow and quinacridone red. I don't know I just love it that's just so pretty to me. Now of course we can mix colors. We've mixed green here a couple of ways. You see this is more of an olive green and this is more of a green that I really love. I love it so much as a matter of fact that I'm out of it in my little tube. It's called azo green and it's just a translucent gorgeous green. This one also by mgram but I'm going to show you I have a more serious watercolor palette I'll zoom out and show you here. This is my palette that I use. It has a top that goes on it too. That is really great if you're mixing a lot of colors you need a bigger area for more water and I keep some of my favorite colors in here and also too I have a little bit of that azo green right here. You see this right here and it is just such a beautiful color but once again in its dried state you can't really appreciate it. So let me just add some water to this and show you this color. Oh my goodness look at that color. It's just gorgeous. I'm going to add a little of this to our palette down here. It's like a yellow green. It's really pretty. So now I'm going to do another color caterpillar with three more colors. I'm going to use the azo green. Let's make this one over here. See that azo? You see how translucent that is? That's just so so pretty. I like it better than sap green. I'm going to mix this with the quinacridone red. All right here's this gorgeous red down here. Let's first put it over here. It's just so pretty. Oh look at that. Wow isn't that a beautiful kind of orangy color? And now if we mix it with the indian yellow on this side you see that pretty color that we get. There's another pretty color caterpillar. So this azo green combined with the indian yellow makes almost an ochre color. Have you heard of the color ochre? I prefer this combination to regular ochre because regular ochre is, I don't know, it tends to be muddy looking to me and muddy up other colors. Let me find an ochre over here. This is more of an ochre right here. I just think the azo green and the indian yellow is much prettier and much more translucent than the ochre. And now let's combine the quinacridone red with the ultramarine blue. Here we go. Look at that lovely violet that makes. Okay isn't that beautiful? Now let's compare that to combining the traditional ultramarine and alizarin crimson. Okay it's a much darker purple. I need a little more blue. This one became a butterfly. We're gonna have to make some fun caterpillars and butterflies out of this. So these are some of the most basic ways you can do color mixing and I encourage you to whatever type of watercolor you have, whether it's the dried already in a watercolor palette or the wet medium, go ahead and experiment with the colors that you have. And often I find we get too serious too quickly when beginning a painting endeavor. And remember this is supposed to be enjoyable so maybe make some little caterpillars like I did out of your creations. Now let's talk about how to actually lay out your color palette for watercolor. And here's where I mentioned if you're going to arrange your palette, if it's in a line, it actually could be in a circle as well. You're going to work from red to blue. Now I'm going to get my cooler red first which is my alizarin crimson and my cooler blue which is ultramarine blue. And I say work to this blue but I'm actually going to add one blue at the end in a minute and I'll tell you why. And we're going to work between there to do a gradation from this warm red to this I mean this cool red to this cool blue. Keep in mind that you may not be working from the wet form of watercolor like I am but often even the little watercolor palettes that you can buy where they are already dried are able to be moved. You can move the individual little pans of watercolor. So what I'm doing here is basically kind of emulating the rainbow and actually the color wheel is based on the rainbow. Something not really discovered by Sir Isaac Newton but he came up with the concept of the color wheel and again based on the rainbow which is God's design of color and that's why it works. And the reason I encourage some of these color explorations and even creating your palette like this is because often we just dive into a medium without the knowledge of the way color works or how it behaves in that particular medium. So definitely give this a try. Create your rainbow caterpillar and these exercises will not only familiarize you with the medium of watercolor but also with color in general. Have you been able to notice yet that there's one color missing in this color caterpillar? It is the color indigo or purple and you can create this on either end of the color caterpillar by simply adding the color that's on the opposite end. For example this red and blue that I added create a purple and I will also create a purple on the opposite side by adding red to the blue. And if you've been on Monet Café very long you know that purple is my favorite color. It's a bit of a mysterious color and actually there's some awesome scientific facts about the color purple we'll save for another video. So in conclusion to this basic watercolor 101 tutorial if I could give you some homework it would be to play play with the color that you have explore the color mixing combinations in order to get ready for part two of this video where you will be creating a painting a landscape painting with only three colors. All right artist I hope you've enjoyed part one in this watercolor tutorial with some important concepts presented in a creative way. If you haven't subscribed already I hope you will and I look forward to bringing you part two. As always happy painting!