Kristin Van Leuven - Your Year in Art: Watercolor: A Project for Every Week of the Year to Inspire Creative Exploration in Watercolor Painting

Your Year in Art

A project for every week of the year to inspire creative exploration in watercolor painting

Kristin Van Leuven

Whether you call yourself an artist or not, you are onecreativity is an inherent human trait, one that is unique from person to person. The capacity for artistic expression lies in everyone. Sometimes it just needs a little push. Welcome to Your Year in Art: Watercolor! Designed to encourage, inspire, and fuel your art-making all year long, this book features prompts, ideas, and creative tips that will help you build your watercolor skills while also giving you the artistic confidence to triumph over fear of the blank page!

Each week, youll explore a new creative and engaging assignment. It may be as simple as experimenting with brushstrokes. It might involve practicing a skill you already know. It might mean pushing yourself to try a technique or color you usually dont use.

As you begin your year in art, promise yourself that you will devote time to yourself and your craft. Perhaps its just five minutes each morning while youre drinking your coffee or tea. Perhaps you can spend thirty minutes once a week focusing just on painting. The most important thing is to just do it, regardless of the outcome. You dont have to make amazing art every dayjust paint something. Not every assignment will yield a masterpiece, but thats not the goal. As long as you make the time to paint, youll find your year in art a success!

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DONT THROW AWAY THE ARTWORK THAT UNDERWHELMS YOU THROUGHOUT THE YEAR. SAVE IT SO YOU CAN SEE YOUR PROGRESS FROM WEEK TO WEEK AND WATCH AS YOUR SKILLS GROW!

Basic Tools & Materials

There many tools and materials you can use during your year in watercolor, but I recommend having these essentials on hand: round watercolor brushes, flat watercolor brushes, tubes of watercolor paint, a paint palette, a pencil and an eraser for sketching, watercolor paper, masking fluid, and masking tape.

SELECTING WATERCOLOR PAPER

Watercolor paper ranges in weight from 90-lb. to 300-lb., but the standard weight is 140-lb. It is available cold-pressed (textured), hot-pressed (smooth), and rough. Cold-pressed paper has ridges and texture, allowing the paper to hold more water. Hot-pressed paper is smooth, requiring less water for paint to flow easily. I use cold-pressed paper more frequently, because I love the texture it provides while handling lots of water. But I also occasionally like to use hot-pressed paper for watercolor lettering and illustrations.

If you dont know what type of paper you prefer, you can purchase individual sheets at your local art-supply store. Experiment to see what you like best!

Round brushes can be used in a variety of ways. Flat brushes create sharp lines and geometric shapes and can cover large surface areas. Thin, long brushes are perfect for small detail, long lines, and script.

For tube paints, choose a palette with individual wells. Keep similar colors near each other for ease of use. Artist-grade paints contain more pigment than student-grade paints, yielding better results. However, student-grade paint is great for beginners. Purchase the highest-quality paint you can afford.

CHAPTER 1

Basics

Color explorations

Patterns and mark-making

Washes, layering, and blending

Learning to see space

Lettering

WEEK 1

Color Explorations

Color theory, which may seem simple, is a vital tool for artespecially watercolor! Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors, and combining these colors in different forms creates the color wheel. Colors directly across from each other on the wheel are complementary colors.

Primary Colors

ASSIGNMENT

Start by getting to know the primary colors on your palette. Try to create a complete color wheel using only these three colors to mix all the other colors.

Mix different combinations of colors on the wheel from your palette. What happens when you mix complementary colors?

Try painting a picture with bold, bright colors from the color wheel, and then paint the exact same picture using colors muted by their complements.

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ADDING DIFFERENT RATIOS OF PAINT CAN PRODUCE A WIDE RANGE OF HUES FROM ONLY TWO COLORS.

Here Ive mixed two sets of complementary colors: red + green and blue + orange. When the colors are mixed just right, I get a muted, toned-down version of these colors.

Bold and bright colors from the color wheel

Muted colors toned down with complementary colors

A COLORS COMPLEMENT IS THE IDEAL COLOR CHOICE FOR CREATING ACCURATE TEXTURES AND SHADOWS ON AN OBJECT.

WEEK 2

Make Your Mark

In watercolor, mark-making refers to the ways in which you use your brush to mark the paper. There are so many ways you can use each of your brushes that you might not have even discovered yet!

ASSIGNMENT

Take out all your brushes: round, flat, liner, fan, mop, etc. Dip them in watercolor paint and experiment with the different marks they can make.

Push the brush, drag it, paint with it very dry, paint with it very wet, play with pressuretheres no wrong way to experiment with mark-making. Try as many ways as you can think of with each brush.

Try painting a simple object or scene, such as a patch of waving grasses.

Make repetitive marks with your brush.

Use a slightly drier brush and cold-pressed watercolor paper to create a textured look.