How To Paint With Watercolours

I'm going to show you how to use watercolour paints, commonly known as by the shortened term, watercolours. I've got a range of brushes that I'm going to start off with to show you how useful it is to let as many different types of brushes as we can and finally use them all eventually. I've got sable which is animal hair, very soft, it holds water very well, it bends very easily and then it's very fluffy.

A couple of those, that's a sable as well. I've got nylon. This one, stiff nylon, doesn't hold much water, doesn't bend easily and it's not as flexible as the animal hairs and I've got a mixture of different types of hairs that's a combination of squirrel hair and a bit of nylon.

I've got a different shaped brush here. It's a chisel-headed one. And this is one of my favorites between landscapes or anything it is with a bit of texture.

This is called the fan brush and this particular one is made from badger hair. You can see the change of colour in the bristles and the idea of this is, as you see, to paint with a variety of brush strokes. So, let's start with the traditional watercolour wash.

So, I have here a set of nicely used watercolours. They look slightly damp to start with but quite moist. If this might just touch with the wet brush, the colour comes off immediately onto the brush.

I don't need to work away. If I wanted a lot of colour, just a bit more water and pick up later. I've also got a palette which is the lid.

Most artists will keep a palette looking quite dirty because they've got colours there that they might want to use again so we want to work on that. Okay, using just any colour at all to start with, I just want to show you how to put a wash on the paper. So, a wash is where you want a nice smooth covering of paint without any marks of the paint running down and as you can see, I'm keeping it very wet.

The paint forms a blob here and the trick is to keep that blob moving. Now, I'm holding my brush upside down to show you how easy it is to move it down and even this way, how easy it is as it keeps moving and what's done before is soaking into the paper and forming a beautiful wash. I can put a second colour on top and also let it run down into the water that's already there and you see how.

The joy of watercolour is that there are no definite rules, you don't what's going to happen, watercolour is full of what's known as happy accidents. When this runs down, I can keep going, I've changed the colour now or I can stop, put it flat, allow that to soak and you'll see once it dries, it dries lighter. You learn about watercolour by doing it.

The more you play with it, the more fun you'll have, the more you'll learn about what it does. I'm going to show you with the stiff bristled brush, this is the nylon brush with the chisel head, how, with a different colour, we can actually almost draw what we paint. I can draw a straight line and then pull across.

I could draw a square and I could fill it in without a wash. This is a different form of painting. This is wet paint on dry paper and I want to show the brush strokes in a little bit so I'm allowing it to get a bit drier, moving the paint around.

As it dries, as it soaks into the paper, all these lines will stay quite loose, fresh, almost like that abstract painting, just a second way of using it, wet on dry. This is a third way and again, I'll show you a different brush just so that you see how it will work. This is a mixture of squirrel and nylon.

This time, I'm going to wet the paper first, just a small square, and then using wet paint, I'm just going to blob it in and let it move around. Put a second colour there, we'll put it in and let it move around. I could move the paper slightly and all that moisture, all the colour will reach the edge of the damp part of the paper and stop, and again, this is having fun with paint.

It looks almost like marble bits of it are moving off. Some of it is already drying, some