One of my favorite watercolor teachers so far is Ana Victoria Calderon who I discovered through Skillshare. The funny thing is, I didn't really connect with her style when I was first looking to learn watercolor months ago so I initially passed up her class. But here I am, a couple months later, absolutely loving all that I am learning from her and finding myself appreciating her beautiful work and style which is much more broad and amazing than I first realized.
She teaches how to create watercolor textures which can be used as a reference and inspiration later. It's almost like creating patterns but these textures are things to incorporate into the final class project which is painting an animal.
Ana has the class make nine watercolor rectangles on a page (you can do circles or whatever shape you prefer) and then create a different design on each. I copied her designs for my first attempt (below) because this whole idea is foreign to me, but once I did a page like hers, I spent the next evening creating another page of my own designs (see above in the title image). It is so much fun.
Now I need to move on to my class project and incorporate some of these elements into the animal I choose...which is another challenge for me but I'll give it a try :)