Hey, thanks for checking out this course on watercolor portraits or pet portraits. My name is still Hong Kong Khalsa. I've been doing watercolors for about 20 years I have a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts. And I just love to share it I love the materials and and what you can do with it. So I hope you can jump in with us this is looking at pet portraits we're going to be it's a bit of more of a an intermediate course. So if you don't have a ton of experience with the materials of using watercolor and how to choose papers, how to choose pigments, things like that, I would just suggest that you check out the first one of the first courses that I've recorded, which is exactly about watercolor materials, covers, papers, brushes, things like that.

In this course, we're going to starting with this video look at how to choose is a good picture to paint from how to set up your paper to get going and then sketching out the image just to get a better feel for what's going on in it. Transferring that to the actual watercolor paper. We're going to look at how to mix colors so that we get the right consistency in terms of image and the animal. We're going to look at starting the painting with undertones adding some color details, some shadows, and really, I like to look at the volume creating volume in the animals. Because sometimes when painting from a photo, the photo is condensed into a single viewpoint whereas your eyes actually see in stereo. So we're going to be looking at how to incorporate that into the painting so that even if you're painting from a photo, you're going to get a little bit more of The depth so that you get a feel for that, you know, looking at the actual three dimensionality of the shape of the animal's head and things like that.

I don't by step approach to it creates that in your in your painting. So I hope you kind of get that out of it. And then we look at how to paint the background, adding details, doing very fine details, and just getting it to look, you know, lively and fun. So, I hope you really enjoy the course and that you get something really great out of it. And I hope you share what you're working on because I love to see animals and love to know what kind of pets you're painting and you know, if you're painting a different kind of pet, then you know the cat that we have in this as a sample and you run into an issue, you know, feel free to post questions and happy to answer and talk about it and see if we can find a solution for you or something that might, you know, improve the situation that you're working on.

So who If you join us, we're going to have fun and let's take a look how to choose your photo. Okay, step one is to figure out a photo to use. Now most of you probably have a photo like this is just your pad, you're standing around the pet standing around, you take picture. You can use something like this. But I would suggest that you go for a photo that is more like this, where you have directional lighting, and you're at the same level as your pet because then you're going to be able to have a better sense of icontact like you have here. You have light, you know, we talked about directional lighting, how light coming from the side, you have a dark side, so you're going to be able to create a better sense of volume when you try the animal and you just have a much stronger control Action, a much cleaner crop as to the face and you have a much nicer just composition because if you're too far away, like in this one, it's hard to get the facial features in.

And it's just, it's gonna look kind of generic, you know, you might get the coloration of the animal, right? But it might not be so great. This is my former kitty Mama. She's cute. And this was another one that you could potentially use. This is if you were just doing a black and white or a single color that you were using.

And again, this is directional lighting. So you have this strong contrast between the face in the background, and then the rest of the body is kind of in shade. And this shows Miss Riley's personality quite well. It's just kind of who she was. And she know you can sense of her face in her eyes and her facial features. So that's again something that will give you a good structure to the face when you're drawing and it will be easier to make the animal look correct so to speak, in terms of dimensionality and proportions in the face.

And then sometimes you might have a picture like this might actually get off the internet or something if you have a cute, cute cat photo. And you know, this one is cute, but it's again, very flat lighting because it's a flash from a camera taken directly from the front and so you're not going to get a lot of sense of dark and light or direction to give you a sense of volume in how the pet looks. So this is a picture of rently when she was really tiny. And she was a kitten and you know you get a sense of this you know the kind of overall shape of her but you don't think Get the sense of volume, like you're doing this one where you really feel like her nose is coming forward. And you know, her body's falling behind the face and ears are perking up.

So you have just, you know, a personality thing where cuteness is awesome. But personality and connection with the eyes is always really important and will kind of help you to connect better. So if you can, or you pets laying on the couch or something or doing something else like that you have good lighting for a window, that's a great time to take a picture. You could even do it outdoors. If you have a dog who's you know, sitting around maybe in the early morning is going to be a good lighting, as opposed to midday mid days and it can be very harsh shadows and it's not going to be as attractive to look at. So take a good photo and we'll get started taking a look at how to create this image.