In this 10‑minute tutorial, Christie Renee Hawkins of The Social Easel walks viewers through foundational watercolor techniques and demonstrates how to achieve similar effects with craft acrylics. She begins by showing examples of her fall pumpkin paintings and introduces a value scale that illustrates how pigment strength is controlled by the amount of water added to the brush—strong pigment with little water yields dark values, while more water creates translucent washes. She then demonstrates the wet‑on‑wet method, applying pigment to a wet surface so colors bleed and blend organically, and contrasts it with the wet‑on‑dry approach, where pigment is added to dry paper for sharper lines and greater control. After covering these core watercolor methods, Christie shows how to treat craft acrylic paint like watercolor by diluting it with water, achieving comparable transparent effects. Throughout the lesson she references the specific watercolor set and brush set available via Amazon and her own store. The video concludes with a promotional overview of her “Tribe” membership community, outlining its pricing ($47/month or $470/year), the volume of lessons (175+ instant access, 2 new lessons each month), community features (devotionals, guest artists, paint parties), and upcoming events such as a welcome ceremony and a mixed‑media pumpkin paint party. The overall purpose is both instructional—teaching beginners essential watercolor concepts—and marketing, encouraging viewers to join the Tribe for continued artistic growth.
Chapters
Hey everybody, it's Christie Renee Hawkins with The Social Easel, and we are going to do a quick Watercolor 101 lesson today where I'm going to show you, um, just some super quick techniques on how to use watercolor in your artwork. And then I'm going to finish with showing you how you can even treat your craft acrylics like watercolor by watering them down. So, um, these are some of the watercolor paintings that I have done for fall. This is one of my newer ones, the orange pumpkin. These are my blue pumpkins from last year. So this is kind of the look that you'll get with watercolor, to give you an example. And this is just one of the many styles that I teach inside of my tribe. So doors are still open right now. Um, you have a few more days left that you can join us, and we are closing doors until next fall to new members. So if you are interested in learning how to paint and you want to be a part of a community that is going to help you reach your goals faster, going to give you the support that you need, the belief and the confidence that you need to start tackling these things, we we would love to have you become a part of Tribe with us. My Tribe includes 2 new lessons with me each month, and then you get instant access to over 175 lessons as well. We do a devotional in the group each month, and then we also have a guest artist or speaker. So there's lots of fun things for you to be a part of inside of there, and Lots of ways that you can continue to grow in your art with the help of a teacher and a community, um, to help you overcome hurdles that you may be having going at it alone. It's so much more fun to do it together as a group. So, um, before we jump into watercolor, I've just got a watercolor set that I got off Amazon here. Um, I'll post the link in the comments. Or if you would rather get a text, you can text the word Amazon to the phone number that you see on the screen right here, and it will send you a direct link to my Amazon store where all my favorite art supplies are. So that's where you can grab that watercolor set. I'm using my brush set today that you can buy directly from The Social Easel. So a couple things First, when you're working with watercolor, I've created a little bit of a value scale here. So from our highest pigment to our lowest. So think of it as strong pigment and down to very translucent, to almost a white. So we don't typically add white to our acrylic painting— or I mean, not acrylic, I'm sorry, to our watercolor paintings. You would actually leave negative space, leave empty space as your white. So if you're wanting just a pure white highlight, you would actually leave part of your paper showing for that white highlight in that area. So the way you get this to go from darker pigment to lighter is all about the amount of water that you use. So I'm just going to do another example for you here. We'll use purple. So I've got plenty of water in here, enough to make this nice and wet, but it's very, very strong pigment. You can see how dark that is. Let's move in just a little bit closer. And as I go in and start adding more and more water to it, wipe off some of that excess water out of my brush. So you can see, and you've— you can either use a little dish. I use a ceramic dish, but you can also come over here in this paint set and just take some of your pigment and keep adding water to it to get a really translucent, light color, and just keep going until you get almost no color. So it's all about the amount of water that you put in your brush. So, um, that's the first thing I want to teach you, is like how you can build value and contrast with your watercolors. So stronger pigment, less water. More translucent, more water. The next thing I want to show you is called a wet-on-wet technique. For this technique, I'm just going to do— just, this is just water on my brush. I'm just going to do a big leaf shape here. Okay, so this is just water, and I'm just doing this in a mixed media pad. You can do watercolor in a mixed media pad, watercolor paper. Whatever you choose. Let's do this green. So while this is wet, I want to load up— I'm going to zoom out a little, scoot this out of the way so you can see my palette as well. I'm getting plenty of pigment in here, just like we did with the purple. But now since this is wet, see how it just expands? So wet on wet, the colors are going to bleed together, which gives you a really cool effect. The other cool thing that I think is just amazing about watercolor is wherever your water is, that's where the paint is going to stay. It's not going to go outside of that line. So I can still come back and change the shape of that if I want to, but Here's what I think is really cool about that. That's just one color, right? Wet on wet, you can kind of see what that looks like. Now let's do a contrasting color that is going to be very different. I'm going to grab some yellow here and put some of this in, get a little bit more water, and while they're both wet at the same time, You can start adding in different colors and just watch how they start blending together. You can manipulate it some while it's wet. You can kind of drag your color around, or you can just let it do its thing. So let's do it again. We've got yellow here, right? It's nice and saturated. It's nice and wet. I'm going to grab some red. I'm going to turn this light off just for a second so you don't have that glare on there. You can add more water to it if you want them to kind of blend together a little bit more. So that's your wet-on-wet technique. You're kind of letting the paint do its own thing and mix together, and it creates this really cool effect. Now another way you can do it is wet on dry. So obviously we're on dry paper, but I'm just going to start— just do another petal here. And you can let this dry, and once it's dry, you can come back and add more pigment over top of it without it bleeding in. Okay, so you want to use the wet on dry technique if you want more control over your color. So like on this one, I came back in and you can see these finer detailed lines here. I waited for that to be dry so that I could come back and add these more vibrant colors, more pigmented, that give me more solid lines instead of the mix of the wet-on-wet technique. So I'm just going to grab a skinnier brush here. Let's get like a dark burgundy. Now this is probably just a little bit damp, but not damp enough that it's going to blend or bleed together. I And now I can come in and still create fine detailed work. Not a lot of water, just a lot of pigment. Maybe I want to come in and do some line work inside of here. Now those colors are not bleeding together. We've got a nice pretty light wash of that pink behind it. And now I can use my darker color to add some fun lines and detail in. So this is your wet on wet, your wet on dry— oops— and then your value scale with watercolor. And then I told you I would show you how you can treat craft acrylic like watercolor. I'm just going to grab a bottle that I have here. This one's a plum. I'm just— normally I'd put this on a palette, but I'm just going to put it directly on this mixed media pad just to show you that this can also be treated like watercolor. So you can do watercolor style paintings with acrylic. It starts out the strong acrylic and the more water I add to it— rinse that, just get some more clean water— you can create a watercolor effect with your craft acrylic paint. So it looks very similar to what we have up above, right? So this is with watercolor, that's with craft acrylic. So you can see that you can get the same effect with it. So if this was fun and you like this mini lesson on doing watercolor, you can find out more about how to do that inside our tribe. Doors are open for a couple more days. You can join us. It's only $47 a month or $470 for the year, and that gives you full instant access to over 175 different tutorials. When you join, um, you will get 2 brand new lessons with me each month our amazing community of women that are going to help cheer you on and encourage you, help build that belief and confidence in yourself. But they're also there for accountability and to give you the support that you need, so you're not doing this all alone. One of the upcoming watercolor ones that we are doing is going to be this one. We are doing this in early November, so if this looks like something fun that you want to be a part of, jump in and do that with us. And then we are kicking off, um, our— all of our new members. We closed doors on the 10th, and we are kicking that off with a welcome ceremony on the 11th. And then we're having a huge paint party, um, just for our tribe on that— I believe it's a Wednesday night— on that evening. And we're going to be doing our mixed media pumpkin. So you may have seen me start on this the other day. I did it a couple weeks ago on a Facebook Live, just kind of showing you an overview of mixed media, but we are actually going to complete this full painting. It's going to be a 2-hour paint party with me and all the Tribe Sisters, and we're all going to work on our mixed media painting together. So that's what we have coming up on the 11th. And then we have an amazing guest artist this month that's going to teach a tractor with pumpkins. And then I'm going to be doing a new autumn fall chapel as well that I'm really excited about. So stay tuned for more details to come on that. But if you want to be a part of this, make sure you get in before we close doors on the 10th because we have a great quarter planned amazing holiday and seasonal paintings that the only way you're going to get them is to be a member of Tribe. So we can't wait to welcome you, and I will see you in the group. Bye!
