Watercolor Painting Instruction
Welcome to the Watercolor Painting section of CreativeSpotlite.com. On the following pages you will find an awesome selection of step by step watercolor painting demonstrations, techniques and tips that I am certain you will find enjoyable. The watercolor instruction on the following pages has been generously donated by professional artists from all over the world. We are most grateful for their generosity and we hope you enjoy! Happy watercolor painting! |
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How to Paint an Apple with Watercolors
I’m trying something new. I’ll post a series of free watercolor demos I use to teach a class of beginners. I photograph each stage and e-mail the appropriate images to my students prior to each class. Here is our reference photograph in a high key to avoid background washes which sometimes poses a challenge to beginners...
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Watercolor Painting Tutorial – Abstracting the Shapes, Simplifying the Message
When painting it is easy to become so involved in the subject matter with all of the details, textures, and colors presenting so many possibilities that our paintings never quite have focus or a feeling of unity. Sometimes we achieve nothing more than to present to the viewer either a collection of random thoughts about a place or detail laden color drawing. We paint around the subject never quite making a point. The work lacks creativity and artistic involvement, and the painting lacks a dominance of major shapes. By not focusing on the major shapes we are forced to paint a collection of things and this is a difficult and tedious task....
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How to Mix Grays in Watercolor for Atmospheric Perspective
I have gotten several inquiries about mixing warm grey and cool grey with watercolor. It’s really very simple to do with the three primary colors of blue, red, and yellow. Some art teachers say, “Never use black”. I say, “Use whatever you want if you like it!”.
But if you go outside and really look at grey shadows on the ground or on the side of a building you will notice that they are not really light black…I mean if you look really, really hard! Shadows and grey actually have a lot of different colors in them. Some are warm grey (with yellows and reds) and some are cool grey (with blues and greens). An example of cool grey would be snow-covered fields on a cloudy day. An example of warm grey would be a bonfire on a beach with a fiery orange sunset. Or you could have both warm and cool grey in a cold, dark cave looking out the opening into the warm sunshine. Above are three greys. The one on the left is cool with more blue in the mix. The middle one is neutral with equal amounts of blue and red. The one on the right is warm with more red in the mix..... -
Watercolor Painting Demonstration by Joe Cartwright
Do a detailed drawing of this scene. The key to doing street scenes like this is to start with eye level and then build the rest of the scene from there. What I mean by this is that if you put in eye level that effectively tells you where the horizon would be if you had one and hence where the general vanishing point for your street would be (obviously this would be a lot more complicated if this was a hilly scene but that will have to wait till a later demonstration).
Draw a line across the sheet at eye level and then adjust everything from there. Start by drawing a person, in this case the one on the bottom left hand side of the painting. Then draw the car near him. Think about the proportions of the car to the man, the man to the awning above in etc, when doing the drawing. In this way everything should look like it fits together. I will be doing a future demonstration on just how to draw a street scene.... -
How to Paint Darks and Shadows in Watercolor by Mara Mattia
Painting darks and shadows in watercolor is really easy. It just takes practice. I’ll start today with drawing a figure of a woman from my imagination (Don’t worry about this part because I’ll teach the basics of drawing people in another lesson). You will need watercolor paint, paint brushes, paper plate (or watercolor palette), big mouth containers of water, paper towels or rags, #2 pencil, a soft pencil (#4, 5, or 6), eraser, Hair blower (optional), and the color wheel you made from my previous lesson.
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Painting in Watercolor Tutorial: Alyssa's Portrait
Many artists are intimidated by faces. In this demonstration, using an accurate light pencil drawing as a guide and the original photograph as reference, I will show how to paint a portrait of Alyssa. I used three brushes: Winsor Newton Series 7 sizes 5, 7, and 10 rounds.
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Magical Sparkling Interference Paints
A most exciting innovation of watercolor paints are the sparkling, absolutely lightfast and tarnish free interference colors including the silver and gold. They have to be viewed at an angle for the sparkle to show. Viewed straight on, they produce a slightly muted effect.
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HOW TO PAINT "BACKWARD"
If you’re after rich, dripping darks, pure color and brilliant lights, then you might consider trying this dark-to-light approach to watercolor. This system calls for painting the darkest darks first, sliding into the middle values, and saving the lights as stark white paper. In addition, there’s no need to premix paints. Just lay in pure , intense colors and let them mix on the paper.
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Learn how to paint katydid with Chinese brush on rice paper.
Chinese people believe that when a person dies, their soul will attach to these insects. This belief is strongly held and it is forbidden to kill any living insect so that the soul of the departed person may be protected.
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Learn the tips & tricks to paint a delicate Orchid on rice paper- watercolor painting tutorial.
To paint a Chinese orchid, start with the flower part of the plant: dip the whole bristle of your brush into light green and then dip just the tip into alizarin crimson...
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Painting with watercolour
Even before I start the drawing for a picture it is important to plan from which side I want the light to come in this case it will be from left to right. Stage one in any painting is the drawing, I use a 2b pencil to lightly do the sketch. I work out at this stage what the major point of interest is going to be (in this case it will be the house and the bend in the road) everything else is of secondary importance.
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Lily Pond
I recently splurged and got a 24-pan set of Schmincke Horadam watercolors, which I used for this painting. My friend Victoria has a beautiful lily pond outside her home in North Carolina. This drawing of it was done with a 6B Mars Lumograph pencil.
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Step by step watercolor instructions
Watercolour paints are bought in the form of blocks known as pans and half-pans, or in tubes. Wash pans are for mixing paint, and are built in to boxed sets, as illustrated on the right. Wash pans can be improvised from any small shallow container...
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Wonderful site with lots of tips and demonstrations with watercolor
In the early stage of our painting explorations, we have a tendency to treat each surface and each edge in the same way. We're still filling in and staying between the lines, as we learned to do in our childhood coloring books...