Creation of Color Palettes with Watercolor

In painting, design, fine arts, or any other artistic branch, having a great command of color is fundamental and just as important as mastering the technique itself. After a longtime career in watercolor, painter and illustrator Ana Victoria Calderón combines and plays with colors like no one else in her organic-style creations.

In this course, Ana Victoria teaches you everything you need to know about mixing and color theory and helps you develop two color palettes to apply to illustrations. In her previous courses she focused more on practical illustration techniques: learn how to paint with watercolors in Modern Watercolor Techniques and take Techniques Applied to Watercolor Illustration as a complementary course to practice botanical and compositional elements specifically.

Ana Victoria starts the course by introducing herself, showing you some of her work, and sharing her sources of inspiration.

Discover all about the final course project: the creation of a color palettes using watercolors from a basic photograph. Also take a closer look at all the necessary materials.

Then review basic color theory, focusing on watercolor as the medium, and learn the fundamentals.

Explore the color wheel through a series of practical exercises seeing how important temperature is in a composition and how to achieve harmony and contrast. Take a look at the tones you can achieve by using complementary colors as well as how to turn one complementary color into another.

Next, start to develop your color palette based on your personal artistic identity. Dive in with a mood board of reference materials taken from your research. See examples of Ana Victoria's personal process when developing the palette for each of her pieces and hear some additional tips and tricks. Now it's time to build up some test color palettes.

For your final project, do two illustrations: two versions of a complete work. In the first, extract a color palette using your knowledge of mixing and color theory to recreate a technical palette from a nature photograph. In the second, create a color palette drawing on your own artistic sensibility.

Create two color palettes to apply to two watercolor illustrations, one more technical and the other more personal. End the course with a new way of combining colors up your sleeve as well as a personal color identity.

Watercolor enthusiasts and artists who want to enrich their color language using watercolors.

Basic notions of watercolor are recommended, such as knowledge of transparencies and gradients as well as basic brush control. This course does not teach you how to paint with watercolors, but rather how to mix colors.

As for materials, you need watercolor paints (pans, tubes, or liquid), brushes of various sizes, watercolor paper, water, and a cloth.