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.

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.

Supplies:

1. 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.
2. 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.
   1. Silver Brush Black Velvet Round #8 Silver Brush Black Velvet Round 8 BLICK  AMZ  JACKSONS
   2. Silver Brush Black Velvet Round #12 BLICK  AMZ  JACKSONS
3. Black watercolor pencil and colored pencil, any brand…(used for drawing details)
4. Micron pens, various sizes | BLICK  AMZ  JACKSONS (use it for your lettering, not usually for drawing)
5. White gel pen BLICK  AMZ  JACKSONS
6. White acrylic paint or gouache (any brand at all)
7. Paper: you can practice in either your Bible, or one of these::
   1. Bible Journaling Made Simple Workbook
   2. 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. 

More deep dive on watercolor

You can decide what kind of watercolor palette you might want – these are only a few options!

1.  Empty Palettes to squeeze your own tube colors into
   1. Palette (empty) – I like a metal palette myself, though plastic is fine for Bible journaling…here are a few options:
   2. 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
   3. 24-color palette (the one shown in this video) Ellen Hutson – need to get the half pans to put in it
2. Daniel Smith Essentials are what I highly recommend – they mix to a ridiculous lovely number of colors, and they’re great for learning watercolor. You can either squeeze a little of the color you need onto a white ceramic plate, tile, or butcher tray – or get a palette.
3. Half pan Daniel Smith Sets: These come in little sets in either plastic or metal palettes.You  could  get  the Essentials  to  add  to  them  if  you  like..
   1. Earth Desert to mountain (6 colors, plastic palette)
   2. Colors of inspiration (6 colors, plastic palette)
   3. Blues (6 colors, plastic palette)
   4. Colors of inspiration (12 colors, metal palette)
   5. Colors of inspiration (24 colors, full metal palette)

Tube colors in my palette at the time of this filming, by Daniel Smith (I repeat, you don’t need my colors!) I change out colors often – and as said before, if you learn to mix, you can get lots out of just a few colors.

1. Nickel Azo
2. New Gamboge
3. Aussie Red Gold
4. Yellow Ochre
5. Burnt Sienna
6. Burnt Umber
7. Perylene Maroon
8. Anthraquinoid Scarlet
9. Pyrrol Scarlet
10. Quinacridone Rose
11. Imperial Purple
12. Moonglow
13. Cobalt Teal Blue
14. Iridescent Electric Blue
15. Cobalt Blue
16. French Ultramarine Blue
17. Phthalo Blue GS
18. Indanthrone Blue
19. Serpentine Genuine
20. Sap Green
21. Green Apatite Genuine
22. Perylene Green
23. Payne’s Blue Gray
24. Neutral Tint

Make a 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.