Alright, so this is where we really start to solidify what we've been learning and putting it all into practice. I'm also going to be talking in this section, this lesson about how you get a really nice flat wash because that's something that only comes with practice. But I will give you all the tips that you need as a beginner to be able to experience success. So these are examples of negative paintings. And this is what we'll be doing a little moonlit scene with some waves. And what you can do is you can do yours on a separate piece of paper, and then trim it down into a little note card because I think that's really sweet.

That's an option as a mini project. Otherwise, you can simply do it on your worksheet and I have included a template for this In the project section so that you can download that and you can trace the design onto the worksheet or onto a piece to make a card if you prefer. There's some really nice examples of negative painting, I put them on the Pinterest board. I've seen negative paintings with lots of cats, negative paintings with tropical leaves or monstera. This would look really nice as a Valentine's Day card as well with heart shapes. So we're going to do this because I love the ocean.

I'd really lightly sketch this onto my worksheet, and we're going to be working light to dark with our layers, right so thin to thick. I'm going to do mine in this same blue, but if you want to do it in a different color, just make sure you pick a pigment that has got a wide tonal range. So this is going to be really hard to do in a light green or in a yellow. If you've got something like analyser and Crimson or violet, probably any of the blues will be okay, cobalt blue might be difficult. Alright, so pick something where you can do this exercise and you know that you can get a broad range of colors. Okay, we're going to start light when they start with a background wash in something akin to this so that we have got some space to get darker and darker.

Okay. Now I wanted to mention to you that this doesn't have to be a monochromatic exercise. You could actually do this by layering different colors over the top, but you'd probably want to do your glazing grid with your colors first to make sure that you're happy with the combination and then you can get painting. If you have got thinner paper, and you're worried about it battling, especially if you want to make it into a card, then use some washi tape which is a Japanese type mat out of paper or painters tape to tape it down. First to card, I find that the backs of watercolor pads are really useful for this or you can use a wooden board, tape it down first and then you know that it's not going to buckle and stretch too much. I'm just going to live dangerously and do it without taping.

So number one, this is a important bit of advice for all beginners is before you start, you need to prepare. So you need to mix up a big enough wash. So that you know you can cover this whole area without running out. Right if you if you get halfway through your wash, and you have run out of paint, you are not going to be able to make the exact same thickness of paint that you started off with. So we made enough volume of paint that this is going to get you through the entire page. Right pick a brush, that's going to be appropriate as well.

I wouldn't be using a size one to fill in this area because it's just not going to help me to flow. I'll finish talking in a second, but I have really lightly outlined my rectangle. I've lightly outlined the moon and just the top layer of the waves, but I haven't worried about any wave shapes down here because I'm just going to freehand that and I don't want to worry about the pencil maps showing through. Right, so I've got a nice wet brush, but it's not dripping wet. Okay, but it is wet. And to make a nice wash without it being blotchy.

It's about balancing the amount of water on your brush and the amount of paint that's on your page. So I say this, this is called the bait and it's about keeping a bead on the edge of your paint so that the edge doesn't dry out. If you get lots of dry brush marks, and then you're dipping in with a really wet brushed and what's happening is that the paint that you've put down is already drying out and then you Introducing wet pigment into that so it is flooding across, it's almost like you're creating a layer and then adding another layer on to it. Now you can tilt your page to help keep it really even if you want to and then you can say that that bead is running right along the edge and you can pull that down as you go. So this is really good to practice if you haven't done this before, have a few practices before you start on your on your note card.

If you want to get it really flat then I think tilting is the way to go. For something like this, I'm not using the tip of my brush I am dragging with the top third. And I'm always rewetting my brush so my brush isn't drying out. I'm not ending up with So marks from dragging the dry paint. When you took the page like this, you say that what you're doing really is just pulling the paint down. nice and steady.

Okay, now we've got a bit extra, whoops, left over. Normally what you do is you don't wash your brush, you dry it off, and then you can siphon some of that extra. So if we tilt it, so that it all runs down. The idea is that you normally don't wash your brush because then it's it's got the same concentration of paint in it that you have on your page. So it's sort of siphoned a bit better. There we go.

That last little bit there and soften that up and then we have a relatively flat wash and We're going to let layer one dry before we start adding the subsequent layers, okay, and it's called negative painting because you, I guess you paint in a subtractive way. So our next layer, we're not going to paint this section, and we're not going to paint this section. So this is going to stay with our lightest color. Then the next areas are all going to save the next darkest turn of the pigment. So leave that there and once it's dry, we'll be back for later. And this is where all the magic happens.

Our layer is dry, and we will now be starting to put on layer two with a color around here. What I like to do is kind of play my journey. If I've got some awkward areas that I need to cut in, I figure out whether I'm going to do them first or last because I want to make sure that that wet bead stays at the front of my painting as I go. If you go around the moon, my moon is here. If it doesn't show up on the video, if I start painting here, and I paid all of this area, and then come back around, this section will have dried by the time I get there, so you need to progressively pull your wash along the page. It's always a good idea to to sort of plan that before you get started.

Concentrating on keeping my edges nice and clean. So you can see it's wet up here, and it's wet here and I'm going to keep pulling those along and around until they're made up again. And that way you don't end up with a patchy wash, you might actually decide that you would quite like to have texture in your sky and you want it to be patchy. And that's fine. watercolor has this amazing ability to give all of these different kinds of texture, and that's awesome. But it's good to be able to do both.

Nice to be able to add texture and also nice to be able to do something really Flat, if that's the effect you're going for, you notice I work quite quickly and that allows me to keep that age wet without too much drying going on. Try my brush off, siphon off the excess. And then I run outside my rectangle here. So I'm going to wash my brush. Give it a really good dry, and then watch that section to try and clean it up. Sometimes it gets too wet, it's better to let it dry, and then come in with a damp brush, and then lift off any little mistakes with a bit of a scrub, right.

So looking at this card here, we've left our moon and we're going to leave this top wave as a level one and we're going to paint this entire section from here down with the same number two color. Just make sure that I have got enough wash mixed up so that I can During this, you can always have a bit of scrap and you can test the depth of your color. You don't have to just mix it and just hope that it's right you know, I'm going to go Yeah, draw these lines using the tip of my brush, and then keeping that Bade as I go so that it doesn't dry out. Okay. You might like to have your, the peaks of your waves offset, or you might like to have them, you know, the same as the labor for working quickly through this section. So if you're drawing your waves and you're not quite happy with them, you can reshape them while they're wet.

But once you get down to the bottom here, and the waves of static dry, just have to leave them you know, maybe you can fix them on the next layer. Maybe that's just how they have to be. And watercolor is an exercise in accepting imperfections sometimes. Also the, you know, the stronger your technique gets, the less unpredictable the medium is, and you tend to find that things. Do what you expect them to more often, which is good. That's, that's the payoff for practicing.

Strike, you have to let that dry again. And once it's no longer shiny, and it's no longer cold, where you can add the next layer. You could make these layers really, really gradual, or you could be quite stark and have a big contrast. It's up to personal preference. You might just want to have four waves or you could do nine, it's up to you. If you go and paint some of these layers and you find that you have fuzzy points on your waves, then it's probably Because you haven't let the bottom layer dry quite enough, and that's when it starts to bleed around the edges instead of giving a sharp edges.

Remember what a color dries lighter than it looks when it's wet. If you have trouble getting really nice, fine points, you can always swap in and out three different paint brushes. Sometimes I'll have a small brush in my hand for cutting in, and then a bigger brush for filling in big areas. So that's totally fine. I waited really patiently for this last layer to dry. I really wanted to make sure that my lines are going to be sharp and weren't going to bleed the next layer up see this is where things start to dry if you let them, that's where you want to keep the bead flowing.

Couple more layers in here, let's say at this point you So I need to be careful that you're not scrubbing. As you move the color around this fellow blue is a staining pigment. But if you have a non staining one, then you might find that you're lifting the color as you put the next layer down, so you need to be very economical with your brush strokes like this drag color, pull it along, rather than, you know dabbing. This is still quite wet so I feel I can go up and give those a bit more definition because the darker pigments are starting to flow into each other. Now when that dry when this dries lighter, I still want there to be a good contrast between these two layers. I'm going to finish off the other two and then we'll have a look at what the finished negative layered painting looks like.

Here's the final layer on our negative painting. And with this one I've done 1234567 layers. So if you're new to watercolor, at the beginning of this class, maybe you didn't picture yourself adding seven layers on to a painting, but there you are, you've done it. Now, up to this point we've we've really been glazing so we've been adding a flat large layer on top of the layers below. Next class, we're going to talk about how we start adding some definition and detail using patent in line. As you'll notice, with my classes, I like to scaffold the learning so we build on previous exercises, I hope that you're really starting to get confident with adding With layers on to dry layers now, but up until this point, we really haven't been working with any detail.

We have been using washes in really large areas. And now we're going to look at how we add depth so that we can bring that into our final project and paint our sea turtle with lots of details. So just to sort of show you how that can link in with what we've already done. I've now got a tiny brush, this is zero, and I've mixed really a really thick dark wash here. And I can start to define some of these areas with some lines. If we have dry layers, and then we start adding lines.

This is how we get really nice sharp details. You could do anything with this. You could add lots and lots of little lines contouring the shape of the wave. You could add foam, you could put stars in the sky or some sort of graphic Clouds shape or moon rays coming out of the moon. And the interesting thing to note here that with our layering because we've got our our contrast right, there isn't a real need to go in and outline everything because using the right tints and shites has actually done that for us already. So, this will lead us into the next section of the class, wash, define, pattern and line