Watercolor Animals: Preclass

Welcome to the pre-class preparation for Watercolor Animals! We’ll be discussing supplies, and a little watercolor basics. See links to supplies below each video.

Supplies:

Watercolors, with or without a palette (you can mix paints on a white plate, or on a simple inexpensive tile from the hardware store. See more on watercolors below.
Brushes: I highly recommend Black Velvet brushes; they’re a part-natural part-synthetic brush, and I use mostly a #8 and #12 round. Anything smaller and you will struggle in covering large areas.
- Silver Brush Black Velvet Round #8 EH – BLICK – AMZ
- Silver Brush Black Velvet Round #12 EH – BLICK – AMZ

Black watercolor pencil, any brand…get a single Amazon (used for drawing details)
Micron pens, various sizes | Blick (use it for your lettering, not usually for drawing)
White gel pen (Uniball Signo is what I use)| Blick | Amazon | EH
White acrylic paint (any brand at all)
Paper: practice in either:
- Bible Journaling Made Simple Workbook
- Tomoe River Paper

Watercolors

See the video below to learn more about my palette – but know you don’t need to use my watercolors! Most of the time I’ll say “purple” – and that doesn’t need to be MY purple. But if you want to know the colors in my palette, you can see how I put together my palette:

Palette (empty) – i like a metal palette myself, though plastic is fine for Bible journaling…here are a few options:
- 16-color palette (smaller than mine) but made in Italy, comes with the half pans – there’s a cheap knockoff that has awful hinges, so don’t get that one: Amazon
- 24-color palette (the one shown in this video) Ellen Hutson – need to get the half pans to put in it
Half pan Daniel Smith Sets: these come in little sets, most have 6 colors and the rest of the half pans are blank; you may like one of these and avoid having to deal with a large palette:
- Sketcher set
- Earth Half Pan Set
- Floral set
- Colors of Inspiration set
- Blues set
- Ultimate Mixing set (all pans filled, no empties)
Tube colors in my palette, by Daniel Smith (I repeat, you don’t need my colors!)
- Nickel Azo EH | Blick
- New Gamboge EH | Blick
- Aussie Red Gold EH | Blick
- Yellow Ochre EH | Blick
- Burnt Sienna EH | Blick
- Burnt Umber EH | Blick
- Perylene Maroon EH | Blick
- Anthraquinoid Scarlet EH | Blick
- Pyrrol Scarlet EH | Blick
- Quinacridone Rose EH | Blick
- Imperial Purple EH | Blick
- Moonglow EH | Blick
- Cobalt Teal Blue EH | Blick
- Iridescent Electric Blue EH | Blick
- Cobalt Blue EH | Blick
- French Ultramarine Blue EH | Blick
- Phthalo Blue GS EH | Blick
- Indanthrone Blue EH | Blick
- Serpentine Genuine EH | Blick
- Sap Green EH | Blick
- Green Apatite Genuine EH | Blick
- Perylene Green EH | Blick
- Payne’s Blue Gray EH | Blick
- Neutral Tint EH | Blick

Color wheel for mixing

If you don’t have the workbook, you can draw circles, break them into 12 sections, and create your own color wheel.

Color Ways

Colorways are different groupings of colors – ways to select colors for an art piece. There’s an exercise in the Workbook but you can also just draw little boxes to test out color combinations.

Share your work in our Student Facebook group! Note that it’s not an all-Christian group, but it’s a safe place to post your art and get feedback. (The Bible Journaling group closed in 2022.)

Copyright

I retain the copyright to the content you are learning in class. That means you cannot sell or give away the concepts from my classes – re-teaching my instruction, or anything contained or created within these lessons, to others. Yes you may gift your creations made with these techniques, of course, this stipulation is about not giving away my ideas taught here.) You may not post a video tutorial of your own showing your redraw of my content. But please DO make your own designs and develop your own style – and rock on! I love to see students making strides and taking this content and personalizing it with your own skills.

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