Experimental Watercolor Techniques for Beginners

In many disciplines, making mistakes often carries negative connotations, but for artist and illustrator Ana Santos, she sees an opportunity to discover something new. In this course, master the basics of watercolor from scratch and explore your imagination.

If you’ve already taken her first course Illustrated Portrait in Watercolor, this time around Ana helps you open up your mind to mistakes and take a more creative approach to your art.

Learn how to draw realistic and creative versions of animals from a photograph and paint them using watercolors and experimental techniques.

Begin by getting to know Ana Santos and how she got started in her career. See some of her recent work and her main artistic influences.

Before jumping into the theory, Ana gives you a detailed explanation of the materials you need to start painting with watercolors and shows her latest discoveries to simplify and speed up the drawing process.

Learn how to draw and frame your reference images without tracing to give your animal portraits a realistic look or a more original touch depending on the style you want.

Next, go over the basics of color theory and its main characteristics and experiment mixing colors to create new ones. Reinforce these concepts by looking at some real-life examples to understand the importance of color in the composition of an image.

Move on to the practical aspects and learn basic watercolor techniques including dry brush, wet brush, dry on dry, dry on wet, wet on dry, and wet on wet. Ana shows you some tricks to perfect these techniques and shares a key piece of advice for painting with watercolors: be open to mistakes.

Now that you have a solid foundation, it’s time to start painting your animals. Experiment with lines and spots and practice using and combining the techniques you’ve learned to create increasingly complex paintings of different animals.

By the end of the course, you’ll have your own collection of stunning watercolor illustrations, including a bird, a toucan, a chameleon, a wolf, a tiger, a greyhound, a Siamese fighting fish, and a hare, as well as the skills and knowledge to create whatever you can imagine.

Paint and compile a series of watercolor illustrations using traditional and experimental techniques to create an animal house that provides endless possibilities for future projects.

Anyone who wants to explore the wonderful and spontaneous world of watercolor.

This is a beginner’s course, so no prior knowledge is necessary.

As for materials, you need a basic set of watercolors, paper with different weights and textures, brushes, a mixing palette, masking tape, white gouache or similar, India ink, a pencil, and other materials that your teacher will specify in the course.