Level Up Your Art! Pro Techniques for Fixing Old Paintings

Hi, I'm Valerie Englehart.

I am a watercolor artist living in the Seattle area.

And tonight I want to show you how I'm going to take this painting that I'm not really jazzed about and use it as a learning piece that will hopefully, when I'm done, be something I like much more.

And if it's not, then at least I'll have gotten to practice and work on some other techniques that I can hopefully use in a future painting.

So a couple of years ago, I painted this scene of two crows on a stop sign.

I made this from a photo I took years and years ago when I lived in Bellevue, Washington.

And I just thought it was so funny that they were sitting there on a stop sign and it was like, stop in the name of the car.

I'm funny.

So I did this painting and it's fine.

It's fine.

I followed the rule of thirds.

It's loose and atmospheric.

It's an interesting enough wash, but it's been sitting in my portfolio book for years and it's doing nothing for me.

So I can either let it sit and rot or I can try and make it better and maybe inspire you to pull out some of your old paintings.

So let's see.

I've got some golden crackle paste and I'm going to apply it.

I think right here on the stop sign, just to give it some more visual interest.

Honestly, I kind of like the stop sign as it is already.

But again, this painting has been sitting for years.

Let's see if I can make it better.

So I've got my palette knife.

I'm just going to scoop it out.

Maybe that much.

We'll just smorgge it on.

I don't want to cover the whole stop sign, just a portion.

So the thicker the application, the bigger the cracks will be.

I'm not sure I want super thick cracks.

So I'll just do this little smoothly.

I'll bring it down.

I'll bring it down about right there, but I don't like that line.

So I'll try and soften, smooth it, round it out a bit.

Just apply it until I'm happy.

And then what I can do is tomorrow when this crackles, I can reapply the red.

But I think that's cool.

It'll give it a little more of an urban feel, I hope.

I've got this on my knife now and oh geez, no paper towels.

Here's an old one, old tissue.

I'll just wipe that off.

Stick it in my water for a moment.

And I think that's all I want to do with the crackle paste.

So put that lid back on.

Now the crows.

I think they're pretty good.

I like them.

I feel like maybe I could make certain spots darker, increase the value range.

'Cause one thing that watercolors usually have a problem with is not making things dark enough.

So I'm going to use this, the Dr.

Ph.

Martin's Payne's Gray.

So it's a liquid color and I need a brush.

Let's grab this one.

I've got a bravery test here.

I don't know what's going to happen.

So this is a little stupid of me maybe, but you know what?

Let's do it.

I'm just going to apply a little straight right there.

Like my brush.

Just drag it and soften that hard line.

Actually really like that.

So let's do it in a couple other spots.

I'm going to put it under the crow here.

I'm going to darken this wing right here.

I'm just drawing on the surface with the little pipette tincture.

So I'm not squeezing any of it out first.

I'm just going straight in.

Ooh, that's dark.

So I'll bring that down.

And then I'm going to soften it so that it blends and it's watercolor so it's transparent.

You'll see my previous layers underneath.

( ( And so I'm just going to keep doing that.

Finding places on the crows that I want to darken.

Apply a little paint.

And soften.

Now I'm the sort of person, I don't like to outline everything.

So I'm going to try and not just outline the entire wing.

I do like lost and found edges in my work.

Come back to this buddy.

Just hit him on the side.

I made these crows a little too fluffy, I think.

I don't know if you have crows where you live.

They're beautiful, but the fluffier ones are usually much younger.

These ones were definitely adults and they're very sleek.

I made them just a little too fluffy.

Put maybe some hints of feathers while I drag the pigment over.

( Just drag that pigment around.

And of course watercolor, even this hydrous will dry a little lighter.

So I don't feel scared going dark.

Also, I'm going to throw this away if I don't like it anyway.

So I'm not scared at all.

Let's smooth this edge.

( And wipe off some of the extra moisture.)

Crows are nice and smooth.

Oh dear.

So I've lost a little bit of his roundness, but that's okay.

So what I'm going to do is bleed it in to this guy.

And then I can correct that line later.

So I'm going to make this ambiguous, definitely darker, but make it a little more ambiguous as to where one crow starts and the other stops.

( And honestly, I might just leave the ambiguous.

They are black in color.

And so when they're standing together and you get a photo, it can be really hard to tell where one starts and stops.

I'm not trying to connect to my shapes.

All right.

Anywhere else, I feel like the crows need to be darkened.

Maybe this guy around his face keeps saying he.

I don't know.

Though I do know the crows around my house right now are a bonded pair.

They've got an, not an egg.

I think it's hatched.

Last year they're hatchling my eldest named Conelius.

Little Conelius.

And we were babysitters.

They would just leave their little baby and go out, go and get food.

They trusted us, which is great 'cause I love crows.

( I'll bring that darkness into the beak and bleed it away on the face.

You know, I like that so much more.

I think I'm going to go back to this guy and make his face darker.

So I'm going to do that.

I'm going to do it right just to drop there.

Don't need a lot of pigment.

The faces are pretty small.

And I'm just going to drag it around.

And yes, these sound effects as I paint are absolutely necessary.

The little beats and the boots.

You need to do it to paint.

OK.

I like it.

Looking much better already.

All right.

Cool.

So I think our crows are fixed or at least.

I'm happy with them right now.

We'll see when they dry.

The stop sign.

I mean, we won't know until it dries.

Yeah, I'll just leave it alone.

So I think I have to tell myself all the time, leave it alone.

Just leave it alone.

Let it work.

Trust the process.

But I've got this dead space right here.

I mean, yeah, there's a little bit of watermark going on and we've got a little yellow for the sun and the sky, but that's not very interesting.

And sure, I could cut it, but I don't think that's very interesting either.

So I want to.

Add some sort of visual interest right here, but this is my focal point.

I don't want to take away from it, but I want to compliment it.

I want to fill out the scene.

As we can see from my brushstrokes, I have things moving in this direction.

So it makes sense if I'm going to put anything in, I do it in this corner up here.

Another fun tip for like, if you're trying to figure out where something needs to be in your composition, pretend that you've cut your painting into quarters and look at each quarter separately.

And if you have more than one boring corner, you need to do something.

And in this case, if I cut it, both of these spots are boring.

So I need to make at least one of them interesting.

So I've got a couple of stencils and I took this picture at my apartment downtown in the city.

So I've got a stencil that looks like bricks and painters tape.

So I'm going to line it up somewhere.

It doesn't have to be perfect.

I'm going to get it kind of close.

And what I plan to do is almost put it in this direction, which will do a couple things that way I don't just do one whole line of it because that would also be a little boring.

But I want to compliment this line.

So get it where I want it about there.

And I'm just going to tape in two places.

One, I want to take the stencil because I don't really want it to move too much right now.

I will move it later, but also my painting.

Probably want to tape that down.

And since my painting has been dry for years, I can put down a little painters tape and I don't have to worry.

It's not going to rip it.

If your painting is wet, don't put tape on it.

And so these tips, your painting doesn't have to be years old.

It could be days old.

It could be decades old.

Just it's much better to use a piece to learn and to play than it is to let it rot.

Right.

It's all taped up.

So what I'm going to do now is grab a brush.

Wet it.

And I'm just going to take a look.

How do I want to start this?

Could just use a spray bottle.

Actually, it's got a flat brush.

So I'm going to grab a flat.

Did have around don't want that.

I want to flat.

I'm just going to wet it.

The pigment I had used originally was mostly aqua green, which is a phthalo color, so it's staining.

It's probably not going to move too much.

So rewetting the paper isn't going to do very much, but what I want it to do is reactivate the pigment a bit.

And I've got this scrubber brush and I grabbed my largest one and I'm going to try scrubbing it away.

This will damage the surface of your paper, but again, I don't like how it looks.

Anyway, let's just scrub it away and see.

Really do need a paper towel for this part though, so I can dab it.

And let's just lift it a bit and see how that looks.

Oh my goodness.

I'm actually seeing some of the grid marks from my stencil.

I wasn't expecting that, but it's not bad.

And now I learned that that happens.

But I like that it's a little too strong in my opinion.

So what I can do is if I don't like that later, cutting a little bit off the top is going to be fine or I just leave it.

Let's see.

Let's do another.

All right.

That's much less.

Dab it can wipe off the little chunks later and lift.

I like that better.

So having one that stands out, isn't too bad.

Unless it stands out really badly.

And you know, maybe I'll do this and decide that I didn't like it after all.

Whips are daisies, but then I know.

So at this point, I'm just going to be doing this over and over.

So I'll just speed this process up.

But all I'm doing is I wetted the paper in the spot.

I want to scrape, got a scrubber.

And you could use if you've got like here, uh, it's not tough enough, but I've got like this little flat brush and it's just a little Princeton elite, but this one will actually do a decent job scrubbing too, though that's a little bit better for softening an edge.

So anyway, enjoy the speed up process.

Okay. (upbeat music) - All right, I like that a lot better.

I have once the painting dries, I'll get rid of some of these other little balls of old paper that came up because I was scrubbing, but it creates kind of a ghost of a building and the buildings around there were bricks.

So it's a nice way to sort of bring my memory back into the piece.

If I didn't like the brick, then what I could do is, or rather I didn't like the look that it came up with, but I still wanted to do the brick.

I could try doing like a crackle paste and then using that aqua green over it to still make it look like a hazy dream, but give that area more interest in a way I liked.

I'd also had grabbed the Daniel Smith watercolor ground buff titanium.

That way it wasn't a bright white and same thing, just to give it some texture in that area.

So if you do this and you decide, you know what, I don't like that, I want more oomph, maybe add some watercolor ground and leave it as it is or then paint over it.

But all right, I think that's a good stopping point for tonight.

What I have to do is I have to let this area dry so I can clean it up a bit and that so it can get crackly and then I can paint over it.

All right, see you in a little bit.

All right, paper is completely dry.

Forgot to scrape off those little paper bits, but I can do that at any time.

As you can see over here, my crackle paste has dried and we have some lovely deep cracks.

This little bit actually lifted up off the paper, so I'm just gonna take it off and I think it still looks pretty cool.

What I could do if I was heartbroken is I could apply more crackle paste and wait again, or I could maybe apply some watercolor ground on the back of that and stick it down, but then again, I'd have to wait for it to dry.

And I think it's fine if anything, I kind of like having that little bit of what was there before peeking through.

So I'm gonna leave it, just gonna throw that piece away.

Now, looking at it, I love how the paint's gray darkened some areas of my birds.

So I don't think they need anything done.

This brickwork looks good, but it's still disconnected.

When you make a composition, usually it's great if everything touches, connect your shapes, and there's still a disconnect between this part of my painting and this part.

So what I'm going to do is bring this wall over.

Other things I could do is maybe paint some bubbles, maybe paint it starting here and having it go over my crows and then over the brick.

That way there would be a line, an element to connect it together.

And that would be a nice little whimsical approach, and that's something I can still do later if I feel like the painting needs more.

But for now, I think I just want to add more of the brick.

So that's where I'm gonna start. (upbeat music) All right, 500 miles of scrubbing later, and I've brought my wall over.

I didn't want it to be too linear, so I placed a few bricks away from the main wall.

And to connect my shapes, I did have it come down this side of the crow.

Now, as I'm sure you can see, some of the brickwork is overlapping my crow.

Now, the crow is not supposed to be merged with the brick wall.

So I can do one of a couple things.

Honestly, I can do many things, but I can either pull out my Payne's Gray and repaint that back in.

Once this dries, this is still wet from scrubbing.

So if I add it now, that pigment is gonna seep into the wet area, and then I'll have a mess.

So little patience is needed there, but you know what?

I kind of like it.

It adds to that kind of dreamscape look.

So I'm gonna leave it.

So now we've got this stop sign here, and I like the cracks, but the stop sign's red.

Now, this red that I used, I don't remember.

Got a few reds.

I'm pretty sure I used a permanent red.

That's literally its name.

And where would that be?

So I think I've got it in here, 'cause it's one of my favorite reds to use.

I'm pretty sure this is the red I want.

So take a brush, wet it, grab some of my pigment.

Oh my gosh, and I've already splashed it.

And you know what?

Let's leave it.

I'm just gonna paint.

I wanna leave the parts that are supposed to be white, but I don't mind if it bleeds in a bit.

Now, this looks a lot brighter than what was there before, because when I painted this previously, I painted the red on top of the aqua green, which is kind of a blue color, but because it leans green, the colors being complimentary kind of canceled each other out, making a more muted red.

But now that this red is being painted on white, this red is much more vibrant.

However, because this crackle medium is not watercolor ground, and wasn't really made for watercolor, this brightness will become quite pale.

This is a very concentrated dot, and so while I like it and want it to stay, I'm just gonna dab it slightly.

So we still get that texture, but it won't be distracting.

Some more red, I'm just gonna, oh look, I need to be more careful.

I'm just gonna paint in, instead of painting the roses red, we're painting stop sign red.

Paint the stop sign red, paint the stop sign red.

Look, you get a musical number here.

And I'm gonna drag this color onto the paper.

That way, I'm not like just coloring a certain segment.

I'm, once again, connect your shapes.

So I'm just making a mess, but a beautiful mess.

An interesting mess.

Don't be afraid to make a mess.

Just getting a little too pale, so I'm going to add more pigment.

And you can just keep layering it on until you're happy.

Remember, watercolor dries paler, and even more so, being on a surface that wasn't really made for watercolor.

Hmm.

Yeah, it should dry fine.

Think I'll drag a little more of the color here.

Yeah, that looks fine. (clinking) And I'll set that aside.

All right, well, my signature is already on it.

And I don't really think I wanna do anything else.

Once this dries, I'll brush off all those little bits of paper I scraped off.

Remember, when you do this, you are damaging the paper, but if you don't like your painting originally anyway, what's a little damage gonna hurt?

If anything, my painting is much more interesting now than when we started.

So I think I'm gonna call it here.

Give this a try for yourself.

I'll have all of the materials in the description.

And let me know what you think.

Let me know if there's anything you wanna see.

Did this help you?

What sort of subjects do you like?

Do you wanna see other kind of painting methods?

So subscribe, ring the bell for notifications, but most importantly, comment and let me know what you think.

Anyway, I'll see you in the next video.