3 Simple Tricks for Unique Watercolor Textures

Hello and welcome to another tutorial every Tuesday. In this week's tutorial, I'll walk you through three

simple

tricks

to create

unique

watercolor

textures

. If you're familiar with me, you'll know that I recently released three different

watercolor

texture kits. and I really love all the different variations you get. I like to incorporate that into my digital graphic design work because I can create results that no one else can replicate, in an effort to make your work even more

unique

. This week. I want to guide you through three

simple

steps to take your watercolor texture much further and different than the typical watercolor

textures

that you see, so what I'm using for this demo are concentrated watercolors and honestly, that's because they see much more. vibrant on the screen so I'm using Dr. pH Martin's HYDRIS concentrated watercolors and I'll leave a link in the video description to these if you want to check them out so I have some color on my palette and I have three different cups so we can walk you through all the different

tricks

, so first we're going to create just a normal watercolor texture so we can compare it to the other one, so I'm going to move this over here a little bit and I'm going to grab my sheet of paper, this is pressed watercolor paper cold 140 lb. from the Canon brand, it is one of my favorites.

I highly recommend it. I love using it for all my watercolor textures, so the first thing we're going to do is just start from our plain old one. cup of water is nothing special, we're just going to put a light wash of water on top of the paper. I'm going to grab some purple and you can see that nothing special happens, it just expands into the water. I'm going to put a little bit of blue in here too okay so just a basic watercolor texture here just to use it for comparison so the next thing we're going to do is set this aside and grab another sheet of paper and the next thing we're going to do is do is add a little bit of salt to our water, so I have about a cup and a half of water in my water glass right now, this is just regular water, there's nothing special about it and I'm using just plain table salt and stream, there's nothing special about this either and I've got about half a scoop full here, be careful not to drop it, so half a scoop and I'm just going to dump everything into this cup of water and then This time I'm going to use a separate brush so I can keep everything in order and that there is no type of cross contamination.

I'm going to mix that salt into the water and make sure it's completely dissolved before I use it, so now that I have my water, salt water completely mixed. Once again I'm going to create a light wash on the paper, so I'm going to go in once again with my brush and I'm just going to scrub so you can see what happens with In the salt water you can see there's kind of a little explosion coming from the salt, so it's cool. I'll take another blue dot. It's like a big ol' eyeball, so it's really fun to make them.

It's fun just to see them small. The explosions are a little hairy, the edges are long and they have these little lines on them, so it's salt water, so it's a lot of fun. That's trick number one, so let's jump right into trick number two. I'm going to put this one aside, as you can see, we compare it to a normal watercolor, just water with watercolor and then we have the salt water. Well, I'm going to put this aside and we'll move on to trick number two. So I picked up my paper again and this time we're going to put some bleach in the water, so I have a little container of bleach here, it's just your regular household bleach that you would use for clothes and I have a little dropper, so I'm going to take some lye and then in my cup of water I'm going to drop it one more time.

I have about a cup and a half of water here and I'm going to drop five drops, so a 2 3 4 5, so again I'm using a different brush for this so I don't contaminate anything. I don't want to put salt from the bristles of this brush in my glass of bleach. so I have my other brush, I'm going to blend it really well to make sure that the bleach goes through all the water and now I'm going to paint with a light wash again like we did before okay, so I'm going to To pick some blue so we can make a direct comparison to our salt water, so I'm just going to add a little bit of color like I did before you can see that this one is a lot more spidery in nature, isn't it. to explode in the same way that the salt dropped some purple here as well, so they explode in a different way than what we saw with the salt, so moving on to trick number three I'm going to set this one to the side, like this That trick number three is pretty fun.

I have basic cling film, nothing too special about this. In fact, I'm going to move this piece of paper to the side and try to flatten it as much as I can. here and this is all I'm using, just like you would use with your food in the refrigerator, so just regular Saran wrap. I'm making it pretty flat, so I'm going to paint a light wash right on top. Saran Wrap and I'm going to keep it a little limited to the area because when we put the watercolor paper on top we don't want the water to go everywhere and it's a little hard to see the water when it's on top of the Saran Wrap so make a mental note of where you're going to put the water here, so I'm going to keep it right in the center, so now I'm going to put a little bit of color on it.

I'm going to take a little bit of blue and at first it's going to look like little puddles of color, little puddles, um, but it's going to get really cool, put a little bit of pink here, mix it up a little bit, maybe a little bit. dark blue too here just to mix it up, okay, it looks good and now this is the fun part because you never know what's going to happen here. We have our watercolor paper and I'm going to try to make sure. I cover as much of this as possible and then I'm going to press right into it, it looks like I'm getting something out of here.

I'm going to grab a paper towel, grab that before we turn it over, so now we're just going to turn it over and you can rub it or, if you like the texture that you're getting, which I am, these edges are pretty interesting except this guy. messy area, let them push things around to try to fix them. a little bit, this is the nice thing because if you see parts you don't like you can move the color around a little bit to get more interesting edges which is fun. I don't like to pressure. There's too much stuff around because I like all these little areas like these edges that I would never get with a brush so that's what makes this so cool and you get little pockets of areas that maybe don't have a lot of color, you can soften some of them. take them off if you don't like them or you can just leave them on and keep the character on so it looks really cool so you're just going to pull up a full pull, throw away your Saran Wrap and let the texture dry so that's Saran trick number three Wrap here's trick number one, it's almost totally dry now this is the salt water which is very soft and a little bit atmospheric and then here's our lye test which expands more than what you see with the salt it's like an eyeball here while this just zooms out which is cool and then here was the first one we made just with the basic watercolor texture uh it's cool to see them all together so that's how to create unique watercolor textures using three different tricks if you enjoyed this tutorial, subscribe.

I post a new design tutorial every Tuesday and don't forget to visit my blog every hyen tuesday.com for even more design tutorials and tons of designs. freebies and don't forget to click the link in the video description to see everything that was mentioned in this video. Thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next week.