Top 5 Skillshare classes to improve your watercolor skills
Skillshare is a subscription-based online learning community for creators, filled with thousands of classes and categories. I was of course initially attracted to Skillshare for the painting and art classes, but I soon found I could learn so much more on the platform, from how to start my own business, how to use the Adobe suite products, improve my productivity, or even how to be a good plant mom.
I have been a member of Skillshare since December 2020, and by taking a variety of classes I have improved my painting skills immensely, I have also discovered so many artists that I love and look to for inspiration. Below I have listed 5 of my favorite watercolor classes that I have taken on Skillshare over the past few years that I feel really have improved my skills, given me tons of new tools, and expanded my mind and art.
Watercolor Mosaics with Ana Victoria Calderon
I absolutely LOVE Ana Victoria’s work and find all her classes on Skillshare to be incredibly informative and great for building different watercolor skills. She has a unique and beautiful style that encompasses a lot of flowers, galaxy art and sacred geometry. Her classes are thorough, and I love that she has warm ups and a final project. And I love that the final project is often a theme with you, the student, getting to choose the exact subject.
Inspired by a trip to Rome, Ana created her Watercolor Mosaics class after recreating Roman mosaics she was inspired by in watercolor alone. Then after teaching a workshop and seeing how all the students represented the prompt differently, Ana was inspired to bring the class to Skillshare. In this class she goes over materials and examples, then sets out prompts for practice and the final project, as we then get to watch her paint her own piece of the night sky.
For my final project, I was inspired by a recent trip where I had walked along the Camino del Norte, along the northern coast of Spain. I mixed elements from several photos I had taken to compose this piece, and love the final product. Using the mosaic style in watercolors is so much fun and somewhat therapeutic, painting small spaces one at a time. The final effect is stunning and I find there is a character to the painting that wouldn’t be there if I painted it in traditional landscape style.
“Dreaming of the Camino” April 2021. A piece composed for Ana Victoria Calderon’s Watercolor Mosaics class
2. Master Masking Fluid in Watercolor Painting: 10 Day Art Challenge by Ohn Mar Win
Ohn Mar Win is another artist that I absolutely love and draw so much inspiration from. Ohn Mar is a UK-based artist that is a top teacher on Skillshare and known on Instagram for her fabulous sketchbooks. Ohn Mar Win is actually the reason I am on Skillshare, I had no idea about it until I saw her promote it on Instagram. Ohn Mar has a lot of Skillshare classes that are all great, and I particularly like her sketchbook themed classes.
Ohn Mar came out with a class all about mastering masking fluid last year in Fall of 2022 and I watched and painted the projects as quickly as I could. Ohn Mar gives great tips in this class on how to use masking fluid and how to first experiment with the material and different tools and papers to see the variety of marks you can accomplish with masking fluid. She then goes through 10 projects with you designed to take a day each; from abstract to Hawthorne flowers, and even a pot of spaghetti. I love the pieces I created in this class, and it ultimately inspired me to create the indigo teapot and teacup painting below. Masking fluid is something I use a lot in my art, and I the things I learned in this class were invaluable!
This Indigo Tea Time piece was inspired by Ohn Mar Win’s class on mastering masking fluid
3. Urban Sketching | Drawing What You See by Peggy Dean
So at the risk of sounding redundant, Peggy Dean is another top teacher on Skillshare who’s career I look up to for inspiration. Peggy has a LOT of great classes on Skillshare, some that are longer and thoroughly cover topics like this one on urban sketching. But she also has some great fun ones that will take less than hour, and still get you to creatively engage and create (I love her watercolor warm up class).
For this class Peggy explains the ins and outs of urban sketching; what tools and materials one needs, how to frame a scene, how to add perspective, and how to add loose watercolor on top. I have been interested in urban sketching for a while, but find the idea of creating art in public to be somewhat mortifying. So to get over this fear I have been trying to lean more into creating in public. For my final project for this class I challenged myself to draw on location, and the piece below is from my trip to Amsterdam in the summer of 2023. I visited the Rijksmuseum early one morning and found that I definitely needed to buy my ticket ahead of time (which I didn’t), so I wandered around until I found this cozy little nook in the adjacent garden. I sketched the scene and laid down the watercolor background to the hedges and building on the left while there, but my anxiety about creating in public started to rear up, so I took a few pictures, waited for the painting to dry and left to continue later in the safety of my home. Despite not painting this piece completely on site, I am still proud of this painting and for challenging myself to do something I am uncomfortable with.
Rijksmuseum Garden, Amsterdam. July 2023.
Cat Coquillette is a surface pattern designer and watercolor artist, that has several classes on Skillshare geared towards uploading your artistic creations on print-on-demand (POD) websites like Spoonflower, Redbubble and Society6. She has classes that thoroughly explain all parts of the process, and this class is specifically for artists that want to learn how to make seamless patterns from their art. She walks you through the entire process, starting from conceptualization, to drawing and painting, scanning, removing background, making the pattern, and finally uploading the pattern to POD sites. This class is specific to using Photoshop, but she has other classes for Procreate and Illustrator. I loved this class because I learned so many Photoshop tricks and keyboard shorts, and she even shows you how to easily change the colors on your artwork to diversify and build your portfolio. For anyone slightly interested in making surface pattern design from your art, I highly, highly recommend!
Below is the floral pattern I created for this class and I am so happy with the final result. In the images below you can see how the pattern progressed from paintings of individual motifs, and some of the different color palettes I played around with.
5. Modern Color Theory: Master Color Mixing for Watercolors by Aima Kessy
Finally, I have a great class for watercolor color theory. This in depth class by Aima Kessy details modern color theory in detail and I was blown away by the effects this has had on my color understanding and mixing. I think we all grew up being taught that the three primary colors are red, blue, and yellow, but have you ever had a really hard time mixing a pretty purple from red and blue? I always seem to have a dark, muddy maroon, no matter how much red I add. Well in modern color theory, the primary colors are cyan, magenta and yellow (like the main colors in printers) and as you can see in my purple color mixing page down below, the range of purples you can get from magentas and cyans are much more purple-y, and there is a better dynamic range (I especially love opera pink and cobalt blue).
In this class Aima does a great job of breaking the concepts down, and giving a project for you to complete alongside the lessons, resulting in a color mixing book specific to your likes. She also includes great resources like the Schmincke Colormetric Position Chart, which is a crazy updated version of the color wheel.
I hope at least one of these classes piqued your interest if you want to improve your watercolor skills! If you enjoyed reading this, please subscribe down below to my newsletter to get updates on my website, as well as news about a new blog or art tutorial!