 Hi there, my name is Sandy Allnock and I am an artist and paper crafter and I'm going to show you some basic watercolor techniques in this Getting Started video. I have a series of these if you'd like more information on watercolor papers, paints, brushes, etc. There's a link in the upper right hand corner to go get more information from my blog. Now I am going to use some Canson XL watercolor paper and Koi SketchBox watercolors. These techniques will work with most any watercolors. I'm just going to show you some ideas on how to apply the color. I have a very clean brush that painted water into one of the flower petals. I'm just going to drop color into it. You can drop color just at one end or you can push it around like I'm doing. This one is actually going to dry really smooth, which is a really nice way to get a smooth coloration in your flower petal. Now I want to try something similar, but I want to see if I can make a super pastel flower petal. Sometimes you have colors that are too intense and you want something really soft. So I put a lot of color in it first and let it set onto the paper for just a second because if you do this too soon you may end up with zero color left on your paper, but then I take a paper towel and dab it. This is all in real time so I didn't wait very long and you can see I've got a very, very small amount of paint left on the paper. So if you put too much on you can always remove some by dabbing it off. And then I added water back into it to let it have a little more of that water color feel. It'll be a little bit more on the splotchy, drifty side the way water color is. And now I'm going to paint a flower that's going to have a little bit of dark color in the middle and fade out to white toward the outside of it. I've painted the color in the center and then I have a very clean brush. I always keep a super clean jar of water handy. I rinse it out in something else first and then in my clean water so that I'm not adding any extra color to this and I'm letting the tip of the brush pick up the color from the inside of that flower and the outside of the brush that's toward my hand is only going to be touching it with water so that it's not going to be adding any color and it'll help it to do that fading out to the outside. And now I want to try to blend two colors together, two different shades. And I've got a little bit of this blue on the inside and I'll move it around on the panel and this one's going to be a pastel one again. And I'm going to wet my brush, clean it all off and then I'll put some purple on the outside. And for this particular type of technique, if you want it to be pastel but still again have enough color, I need a little more purple than what I've got here. That's going to, when I dab it off, that's going to turn pretty much white. If I want to have a slight amount of purple, I should put some more paint on. So I'm just going to add a little bit more from the tip of my brush onto the outside of that flower petal. And you can see I'm not blending it real careful here, anything. Just going to let it sit there for a second and allow it to dry and at least not dry completely, but I wanted to soak into the paper a little more so that color stays there. And I'm going to do the same on this flower with a wet on wet technique. Again, this time I'm putting it over top of the blue color that's already there before I just painted it into a white area and let the two of them mix. And now you're looking at it and thinking, gee, that looks terrible. It didn't blend at all. Now I have a clean dry brush and I'm just going to push those two colors around until they blend into each other. I'm not going to fuss with it too heavily. And you can see it blended pretty nicely. And next I want to see how that flower petal proceeded because I let it sit there and dry a bit and you can tell that it's got two colors in it. It's got a little very slight purple and the slight blue. And if I go over it with a clean brush, it just turns right back into watercolor texture again instead of the paper towel texture. But you can, of course, leave paper towel or any other texture on your paint. And that can be a lot of really fun effect to play around with different kinds of things to add textures to your painting. And now I'm going to do the same thing, but I want just the tip of the flower to have a little bit of color. So I'm only putting it on the very edge. And then my clean brush is what's going to blend it. Just keep it really soft. Next, one of the things that we like to do on cards is to paint backgrounds. And sometimes you need to figure out how to blend a background into white. And I've learned from my students in my classes that this is one of those challenging things and this explanation seems to work for them. So I take the tip of the brush and point it toward wherever the dark area is going to be. If I was going to do the top end of the flower, I would turn the paper upside down so that the brush is pointing inward and then fill the brush with water and start blending outward. And just keep cleaning that brush and picking up more water as I get outward to the area that's going to turn white. When you're painting like this, your brush is going to pick up some of that on the tip, but the feral end, the end that's closer to your hand of those bristles will still have water. So you always want to make sure you're facing it so that the end that's furthest away and that's furthest toward the white is the area that has more water being applied to it. So now I've dabbed off just the edges and I'm using a very clean but dry brush to pull some of that water that was already on the paper and soften out that blend. You can fuss back and forth with this quite a bit and sometimes the paper will handle it, sometimes it will start to peel up. But in general, I like to just let that watercolor look remain because that's what we're doing. We're painting with watercolors. Now, if you want to make a cloud in a sky, I want to show you this because it illustrates the tip end versus the feral end, that end toward the hand. You can see the real sharpness of the end of the brush made the tips of the clouds and then the end toward my hand again is the end that's filled with water. And that's where I can press down a little further and make my brush flat along the paper to create that soft blend up into the sky. And if it's too dark, super easy to just take my paper towel and dab off some of that extra color. And here, if the little line around the clouds is still a little bit too dark, sometimes you can go back into watercolor and work it a little bit more. So I'm going to add more water right along that edge where the little dark blue is because I can lighten that. You can dab it again with paper towel, but I like it with just a little bit of that darkness because it adds some real contrast and pop to those clouds. And finally, before we finish out, I wanted to show you a little bit of dry brush technique as well. Dry brush is where there's not a whole lot of water, so you're going to get a little sharper edges on things. And you can add more detail this way. So I'm using just the tip of the brush and more paint than water in this particular case to add little veins to the flower. And it takes a very light touch, takes some practice, but you can do it. I promise you. And now I want to take my purple and add some veins from the inside going outward. Forgot to change my brush there and clean it off. So I cleaned it off and I have a little more water on this one this time because I want to mix techniques. So I have slightly wetter paint, but it's still considered a dry brush technique because it's drier paint going over top of paint that's already dry. And now I can go back in and add some blue at the base of the flower petal. And with a clean brush, I'm going to pull some of that color up into that wet purple paint. And now I have a two-tone shadow in those veins. There's a lot of different techniques you can combine. And I encourage you to give it a shot with whatever watercolors you have. Here are two other videos in this beginning series. And the top one is all about papers and paints. The bottom is all about brushes. And you're welcome to go watch those. There's also a link in the upper right hand corner and in the description down below to the products that are used in this video and lots more information on watercolor. Thank you so much for spending a few minutes with me. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye.