DIY

Learning to Watercolor with YouTube

Sharing in my mom’s hobby

YouTube is a gift for self-taught artists who like to work at their own pace. You can search for pretty much any skill you want to learn, and find demonstrations and tutorials. You can even get very specific: if you want to draw a sunflower, you can find step-by-step instructions to do just that, and it’s easy to pause and rewind as needed.

It’s also nice for trying something out in a low-pressure way. It’s free, other than your costs for art supplies. You don’t find yourself looking around a classroom to compare your work to the masterpieces of other students. You don’t even have to leave home, which became an extra benefit during the pandemic.

When my mom decided to learn how to paint with watercolors, she found a lot of helpful resources on YouTube. Her cost was minimal: she started out with buying a couple of brushes, a few paint colors, and some watercolor paper. She got them locally from arts and crafts stores.

She told me how fun and relaxing it was to paint along with video tutorials on YouTube and invited me to try some with her. I’m happy that I said yes as it’s become something fun for us to share, and it also gave me a hobby I can enjoy on my own whenever I feel like it.

We found that painting together gave us a fun activity to share during the pandemic. We could even do it outside on her covered deck if we were feeling like we needed to take added precautions for social distancing.

My mom has followed tutorials from a variety of different artists on YouTube, and I found that I really liked one of her favorites: Let’s Make Art with painter Sarah Cray. So most of the tutorials we’ve followed have been from Let’s Make Art, though we’ve also worked through video lessons from artists like Dani Till.

When we want to paint together, we often browse the Let’s Make Art website or their YouTube channel to see what’s new or if there are some seasonal paintings that catch our interest. Or sometimes instead of starting with Let’s Make Art or another specific YouTube channel, we search on YouTube for the specific thing we feel like painting, like one day when we thought it would be fun to paint birds.

We’ve done a lot of fun holiday-themed paintings like Halloween cats, pumpkins, and haunted houses. I especially like to paint fruits and vegetables, as those seem pretty manageable to me such that I can come up with a recognizable result. I enjoy landscapes, too, although those can be more hit or miss (sometimes I have to just “Bob Ross it” and add a little fence to distract from my strange-looking trees or grasses).

One of the things I appreciate about Let’s Make Art is that even though they operate as an arts education business, they provide their essential content for free. There’s no paywall. You can watch all of the videos for free, and some of the paintings have a free downloadable template that you can print out and trace onto your paper as an outline for your painting.

They do sell kits and subscription boxes, which make it easy by providing all the paint colors that you need for particular projects, but you can do just as well on your own. I think a lot of people buy their products to support them because they just seem like really cool and supportive people — and it’s a fun gift to buy someone a painting kit they can complete by themselves even if they’ve never painted before.

My mom had a subscription for a few months when her interest was ramping up as she was getting more and more into her hobby. It helped her build up a little stock of paint colors, and buying the boxes was also motivation to sit down and complete all the paintings for each month.

When I first started painting with my mom, she lent me supplies to use when I came over. Over time I decided to buy a few things for myself that I could bring to her house and use when I was back at home, too. I found a good quality yet inexpensive travel paint set on eBay, which was an easy way to get a range of colors all built into one convenient and portable package. I also bought a variety pack of student-grade brushes, and I got a pad of watercolor paper for forty percent off using a coupon at Jo-Ann’s craft stores.

The painting in the photo at the start of this story is one I did when I was home by myself one night. The tutorial on Let’s Make Art called for masking fluid to use along the shoreline to keep a white line from getting painted over. I didn’t have masking fluid, so I tried to leave an unpainted white line — not easy with the way that watercolor wants to flow, but I was pleasantly surprised with how it turned out.

One of my favorites that I painted with my mom was this watermelon from a tutorial by Dani Till. One of the cool things about Dani Till’s tutorials is that they are pretty short, so you can make something new in ten or fifteen minutes. I feel like this is another good example of the relaxed level of commitment with free tutorials: it can take less than an hour of your time, as well as just a few dollars for basic supplies.

Have you ever taught yourself how to do art or craft projects by watching videos or following instructions in books? Have you ever enjoyed this kind of DIY art-making session with friends or family and maybe a video to paint along with?

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