Your Year in Art: Watercolor

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

Kristin Van Leuven

• Publisher: Walter Foster Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781633228269
• eBook ISBN: 9781633228276
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Overcome your creative blocks and fears and start painting with confidence with Your Year in Art: Watercolor! Filled with weekly art challenges, step-by-step watercolor lessons, helpful tips and techniques, and gorgeous artwork, this follow-up to the drawing-focused Your Year in Art is a must-have for any watercolor artist.

Written and illustrated by Kristin Van Leuven, owner of the popular online art shop Hello Lovely People and author of Modern Watercolor (Walter Foster Publishing), Your Year in Art: Watercolor seeks to motivate and inspire. The book is divided into weekly art challenges and prompts that cover appealing themes like florals, birds, and portraits, as well as inspirational ideas for painting patterns, holiday decorations, scenery, and so much more. Lessons and prompts are guided but invite personalization so you can build your skills while celebrating your own unique style.

If you're a beginning artist, you might feel intimidated by watercolor, a medium that doesn't allow for many errors. However, Kristin Van Leuven makes watercolor fun and approachable with her easy-to-follow tips and free-flowing, expressive style. With her guidance, you'll learn to embrace imperfection and use the lessons as inspiration, rather than something to imitate exactly.

With Your Year in Art: Watercolor, develop your own painting style and express yourself using watercolor!

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 art—especially 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

1 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.

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

3 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.

TIP

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

Here I’ve 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 COLOR’S 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

1 Take out all your brushes: round, flat, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Basics
• Chapter 2: Jump-Starting Creativity
• Chapter 3: Getting Outside
• Chapter 4: Making It Personal
• Chapter 5: Keeping It Going
• Meet the Author
• Copyright