Transcript: Simple Sketchbook Exercise with Minimal Supplies for a Relaxing Daily Creative Practice.

Hey, My name is Jen Fletcher. I'm a mixed media artist who uses watercolors and acrylics to create abstract floral paintings. I believe creativity flows like the seasons where we have a chance to plant, grow, gather, and rest and it continues in that cycle as we expand our knowledge and continue practicing.

Today I have a short tutorial for you using minimal supplies to show you just how easy implementing a creative practice in your life can be.

Ok, today we're going to explore with an Art Philosophy watercolor confections pan, the one I have today is called Essence. I love these because it's already a curated selection of colors that are going to work well together and these containers are easy to travel with. When you open it, you already have palettes. You don't even have to take an extra pallet with you. Mine is messy, I don't mind my colors mixing too much. I feel like it gives more depth and interest to the colors I create.

These also come with a little swatch card. It's blank when you get it and then you get to swatch each color to see what they're going to look like when you paint with them. And then you have it as a little reference card for when you’re painting. You're going to need a paper towel, a jar of water to rinse your brushes, watercolor paper. This is Arches watercolor paper cold pressed, it has a nice texture to it, which I love. I also have a number 6 round brush and a Posca pen, this one is 0.7 mm pin type so I get tiny dots with this one, it’s super fun at the end.

So you can have more than one brush if you want but I find that the round brushes are so versatile that I can use them for pretty much whatever I want. Ok, we're just going to play around today. We're not creating anything, we're just enjoying the process.

So let's start with this beautiful teal. I’m just going to put some color down. The fun with watercolor is to put some color, then put some water and spread around. Super fun. While the puddle is still wet, you can experiment with some other colors. So, let’s see. I’m getting some Namaste. If you put it into the wet paint, it blends on its own. This is a great way to experiment with color mixing to see what's going to happen. As you can see, because this is yellow, that's the Namaste on its own, and I already had that teal blue it's making this gorgeous green, which can be really useful to know if you need to create that color for something you’re working on.

I also have another yellow in this palette, this one’s called chant. If you want to see what other kind of green you can get, you can work on it over here. That one's more of like a sage green. You can see where this one made a brighter green color.

I find watercolor to be really relaxing because you don't have to worry about cleaning your brushes, you can take it with you when you want to travel. It’s also awesome if you don't have much space to create you can keep a little basket with watercolor supplies in it. If you have kids running around, it’s not going to get super messy, it's easy to clean up. Watercolor is an excellent option if you feel like you don't have the time or the space to start a creative practice.

I do recommend getting high-quality watercolor paints and high-quality paper. I did not like watercoloring until I got quality supplies. I don't believe that’s true with all art supplies, but with watercolor it makes a huge difference because you can see how this is blending and spreading and making really cool effects. That doesn't happen with cheaper paints because the pigment isn't strong enough.

I'm going to put links in the description below so that you can click on each link to see the supplies I'm using today. You can also click through to my website if you'd rather see it that way. And there will be links there.

Okay, so this is a beautiful yellow, blue, and green. Let's try, I'm going to see what this Creation blue color can do. It's a very bold blue, let’s see what happens with this one. What's going to happen if, let’s see, I want to add an earthy Green, it’s actually called Earth, like a brownish green. You can see I'm getting like a really beautiful gray color. Make it spread out this way. Look at that gorgeous spread, I love watercolor when it does that. So fun. You can also try experimenting with putting a dot in wet areas. See how it looks next to the spots you already had. Add some dots. I'm a sucker for dots. I add them all the time if you look at my artwork in the shop most of the paintings have dots somewhere in them. It’s a select few that don’t. 

What’s also fun about just doing these blobs of color is you can see what the color looks like really dark and then when it spreads out into the water you can see all the different tones and shades that you can get. Let’s see, how about a red. This one is called Adore, it’s kind of like a reddish purple, kind of a maroon color. So, if we do, let’s see. Oh that’s beautiful. It reminds me of fall leaves. See what happens, that was still wet so it's going to blend and I’m guessing it's going to give us a beautiful purple. Red and blue, right? Basic color mixing.

If you want to get really dark bold colors, you can add more on top of what you've already put down. When you get really dark like that it's super fun to do the water spreading too. Look at that. How about we add some Namaste to the red, which is yellow, and see if we can get an orange. It's a beautiful like mustardy orange, which is one of my favorite colors ever. So that's really good knowledge to have if I want to create something with that color. So you can see while you can use these colors on their own, you get really interesting colors when you start to mix them up together.

I love getting unique colors, so I will keep mixing. Look at that gorgeous purple we just did. That’s with Adore and more Creation. That is gorgeous, so pretty. So while the paint is still wet, let's see, you can try adding, how about some of this Nirvana green to the red. And to the yellow, why not? So you can see how much it spreads when the paint is still wet. If I do the same thing up here where it's dry, you're going to get much less spreading, more dots. That’s good to know if you're trying to achieve a certain effect.

What else do we want to try? How about this really beautiful earthy green. I love like a, an olive green, like a brownish green. Let’s see what happens when we add a little of this green, this is called Serenity. That makes a beautiful olive color. Look at that. It's so interesting to work on color mixing because who would have thought that this bright green color could make a gorgeous olive. You can only figure that out by practice and play, so playing with these colors it's just fun. You can do it every day because you're not aiming towards a finished product. It's all about the process. We always feel like we have to produce something for it to be beneficial. The point of painting is that it's beneficial just because you do it. You don't have to produce anything to make it beneficial. Working on this is so peaceful. It gives you a moment in your day to be present, which is a beautiful thing.

Okay, now this watercolor is completely dry, which means we can start to add details with the Posca Pens. This is a point 7 mm in white. It gives you a very fine dot and lines. I just want you to notice too, just on this little piece of paper we have so many different colors. I barely touched the colors that are available in the palette. We used maybe half of them and I only combined two colors at a time. You can try adding three colors together, four colors, whatever you want. Try different proportions to see what colors you can get. There’s so many things to explore just with this one palette, one brush and some paper. You could spend hours just experimenting with this one.

I want to add some little lines over around this one. I like to look at what I have and see if anything inspires me. So this blue shape was already arched a little bit, that's why I want to do some lines like that. These look fun for circles, these little dots that I had, just little sketchy circles around those. Whatever you can think of is totally fine. Of course the white works better on the dark colors. So, let’s see, if I turn it a bit I can get some dots in this beautiful purple that we made. Yes more dots. I do love the dots. I think because they're so relaxing, like if you just pick a spot and start making dots, you’ll see. You don't have to think about it, you just kind of go with the flow. They can be as wide or as close together as you want.

Over here, these are making me think of like maybe a dotted line. That’s also an arch. If you can't see your white super well in the first pass you can always go over again. This is pretty light, you're not going to see it that much. Especially not on the camera, but if you're looking at it in real life you can see it.

I hope that gives you some ideas for what you can do as a daily creative practice. If you get a Moleskine watercolor journal, you can do it in there. It just doesn't flow as much as actual watercolor paper. So I get the blocks of paper and then I cut them down to size. I am linking my favorite watercolor papers in the links below and on my website. This is Arches, but there are a few other options that I really enjoy and think they do a good job.

Finally I want to show you a color palette I created with this palette mixing just a few of the colors, exactly what we just did. So I made this beautiful fall inspired color palette. This is the only color that is just straight out of the pan, it's the chant yellow. The rest are mixes of various colors. With that color palette I played around with circles. This is another fun way to experiment with colors, especially if you've already come up with a color palette. I also, because I was thinking fall, made this little pumpkin. So cute, lots of splatters, very loose. And finally an abstract floral because they're my favorite it's what I make all the time and these colors just made it so pretty to make a bountiful Autumn bouquet.

I hope you enjoyed today. I hope you implement what you learned and try it out. Let me know in the comments below if you do and definitely subscribe or like this video, so that you can see more of what I create and more ideas for how to include a creative practice into your everyday life. Thanks.