Hey everyone! It’s Kate here, back with another watercolor doodle video. I recently did a geometric doodle that I loved so much, and I had some leftover paint on my palette, so I thought I’d play around and create another one.
This time, I’m using some blues, greens, and browns – a real hodgepodge of colors! I also didn’t want any paint to go to waste, so I grabbed my round brush and got started.
Watercolor is a great way to experiment with brushstrokes and brush control. Just grab a brush and play around with it in as many ways as you can think of. This will help you get comfortable with different brushes and how they make marks on paper. Don’t worry about where the marks go or what they look like – just have fun and experiment!
Speaking of leftover paint, I can’t get over how well these Marie’s Masters artist grade watercolors go down on paper. They’re definitely a step up from the student grade paints I’m used to.
While Scamp the cat makes her usual evening presence known, I’m just making some loose marks on the paper, overlapping colors and letting them meld together a bit. You can see this happening in the two blue rings at the bottom right corner. I’m also adding dots and little rainbow shapes, and I’ll turn this whole thing into some kind of design once everything dries.
It’s such a relaxing process to play with watercolors and see how the colors flow and blend. This is a great exercise for beginner watercolors, or just for practicing brushstrokes or getting to know how your paints behave. Different brands and colors can act very differently, so it’s a good idea to experiment and see how they work together. You can even see how paints from different palettes interact if you use a mix!
The other day, I was thinking about how much easier it can sometimes be to do representational art, like painting a rose. At least you have a general idea of where the colors and strokes need to go. But with abstract art, where you’re creating something completely from your imagination, it can be easy to get stuck. There are just so many options! This kind of doodling challenge is actually a lot harder than painting a tree or a flower, in a different way.
As I’m recording the voiceover for this video, I can see where I’ve tried to incorporate the rule of thirds into the composition. If you divided the paper into a tic-tac-toe grid, some of the interesting intersections would fall on those lines. This is also important for considering color contrast and other compositional elements. It’s one of the things I’ve been focusing on to improve my abstract work, whether with acrylics, watercolors, or doodles. It’s all about learning by doing!
So, I started with some crimson dots because I was missing some reds in my palette. I just wanted to add a little pop of color here and there. For this piece, I actually ended up breaking out some Posca pens for even more color, which I really liked. These pens are very opaque and have great coverage. They work a little differently on watercolor paper than on acrylic, though. The watercolor paper tends to soak up the paint pen more than a surface covered with acrylic, which creates a bit of a barrier.
Interestingly, some pens that have poor coverage on watercolor paper work great on acrylics. I found this out with a chalk marker – terrible on watercolor, but amazing on acrylic! Anyway, back to the doodle. Since things were getting a bit busy, I used a black paint marker to create a larger, blocky shape. This adds contrast not just in color, but also in size. There are a lot of thin lines and small elements in this piece, so adding these chunky shapes helps to ground it a bit.
As I played around more, I decided to go back and fill in some horseshoe shapes with a turquoise Posca pen, which I thought really finished it off and totally changed the look of the painting. Then, I went in with a white pen to add some white dots to complement the black ones.
Overall, I really liked how this doodle turned out. It started off very busy, but it’s not overwhelmingly so now. It was a lot of fun to create, and I hope you enjoyed watching this video and doodling along with me! Until next time, keep creating!