30 Days of Nature in Watercolor: A Beginner's Painting Journey

1. Welcome: Watercolors is one of the most beautiful and captivating mediums to paint with. Its flowing pigments, soft plants, and happy surprises makes every painting a unique experience. Hi, I'm Madhu. I'm a watercolor artist, a published author, and an educator and the owner of the brand Femvisionary. My mission is to make watercolors more approachable, relaxing, and enjoyable. Over the next 30 days, we'll escape into beautiful landscapes together. We'll wander through blooming flower fields, admire peaceful lakes, paint charming cottages, dramatic skies, and so much more. Whether you're a complete beginner or would like to build a daily consistent habit, this challenge is just for you. We will begin by going over the materials you'll need, followed by some practice exercises. By the end of these 30 days, you'll have a beautiful collection of watercolor landscapes and a deeper understanding of the medium. So grab your brushes, and let's discover the beauty of watercolors together. 2. Materials: Let's talk materials. The first thing we're going to need is our watercolor paper. We're going to need 30 of these sheets A five size, and it is 300 GSM, Cold Press. You can have a couple of practice sheets in hand as well for some of our other sessions. Also, we'll need two brushes, a round brush of size six with a pointed tip, and a mini detailer brush. Next, we're going to need our paints. I like having a paint palette because I can look at my colors, and I'm using the Odysseus set by Art Philosophy. You can get the similar shades. A color mixing chart is there in the A section, which you can download and save so you know all the different colors we're going to mix. It's nice to have it swatched out so you can see your colors. Following this, we're going to need some more additional items like white acrylic paint or white gouache paint. This is going to be very useful for some of our detailed work. My next important must have for this class is a craft or blow dryer. This is going to speed up your painting process. Masking tape, some scissors, and then a bowl of water, pen, pencil, eraser, scale. With our materials in hand, let's begin with day one practice exercise. 3. Color Mixing: Let's talk color mixing. So we're starting with our standard colors. This is from the Odysseus set by Art Philosophy. The main colors that are in the set that we're going to be using to mix our other colors are crimson, violet, orange, Van **** brown, sienna brown, Veridan, cerulium blue, cadmium yellow, and burgundy. Now, if you don't have burgundy, you can mix cerulium and crimson to create burgundy. You don't have to get the exact same brand, but if you have similar colors, that would work well. Now we're going to go into a little bit of color mixing. I'll talk about this through each project as well. But this is a general idea. You can come back and refer. The files are also added into the project sections. You can download them so you have this color chart as reference. So we're starting off with our serolem blue and mixing burgundy into it. And that is going to give you a muddy purple color. Let's change up our proportions, taking more of the serlem blue and less of the burgundy, we're going to end up with a royal blue. Now, to the same mix of blue and a little bit of burgundy, when you add in white, you're getting blue gray color. So that subtle shift, and you can use white watercolors or even gouache for this cleaning up our palette, mixing equal proportions of blue with white gives you light blue, like a pastel shade. And if you mix in VidianGreen to this, just a little bit gives teal, which is such a pretty colour. Adding more of Veridian green will give a teal green colour. And these are the main shades we're going to be using mixing blue. Again, as I mentioned, in each project, I will go over it again, but this is a good reference for you to have. We now go into mixing of veritianGreen to get different shades of green. So mixing verdanGreen with serleum blue gives you a bluish green color. Next, mixing vertian green with erleum blue, but a little potion, so it's more of green. It's gonna give a forest green. Next, mixing green with van **** brown. We'll give you a deep sap green. We're taking just a little bit of the van **** brown. And finally, mixing vertan with erleim blue, van **** brown will give a deep green color, which is really nice and rich. A Now, we do have sap cream that we would mix in some of the projects. But as I mentioned, don't worry. This is a good reference point for you as we move forward. Now, the last set of color mixing is more towards the reds. So we're going to play a little bit with our crimsons. Mixing crimson with white gives you light pink. Super simple. The more white you add, the lighter the pink gets. I Now comes an interesting color mixing crimson, white, and cadmium yellow gives a nude warm color. It's very, very pretty. I the same combination, adding more of the pink, but less of the white and yellow gives a little bit more of an orange color, a red orange color. And then finally mixing equal proportions of red and yellow with a little bit of white gives you a orange. And as simple as that, we have our color mixing chart. With all of this information, let's get started with our projects. 4. Birds Practice: So let's dive into a little bit of a bird's practice that we're going to use for our day one project. Birds are super simple to do. There's two simple shapes that I follow to create a variety of birds. The first one is really simple, adding a circle in the center and then adding two lines pointed downwards, one line being a little bit thicker than the other. You can do this in varying sizes depending on your painting. The next one is a little bit more elaborate. So we start with oval shape for the body, a triangle for the tail feathers, and then two downward wings on either side, and then connecting them to the body, making sure that one wing is larger than the other. Let's paint this out so you have an idea. Oval shape for the body, triangle for the tail, the two waves on either side, and then connecting them. We can play around with the shape of this as well, making them smaller or bigger, depending on the painting and where it's going to be placed. This is a very simple way to do birds. There's so many different techniques, but I feel like these two techniques cover most of the birds that you'd need when you're painting landscapes. The next quick thing is when you start painting, when you take paint directly from the pan, the colors are usually darker, and that we usually use for details. If you want lighter shades, add in more water to lighten up the color. You're going to see me use this term, lighten your color, add more water. And what I mean is just take it in your palette, mix in more water so the color becomes soft, light, and almost transparent. 5. Day 1 - Lavender Blooms: Are you ready to begin with day one? For this project, I decided to go with something a little bit interesting that is going to pique your interest and hopefully inspire you to continue painting through the entire challenge. So we have taped down our sheet on all four sides, making sure that we left a little bit of space. Now I'm taking my brush and just adding in water to the paper, making sure that the paper is damp and ready to paint. I've skipped the whole process of drawing because this is just going to be a very simple painting with clouds and some lavenders. Go back and forth to make sure that you get water all through the edges. This is a very common mistake that happens. And now we're taking in our serleium blue. I've added a little bit of water, so it's much more faded in, and I'm going to go into adding in our sky. Now, you can see my swishing movement like I spoke about in the practice exercise. I'm just pushing my brush with spaces in between for the different clouds. Continue this process. And then we're going to go in a little bit darker and make sure that we have painted all the way to the edge. Now, the paper is still damp. So we're now going to take our green, add in more water, mix in a little bit of blue for a bluish green color, and we're just going to paint the bottom of the sheet only towards the right side. This is for the grass. I. As this fades in, let's take purple. We're going to add in water. Again, lighten it down, and we're just going to add in some dots to show that there are lavenders that are in the background. I'm keeping spaces between the lavenders playing around with the sizes and the heights. So some that are higher, some that's shorter. I This painting is a simple ten, 15 minute painting. So even if you're having a busy day, you can just paint it so quickly, and most of the projects are around that timeline. Now, I'm going to switch my brush and use the back of the brush, make sure that it's clean, and we're going to add in some stems for these lavenders that we just painted. I just wanted to fade into the background, and I don't want it to be a thick line, which is why I'm not painting it. As it dries, it's going to be more clear. We just move on to the next step, adding a little bit more green between the lavenders while everything is still wet, so make sure that you work a bit quickly so your paper doesn't dry in the process. In case it does dry, you can take clear water and wet the section again. Once that's done, we're going to take our dryer and dry our painting completely before moving on to the next set of lavenders. This time we're getting closer, we're going to go into our purple directly from the pan, so we're not adding too much of water to the mix. I've switched to my detailer thin brush, and I'm going to add in dots, thin little lines, stacking them on top of each other to form our lavenders. Continue this process. You can have lots of different lavenders, add as many as you would like, or as few as you would like. I really love the background that we created because it does look like there are lavenders off in the distance, and then you have this hyper focused stems and flowers right in front of us. A Time to add in our stems. I'm just adding four of these lavenders. I think it's enough. But again, as I said, you can add in as many as you would like. I'm mixing in my green with a little bit of blue to get a nice greenish blue and to match the background that we painted. And I'm using my thin detailer brush so I can add in a nice stem. A Continue adding some long leaves by just dragging your brush and pressing it down. Fill up the space as much as you'd like. And then we can move on to our last step, which is adding in some birds and completing our painting. Intuitively, I decided to add in a little bit of purple with my green to give a more dark green color and add some leaves using that. You can see how that color just again matches what we've been painting. And it's the same purple that I used for the lavenders. You're going to see me do this a lot in our entire challenge, where I mix colors that we've already used to create different shades of colors, and that's going to really match with our painting. It's a little trick that I use to create a more cohesive painting. So in case you've painted before and you feel like some of your colors just don't match each other, this is a really fun trick. Now, I'm using a scrap paper that I had protecting my flowers and sky and then just taking a little bit of the green and adding in some splatters at the bottom. To show a little bit of movement and playfulness. Just enough, you can see how great that looks, and now we can go into our birds. Using my detailer brush, I'm going to add in one bird at a time, exactly how we practiced. A A that we have our main bod. Let's continue adding some smaller birds around it. Maybe we can add one more bird. So we have four, and that should fill up enough of space. Once everything is dried and you're happy with the overall painting, we can remove out our tape to reveal our day one painting. Good job on painting your first project from the challenge. I'm sure you're able to learn and see your results. I'm so proud of you. See you in the next one. 6. Day 2 - Sunset Reflections: Let's dive into Day two. We're going to work on this vibrant, fun sky. I've taped down my paper on all four sides. It's prepped and ready. Now, let's use our pencil to just mark out where we're going to add in our greenery. We're going to have some green hills, adding in a little bit of a wave on either side. Next, we're going to add in the horizon line, so we know where the sea is going to be and the sky. I've left a lot of space for the sky, so we can really play around with the dramatic colors that we want. Use a scale to do this so your line doesn't end up crooked. And once that's done, we're going to start off with our painting. The first thing is I'm going to take in my brush filled with clear water and just paint the entire sheet. Make sure that the entire sheet is damp. And I'm also making sure that there's water all the way to the edges. And then we can just go back and forth, make sure we cover all the spaces. I like going horizontal and vertical just to make sure everything is covered. And then once that's done, we can move on to our bright sky. I'm starting off with purple. Let's get a little bit of that purple right on top. We can take more purple to really deepen the color, and I'm going a little diagonal with this. Next, we can take in our orange. I'm adding a little bit of water so it's not too bright and mixing a little bit of red. So it's a more warm, reddish orange color. And then adding it diagonally to what we have just painted. A Next, we're going to take yellow and then continue with the diagonal movement. One thing I want to share is that when we're doing all these movements, I'm not going back and forth. I'm actually just going in one direction. We can use a tissue to tap out any of the excess paint so that it's not too vibrant. It mellows down a little bit. Let's take a little bit more orange and add it especially to the edges. A And then using yellow to again brighten up the colors a little bit more. I'm leaving a little bit of that white space along the bottom of the sky. Now, we're going to follow the same colours for the water because it's a reflection of the sky. Starting with the yellow along the edge, adding a little orange, and then finally purple. A this time around with the purple, I'm moving upwards diagonally. So keep that in mind because it's a reflection of the sky. Another cool trick is, if you want to lighten up the colors a little bit, instead of using a tissue like we did last time, you can use a dry clean brush and just press down and lift up the color. These are too simple tricks to use when you feel like your colors are too dark for what you're going for. Now we move on to greens. I've basically mixed in a little bit of blue and yellow to give a very light green, and I'm using it, especially on the top section. Adding a little bit more of a deeper green as I move towards the edges, giving a very natural shadow. Adding a little bit of that deeper green between the two hilly mountains to show that they're different mountains and for a little bit of shadow. Now, I'm going to wait for a couple of seconds while everything is still wet. I'm going to take a little bit more purple and add it to the top of the sky. I feel like it became too light. So just going in with that purple and brightening up the color more. So with watercolors, what tends to happen is after you dry, the piece can look a little faded. So if you want to add in more colour, this is your chance to do that. I overall like how it's turned out. We're going to let everything dry. You can use your dryer to speed up the process, and then we're going to move on to getting a little bit more details, adding more texture to our hills. So I've switched to my thinner brush, and this is great for my details. And I'm using green to first add in a little outline to the top of my mountaintop. And then adding couple of dots maybe pressing down and adding more green to a couple of the sections. We can do that for the other side as well. You can see how the colors are making everything just pop a little bit more. We have few more steps. I'm going to add some lines to the water, especially the horizon because it looks like it's kind of faded away. And then we might add in some trees as well. We're keeping the stay two project, S simple, relaxing, I think, just about ten, 15 minutes. But it's all about understanding how to play with these vibrant kis and to get a little bit more confident with your watercolors. It's so easy when you have a thin Detailer brush because you can really cover up some of the thinner sections. Now, I've switched back to my bigger brush. I'm taking in green, and I'm just swishing around my brush to add in some trees. We want to make sure we get some darker color, especially at the bottom. Let's use a scrap paper and protect our sky, and we're just going to gently tap some more green onto the section to give it a little bit more of playfulness, some splatters. For the finishing touches, make sure you paint all the way to the edge with your green, and then we're going to add in some purple thin lines for the ocean. I've switched to my thinner brush so I can control this a little bit. And it's just a thin line keeping it very light. We mainly want the lines to come in at the edges, so keep that in mind when you're adding them. So gaps between them is perfect. We don't want a thin line that's stretching across the entire sea because they're just little waves. We can use a little bit of that purple to mark out our hilltop a little bit. Finally to balance out the painting on the left side, I'm adding in a little bush, following the same thing that we did before with the greens, adding in deeper color, especially at the bottom, using some splatters. Let's go in with a deeper green on both of these plants. Once everything is dry and ready, we can remove out our tape. Make sure that you remove your tape at a 45 degree angle, not just straight up to reveal our final painting. 7. Day 3 - Mountain Escape: It's Day three, Mountain Escape. I think this name was so perfect for this project because it has these little mountaintops and a little ocean going in between. So using my pencil, I'm first marking out my hilltop. We're having another mountain and then just marking the horizon line between. Start by adding water to our entire sheet, making sure that you cover all the four sides going back and forth, so we don't miss anything. Now, you can use a bigger brush for this, but I kind of wanted to maintain one brush or two brushes, in this case, for my entire 30 days, and I didn't want to get into too many materials. But if you do have a spare big brush, you can use that. It might speed up the process a little bit. So yeah, there's always additional ways to do things. And my aim for you from this 30 day challenge is for you to break down watercolors into such an easy process that you can just truly enjoy the medium without needing too many supplies, without needing too many brushes, and where everything is relaxing and fun. So I'm starting off with my blue, and I'm mixing in white. So I had some white watercolor in hand. And this is part of the set. You can add in a little bit of Varidian green. To get a bluish green color, I think this color is so pretty. It's the teal blue color. It's so special. And I think it's just perfect for the painting we're going to go into today. So what I'm going to do is just paint out the entire sky with this blue. For this project, the sky needs to be a little darker because it's very light. So we're going to add a little bit more blue, mix in a little bit more color so that the sky really stands out. And then using a tissue, we're going to dab out some paint to form our clouds. I think that's such a cool, fun technique to use when you want to paint clouds without wanting to really add white to your painting. So I've gone in with a little bit more of blue because that's also important. You need to have enough paint for these clouds to show. And I'm going gently from side to side, so I have a nice backdrop, and then I'm going to take my tissue, and I'm going to use the tissue to gently tap out the cloud. You can see how I'm lifting up the paint. Let's do that a few more times. Once you're happy with this, which I think I am, we can add in our mix of blue and white to paint our water, the ocean. Taking a little bit more blue, so we have some shadows in the water, so it's not just dull. And I'm adding in a little shadow, especially below the mountain. I wouldn't call it a mountain. It would be more like a hill because it's quite small. Mountains are much more bigger. And then I'm going to mix in my viridian green with yellow to paint our hills. I think of all the paintings in this project challenge, this one is the most calm, and I would say the most happiest. It's blue skies, green mountains. It's the typical idea of summer in the mountains, if you really think about it, it's just such a classic image. Now, I'm using a little darker green around some of the sections, especially you can see in the lower part of the hills to give it a little bit more shadow, and so you're giving some playfulness and some realism to your painting. While everything is still wet, let's go in and add a little bit more green. This time, I'm mixing my green with glue. There is a color chart that is shared in the about section, so you can have a look at different mixes of colors. And you can see how I'm just adding that little dots below. And by doing this, you can see how the hill automatically has more depth to it. Let's dry our sheet completely before moving on to the next step. And you can see now everything has dried down, the colors are a little bit more muted. So now we can go ahead and work on our water, our ocean a little bit. So I'm adding in thin lines using my detailer brush with the blue. I'm also going to add more shadow below to show that the hill is reflected onto the water Now we can take in some dark green, and we can go and work on our hills and grassy areas. Just mixing green a little bit. First, we can start by adding a couple of thin lines to show that there are some shrubs. There's some little grass elements. Small dots, small lines work really well. We don't want to add too much of detail because the more detail you add, it looks unrealistic because these are pretty far away. You won't be able to see too many details very clearly. So just small lines works well enough. I Now, we tackle our hill. I'm starting off with my green, and then I'm just going to go over the edge adding another patch of green to show that the hill had two sections, one that was shorter, one that was higher. Continue adding little dots, small lines using the green. As I was painting this, I had a little doubt in my head. Would this be considered a hill or would it be an island since there's water in between. I think that's going to be my homework for the next session to read up the different definitions of these different geographical elements and get the definitions. Right, because they're quite similar. So anyway, it's a little bit of a tangent. Let's get back into our painting. I'm going to use my scrap paper to protect my sky and then adding a little splatter along our little hill, since that's what we're calling it and gently tapping your brush. I think I like that little dots because you could do it with a brush, but the splatter just makes it look more natural. We're going to do the same thing at the bottom side as well. If some of it comes on the water, it's okay. We just wanted to protect a little bit of the sky. We didn't want too many of those platters that it just ruined your entire painting. And just like that, we're done with today's project. Simple fun. So pretty. I love the clouds. I think that was such a nice technique that we learned today. And once everything is dry, remote your tape to reveal your final painting, which I always think is such a special moment, 'cause you have that nice crisp white edge that just makes the paintings look so special. 8. Day 4 - Golden Hour Glow: Welcome to a new project Golden Glow. This is going to be really bold and bright, and I want you to get really comfortable with going really bold with your colors. Until now, we've been playing it a little safe and going for lighter shades. So here we're challenging ourself a little bit. So I've drawn out the horizon, and then I'm using my clear water brush to just wet down the entire sky. This time, I'm not going to paint the ocean. I'm just going to paint the sky first and then move on. Making sure you go back and forth with your water and just dampening the whole area. Once that's done, we can dive into our colors. So I'm using a burgundy, rich burgundy right on top. We're going to go ahead with adding more color, and I'm going directly from the pan, so the color is bright and vibrant. Let's add the same color along the horizon line going back and forth and blending it out. Next, we're going to move on to orange directly from the pan. And I'm adding a very bright streak of orange at the top and at the bottom, leaving a little white space in between. Now for the space in between, we're going to take our cadmium yellow, and we're just going back and forth and filling up our sky. Now, looking at it, you can see how the burgundy has become dull. So we're just going to go ahead and add another layer of burgundy, brighten up the color before moving on to our next step. Now we're going to try something interesting. We're going to take a tissue paper, and we're just going to dab out a portion for the sun. Making sure that our paper was still wet when we did this process. If it dries, you won't be able to dab out the colors. But I find this so fun. It's exactly the same technique we used for our clouds, but this time for the sun. You can go ahead with a little bit of burgundy and just paint out the edge if you feel like it's not as perfect as you wanted it. Now, we're going to let the sky dry, and meanwhile, we're going to go into our ocean and paint that. For the ocean, we're starting with our burgundy all the way through back and forth. We can add in some clear water just to blend through the colors a bit and then taking our orange. But I'm adding the orange only towards the sides, keeping a nice path or space between for the sun rays. So that middle section is going to be in yellow. Now, taking a burgundy, let's add in some aves for the ocean. I'm using my detailer brush so I can get some really thin lines, leaving in some caps. So I'm not doing a straight line all the way from side to side, but leaving caps in between, which makes it look more natural. And I'm adding quite a few right on top. And as I move away, I'm going to go lesser Now, we're going to let everything dry, and this is where there's such a drastic transformation. You can see how the colors just really mute it down. And also, you get to see what mistakes or what things you'd like to add into your original blends because sometimes it looks so amazing, but when you let it dry, you realize how maybe it didn't look as great as you wanted it to look. So I'm going ahead and taking a little bit of burgundy, and I'm just painting out the horizon line again. I think what ended up happening is a little bit of that color from the ocean spread out. But what we're going to take this as an opportunity to deepen up the color for the Burgundy a little bit more. I feel like it just became so dull after everything dried up. Now, there are multiple ways to tackle this. You can go over another layer, and there's different ways to do it. But this time, we're going simple with our projects, and we're just going to add another layer and continue on. A so let's use our thin lines now and just go over the ocean again, adding more lines. Some of them faded and some of them kind of became much lighter. So we want to have some deeper waves coming through. And you can see how we're really just playing around with this, and this is looking so great. I love how bold these colors are, and it's just it really makes you step into challenging yourself a little bit. Now, we're going to let everything dry before we go into painting the sun. Start by adding yellow on top and then add an orange towards the horizon line. This is going to give us a nice shade for the sun, as well. For the finishing touches, taking a little yellow and adding our reflection of the sun onto the water. I To complete our project, we're going to add in some birds like we practiced on day one. Fill up that sky. And we're done with our painting. Make sure everything is dry and then you're going to remove out your tape to reveal your final painting. I love how this turned out. It's just it's so different. I think, compared to all the projects in this challenge, this is the one that is so bold in color and definitely a very unique color scheme put together. I can't wait to see you tomorrow for day five. 9. Clouds and Rocks Practice: Let's dive into some practice exercises before we begin with our project. In this, we're going to cover clouds. Just a simple understanding so you know what we're talking about when we go into our main projects. Mixing whichever color you like clouds can be different colors depending on where the sun is and the sky is. I'm just taking an orange for us to have an idea. Now, the shape of the clouds, basically, it starts with thin lines, and then you have a fluffy body, which then again tapers into a thin line towards the end. This is a general shape. You can make this as big as you want. You can layer them up. So I have a secondary cloud that's again, right on top of the previous one. Maybe some that are much more smaller. And you can see how that really creates a beautiful effect. Extending some of the lines also creates a nice wave. And just like that, clouds are formed. So keep that in mind, start with thin lines, build up, and then thin again. The other thing we're going to be talking about is a little bit of a rocks practice. I want you to test this out before we move on to our projects so you get really comfortable. So rocks have a little I would say, chunky shape. And what we want to do so I have three rocks here. You have one that's separated, and then two others. You have to cut them into different pass, the different pass of the rock. This can go however you'd like to. You can see how I've done that. And once you have that ready, it gets a lot more easier to move on to the next step. So we're going to mix in our colors, and I'm going to mix in a dark grayish shade. Let me show you what I'm going to do, which is a mix of burgundy and blue, which was mentioned in our color chart. In this case, since the sun is up, we're going to have more of our shadow down. So the faces that are below, I'm going to paint them up with this mix that we created, which is a bluish gray and adding a thin line for the outline of the rock. Let's repeat the same thing for the second and third rocks. An outline for the top of the rock and then filling up one or two of the faces a little bit adding in some little dots for texture. Now, while this is still wet, I'm going to go ahead and add in a little bit more burgundy and just add a little bit more colour, especially at the cuts. You can see how that kind of added a little bit more richness. Then we're going to add in the shadow for the rock. Then we let this whole thing dry and just add in a layer of blue on top of the rocks to complete it. For the shadow, we're basically doing a mirror of the shape of the rock below. Let's try this. You can see how this looks, dried up. It's almost there. We're going to use blue, mixed in with a little bit of water and just paint the entire rock again. Because rocks are generally gray or grayish in shade, so we don't want it to be a bright white. It doesn't make sense. So we're just going ahead and painting over it. Making sure that this layer had a little bit of water mixed in, so it's a little lighter. And then with a pen, you can just outline some of the details. I'm using a black pen, adding in the bottom, adding a little bit of the rock shape, maybe some of the details which I felt like kind of got hidden away. Maybe some hash lines for the rock face that's further away from the sun. And there you go, in a few simple steps, you have rocks, practice a little bit a couple of times till you're confident, and then we can move on to our main project. 10. Day 5 - A Moment of Stillness: I really love how this project turned out. So pretty, beautiful blue orange shades of sky. So let's dive right in. We're going to use our pencil to mark out our horizon line, add in some mountains. In the backdrop. We're going to have a couple of rocks closer to us to frame the painting. I'm just doing rough sketches just to know where everything goes. And then once we're ready, let's take our brush. We're going to take clear water and paint the entire sheet, prep it ready for our next step, which is adding in our clouds. Making sure that my entire sheet is filled with clear water going back and forth to cover every spot. Now, let's mix in our color. I'm taking crimson, a little bit of cadmium yellow. So it gives you a nice orange color, taking a little bit more crimson. And then I'm going to take white. You can use white watercolor if you have or white gouache. To lighten up the colors, you get this nice peach color. Adding more white and more yellow till we get a nice orange mix. And once that's prepared, we can go ahead and start with the blue for the sky. So obviously, my color mixing took time. So I'm going ahead with clear water and just adding another layer because my paper might have dried up in the whole time that I took. So that's another thing to keep in mind that in case you get distracted or busy, just go ahead, add more clear water, prep your paper, and then begin again. So I'm taking in my cerulean blue, starting right at the top, adding in this beautiful blue color for the sky. Leaving a little bit of a gap and adding some quick strokes. You can see how I'm doing that, trying to get them more towards the right side, moving away. You can drop in a little bit more of the blue, so it brightens up. Remember, everything dries a little duller. So you want to get a little bit more color into these. Skies. Next, I'm going to take in this orange mix that we created, and we're just painting it through our page, through our sheet. Adding a little bit of that orange in those in between spaces. All in a diagonal motion, if you can have a look. My brush is diagonal to the sheet, so I'm not keeping it straight or flat. It has a little bit more of a 45 degree angle. Now, let's take in cadmium yellow, and we're just going to add it right at that orange point. Blending it out until it's nice and smooth. We're going to use a tissue to dab out any excess color. With a light touch, move around a little bit of the color, make sure everything is blended well. We're going to go ahead and continue with our painting. I'll start by taking a little bit more of the blue and finishing up our sky because I feel like it's going to be really light, and I think it's going to dull down quite a bit. So let's take a little bit more blue, do the sky, do the mountains, and then move on downwards. Dropping in a little bit of blue for the mountains. I'm being a little careful because I don't want to blend too much. I'm just adding a little bit. We will go over it again once everything is dried up anyways. And then we go onto the water, the ocean. So for the ocean, I try to continue with the details we had for the sky because water is usually a reflection of the sky. It's a mirror, and we're trying to capture that, as well. So we're going to start off by first using my dry brush. And I'm just picking up a little bit of paint in the middle of the sky and a little bit of that blue because I feel like it just went bled through to the ocean. Now we're going to take yellow, and we're going to add in a quick line. You can see how I'm doing this right below the sun. Next, using orange on either side. Then finally, blue. At the end. A continue adding in the blue and paint out the bottom section. I'm keeping white space for the rocks area because we're again going to paint that out with a different color. Don't worry if everything looks a little bit messy with the water side, the ocean side. We will be working on it in the next step. But for now, we're just trying to get all the colors in place and ready for what's going to come next. One thing I learned with landscapes is there's a lot of I would say, not even trust, but a lot of building colors. When you do florals, it's pretty simple. You don't really build colors. It's the same colors that you use, but with landscape, you can build the colors. So your mountains get painted again, the ocean, you're going to add layers, and we just keep building in the colors to get a better look. Now, I'm using my craft dryer and just drying everything up, and we're ready to begin with our second dip or the second layer. Now, I'm taking in orange using my thin brush to add in some bold clouds. You can see how I'm doing this. Adding in that cloud like shape. We discussed this in the previous practice exercise about the shape of clouds. And it's actually really simple. I never realized until I started getting more into detail that it's just trying to get a thin line at the end of the cloud, which makes it look realistic. And so you can go into different shapes, sizes as far as you follow those main details. I don't want to have too many clouds just enough right near the sun, and then we can add in the orange for the horizon line. I'm adding a little bit of blue for the mountains in the backdrop, using my small Detailer brush, adding in thin lines for the ripple lines of the water with blue, getting them spaced closer when they're far away and keeping more gaps as they get closer and closer. With these lines, make sure that you don't have them go all the way across the paper. You can have them either moving from left, midway through, or right midway through or somewhere in the middle because they're just ripple lines. Using the same blue, let's paint out our background mountains because I feel like they're just quite dull. Adding a little bit of water mix, so it's not too dark. A Now we move on to the rocks, as we did in our practice exercise. We're just basically mixing in our dark gray color. And I'm adding a little shadow to our rock. Time to take van **** brown, and I'm starting by adding a thin line for the outline of the rock. This is standalone rock, and then there are a few that are more towards the end of the paper. Continue by working on the rocks closer to us. You can see how I do the outline and then add in faces of the rock. Maybe adding in a little bit of blue for some of the sections. And I'm just breaking up the rock into different cuts. Again, as we did in the practice exercise, we're just following the similar technique, painting some of the areas, adding a little bit of maybe blue to deepen the color a little bit more, adding in some dots for the textures. I feel like my rocks need a little bit of work, but let's dry everything, and then we're going to add in just a layer of color. I think that would help because rocks are generally not this white and bright. Time to dry our painting, see what it looks like, and then we can move on to our third layer. Now that it's dry, let's take our blue mix in with a little bit of burgundy, so it's a little darker, and I'm just adding a thin layer on top of our rocks. And that just looks so actually looks a lot better than what it was. I think it really needed more color to it that white was just it did not work out. Let's take a black pen and just add some more details, maybe outline the rock a little bit, especially since there are two sets, one that's in front, one that's back. So we're just going to outline the two rocks, maybe add in some thin lines for a couple of the cuts that we created. Now, for the final part, I'm just going to take light blue or the blue mixed in with a lot of water and just go the middle section of the mountain to fix that part in case it wasn't smooth. Keeping it very light. And once that's done, we can allow our painting to rest and then remove out the tape to reveal our final painting. I really love how this one turned out with the blues and orange. I think it's a very unique color combination, looks really interesting. And the rocks that frame the painting just all of it works so well. Really excited about today's project. See you in the next one. 11. Day 6 - Painted Skies: Now we move on to another project where we're going to be playing around a little bit with mountains, a bright vibrant sky. Let's start by planning out our mountains a little bit. And then once we have our layers, we can start by adding water and painting our entire sheet of paper. Now, this time around, we're going to add bright cadmium yellow directly from the pan to one side of the sky. I'm adding it a little bit lower towards the mountain, as well. But we want that bright sun to peek through. Now adding water mixed in with crimson. We're going to add in pink, just being very gentle, not pressing down my brush too much so that it blends into the sky. Next, we can add in our violet right at the top, giving it a nice bright shade of colors. You can see how I'm just gliding my brush and then adding a couple of lines to make it look like the clouds are just parting ways. I love working when the paper is wet for these kind of effects. I just gives you a nice finish. Adding a little bit more purple, just a couple of lines. You can see how I did that. And then we have this nice vibrant sky. After some time, I might add a little bit more violet because it does dull down, and I want the sky to look bright. It's kind of our focus for this entire project. Now I'm switching to my thin brush, and I'm going to be taking a little bit of redder. I'm painting just the part closer to the sun. Next, we can use green and then just continue painting that section of that section of the hill. Once we have one of the hills complete, let's move on to the next one. What I'm going to do now is mix a little bit of cadmium yellow with varietian green to give you a soft sap green color, and I'm going to use it in the top section of our hill closer to the sun. So you can see how I'm doing that on the left side, just on top. And a little bit right next to the other hill. Next, you can mix in some cream, and then we can continue filling in the rest of our hilltop. I know this part can look messy because it just looks like everything is together, but don't worry, we're going to add in more definition, more details, and it's going to look amazing. So I'm taking in dark green, mixing inverdian green with a little bit of blue, and then switching to my thin brush to add in some little dots to show that there's some grass, there's texture, and the hilltop isn't just one color because in nature, you can see the shadows of these trees and grass and all these little details. And it looks so interesting. There's a lot of texture in nature. So adding these little dots to our hilltops and what I'm going to do is I'm going to use a little bit of crimson, add a lot of water mixed into it, and paint our mountain that was very far away in the distance. And because I'm adding a lot of water, you're going to be able to see the yellow shine through. And we want it to be very transparent. So it truly looks like it's off away in the mist. I Now, we're going to use our dryer and dry p sheet before moving on to the next step. We just have a couple of details, but what I want to do at this point is see how our painting looks. Now that everything is dry, are the colours still vibrant? Are they rich? Do we need to add more? You can see some of the hilltops. It's just not obvious. So I'm going to go in with my green and just add a little bit more detail so you can see them because right now it still looks a little bit messy. Adding a little bit of that dark green. By the way, you will see me use random mixes. Don't worry about it. I think this time I mixed a pink and a green. You can just use a dark green if you have or mix your Verdan green with blue, like we shared in the color mixing chart, which is in the project section Upload. I also have a mix of Verdan green and Van **** brown. That also works really well or verdant green with burgundy also looks really nice. So don't worry too much about that. You will see me mixing random colors because I just use what's in my palette sometimes. And it's not necessary to follow the same thing. But if you want to, you can just have a look. I basically mixed a little bit of brown, I think, a little bit of crimson with my green. Now you can see how I just added those little dots, and this makes the hilltop a little bit more, I would say, clear. It shows them without needing too much detail. Now, I'm taking more of the green, and I'm just going to add in some splatters. And you can see how those little dots just add a little bit of vibrance to the painting. And you can see how that looks. I love how this is coming together. And we're basically done with our painting. If you want, you can add in some words from what we did on Day one, which I think is such a great addition and which is why I decided to add it as a day one practice exercise. So you have that for you to use in any of the upcoming projects. But as a whole, I like how this looks. Maybe a little bird would be cute. I think it would just be such a nice touch to what we've painted already. A I feel like painting nature is so therapeutic and calming. Like, there's just something so nice about painting the bright greens and the reds and creating your own colors, imagining a beautiful scene in front of you. I think a lot of us are living city lives, and you kind of forget that nature does exist, and it's so beautiful. At least that's the case with me. After seeing all the steel buildings, I miss seeing green grass green hilltops. And there you go revealing our final painting. I 12. Day 7 - Thundery Clouds: After going through a couple of interesting projects, we're going to dive into something that is more of a stormy sky. Starting with our horizon line, we're going to play around with a couple of trees on either side. The focus here is mainly on the sky itself. So you know the basics. Let's take our clear water with our brush and just paint our entire sheet, making sure that we cover all the edges, and the paper is prepped and ready to paint. I really like having the paper as damp, but we don't want too much of water where it puddles up, so just make sure you go over it. Now we're going to take in blue directly from the pan and just add it right on top. Gently blending the color. You can take more blue, so it's a little bit more vibrant. Next, I'm going to take red, crimson color, which when you lighten down, is going to give you a beautiful pink. And that's where we're going to add for the remaining of the sky from somewhere in between. Now, this I'm keeping more towards the right side and gently blending it out. Let's add a little bit more of that pink. It's really light. So let's add more color because we want it to be a bright sky. Now, let's mix a little bit of that pink and blue, making sure that we have more blue, so we get a nice deep color. This is going to be, like, a very dark purple, a very muddy color that is going to be perfect for some of our details. Once we have that prepped, let's just work on the bottom, finish up our landscape a little bit. And for that, all I'm doing is washing my brush, taking Verdan green, and just painting the bottom of the sheet. Mixing in a little bit of red to get a muddy green colour that we're going to use for our painting, adding more green and filling up the space. While everything is still wet, let's switch to our thinner brush. We're going to add a couple of details and basically finish up our bottom section. This is going to give the top part of your sky a little time to blend through for it to dry up a little bit, so then we can get back to it. Now, I'm using a little bit of green and just adding little dotted sections to show the grass in some of the areas. A Now that I'm happy with the overall look, let's get back to our sky and finish up those details. So washing my brush, taking that muddy purple blue color that we mixed, and let's start by adding in our clouds. I'm just adding straight lines and noturally forming perfect cloud shapes like we discussed before, thin lines, making sure that they start from the left side, moving to the right. And What's so amazing is when your paper is still wet, you can easily create these cloud shapes. And it's just such a simple process without having to think too much about it. Just dropping in color works really well. Next, let's mix in our van **** brown with Verdan green to get you a muddy green colour that we're going to use for some bushes and trees. This is just to complete the entire project. We already have our dramatic sky. We've learned a little bit more from this project, and it's going to help us as we move on to the more complex projects along the way. I like slowly building up skills because as you grow with each project, you're learning small little techniques that are going to help you build your confidence, feel more comfortable with watercolors. So when we go on to other projects, it becomes so easy. And that's my goal for you from this entire challenge. Little bit of fun, little bit of enjoyment, and a little bit of growth. Now, I'm adding a little bit of that dark green to some of the grass. Let's use our craft dryer and dry up the section. You can see how the layers have become a little bit more lighter. So let's take a little of the green and go ahead and add another layer. Just a couple of dots. I just wanted to lift up the color a bit more because I felt like it became so dull. Maybe adding a line for the horizon as well. Y finally using a spare sheet, let's protect our sky and then add in some splatters for the grass. And just like that, remote your tape to reveal your final painting. A 13. Day 8 - Wildflower Meadow: It's day eight, and I wanted to pick a very fun project for us to try out. It's got flowers and the sun, and it's definitely full of joy. Starting off by drawing out our mountain off in the distance. It's quite small, and it's just going to be very subtle and very misty. Now, I'm going to take my masking tape or painter's tape, and I'm going to draw a circle for the sun. I'm going to use this to mask out the section of the sun. This is a really fun technique that we're trying. Looks really great and creates very nice results. So once you've drawn out your circle, we're just going to cut it. With our scissors and then paste it onto our paper before we begin with our painting today. Make sure that your circle is proper sized, or you can use something that's circular, so you get your design or the shape, correct. Placing our circle right on top of the mountain, pressing it down to make sure it really stays there before we continue. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is take in my brush with clear water and just paint out our entire sheet. Let's start with yellow in the middle right next to the sun. We can take in our crimson and add it in the middle section. You have a yellow reddish sky. Let's continue add in a little bit more of the crimson right on top. Just quick lines. And then let's take in blue. We're going to use the blue right near the mountain or the hill that we just drew. It doesn't have to be perfect. It's okay if it comes over the section, but we're just trying to get a little bit of blue in that area. Going back and forth with your brush. Now, as we get to the bottom, I'm going to use verdant green. Maybe mix in a little bit of blue and red to get a more muddy green color, add in some bright pink or crimson in some of the sections. So areas that have crimson, we're going to add in some flowers. So we're keeping it a little bit mixed in together. Using green mixed in with blue to get a little bit more green in between these red sections. Keeping in mind that the painting is going to dry out and become more dull. I'm adding burgundy at the bottom to build up even more color. Now, before drying our sheet, I'm going to take my thin brush and add in some quick lines to show the grass using green. Now, this is going to blur out once it dries because it's on wet paper, but I think it's going to give us a nice look for us to continue with our painting. I love projects like this when you're doing challenges because they give you a little bit of a break from the usual and you have flowers coming in, which is always such a nice touch. Now, we're going to use our dryer, dry up our entire sheet. You can see how the colors have muted in a lot more. And now we can go in and just add another section of leaves and flowers and brighten up everything. Using my thin brush, I'm taking green and I'm just adding in some stems. I let's take crimson and we're going to add in little dots that connect together to give you some nice long flowers. This could be a good representation of delphiniums. And we're just continuing to follow the structure of the flour, having some of them smaller, some of them bigger, but making sure that the top is pointed and they become wider towards the middle and then small again. Having some smaller ones going towards the back, I just really playing around with the flow, different sizes, different widths, different length, heights. A Let's switch to green to add in our leaves for all of these flowers that we just painted. I'm leaving certain sections out, but I'm going to actually paint them with the flour, as well. And we're just going to continue this process till we really fill up that entire bottom space. A a continuing along the process, I'm leaving those two sections free because I want those to be our center flowers. They're going to be the focus. Once you're done with adding all the leaves, we're going to use our scrap paper, protect the sky and add in some little splatters with green along the bottom. Once that's done, we can then move on to adding the flowers because I didn't want green splatters to come on the flowers that we are painting. Add more leaves to complete the space, filling up as much as you'd like. I've sped up the process so you don't have to really sit through this. Now, let's go into a mountain using the same dark green. I'm just going to add a lot of water and add a very soft mountain in the background like it's really misty and you can't see it very clearly. Blending it out with a little bit of water, so it looks like there's a lot of mist off in the distance. Once everything is dry, let's remove out our sun. Just be very careful while doing this. I have had instances where I've ripped my paper, so just be careful very gently lifting it out one small section at a time to reveal our empty white spot that we're going to then paint with our yellow for the sun. Now, for the final step, let's add in our pink flowers for those sections in between that I left empty. And I'm making this much more bigger than everything that I painted before. So they really are prominent and they are our focus flowers. Add in some greens for the stems in case you haven't, leaves everything else to finish our painting. And there you go. I really like how this turned out with the very soft colors of pink and yellow for the sky, the very interesting flowers in the foreground. Definitely very interesting painting. And I hope you're giving yourself a lot of compliments for getting this far, for continuing and continuing the challenge. Remember that it's not easy and the fact that you're committing to this challenge of 30 days, I'm so proud of you. I 14. Day 9 - Thunder Storm: Today's project is going to be a very interesting one. We're playing around with clouds. If you have your white gouache or white acrylic paint, keep it in hand because we're going to need this for today. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint the top part of the sky. So I've drawn out a horizon line that is in the I would say lower third of the painting. And then I'm using clear water and just painting out the sky. My paint had a little bit of black because I didn't wash it, but that's okay. It's not going to be noticed, so I didn't really worry about it too much. Sometimes your water color could be a little bit off. It doesn't affect your painting as much, especially for something else where we're going to use bright bold colors and really fill up our sheet. So started with cerulean blue and painting a little bit on top. Now, mixing a little bit of burgundy to this to get a more navy indigo color. If you have indigo, you can use it directly. I decided to just mix my shades in. And I'm starting right on top, just building the color downwards. Let's add some blue in the middle section. As we know, the colors dry out and can fade away. So we're going to add more layers of the indigo to deepen the color a lot more. Really making sure that it is bright and bold at the top. I'm also swishing around my brush instead doing straight lines so we get a more cloudy feel. Now, as I go downwards, I'm taking my cerulean blue and just continuing to fill up the space. The first thing I'm going to do is using a tissue. I'm just going to tap out the center where I'm going to be placing my cloud. Let's take a gouache or acrylic, whichever one you're using and paint our clouds. I'm using a brush that works with the medium. Make sure you don't use your same watercolor brush because you might damage it if you're using acrylics. Now, I'm going with a little bit of a circular move and building out my clouds. Making sure that I have those little dotted lines towards either end, like we discussed in our practice exercise for the shape of the clouds. This helps it form a little bit more. Also painting some of the areas that are still dull because even though I used the tissue and removed it, some areas remain I would say remain dull would be the best way to explain it. Now, as I add in a little bit more of the white, I can see how it's kind of coming together, but I want the clouds to have a rain like effect that it's about to rain and we have this stormy sky. A So to pill that, what I'm going to do is mix in a little bit of the indigo that I had with the white. This is going to give us a more grayish color. And then I'm going to use this to paint some sections of the cloud, especially the bottom areas because that's where it's filled with water. It's heavier. If you look at the natural cloud, the bottom section carries most of the water, and that's why it's going to be darker and shade. So we're really filling up that area. With this grayish tone. Adding a little bit of that gray for some of the smaller clouds as well. Usually, you don't have one big cloud. There's usually patches of smaller clouds that combine to give you that big cloud. I Now that we've done this, we're going to take our white again and just paint over this layer. Not too much, but just enough so it blends in and really stands out because right now everything has kind of come together and all has just blended in. So we're going to use our white and place it over this gray. But what happens is it's going to mix in with the gray and give you a brighter color. You're going to see this in a bit as I'm painting, so just follow along and trust the process. You can see how it's coming along slowly. I actually like how this is looking. Maybe we can add a couple of more clouds off in the distance. You can see that gray that we painted peeking through. A And now once you're happy with the overall look, let's let this dry, and then we're going to work on the grass section. I'm going to use the green mix in with the blue and just paint right above the grass. Adding in some thin lines to show the grass details and continue painting the area. Dropping in some yellow and continuing to paint it out. You can add in some clear water to blend everything together. Adding in some green and continuing it. Get all the way to the bottom of the sheet, make sure that there's no gaps. Now, we're going to let everything dry. Let's see how it looks, and then we can make any adjustments. I want to add a little bit more detail to the grass, especially. Maybe add in some of some more smaller grass details using a thinner brush, adding some little dots, some quick lines. Using a scrap paper, let's protect our sky, and then we're going to add in some splatters for the grass. In our entire project list for this class, I felt like while everything is happy and cheerful and bright colours and interesting, I wanted to add something stormy and thundery. I love the rain. Um I love looking at rain, especially since I live and have grown up in a country that is so hot, the Middle East. It is very hot. There's barely any rains. I miss the rain and I enjoy it so much. And I know there are other people who hate the rain because they've just lived so much of their life in it, but you always see the grass is greener on the side. So since I haven't experienced much of rain, I really love it. I love looking at it. And so this painting is a personal favorite. It means so much to me, seeing these thundery skies and cloudy it's just the perfect setup for someone like me who just loves in looking at the freshness, feeling, the smell, just enjoying all of the senses of rain. And that's why I decided to add it into this 30 days because I think it really meant so much to me. So as we continue with our platters, adding some small ones, big ones. I like that it adds a little texture to our painting. And once we're done, we can allow everything to dry up and then remove out our tape to reveal our final painting. Additionally, if you'd like to add in some birds, you can go ahead. I think it could work with a paint in this and really add some more detail to the sky. And so I'm just following along from our practice exercises on day one. Which was such a useful exercise because we're going to add these birds to a lot of our projects to make them look even more better. Congratulations on completing day nine. I'm so proud of you. Definitely give yourself a pat on the back and see you tomorrow. 15. Day 10 - Hidden Cozy Hideaway: To celebrate our ten days of projects, I've picked a very special one for today's painting. It's our little hideaway cottage with these really nice warm colors. Let's start by drawing out our cottage. I'm just following simple steps. You can have a look at what I'm doing. We're just getting the basic structure in place, having some mountains in the backdrop. And then let's use our tape to draw out a small circle for the moon. I'm making it much smaller in size, about, I would say a centimeter in diameter or maybe 1.5 centimeters. So it's quite small. We're going to cut it and then use it to mask out the section like we did in our previous painting. Let's paste out little circle somewhere in the middle of our paper. Press it down, make sure it's flat before you continue with your next steps. So what I'm going to do now is start by using clear water to paint our background and grass. The thing that I'm going to do is make sure that I paint around our house. So just keep that in mind and just be really careful. To make sure that we don't paint the house section and then add clear water for the remaining parts, we're going to do all of it and then finally get to the details for the house or our cottage. Now that we're ready, let's begin with our color mixing. We're going to mix a very interesting color for the sky. I'm taking a little bit of cerulean blue and mixing burgundy to it to give you a nice warm indigo color. Once you have that, let's mix in a little bit of red with white and yellow for a nude skin tone color. And once we have all of that ready, we can begin with our painting. So I'm starting with indigo right on top. It has a little bit of a purple feel because I mixed in Burgundy, but you can use Indigo as it is, as well. I'm going all the way to the top, making sure that I really blend out the colors. Adding a little bit in between, as well. You can see how I just flick my wrist, not necessarily paint certain sections because we want the color to blend through. If you have any questions or doubts regarding any of the techniques that we've gone through, please add them to the discussion tab. I can go ahead and add in a sample tutorial or additional information if you're wondering, or if you have any questions, I can answer them. Now, I'm adding more pink and white. And then adding a little bit of that yellow, you can see how the color turns more skin tone. And once we have that, we can go ahead and add it to our sky. I'm starting from the bottom, but I'm making sure that I don't paint over our cottage. Adding more of this nude skin tone color in between the purple sky. And because everything is still wet, it's going to blend through and create a very interesting result. You can notice how I'm not going back and forth a lot with it. It's just quick strokes. If you go back and forth, you're more likely to mess up your painting. So we just want to do this with very simple, easy strokes. Painting around the house so that in the next step, we can just paint the house without worrying about the background. Let's now move on to the grass, the meadow, adding verdant green for the greenery, mixing in some yellow along the way to get a nice shade of colors, and then adding in some burgundy to get in some darker shades, especially along the bottom of the page. While everything is still wet, adding little dots of this mix green and burgundy little dots along the meadow. We're getting more bigger ones at the bottom, and as you go up, just few of them. It is going to dry up and blur out, which is great. For now, it's just a nice effect for our painting. Using the same green, let's add our background mountain. Just be careful because we don't want to blend with everything. So I made sure that the painting had dried a little bit, so the color just doesn't flow. It will blur out, which is great, but it's not puddling up. Our background is almost dried up. So meanwhile, let's go into painting the details for our cottage, mixing the same nude skin tone color with red and yellow with a little bit of or with a lot of white. I'm just going to be painting the left side because I'm going to add shadow towards the left side. So I'm just making sure that area is darker in color. Keep your tissue ready so we can just make sure that we remove any excess colors so we can gently blend it. Let's allow this to dry for a bit, and then we're going to take in our thinner brush and use green to add in little dots to our meadow. I I Next, let's get back to our cottage. I'm going to take brown, and we're going to do our roof and add a couple of details and finish up our painting. So starting off, let's do the top of the roof, adding a thin line for either side so we know what we're painting. Let's paint the entire roof with brown mixed with water, so it's a lighter shade. And then while it's still wet, we can go ahead and add brown directly from the pan. It will blur out, but that's okay. Once we have the roof, let's move on to the other side. Outline the chimney. Add in the little door for our cottage. As well as some of the windows. Use cadmium yellow to paint the inside of the windows to show that there's light coming through. Now, with Burgundy, we're going to just add in some of the outlines, add in a couple of pushes right next to the house. Add a little bit more of dark green around the meadow, as well. Just small little details. You can have a look at what I'm doing. Small things to finish up your painting. Let's add in some dots to the mountain. Just three of them to show some texture, add in some grass lines, especially to the grass that is closest to us. I'm using tissue to protect my painting, and then I'm going to be taking acrylic white or goose white and gently tapping for the stars in the sky, removing out our circle, being very careful while doing that to reveal our moon. Now, in case your tape rips your paper, like mine did, very easy fix. Instead of removing out your paper, we're just going to paint on top of it. I'm taking a little bit of yellow, and then I'm just adding an outline to the moon, painting some diagonal lines to match what we have in the background. And this way, you can't really see that the paper had ripped a bit. It happens, and instead of panicking, I want to teach you a little bit of patience and trust. Now, we're going to take a little of gray. You can mix your gray between blue and burgundy and add a few spots around the circle for the texture of the moon, allowing everything to dry before mowing out your tape to reveal our hidden getaway. I 16. Day 11 - Ocean Whisper: After painting a lot of mountains and cottages, I wanted to go back to the ocean and paint beautiful soft waves perfect for this project. Let's start by drawing out our horizon line. I'm actually keeping it towards the middle of the sheet so that we have enough space for the sky and enough space for the waves. Using a pencil, let's draw our waves. I'm adding in a couple of layers. So we have one layer. Let's add another one. And I'm drawing them diagonally. And then maybe a final one that's just small. It doesn't have to go all the way to the end. So we have three waves that are going to be the focus of our painting. Let's begin with our painting. Using clear water. Let's paint our entire sheet, making sure that it's damp and ready to start. Et's start with our sky. We're going to use indigo. It's mentioned in the color chart, which is basically a mix of serleum blue and burgundy. And we're going to start right on top, gently blending in our indigo. Next, let's mix our crimson with white to give us a very subtle pink tone for the remaining of the sky. Now, let's mix crimson with white to give us a pink color that within going to use for the remaining of the sky. Keeping it really simple, just quick strokes. I'm not going back and forth too much, and that's really important to note. And finally, we can add in some yellow for the remaining. Let's add in the yellow at the bottom of the horizon line. We're going to add in a little sun and follow the same colors for the water since it's a reflection of the sky. What I'm going to do is take a tissue while everything is still wet, and I'm just going to dab out a little circle in the center for the sun. It doesn't have to be too perfect. We will go over it with white paint, but I just want to make sure that I clear up that area. Just lifting up a little bit of that paint. You can use a dry brush as well to remove any of the excess color. While we're at it, let's take cadmium yellow and just go around the circle. Now time to move on to the waves. This is my favorite part. It's so fun to paint waves. It's a little bit of an experiment. And as you get more comfortable, you're going to find it so easy. We're starting off with yellow at the bottom. Make sure that your bottom section is still damp. And in case it's not, go ahead, take some clear water on your brush and just paint over it again. Make sure everything is damp. So when we go into the step, it's easier. So I've added yellow right below the sun in a line and then using pink to continue the sky. Wash your brush. And then we're going to take in our excess pink with a dry brush. Finally, we can take our indigo and just paint the remaining part of the waves. For the sand, we're going to use our burnt umber to paint out the section. We're going to bring a little bit of that brown below the first wave. You can see how I'm doing that just getting it a little further. Have a look at the video and go back and rewatch it in case you're having any questions or doubts. Sometimes I'm not able to explain it exactly. It's kind of hard to explain what you're painting with words. So have a look at the painting, pause so that you understand it, test it out a bit, and then continue. Now, while everything is still wet, I'm going to take my thin brush and add in little dots of brown to the sand to add in some flecks of maybe stones, little texture to it. Now, we continue with the waves. Everything is still wet. We haven't moved on to the drying portion and moving on to the next layer. So in the same layer, I'm taking blue with my thin brush, and I'm just going to go over all the waves that we threw out in the beginning. After tracing out the wave, a little bit of the blue in between before the second wave. Again, following the outline or the shape of the second wave and repeating it for the third. Adding a few more dots of blue having in some thin lines. You can see how our waves are forming already. And in the next step, we're going to add in more detail, and it's going to look so amazing. I'm so excited about this project. I think it's definitely unique. And it's the next kind of fun thing we're experimenting with in this challenge. Now, dry out our entire sheet, make sure everything is dry before you move on to the next layer. Now that everything is dry, let's go back and add in our details. I'm switching to my thin brush, mixing in blue and burgundy, so I get a more dark indigo shade. And I'm just going over the outline for the wave right above the previous layer. Adding a couple of little small lines for those in between sections. Continuing to add the outline. I'm making it really rough, so we don't want it to be very smooth. It has a little bit of bumps. For the third wave, we're just doing lines. You can see how I'm doing that little short lines. Now we move on to the next step really important, we're going to take our white guche or acrylic paint. I'm using acrylic because I had it in hand, and I'm just going to paint the white form of the waves. So painting very close to the edge of the wave you can see how I'm not doing straight lines. I'm actually just waving around my brush, kind of like we did our trees or clouds. It's the same kind of wavy motion instead of just doing straight lines because we want it to look like foam, making it more white towards the edges. Moving on to the second wave, following the same steps. I a little bit on the third wave, and then we can also paint the circle for the sun. Y Almost there, I can see it's deforming. Now I'm going to mix in burgundy and just add in some mountains in the distance. So adding a little bit of water to it, so it's much more lighter in shade and translucent. Add that little mountain in the backdrop, it also makes the horizon a little bit more crisp. Following that, we're going to add some quick lines for the ripples of the water. Now, using burgundy, we can go ahead and add in one more layer of outline this time I'm making it really rich. And just going ahead and adding little shadow to our waves. I'm not doing the entire outline, as you can see, the section that is closer to I don't know how to describe it, but if you have a look, you can understand it's just where the wave dips is where I'm adding in the burgundy. Same thing for the third wave, just a little bit. I think the reference is the best way to go about it. And you can see how that looks more natural now. En you can continue to add in some more small little dots and details with purple. This basically shows the kind of shadow of the waves and makes it look more realistic. I'm using a thin brush for all of it so I can get really into the details. Now gently tapping your brush to add in some splatters. Just along the wave section, if you want to protect the sky, you can just place a scrap paper over it. And now that we have done, I love everything to dry, remote your tape to reveal our painting today. I think this is definitely a special one. It's calming, it's relaxing. It's the perfect touch of ocean that we all need. 17. Day 12 - Evening Radiance: Welcome to a brand new project today, evening radiance. I think this is perfect for our challenge. It's got rocks. We're going to play around with the sky, some clouds. It's everything that we have been working and painting towards. First thing I'm going to do, tape down my sheet, prep it, draw out the horizon line three fourth of the paper. So we have more focus on the rocks and the water than the sky. Now that we have that, using our pencil, I'm just going to do a very broken line for the rocks. Follow along and just repeat the same thing on your sheet. I'm doing little cuts for the various rock. Something I've been doing in my voiceovers for my projects and classes and courses is adding a little story time, sharing a little bit of what I'm going through, or a little bit about my past. And I wonder if that makes the process of painting feel like a story. I do that sometimes even when I'm painting, I imagine something for my past or I imagine myself actually standing on the edge of rocks, standing looking at beautiful florals. I imagine myself there and that adds to the feeling of calm and excitement and joy. We're just adding clear water to our entire painting before we get started. And I want you to give yourself that little visual before you get started with your painting. Imagine that you're standing right there and you're painting along. It puts you at that moment, and it gives a little bit more of peace and sets the mood before you begin with your painting. Try it out and let me know how you felt. The discussion tab is always available. If you want to share a little bit of how you felt, you want to share or ask questions, I love discussing and I love talking about art makes me so happy. I've added yellow, going back to the painting, yellow in the center for the sun and then added in some quick thin lines all the way downward for the reflection. Next, using orange, I'm adding it to the sky as well as the water since it's a reflection of the sky. Finally, we're going to take in our burgundy and we're going all the way from the top and blending downward. Burgundy is there in the color mixing chart. So if you don't have the color, just have a look at the color mixing chart. It's a color that I use often in this challenge. And what you can do is prepare a little bit of it and keep it in advance. So you have that for the entire challenge. So repeating the same thing along the water, the same burgundy color. Now, I know this could look like a little bit of a mess because nothing has been added in. There are no details, but it's okay. Let's continue with our painting. Switching to my thin brush using orange, let's add in some of the ripple lines for the water keeping them really thin and just going back and forth. Now, let's mix burgundy with a little bit of actually brown or blue. We're trying to get we're trying to get actually van **** brown and adding in the shadow along the rocks. The area that's right below, we're just adding in more darker brown, so it looks like the shadow. You can see how I'm doing that. Switching back to my bigger brush. Let's take in our brown, and we're just gonna go over all the rocks. I felt like I was being a little timid with the brown. So we're just adding a lot more, more of the burgundy and really just painting out our rock. Don't worry about the mixing that I'm doing. It's basically standard colours of Vandyke brown that I'm mixing with my palette. And so you can use Vandyke brown as is switching to a thinner brush, let's add some of these brown lines for the ripples of the ocean. Make sure everything is dry before proceeding to the next layer. Okay, so this is our first layer. You can see how colors have dulled down, some of it has mixed up, and we have a clear idea of what's happened. Now, let's go ahead and add in details, and this is going to be what's going to bring everything together. So I've taken directly Burgundy or you can use Van **** Brown, and I just did the Horizon line again. And now I'm going to go through each rock. So starting off with doing the top outline, and I'm using my thinner brush so I can really get into the details. I'm breaking up the section into little parts for different rocks. And then I'm going to be painting more of the bottom part to add in some shadow. Just have a look. You can see me paint this entire thing before you start so that you have an idea of how it's supposed to look. It's a little bit of practice, but don't worry. I'm sure you're going to get it. We have done so many different projects, and you've gotten this far that I feel like this is such a good step for you a little bit test yourself and push yourself a little bit more. All I'm trying to do is just paint out little sections of the rock, making some of them empty while painting the rest of them. I think this side is a lot more clear, and you can see how I'm doing this just adding in rough rocks. Adding in little dots with vandyke brown for some texture. Using the same Vandyke brown to add more shadow to the area below the rocks to make it look like those areas are darker. H. With the same Van **** brand, we're going to continue adding in some of the outlines, just working a little bit on these rocks so they look a little more realistic. And rocks are all about depth. So if you can add in layers, it looks more realistic and works really well. So you can have a look. I'm just adding in a couple of outlines. We're moving on to the water and just using the BandagGround to add in thin lines. Again, especially the area that was under shadow, right? So right below the rock section. I mixing in a little water to this, and we're going to add in a cloud. I wanted to balance out the colors because I felt like the bottom part became really dark and heavy. So adding in the clouds for the sky just balances out the colors. We're following what we did before. So these are two different clouds. We have a bigger cloud, which tapers and then we have a smaller cloud that is attached right next to it. Let's do another one, the other side as well. Same exact techniques, Mhing your brush around to get that fluffy cloud. And there you go. We have a balanced piece. You can see how the clouds match the rocky section and everything just comes together. I love everything to try. We're going to remove our tape to reveal our final painting, evening radiance, which I think is such a great name for this painting because it does feel like you're walking down a rocky path in the evening enjoying the weather and definitely enjoying the view. And 18. Day 13 - Into the Hills: After all our different projects, I decided to pick today's project because it's simple. It's just ten to 15 minutes, and we're going to end up with really pretty results. I'm starting off with my pencil just drawing out different mountains. And then I'm going to use my brush with clear water and just paint everything before we begin layering in our colors. This painting into the hills is all about greens and blues and if you think of an ideal landscape, this would be it. Lots of greenery. I have to say, I'm also sitting in a desert climate where it is currently 48 degrees. It is very hot. I am missing this blue skies and green mountains. So this is such a perfect getaway. I've started with serum blue right on top and just gently bringing it downwards. Quick flick of my wrist. Then we can move downward into our mountains. What I'm doing is mixing a little bit of serleum blue with ardian green, and I'm just going to paint each section of the mountain at a time. It's okay if the colors blur in a bit, but we want to have different shades of green. Mixing a little bit of the ardian green with burgundy to give you a more vintage forest green, and then mixing a little bit of yellow to give more of a sub green. All I'm just doing is really going back and forth with migraines. Let's continue this process using yellow mixed in with ardian to give a more sap green. S that beautiful color. Then taking Verdian green as it is, adding it to the edges, adding a couple of dots along the way, mixing in burgundy to the green to give you a forest rich green for the bottom part of the painting. Notice also that I'm not going back and forth with my brush. I'm actually just going round and round. Exactly how we practiced our clouds, our trees is the same method of just moving your brush in circles. I added a little bit of van **** brown along the bottom. Just few dots here and there to give a nice mix of colors. Now using my tissue, I'm just going to dab out my clouds like we did in one of our previous projects. That looks so nice. Love how that's turned out, making sure that it tapers towards the end. In case your section dried out and you are able to dab out the paint, just use white acrylic or white Gouache paint and paint in your cloud. Let's make sure everything is dry before proceeding. We're just going to go back to each of the mountains and get in the details. So starting off with the topmost mountain, I feel like it kind of blended and you can't see it as clearly, so I'm just going to go over it with a little bit of Verdan green and burgundy mixed in with water because I want it to be very light and translucent, not taking away from any of our main elements. Next, mixing in our ardian green with burgundy. We're going to add in little dots for some foliage that's very far away, trees that are very far away that we can't really see the details, but we can just see them off in the distance. I while I'm doing this process, I'm also breaking down the tree into different sections, there are different fields of grass. You're going to see that in a bit. I think it's not as clear at this point, but as I move on to the next part of the mountain, you're going to see me really divided up. I absolutely love how this turned out. Just so interesting, we're going to add more trees. Then the hill that we're standing on or where this painting is created. We're going to just add in grass because that's closer to us. We can't really see too many trees next to us. We're just going to add in little dots for grass, maybe some longer grass lines as we're closer to the details. After you happy with the result, we're just going to use a scrap paper and just add in some flatters to the crus gently tapping our brush. There you go, our simple painting in just a few minutes. Let's let everything dry and then we're just going to remove our tape to reveal our final painting. A 19. Day 14 - Soft Daisy: Soft daisy, another interesting project with a different technique that I cannot wait to get into. We're starting off with taking down our sheet as usual and drawing out our daisy. You can see how I'm leaving spaces in between the petals. This is really important as we continue with our painting. We have our little daisy here, add in a stem, maybe a bud. That would be really nice. And then we can plan out where we're going to add in some additional leaves. Once we have that in mind, let's just take cerulium blue mixed in with water. I'm using my thin brush, and what we're going to do is a negative painting technique and paint around the flour. This way, the flour remains white while we have a very interesting backdrop. So I'm using blue and just painting around I'm going to fill it up a little bit, use some clear water and blend out that layer. So we don't just end up with an outline, we end up with a background, dropping in more of the serlem blue next, we're going to paint around the bud, taking more Silleum blue, adding water. I'm trying to make sure that there are no dry lines and everything is blended through. Make sure to paint each section, taking in your time so that you get the best result. This is a part of patients. Negative painting is a topic that I talk about more in my other classes. Now, we're going to continue adding in water, blending out the colours. I'm not going all the way to the end. I'm just trying to get the section that is closest to the flower. Once we have that, it's going to be easier for us to work on the remaining. I sped up the process a little bit and slowly, but surely we have reached here, where we basically have painted around the main flower. Now to complete out any of the sections that dried up, make sure it looks nice, and then we're going to add in our background, our sky. Now, these sections might have already dried up. So all I'm doing is adding a little bit more blue with more water to blend and kind of paint over those dried sections. You can see how I'm doing that. And that way, we have a nice background. Next, I'm going to add purple for the top of the backdrop. It's more midnight and really suits are painting today. For that, what I'm going to do is just take purple or violet and add it to the top of our painting. Mixing in a little bit of blue with burgundy to give us some clouds that we're going to add into our sky. I Amazing. For the final touch of our painting layer one, which is going to add in blue, little darker. So I've added a little bit of burgundy. You can use indigo as well, and just painting the area below. And in case you have sections that have dried up, just make sure to add in more paint. You can add in some green as well and just paint over it. Time to completely dry our painting. You can see how the colors have muted down and also blended through. So it looks really great. We have a good start, and we can continue with our next step, which is just adding in our leaves, maybe painting the center of our daisy with yellow. Adding a couple of dots of brown along the bottom for some shadow. A using green to add in the stem as well as leaves. You can add as many as you'd like or as few as you'd like. I'm adding in some really long leaves, and I'm going to speed up this process a bit so you can have a look at what I'm doing. Continue adding in lots of different variety of leaves. You can have some smaller leaves, some longer ones. Waving about in the breeze. This also gives you the effect of breeze. So if you can just vary the different directions of these leaves. Now, using a scrap paper, I'm just going to add some splatters to the bottom of our painting. I really love how this is looking. Adding a little bit of blue slight tinge to our petals because it looks really just white. That little blue is going to really add to it, adding a little bit below the yellow section, and letting it dry before removing out the tape to reveal your final painting. Now that you've gotten this far into the paintings, I am curious to know which is your favorite. We've tried a lot of different techniques, a lot of different styles, a lot of different colours and themes. I think I'm I'm still not sure which is my favorite yet, but I'm curious to hear yours. 20. Day 15 Fields in Bloom: We are midway through our challenge, and we're diving into some of the more floral based paintings, and I'm so excited about them. So let's start with this one. It's going to be a good step up as we move forward. So I added clear water, make sure that the paper is wet, and then I'm just painting the sky using cadmium yellow, and I've actually painted around a little mountaintop. Now, let's use orange and add it to the left side of the painting. I'm smooshing around my brush so it doesn't really create any harsh lines. And then I'm gonna mix in my erleium blue into the sky. So our sky is looking a little dull. So let's go ahead and add a little bit more of cadmium yellow near the mountains. And then we're going to add in some clouds with our mix of seroleum blue and burgundy. A Start right on top, and we're going to add in some fluffy clouds. Drop in more of the burgundy color so it deepens it up. And then we can continue with the rest of our painting. Make sure that your layers are still wet. So in case you feel like things have dried out, just add in a layer of water again in that section, and then we can continue with our painting. Let's use burgundy for the mountain. Keeping clear water near the cadmium yellow because I don't want the two to mix. And then adding in cadmium. I'm being really careful. In the next step, I will go over it so that the edges are a little bit more sharp. But for now, I'm just painting it out, but making sure that I leave little bit of space between the yellow and the burgundy. Time to move downwards. We're gonna be using green for the other hilltop or hillside. And then we're going to go ahead and add in some color. Using crimson, painting the section up. Let's take more crimson, add in little dots. Remember, it's all going to become softer as it dries, so we're taking advantage of that. Now, I'm painting the crimson, leaving little gaps in between so I can add in a different color. I Washer brush use cadmium to paint in between some of the areas. So we have some yellow flowers. Also leaving space so that we can add in our stems of green and leaves of green. Very carefully, we're going to use our brush and paint verdant green in the sections in between. We can mix in a little bit of burgundy, so you end up with a muddy color that I think would match the painting a bit more than a bright green and gently placing it in the areas in between. I We're now going to dry the layer using our craft dryer, and you can see how the painting has become a little bit more softer. The blends have come together, and now we're going to go into the details. So I'm taking in green, and we're just going to do our mountain. I'm adding a little outline to it at the bottom. Let's add some thin lines in between the flower fields for our stems and grass. Now that we've added in our lines, we're going to go into just adding some more flowers. This time around, we're going to make our flowers more obvious. We're going to use crimson. The flowers that are far away that are far away from the bottom of the sheet are going to be smaller in size because they aren't as clear. And the ones that are going to be closer to us that is closer to the bottom of the sheet are going to be bigger in size. Next, we're going to use our gouache white and mix it in to get different shades of colour. Maybe we can mix a little bit of yellow with the gouache white. So it's going to give us a more opaque layer. Mix it well together, using your thin brush. I think a detailer brush is so useful for pretty much any project. You could use the same round brush, which is what I do for a lot of my paintings, but a detailer brush is great when you don't want to think about too much and can easily create smaller elements like even dots and small flowers, it's so easy to do. So I would highly recommend investing in a detailer brush if that's something you don't have. Watercolors, I think, is one of the mediums that you don't need too many supplies off. If you have your basic paper, paints and even one brush, you're good to go. And the paints last such a long time. I highly recommend even creating your own paint palettes. What I used to do is if I had tubes of paint, I would mix them to colors that I like. So taking a little bit of ceruleium and ardian, mixing it into a pan and adding a little bit water, so it all blends together, and then I have it ready for the next time I want to use that color. So that way, you don't have to keep blending every time or color mixing every time. So what I've done is I'm just protecting the sky and then I'm going to use my white mix with yellow. Just add in some splatters for some of the flowers that we can't really get into painting. Repeating the same thing for red or crimson. A a For the last step, we're going to basically mix in our verdian green with burgundy to get a dark color for our stems. And this is when we can finish off our floral section before we go ahead and add a little bit more detail for the mountain. You can see the mountain kind of has disappeared into the mist, so we're going to just fix that a little bit. And then we're kind of adding more detail. Okay, the flowers have turned out so great. We don't want to have perfect flowers. It's just the idea of a flower is enough to create that effect. Now, mixing in more of the green, our vintage forest green, we're going to go ahead and add in the hilltop, add in some mountains, add more detail and layers to our mountains. If you've gotten this far, I'm so proud of you. Honestly, this is amazing, and you should give yourself a pat on the back for being consistent, for keeping up whether you've done all the projects together or you've pasted them out. However, you have decided to go about this, give yourself a pat on the back. Remember that it is a commitment and you have done so well. And this is a commitment not to art. It's a commitment to yourself and to your peace. And I think that is so much more important. Nowadays, with so many things happening in the world, so many things happening in life, we need that little bit of peace for ourselves, that little moments that we take, and that we honestly, I think gift to ourselves. I take it as a gift that I'm gifting myself this moment to paint, to relax, to feel good. So, yeah, I've added in a little bit of color to our mountains. And once you're happy with the overall result, let's allow everything to dry, and then we're going to remove out our tape on all four sides to reveal our painting for today. You are doing so great. I'll see you in the next one. 21. Day 16 - Out at Sea: Another really great project out at sea. This one is 10 minutes, which is perfect if you've had a busy day, highly recommended. We're going to start with adding in our horizon line in the middle of our paper, and then we're going to use Clearwater added in throughout the entire sheet, prepit before we start working on the sky and other details. I like adding in quick projects in between my challenges. You have something that could be 15, 20 minutes, and then you have projects that are like this, which are 10 minutes or so because it gives you the opportunity to paint at your own ease. If you want to skip a project, you can or want to come back to it a little bit later, you have the option. It's all about making the challenge work for you. And if you've had a busy day, you might as well paint and make it a habit rather than not paint at all. So even 10 minutes is still a good win and give yourself a pat on the back for just doing that. I think that's something we do to ourselves. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to get everything done every day perfectly, and sometimes it doesn't have to be perfect. Sometimes just showing up is enough. Back to our painting. As you can see, I mixed in my cerulean blue with white and added it for the backdrop, added in yellow for the middle of the sky, and then finally pink, which is a mix of a mix of crimson and white. We're going to repeat the same thing for the ocean, the pink, the yellow, the blue. Going back to what I was saying, which is giving yourself the I would say the support to not have it perfectly done, but to just show up. I used to put a lot of pressure on myself to be perfect, to commit, to do all these things, and it just felt like stress. And I stopped enjoying the process until I decided that, Okay, I'm going to just show up, even if it's 5 minutes, even if it's 10 minutes, I'm just going to show up. And that actually made the process much more fun for me, and I really enjoyed myself. So, used a darker blue and added in another layer. As we know with watercolors, things tend to fade out once you dry them. So we just want to make sure we add enough color, so it still stays interesting. Add it in a little bit of a shadow for the boat that we still haven't painted, but I wanted to add it in because I think it's going to look really nice and blend into the background a bit more. Drawing up the entire painting, and we can get back to layer two, where we're going to add in our details. Using a pencil, let's just draw out a very simple boat out in the ocean. Add in the mast. Great. Ready to start? Let's use our thin brush so we can really get into our details. I'm going to start by painting blue for the body of the ship. Et's continue to use the blue for the remaining of the ship. Later on, we can add in white to brighten up certain areas. Whether you use gouache white light me or acrylic white, the results just add to the painting. Is that little white streak along the ship as well as the body. Time to mix in our indigo seruleum blue with burgundy. We're going to get a dark color. Maybe mix in a little white to that, and we're just going to add the ripples for the water. A a next, I'm going to take my acrylic paint with my acrylic brush, and I'm going to paint the sun. Using more of the white to highlight some sections of the boat and the water. I was a little hesitant with this section because I decided to take a black pen and outline the boat. I would suggest if you want to do a black pen that works, or you can just use your thin brush with burgundy and do the outline. I felt after I finished that the black might have been too dark. I still love how it looks, but there are alternate options you could try as well. Let's darken the shadow of the boat just a little bit below. And our very simple painting is ready. I love everything to dry, and then you can remove your tape for the final reveal. I love how that white space that we have along the edges, the border looks so nice and actually makes the painting look complete. 22. Day 17 - Nature's Embrace: Let's dive into a brand new project. This one is definitely special. It's a walk in the path just filled with greenery all around us. Using our pencil, let's plan out our painting. I'm starting with the edge of the horizon. We then are going to have some trees in the backdrop, and then we can have a wave footpath you can see how I am drawing that out here. Make it a little jagged, so it's not too perfect. Like there's stones in the way, and we're trying to paint that. Just something simple. So when we get into our next step, we have a basis for our painting. We're also going to add in some grass along the way. The closer or towards the edge of the painting, the grass is going to be longer. And as we move away to the center of the painting, it's going to be shorter to show distance and to show that depth in the painting. So it's very important that we keep that in mind. I'm just doing quick lines with pencil. It's not necessary, but I just wanted to have that as my reference point. And now we're going to use clear water and just paint the entire page. Make sure you get through all the edges, and you add enough water so that when we go to the next step, it works beautifully. So starting off with our cerulean blue, we're going to do our sky. We're going to paint our sky. And what I'm doing is keeping little gaps in between for the white fluffy clouds and using blue in between. You're making sure that we get blue all the way to the edge of the sheet and also limiting it to the sky portion. Next, let's take green, and we're going to add some pushes in the backdrop, and I want them to blur out, and that's why I'm doing it as a wet on wet technique. So while it's still wet, I'm adding in this green. We will go over it again in the future steps so we can layer it up. But for now, I think this is a good start where it's off in the background, it's soft and just adds to the painting. We now move on to the grass. I'm going to use verdant green mixed with yellow to get a lighter shade. And we're going to use it at the top towards the center of the painting. And as we get closer to us, the viewer point, we're going to make it darker and darker. I love mixing in different shades of green when I paint this part because it's going to look so great and so natural because in nature, you don't just see one green. There's usually variations, and also it depends on how sunny it is, the clouds because all of that reflect onto the grass. And so you can have a mix of greens for this and then using the darkest for the bottom part. I think of all the paintings, this one made me feel like I was traveling, like I was actually in a countryside just looking through a field of grass, walking through a path. I think it was the most calming, relaxing piece of everything that I've painted. I'm using the back of my brush to add in some lines for grass. What this does is add a little impression, and that's going to actually look really nice. Remember longer lines closer to us and shorter as we move further away. Let's take a little sandy yellow and paint the footpath. But I'm being very careful because I don't want it to mix in with the green. So I'm just going to be a little careful leaving gaps so I can paint that sandy footpath. Now, let's take dark green, and we're going to use it to paint the section that is below, if you can see what I'm doing. It's just the area down which is going to be in shadow where the grass is kind of falling through. So that's the area that we're adding more shadow to. Time to mix in our burgundy and paint through the trees so they look even more vibrant. I We're going to use a little bit of burgundy as well for the shadow areas to make it a little bit more obvious to create more contrast and add more grass it's so interesting while I was doing the voiceover for this, there were a couple of birds that chirped, and I immediately paused my recording. It's pretty rare where I am to actually have birds around. It's too hot for them to fly about. They mostly seek shelter and kind of hide during the day because it's so hot. So this was so surprising, and it just matched the painting so well. I immediately cut it off, and then after a second, I wondered, why did I I would have actually been a good addition to this voiceover. I think it just matches the vibe. But definitely such interesting moment. So I'm going to continue to add in more and more burgundy grass through the entire grass field. Now, let's allow everything to dry, and then we're going to add in some quash flours. A simple trick is to also make sure like the grass, we add smaller flowers as we move away from our painting and have bigger ones closer to us with more detail. As you move away, you can literally just add in dots to show that the flowers are so far away that you can't really see them, but you can see the color. A Now, I've let everything dry, and for the finishing touch, I'm going to use another layer of green or burgundy to just paint some of the stems, some grass, add some more detail or depth. You can see how some of the sections I'm adding more, adding the center of the flowers as well, all the little things that will help it all lift up and make the painting more vibrant and real. A We're slowly getting there, adding a little shadow for the flowers. And we're done with our painting. Let's allow everything to try and then we can reveal our final painting. 23. Day 18 - Purple Skies: How about another new painting. This one is bright, it's vibrant. I love the colors. After all the subtle paintings we've been doing, I think this pop of color is going to be perfect. Let's start by drawing the horizon line in the middle of the sheet, and then we're going to use clear water and just paint the entire page. Let's start with violet, all the way from the top and then we can just gently blend it down a little bit, keeping your wrist soft and also making sure that you aren't pressing down your brush too much, just keeping it very light. Wash your brush. Take a tissue paper in hand. And what we're going to do is use a dry brush and gently lift up a little bit of that color and blend it. Let's take more violet. Darken up the top. Now we're moving into orange, and you can see how I'm adding orange right below. Making sure that I don't go back and forth, quick lines. We can take a little bit of burgundy and then finally move on to cadmium yellow for the remaining of the sky. Let's repeat the same colors for the Sea. Just flip them around. We have cadmium yellow, orange, and then violet. Next, taking a dry brush. Let's take some burgundy and gently tap in our clouds. I'm making them fluffy by moving them in a little bit of a circle instead of just straight lines. And remember, what we've been doing is to taper it when we start and end. Leaving couple of dots to us edge. Now, let's repeat the same placement of clouds along the reflection of the water as well. I Now, let's use our craft dryer and dry it up completely before moving on to the next step. What I'm going to do is with my pencil, I'm going to add a little pathway, a wooden deck for us to look out into the ocean. So making sure that the Distance is triangle, you can see how I'm doing this shape. So further away, it's smaller and closer to us, the path is wider, creating a kind of triangle like shape. You're going to see this in a bit so you understand it a little bit more. Time to take Burgundy and let's paint our footpath. I'm starting off with a darker color towards the edges and clear water along the path. Let's add more color closer to us, so it's darker. We're going to let this dry, and then meanwhile let's add in some mountains off in the distance, mix in water with burgundy and add some mountains off in the distance. Using our detailer brush, let's add in shadow. We're going to start by adding shadow for the mountains. Now, let's use Burgundy to add in some ripple lines across our water. Let's make all of this so much more realistic. Aren't these colors just so fun? I love the shades. It's definitely really bright and interesting. I think it's a good step away from kind of muted colors that we've been going into. You can add in some birds off in the distance from what we learned on day one. I really love the birds practice. I think it's such a good addition. And I think I mentioned this even in one of the previous projects. It's such a cute thing that you can add into literally any painting that you're doing with landscapes. I do want you to take a moment and give yourself a pat on the back. I'm so impressed that you have gotten this far and you are sticking to the challenge. It's not easy. I have the habit of kind of sometimes not keeping up. So I'm really proud of you for continuing and making this a part of your daily habit. I've made sure that the projects are short and limited, so that way you can really just take out a little bit of your time to get into them. But also, I think painting nature is so relaxing. There's just something so calming about nature and its beauty. Now, time to let everything dry. You can use a raft dryer or a blow dryer. Make sure everything is dry before moving on to the next step. The next step is all about details. We're just going to add in details for our footpath using a black pen, or if you want, you can use your thin detail brush. I thought a black pen would just be easier. So all I'm doing is adding the little wooden fence on either side of the path. Making sure that it is bigger and has more distance as it is closer to us and smaller and lesser distance as it's far away. We're really using this depth in every aspect of our drawing to make it look more realistic. I think this is what happens when people get into painting is that they forget that there's depth. So maybe they make the width smaller and bigger, but they forget that the wooden stumps will also have the same effect or the colors will have the same effect. So we just are trying to make sure that everything just matches with what we're painting. Next, we're going to draw out the wooden planks for the footpath, keeping in mind that further away is going to be shorter distance and closer to us, the distance of the wooden planks will be bigger. You can see how I'm doing this as well in the steps. I kind of like the idea of adding a little boat that's docked to the deck. So using a black pen, I'm just going to draw out a simple boat and keeping in mind that it needs to be quite small, so it matches the painting that we've done. Next, we're going to use Burgundy and just paint out the boat. Let's wash our brush, and then we're going to just lift up a little bit of that paint in the middle of the boat. So it's lighter in color. Using the same burgundy, let's add the shadow reflection of the boat onto the water. It wouldn't be the shadow. It would actually be the reflection of the boat. I How adorable is this? Final step. We're just going to use our burgundy and just paint some of the planks for the path. This makes it look more realistic instead of just having the black lines that we added in. So just a few of them. You're just going to paint either the plank itself or just the bottom or top edge, giving it a little bit of difference. So each plank doesn't look like it's one piece. It looks like they're individual wooden pieces put together. A a and we're almost done. We're going to let everything dry and remote our masking tape from all four sides to reveal our painting for today. I kind of find it hard to pick a name for this painting. So I decided to go for something really simple that is purple skies. But I do think I can do better. Maybe footpath to the water, walk into the water. I think I'm going to stick to purple skies. 24. Day 19 - Peaceful Path: Welcome to today's project. We're going to start with something really fun. Let's start by drawing out our little details before we get started. So first thing, I'm drawing out my pencil line of a mountain in the backdrop, and then one that is closer that we're standing on. It's going to get a little bit more clearer as we continue painting, but for now, we just need an overall idea so we can plan our base colors accordingly. Now I'm going to use clear water and just paint out the entire sheet in preparation for the next step. Right. Let's start with the sky using cadmium yellow right on top. Let's bring it a little bit more lower, keeping my brush very light, so it just blends in. Next, we're going to mix our crimson with cadmium yellow for an orange and use that to paint the rest of the sky. Adding a little bit more crimson, a little bit more cadmium yellow to get more of a vibrant orange. As we get lower, let's add red towards the bottom of the sky a Burgundy. I made sure to add in the burgundy around the mountains, and in case some of it seeps through, just wash your brush and take a dry brush and remove out the excess paint. And Now, let's move on to painting the mountain. I'm actually doing a gray, so a mix of blue and Pandyk brown or blue and burgundy. If you have black, you can just use that directly. But again, make sure that you add a lot of water, so it's a very light mix. We don't want something dark and harsh at this point. I'm just painting our mountainside. Using more of the blue for the second mountain off in the distance, being really careful to not blend it too much with the Burgundy. Closer to us, we can again use the grayish blue mix. Maybe mix in burgundy with seruleium for an indigo and use that to paint. Well, everything is wet, I'm going to use my tissue and then try to tap out the sun in the form of a circle. Now, in case your painting has dried, it's not going to be posible. So what we want to do is just wet that tissue and then use that to lift up the color. Then we can use our brush, wash it, add in a little bit of white. A and paint our pretty sun. In case you don't have watercolor white, you can use quash white or even acrylic white. Now that this is done, we're going to let everything dry before moving on to the next step where we're going to start adding in the details. Okay, now that it's dry, let's use our gouache or acrylic and actually paint the circle. For the sun, it's going to be a lot more better now that everything is dry. Let's mix in burgundy and uruleum to paint the back mountains one at a time, add in more texture. Switch to a little bit of green mixing in Viridian green and painting the rest of the next mountain, leaving in little gaps. A Continue to stack on the colors. You can go ahead and add some burgundy to a little bit of the outlines. Great. I'm happy with this. Let's move on to the mountain that's closer to us. This one, we can add in more color, more greens, different shade of greens. A And while we're at it, let's take our serleum blue and add in blue for the I would say a little lake that's in the middle of these mountains. A Great. So mixing in a little bit of black, and then we're going to use that for the mountain closest to us. I really want to darken up the color because for the next step, we're going to add in some flowers, and so we want this area to be really dark so the flowers can pop out. Now, time to dry our painting before moving on to the next step. You can see how our painting is looking. I love the sky. I wouldn't touch it. The mountains in the background look great, adding a little bit of white gouache for the ripple lines and reflection of the water, so it looks a little bit more natural. And then we start working on the element closest to us on the cliff that we're standing on. And so I'm going to use white to add in little flaws through the entire section. Now, for the flowers, what I'm doing is the ones that are further away, I'm just adding little dots, simple. The ones that are closer, I'm just adding in a couple of lines that represent petals. Not being too specific about how this looks. It's okay if you just add little dots all around. It doesn't need to really look like a flower because they're quite far away. Now, mixing in a little bit of burgundy with blue. We're going to add a little colour to the bottom of all the flowers as much as you can. This gives it a better effect, a better look. And I'm using my detailer brush so I can really get into those details. Next, we can mix in a little yellow to this gouache mix to add in some yellow flowers because I wanted a range of colors, so the flows instead of just keeping them all white. I thought that would be interesting. Y this is so great. It looks like there's little spots. It looks so pretty, love the flowers, love the sky. All of the details have come together, and we can let everything dry before removing the tape on all four sides to reveal our project for today. I think with all the different flowers, this one is definitely very interesting. And I like that we have some clips and details off in the distance. The sun with the white is bright and it's shining. I can't wait to see the recreation of this project in your uploads. 25. Day 20 - A Quiet Retreat: Let's dive into a new project, a quiet retreat. We're starting off with our pencil drawing after taping down our sheet and just painting our hills. We're also going to paint a diagonal road that crosses through our cottage. Let's get in our cottage now. Very simple, adding in a triangle with a rectangle body. Breaking it down into simple geometric shapes so we can paint a very simple, cute cottage. And you can see how I did that. Now, after adding one more hill at the background, let's use clear water and just paint our entire sheet. Prepping it for the next step when we add in our sky and other details. Start right on top. I'm mixing in cerulean blue with a little bit of violet to get a bit more of a purple color. Starting right on top, it actually looks more indigo. So we could use indigo as well, right on top. And then adding a little erleium as it is in the middle. Compared to the indigo, the erleium looks much more lighter and really just complements that sky another way down with this, let's move on to our hills. Using cadmium yellow, I'm going to just paint the hillside. Using that bright yellow to just make our painting look bright. And then we can mix in our green and add in green for the remaining part of the hills. You can switch around the greens, maybe add a little bit of iden to the mix to brighten it up. As I mentioned in previous projects, having a mix of greens for your hillside just looks more natural and really works well with paintings. You can see how all of this is coming together, and we're just layering our first base. This is the foundation of our entire painting. I'm leaving that little pathway. So that I don't really add any green to it. Using the same green mix, which was basically variant green with blue to complete our hill leaving the cottage area white or clear by not adding paint to it. So just being really careful when you're painting around it. A I to use a little sand brown for the path. And then we're going to use our craft dryer and dry this entire layer before we continue with the next. This way, we're building colors with a little bit of layer and layering technique, and also we want everything to dry because we can see how it all looks. You can see how the sky looks amazing, so I'm not going to touch anything from that. The hills, I'm just going to use a little bit of ardiant green mixed with a little bit of yellow to add more texture, some dots, some outline to separate the different hills. Let's add few bushes, some grass. All using our detailer brush so we can really get in those details. Next, use a green to add in grass on the edges of the pathway as well. Continue adding grass through the entire painting, little dots, little thin lines, some bushes. And Let's move on to painting our cottage. We're going to use our red or maroon shade. And let's start by painting the roof. I'm being really careful to make sure that I get a nice edge for the roof. It's going to really make everything look nice. And then we can keep a little cap and paint the cottage. After painting the front of the cottage, we're going to use a little bit of a darker shade with lesser water mixed into the red to paint the roof and the side of the cottage. Now, let's dry up our painting before moving on to the next step, we're just going to add in details for our cottage. So I'm using my detailer brush, and we're going to start by taking burgundy and just working on our rooftop, adding in the lines for the tiles on the roof. Let's add in a little door, some windows. Now, we're going to add in thin lines for the wooden planks of the cottage. Could leave it as it is, but I felt like the planks just make it look more rustic. If you want, you can use a pen to get the details instead of using a brush. But if you can have a nice thin brush, you can create this very easily. Let's add a little bit of water and just lend each of the tile out so it looks more natural. And we're going to do the same thing to the side of the cottage. A we're almost done. We're just going to add the shadow for the roof onto the cottage. You can see that. We're going to let everything dry, maybe add in some white highlights, especially on the top of the roof side. Now, let's allow everything to dry and reward our tape to reveal our quiet retreat. 26. Day 21 - Spring Awakening: Let's paint today's project, Spring Awakening. We're going to be adding so many beautiful flowers together. Let's start by taping down our sheet and then we're going to use a pencil and add in different hills of different heights. First, we're going to use clear water and dampen our sheet all the way top to bottom, side to side. Um, Since our focus is going to be the hills and the flaws, we're going to just keep the sky very simple using serleum blue, gently blending it into the sheet. You can add a little bit more blue towards the edge since it will dull down once it dries. Next mixing crimson with white. Let's add a little bit of pink to the sky and then continue adding blue for the mountains in the backdrop. Now we start with the flower fields, starting with the mountain that's far away, we're going to start with our thin detailer brush and add in layers of green, pink, yellow, and so on. Right on top, let's start with green. We're keeping these details small. These lines are very far away, so you can't see much detail. You can't see the flows and we're just adding little dots. We have the yellow layer. Next, we can continue and add in maybe a pink layer. I'm keeping my brush light and I'm also, if you see going around instead of going straight back and forth. It gives it a little texture. Now we can do another layer of green to finish up that hill. Add in a little bit more pink so that the colors brighten up because it is going to dull down a bit once it dries out. Let's now tackle the next hill, very similar steps of layering different flower fields. The fun part is you can really play around. Here I'm adding in a violet, so it doesn't have to just be the standard colors. You can add in different shades of flowers. Painting some yellows and oranges. Now we move on to the main area, which is the section that is going to be closer to us. That one, we're going to do bigger layers of color. H. Drop in more pink and you can see how those bands are becoming larger and larger closer to us. We can take a little bit more of the direct color and use it. There's a little depth to the painting. Small little dots using your detailer brush for these sections. Well, everything is still wet. I think it would be nice to add in more colors. Even the yellows, you can add in some yellow dots, some greens, more flowers, more dots for all of them. One of the really funny things is that while I was painting, I realized my mountain just kind of disappeared into the background. So I'm going to paint it again. The last mountain, the first one that we painted, basically, all the way to the back just kind of disappeared. So let's add a little bit more colour. And to balance it, we can use a little cloud with the same colour. Now, we're going to let everything dry before moving on to the next step of just basically deepening the colors, making the green a little bit more green. We can even add in a little darker green to the edge of the hills to separate them out, a little green in between some of the flowers. It's all about layering and layering. Are we going to darken our green the one that is closer to us. I really love this picture as an inspiration. I haven't actually had a chance to see a fully floral hilltop. I've seen a little bit here and there, wildflowers, but something like this that is just color. I haven't had a chance to see, and it's definitely on my bucket list. For example, the tulip festival that happens in Europe has always been on the list where I can see those tulips all across the field. I think it's one of those must see at some point of time in life moments. Even if you can't think at least being able to see it on pin interest and just imagine yourself there is amazing. There are so many different areas in the world that has this, smaller sections, maybe it wouldn't be tulips, it would be other flowers. The world is full of flowers. That was a little segue from our conversation. Let's get back to our painting while we add all those small little greens Now, I've just added in a lot of greens. You can see this looks more realistic. There's a lot more texture. There's a lot more details going on. Once we are happy with everything, let's allow it to dry for a bit and then use our tape and remove the edges from all four sides to reveal our final painting. I think this is one of the brightest painting of everything that we have painted in this challenge. Lots of color, lots of flowers, very happy and peaceful. One. 27. Day 22 - Country Road Trip: Today, we're diving into a new project, driving through the countryside. I think this is such a great change to what we've been doing. If you're taking a road trip, this is such a great view that we're just capturing today. But I wanted to make it a little different. We're playing around a little bit with the colors, making the whole painting more moody. So the first thing I'm doing is I've drawn my main horizon line, and then I'm adding a curve for the road. What we want to do is remember that the road is going to be wider as it's closer to us, that is at the bottom of the sheet. And as you move away, the path becomes smaller. The width reduces. If you can just keep that in mind, the painting is going to turn out amazing. Once you have your general idea, don't worry too much. We're just going to go into painting. Start by adding clear water and just painting out the entire sheet, prepping it, so we're ready to start with our colors. As I mentioned, the colors we're using are going to be very moody. So color you can mix and keep prepared is burgundy, which is a mix of blue and red. And that's going to be for our beautiful sky, the water. Starting right at the top, we're going to start with burgundy and gently blend it into the background. I usually start with a very light layer and then build from there. I felt like this became too light, so we're just going to go ahead and make the colors even brighter, adding a little crimson to the side to add a little hint of pink. A now we're taking orange, and this is mainly for the bottom part of the sky. It is going to be covered by the mountain, so it's not necessary, but I felt like I still wanted that color to be seen through. Once you have that, we can kind of move towards the water. And for the water, we're using the similar color that we used for the sky. I'm making sure to leave the roadside section plain so we keep the colors separated. We're switching to our thin brush, and we're going to add in some ripples for the water with burgundy. Thin lines just along the waterway. It is going to dull down and blend in, but I think it's still going to look really great. What I've been really enjoying about this challenge is that it's made me try a lot of different techniques. And I think that's what I wanted to bring to you because it's not just, Oh, we're doing a mountain or we're doing flowers, we're doing roadways, we're doing windmills, we're doing cottages. There's a lot more that we are playing around with and a lot more emotion that we're capturing in our paintings. And I think that's what's so special with a 30 day challenge because it gives you so much time to play around with so many different techniques, so many different ideas and moods. Like, I think this one is perfect for, like, when you're really moody, you don't feel like painting something bright and happy. This painting, I think perfectly reflects that. I'm using a little bit of a green towards the edge of the roadway to show that there's a little green pasture along the side of the road. Adding a little bit of yellow, so it brightens up a bit, and it's not just green. I love mixing my blues and greens together to get a very nice, interesting shade. I've added in the color mixing chart in the about section, as well as I think the project section, or I think it's only in the project section, but you can see all the ways that you can mix in your color, so you get an idea. Try it out. I think mixing greens is so fun, and you get these beautiful vintage shades. I'm mixing in my variant green with lean blue, and you can see that muddy green color that's come through. I Now for the road, we're going for a gray color. And since I didn't have gray with me, I wanted to mix a gray. All I'm doing is mixing in my burgundy, so basically adding more blue with a little bit of van **** brown and trying to get this gray shade. You can use black and just water it down to give you a gray color. I love mixing my blacks and grays. You will see me do this often instead of just using the color from the tube. I feel like it's a lot more richer, as well, but it's, again, a personal choice. I honestly don't think it needs to be a big deal if you just use black directly from the tube. The one thing I've been trying to do with my challenges is use one set of colors. So if you want to get the same results, you know you can get the set. But if you have paint sitting at home, you can just use that as well to mix your own colors. So either way, it just gets easier, and I want you to have the best result. That's always my intention for my classes, challenges, everything that I do. I want you to get the best results. So there's no doubts and questions around. So I'm using that little gray painted out the road. The painting looks a little messy now, and this is a point where I feel like a lot of people just give up because they're like, Oh, no, it doesn't look great. But here's where you trust the process and just know that it's going to turn out great once it tries and once you add in your next set of layers. So we're going to dry out our painting. You can see this is our first base, and now we're diving into the details. We started off with a gray mountain in the backdrop because I felt like it was nice to have something misty just off in the back, going ahead, using Burgundy for the ocean. And now we're going to go into our little garden section, adding darker green, especially along the edges to kind of mark it out. But instead of doing a thin line, I'm actually just adding little lines, dots, making it look like there's grass kind of popping out. Same thing along the edge of the road, adding in some lines, sprigs of grass that's coming through, some dots. We're going to repeat this on the other side as well. And what I did is also make sure that I added a little bit more gray towards the edge of the green grass to show the shadow in that section. So it's slightly darker. We will go ahead and add more depth to the painting. Little dots, little lines, small little details to show that some of the grass is there. It also gives nice texture to the painting. And I also want to add in a little tree that's just popping off. This is a little about framing the painting and giving it a little composition. So the screen that on the side is just going to make it look more acidically pleasing. Like, it looks interesting, it looks fun, and it just stands out. Now I'm protecting my paper, especially my sky, and I'm going to add some splatters in the grass area, gently tapping my brush. To give it more texture, maybe you can add in some dots if you'd like. And now with a pencil, I'm just going to mark out the road lines. You can have a center line, maybe some dashes, but I just wanted to keep two, sorry, three thick lines, two on either side for the emergency line, and one in the middle. Once you have that, we're going to use white acrylic paint, or if you have guache to paint out this detail. Now, as we continue, I feel like it'll be nice to add in some white flowers along the sides of the road. It's gonna add a nice pop of color, as well. I think white is so important in any of our paintings, especially with watercolors cause you do use the white of the paper or we add in white to just add to the painting. Little dots. Dryer painting completely and then remove all four sides to reveal our road. 28. Day 23 - Lavender Feilds: Of all the projects from this challenge, this one, I love it. I love it so much. Yes, I have a lot of favorite ones, but this one is just so pretty. There's something about the colors, there's something about the lavender fields just makes me smile. So we're taping down our sheet on all four sides. I like to keep an equal distance across everything. So we have a nice crisp border. Once you have that prepared, we can move on to our painting. Now, I also use this because it taps down the sheet, and it gets it makes sure that your sheet is flat when you're painting. Now that we have that ready, let's go into a little bit of drawing. So we're starting off with our land, and we're trying to plan out our spacing. I want to make sure that there's not too much spacing for the windmill, and we're having more of it for the lavender field itself. That's the focus. And we're going to just with a pencil, draw out our lines so we know exactly where everything is going to go. It's generally, if you notice, a little angled. So it looks like you're standing in the field and you can see the lavenders across. Then we can draw out our windmill, as well. Very simple shape is just a dome. And this is just a rough idea. When we get into painting, we can go into more details. I also have off centered the dome, so it's not in the middle of the sheet. It's slightly towards the left. And that's going to look really great when we finish our painting. We're going to have four windmill spooks, and you can draw that out as well. Now, let's use clear water and just add water to the entire sheet, prepping it for the next step. Once the sheet is completely wet, we can start right on top with our serleum blue, very bright, beautiful blue for a nice, bright sky. After yesterday's gloomy painting, I think it's time that we embrace the countryside and just go very bright with our colors. We're going to go into our bright blue. I'm leaving gaps for a very cloudy look, so it doesn't look like it's just plain sky. There are some clouds there, and the white spaces I'm leaving in between will give that effect without really needing to do much. It might look a little messy at this point, but once it's dry, it's going to look great. Now, we're taking in our purple, which is our let and adding it to our fields. I'm keeping little spaces in between, which I will then go ahead and paint as well. But notice how when I paint these lines, I'm also following the path that I had drawn before. And that's also important to keep in mind because it looks better. Now, taking a little bit more of a darker violet. On top, I'm adding little dots, so it deepens up. We're now going to gently tap in more of the violet through the entire field, taking it directly from the pan. But our paper is still wet, so this color isn't going to be as bright, which is great. It's going to fade out, and that's what we want. Now, protecting our sky with a scrap paper, let's use a thinner brush and just add in some splatters of violet onto the field. It's going to give you a more natural effect. Like, we can see some of the lavender, but not in detail. Tap, tap, tap, and then move your paper. Now we can go into adding more colors to these fields. What I'm going to do is take my thin brush with the violet, and I'm going to add little dots along the lines that I had drawn before with my pencil, darker lines, and they will fade a little bit, but that's okay. What I'm trying to do is get more width, closer to us, the viewer, or at the bottom of the sheet, if that makes it easier for you to understand. So anytime that we are adding these little dots, we're adding more closer to us. And as it goes further away towards the windmill, we make it thinner and lesser dots. This is such a simple way of giving the illusion of depth that there's a distance between us. It's not that this whole thing is right in front of us. It gives a better look and looks more realistic. Continue adding these little dots across the field. A among all the painting from this challenge, I think this one definitely is my top ten. We still have two more of my paintings that are three more that are coming up later on the challenge that I think are my favorite. They're so special. I keep staring at them because they're so pretty. So this definitely is on that list. The violets, the lavender is just it's so special. Take your time, add little dots here and there, and then we're going to use our dryer to dry up the sheet and see what we're working with once the colors have dried. I I'm so excited to see the next step where we're going to add in our windmill and just bring everything together because I think that pop of brown as well is going to be very interesting. Now, our painting is dry, and I actually like that it's not faded out, the violet. It still is bright. You can add a little bit more depth by adding more color if you feel like it just became a little too dull. Let's add in some green off in the distance for some bushes on either side of the painting. Next, we move on to painting our windmill. So I'm going to take brown. And this is actually burnt umber is what I'm using. And just painting the base for the windmill. Let's add a little bit more colour because I feel like it is quite dull. Adding in more of the brown, especially along the edges. So towards the left side, I'm adding more to show the three dimensional view of the tower, and on the right side, I'm just doing an outline. Drop in a little van **** brown, a darker brown color. So it just looks deeper and gives more depth. Now we can do the top dome of the windmill. A Let's try out the section a bit, and then we can add in the door, the windows, some more details and even the windmill spokes. Using thin brush, we're going to start by adding the spokes with Van **** Brown. A at our tiny mini door and windows. A Now, using a black pen, we're going to add the details for the windmill fan. And it's just a rectangle that has lines. We're going to do that on all four of them. For the final steps, we're going to use our Van **** brown and just add a little bit more depth to the tower. A Add in some dots as well to show the texture of the windmill tower. Now, let's love everything to try and then we can remove out our tape from all four sides. We are currently at 23 of our entire challenge. And if you've come this far, I want you to give yourself a pat on the back, give yourself a moment to appreciate your consistency, your commitment, and the fact that you've learned so much and committed to painting every day. I'm so proud of you. Diving into a 30 80 challenge is a gift to yourself. It's a gift to committing to spending a little time in your busy day for you. And I would always say never take that for granted. See you tomorrow for day 24. 29. Day 24 - Serenity by the Lake: Diving into another new project, we've taped down our sheet, all prepared, and we can get started with our pencil drawing just to mark out where we want everything to be. So I'm starting off with a landscape, and I'm going to have a little hill on which I'm going to have a tree that's going to pop out. And then we're going to have some rocks. You can see how I'm creating this a few rocks. A few little details, and our focus is going to be more on the water and the rocks and the grass. So we're leaving just a little bit space for the sky. For this painting, instead of adding water, we're just diving right in. We're going to mix some colors. So mixing green with yellow to get a more softer green that we can then use for our painting. Let's mix a couple of more greens, prep them, have them ready. This one, I'm going to mix with Vandyk brown, so it's going to be darker. Next, we're going to take erleium blue, have that prepped. With a little bit of andyke brown again. This is going to give you more of a indigo darker shade. And finally, we'll be using orange. So in total, we're going to have four different colours. Maybe we'll mix a little bit more of Vandyke brown for the painting, for the rocks, especially. Finally, for the flowers, we're going to use yellow. Now, I don't want to use yellow from the pan. We're gonna mix a little bit of gouache or if you have acrylic paint, we're going to mix that in so it is more opaque, and that's going to be perfect for our flowers. The first thing I'm going to do is add clear water through the entire sheet, prepping it for the next step. And then after that's done, we're going to start right on top with blue, add an really pretty sky. Next, using orange with water mixed in, we're going to use that to paint the remaining sky all the way to the horizon line. Don't be shy. Add more orange to brighten up the colors because as we know, they do dry down dull, so we want to make sure that we keep it deep in colour. We're going to repeat the same colour combination for the water using orange moving into the indigo blue. Let's now move on to the cross section. We're going to start with our various greens and just paint the entire area out. Oh I like to add the lighter green away if you see more towards the left side and the darker green more towards the edge of the sheet. Maybe we can drop in a little bit of burgundy or if you have Bantik brown to just deepen the color a little bit more, especially towards the edge. And you can see how that's going to be even more darker green. Now, using the back of the brush, I'm going to add in lines for the grass. What's going to happen is I'm marking the paper, creating a score line, really pressing down onto the paper. So what's going to happen is all the paint will pull in there and you'll have these lines that show up. Now we're going to use our burgundy to add in the rocks. Just a little bit. I know it's going to blur out, but that's okay. We're going to get into all of the details in the next step. Now, let the painting dry completely so we can see what we're working with and then continue to add details. Our painting is completely dry now. You can see how those score lines for the grass really show. It looks really interesting. And now using our thin brush, let's first paint our horizon line. Quickly add in some ripple lines with the same color. Next, we're going to add tree bark. Now, I wanted the tree bark to be really moving, so it's not a stiff tree. It has character. And you can see how the branches are coming out of it, breaking into little branches, having another one that's maybe not so perfect. It's a little tilted and crooked. Again, giving our painting more character. A Using green, we're going to add in our branches or leaves, sorry. Varying greens can be used for this. Maybe add in a little bit more of erleium blue, so it deepens up the color a little bit more, gives it a more bluish green. And we're just moving our brush in little circles to give it a very fluffy feel. I like to add darker green closer to the branch. Y our tree is completed. Now let's move on to our grassy areas, starting off with green. We're just separating some of the sections out. Add in some grass. At this point, you should be so comfortable doing grass because we've been doing it for 24 projects, this being our 24th project, which means that adding these thin lines, adding the grass effect, you'd be able to do this so easily. And I think that's why a challenge is so great because you're practicing for so long. Switch to your thinner brush. If you're kind of struggling to add in this thin line, a detailer brush is such a good investment, and I think I've spoken about this in the challenge as well. Like if I was going to recommend brushes, having a detailer brush is so, so important, and then you can have one round brush, and you're good to go. Don't need too much to work with watercolors, a set of basic paints, you can mix in all your other colors. I think that's another thing that is amazing about watercolors is that you don't need a massive investment to start. And you can create something really pretty with just 15, 20 minutes. So I'm adding in more grass with my green. A and next we're going to work a little bit on our rocks. So I'm adding a little outline and just making one face of the rock darker, adding some shadow to it, some reflection to it onto the water. Let's do another one. This one is going to be more obvious. We're going to get a little bit more detail. So I just break apart the rock into different sections, one part becoming full with color and then adding in the reflection onto the water to make it more realistic. Et's repeat this process again for a few more rocks. Rocks are all about layering. Once we've done that first layer, we're going to go in with Van **** brown and just add even more depth to the rock. Et's deepen out the reflection onto the water a bit more. H. I randomly decided to add one more rock. Just because I was having fun, and I really like these little rock details that we're adding into our paintings. And I think I'm actually enjoying how this painting is looking. It's got the color. It's got the movement. The trees are very interesting. And then we can just add in maybe some flowers to just make it more spring and fun and colorful. Mixing in our yellow with gouache or if you're using acrylic, you can mix it with acrylic. Just remember that acrylic, you need to use a different brush and a different palette and be careful to not ruin your watercolor paint in the process. But if you're using gouache, you can just use it in the same palette because gouache is very similar to watercolors. And I'm just adding a variety of flowers. Some of them that are just side view flours, so they just kind of they're just little details. If you want, you can go more into detail and get the shape of the flour, but it's not necessary. And we're having also varieties, some small ones, some big ones. And especially as we move away from us, we're just going to add in little dots. So closer to us that is closer to the edge of the sheet, we're going to make the flowers bigger, bolder, more obvious, and then further away, just little dots because they're off in the distance. I specifically used opaque colors for the spots that it layers on top of the watercolors. While we're at it to balance out the colours, I'm going to add a little yellow to the rocks, as well. Just a little bit. It's gonna be a little highlight of the yellow. There's never enough flowers, I feel like. And so I keep adding them sometimes more than I need to. And let's just have a look at our painting. Is there anything that we want to add in? I do want to make, add a little bit more detail to the flowers. So let's take Vandyke brown and just add the center for some of the flowers and then add in more of the stems with a darker green. Adding in few dots to show some texture out in the grass. And what we can do is also protect our sky with a scrap paper and add some splatters, as well. I So at the bottom, I'm using yellow splatters for some flowers. I could have used green as well, and now that I think about it, I should have probably done that. I think that would have been nice. But I think the painting still looks great. It's just have fun with it. Don't overthink it. Trust that it's gonna look great. And what we can do is maybe add some splatters to the tree. I think that would be interesting. Give it a little bit more texture instead of it just being flat color. And you can protect your sheet or I decide to be very bold and just splatter it. But I think that's a risk. I think definitely use scrap paper and protect your sky so that you don't have blobs of paint just randomly on your sky. But I'm being bold today, and I'm just going with it. So once this is done, we can let everything dry and then remote our masking tape to reveal our painting for today. This is definitely a really fun one. I 30. Day 25 - Looking Glass: We're going to dive into another new project. This one I really like the vibes. It's a cave, and then you have some ocean waves. It's the perfect sea into a new world. I think the stormy skies it's just very, very dramatic, very interesting painting. We're going to start by dividing our paper by half, and we're going to then just do the waves by adding in little curved lines. In a diagonal. We've done this before in one of our previous paintings, you would have a general idea, which is why I did that one first, which was much more simple. And then this one, we're kind of upleveling and we're going into more details. Adding a little cave rocky formation around it doesn't have to be too perfect, but we want to get the general idea. So when we get into painting, we know where everything goes. Remember to erase out your pencil lines where it's not needed because they do stay after your watercolor. I have this happen so many times where students would do the pencil marks, and then they realize they can't erase them. Let's wet our entire paper, add a lot of water, make sure that it's completely blended in. Making sure that you also cover all the edges, and once that's done, we can move into painting. The first thing we're going to paint is our sky, make it very dramatic. It's gonna be cloudy, very, very interesting. And then we'll move step by step into each section of the painting. Starting right on top with erleium blue. Next, we're going to use violet right on top. Now, you notice how I'm not going all the way to the end. It doesn't matter because we're going to have the cave coming through. So we can just paint the center portion. Adding in more of the violet, adding little clouds with it to show that it's very stormy and thundery and it's about to rain, and that's what we're capturing today. A Finally, we're going to use orange at the bottom of the horizon, just a little bit to give a little hint of color. Don't worry if your color just spreads. I know that this can be very stressful to see it just blend through and you can't really control it, but that's okay. Once it dries, you're going to see it look really nice and it comes together really well. So I'm using orange, adding in little details, and then we're going to repeat the similar colors for the sea. When I first started doing painting landscapes, I always thought, growing up, the water is blue. So I always would actually add in blue color for the water irrespective of the sky. And it took me a while after painting for a long time to realize that the blue was because the sky was blue. So water reflects whatever is there because it's transparent. So whatever color you have in the sky gets reflected onto the water, and that's the color we see. So the blue color water that we've always painted as children was just a reflection of the sky. You can see how I've added in a little bit of purple along the waves. And then I'm adding brown for the sandy section. Now, going back to the realization that water is based on the color around it. I found it so fascinating, and then I noticed more and more landscape paintings and realized that that's actually true. And I never realized I always used to do blue color for water. So this is what happens when you get into painting, I think, you start noticing the little things around you that you just kind of take for granted. Right? And I love that. And I hope you're actually noticing your environment after this challenge and really seeing those little details that we often just miss. Now, I'm using my thin brush and adding drops of brown to the sand to give it a little texture. And this is directly from the pants. You can see how deep the color is. We now move on to the waves using burgundy, which is a mix of blue and red that we've done in the color mixing chart. Don't forget to refer the chart. It has so many different color blends that's going to really help you with this entire challenge. Then also with your painting process. So I'm adding a little bit of this color just in some sections, not all around. It'll blend in and dull out once it dries, but I wanted a little color there. We're going to do another layer. And once that's ready, we can just add a little bit of water and blend so it doesn't feel so stiff. Now let's switch back. And then we're going to go into adding our ripple lines for the sea, thin lines. And as they're far away, we're going to add them closer together, and as it gets away from the horizon closer to us, you can keep more gaps. The distance between the lines increase. You can see how I'm doing this here. You can even make them much more smaller, so it's not a full length line, and it just looks like it has more ripples. Now we move on to allowing our painting to dry. And once it's dry, we're going to go ahead and just add in more of the cloud details. So I'm using burgundy to just go over the cloudy areas and give it a little bit more definition. Using the same fluffy technique which is moving your brush in little small circles, adding some thin lines at the start and the end of your cloud. Let's try this. And then we're going to move on to just having a look at our painting, seeing what we need to work on. The first thing I want to do is really mark out our horizon line because I feel like it just looks like the ocean is continuing. So I'm using blue to just add a thin line, adding some more ripple lines. And now we're getting closer to the waves. I'm adding blue in between. You can see how I'm doing this more and more ripple lines. This is very similar to what we did in our painting with the ocean waves. So you can have a look at that and drefer. After doing this, we're going to take blue directly from the pan and just outline a little bit of those waves. Using Burgundy, we can just add a shadow for the last wave. I'm using my Detailer brush for all of this so I can really get into those sections and it looks really nice. Now using Burgundy, I'm just adding more waves because I want to look more full, like there's a lot of waves closer to the shoreline. And you're going to see me deepen up the color a little bit more, take it more from the pan, so it's not mixed in with a lot of water. Add in little dots to show some of the shadows. Finally, continuing to add violet near the sandy areas, right on top of it with a lot of water mixed in, so it's very translucent and you can see the brown below. I'm super happy with how this is looking. We still need to add in our white. So let's go into painting our cave. I'm using an Dike But, very deep, very rich, and just painting the entire section. I kind of mix in a little bit water, so it's not too flat and it has a little texture to it. Now, we're going to take Van **** brown directly from the pan and add more texture to the painting. Now that our waves have dried up, I feel like it's still so dull. So we're going to take our Van **** grown and just add more shadow. So I'm adding it especially to you can see one section of the wave. More towards the bottom part. And I'm going to continue doing that for the rest of the smaller waves. Next, we're going to use acrylic white or gouache white, whichever you have in hand. And we're going to add it to this section to add a little bit of foam to the water, make it more realistic. I already love the sky. The cave just looks amazing. It looks so realistic. It pops. The colors just stand out. So this part, it's going to be the finishing touches for our painting. We're adding in the white just above the shadow areas we painted because it comes right on top of that, so just keep that in mind. Adding a little bit more white to the rocky section. This is necessary, but I feel like it added a nice touch of white. And with rocky areas, we just want to add more texture by showing that there's different colours, like different shadow areas, small little detail, but it really helps. Overall, I like how this painting just takes you inside of. It's like a looking glass. You're seeing through this. Absolutely love this painting, and I hope you really enjoy this process. Romardo tape to reveal your final painting for today. 31. Day 26 - Sunflower Feilds: Today, we're diving into one of my top ten paintings for this entire challenge. These beautiful yellow flowers. It's going to be so pretty, and we're also learning some different techniques. So I started by adding in my horizon line right in the middle of the sheets so we have equal space for the sky and the flowers. Adding a little mountain in the backdrop because it's nice to have something behind in the background. Once we have that, we're going to use clear water and just paint out our entire sheet like we've been doing. You can see how the sky just turns out so much better and smoother when you do that. I started with a little bit of blue, but don't worry. I'm going to continue with clear water and finish off the entire process. Once you've added water throughout, let's start with our sky. I'm using bright blue right on top, and then I'm going to add it in a little bit of a random way, leaving white space for clouds. Hold your brush in different angles that make you feel a little bit more comfortable with it. You might be able to paint a little bit more if you hold it sideways and also pressing down your brush, so you really add the paint into the sheet. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're just adding in that blue, and you can see how it's already looking so interesting. Now we're going to add a little bit of green to the mix for our mountain that is in the background. Watercolors can feel a little bit intimidating, and I've been teaching long enough to see people just scared to start with a medium. But it's all about confidence. So challenges like this are a great way for you to build that confidence and to get more comfortable with the medium. End of the day, it is just a piece of paper, and if you make a mistake, you can always try again. There is no stop or end or anything like that. You're not losing out on anything. So mistakes help you grow, and it helps you feel more confident in what you're doing. I'm adding in yellow dots all over the sheet. Now, towards the mountain, you can see how I got them a little bit closer, and they're much more smaller in size. And as we get closer to us, the viewer or to the bottom of the sheet, I'm making the flowers a little bit bigger in size and more spaced out. This is a very simple way to do our depth and to show that there's a lot of gap between these flowers, and it's not just a flat painting. We've been using this technique in our previous painting, so I'm helping you get a little bit more comfortable with the idea of showing this. Now I'm mixing in a little bit of my blue and yellow to form a nice green that we're going to use in between these yellow spaces. And this is for the green of the leaves and the plant, the stems. So they come in between. Just be a little bit careful to not touch the yellow too much. What I'm going to do before I completely let the painting dry is just add another darker green and add it more to the bottom. You can see how I'm building a little shadow by showing just the bottom section deeper in green, more richer in color. Okay, so this is looking interesting. I'm going to use the back of my brush to add in some thin lines for the stems. This is an easy way to add in stems. The color pulls into those areas, and so you have the nice thin lines that have been created. We will paint over them, and we'll do more details as we proceed, but this is just really marking the paper. I'm really pressing down so I get those thin lines. I had a little bit more of the green, so I'm just painting the mountain again because I feel like it was too light and almost not seen. The darker green is just going to make it pop out a little bit more. Let's dry our paper before proceeding to the next layer of details. I already like how this is looking. It just looks so fun. So I'm using my thin brush and taking yellow directly from the pan, and I'm adding little dots right on top. So you see the section that's near the horizon. There's going to be little dots there. And then as I get closer and closer to us, the viewer, I'm going to make the flowers more clear. So actually adding in the leaves, adding in the center of the flowers and making it more detailed. This shows that closer to us, we can really see the flowers, whereas further away, they're just little dots of color. Adding a little bit brown to show a variety of colors. And this also gives a nice variation because everything in nature has a little bit of shadow and movement and things like that. So I've taken in brown and I'm just adding little dots to all those little yellow spaces that I left, this is for the center of the flowers. And then I can proceed to add in each petal. I'm targeting each of these little brown dots and adding in my petals just by dragging my brush. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're looking at the big picture. So even if the smaller details aren't that exact, because I know that it is very hard to see some petals, a little bit bigger, smaller, and it can be a little stressful. But in nature, things aren't exactly perfect. The flowers move around, the petals move around, so you won't see every petal looking exactly the same. Some of it has more shadow, some of it has more movement. So don't worry too much about getting everything to be asymmetrical or perfect. It is a part of nature that we're trying to capture in this painting. Now, mixing in a little bit of gouache with yellow, or if you have acrylic paint with yellow, you can move to a different brush if that's the case, so you don't spoil your watercolor brushes. And I'm just going ahead and adding in more petals with this brighter yellow. You can see how because it's opaque and lighter, it really stands out as well. Continue this process through the entire painting. A And while it's all drying, we're going to use more brown and just make those center of the flowers a bit bigger. These aren't exactly sunflowers, but I do think it looks like sunflowers, a bit more. Allowing the painting to dry for a bit, and you can see how this is coming together. Now we're going to use dark green, and we're going to just add in more leaves and more stems. You can see how this darker green actually makes a yellow pop out even more. Just thin lines is more than enough. And that's why the detailer brush is so helpful for the step. Painting this makes me feel so relaxed. There's something so peaceful about this painting, and you can just repeat it over and over again. And each flower just comes to life by adding in the leaves, adding that little green. Using a scrap paper, I'm going to protect the sky. And then I'm going to use a little splatter of green around the bottom to give it a little bit more texture. We can now remove our scrap paper. And what I'm going to do is paint the horizon line, and I'm going to just work on the mountain a little bit. Maybe we can add in some greenery, some trees off in the distance. I'm so proud of you for getting this far. Good job. Give yourself a little brick after painting this, sip your tea or coffee, and enjoy the rest of your day. Revealing our fields of I would say sunflowers. So I'm gonna be calling this painting sunflower fields. A 32. Day 27 - Lighthouse: Today, we're going to be painting a lighthouse. I think it's a perfect add on for this challenge because it's so important, so fun, so pretty. I'm starting off with my pencil drawing. I want to have a little backdrop, so we have some stones, a little pathway. And then over the ocean, you can see the lighthouse. You can have a look at my initial painting, pause for a bit, so you know how I am just drawing out the different elements. And next I'm going to go into painting the lighthouse, doing a little stand section for it to sit on some rocks and then adding in the lines for it. Now, we're going to add in the little top for the lighthouse where you can look out from. And I'm just adding in a little platform, small little details. You can see the reference image on the side. So this is going to give you a better idea of what I'm drawing. This is important because our lighthouse is the main focus for this painting. In a lot of the other things that we've been doing elements, the house or the windmill is part of the painting, but it's not really the focus here. The lighthouse being this big, it is the main part. And we also want to make sure that we get enough of details. So when we move on, it's easier to paint. Adding in the little windows. And once we've done that, we're ready to get started with our painting. Let's begin with our painting. What we're going to do is use water and paint around our entire lighthouse, painting the section of the sky, the stones, the pathway, the sea, everything except that building because we wanted to remain bright white. A Now that we have preptar painting, let's begin with starting with our sky. For the sky, we're going to go into a bright blue. I just want to have a nice bright sky starting right at the top. And then you know how to do this. We're just going to continue to paint our blue downwards, leaving little gaps of white spaces for the clouds. I'm being very careful to not paint the lighthouse section. Keep adding more blue to deepen up the color a little bit, so it's really bright and vibrant. Now we move into the water part. For the water, I'm just mixing in a little bit of green variant green to the water to get this bluish green color. And that's what we're going to use for the water, the ocean. A Next, we're going to begin painting our pathway. So adding a bright green push at the bottom, a little bit of Bandik brown to deepen the color towards the edge. And then we can use brown or burnt umber to paint the pathway. Using seam burnt umber to paint the stand on which the lighthouse is sitting, the little island. I'm going to switch to the thin brush, and with the thin brush, I'm going to add the ripple lines for the water. So mix in more green with the blue. So we have that bluish green, and we're going to start with thin lines along the horizon and just continuing through the water. We're done with our base, so you can use your dryer and just dry up the entire thing before we proceed to add in more details and continue with our painting. Okay, so our painting is completely dry. You can see how it is coming together, looks very pretty. I love the sky. We're going to start by adding a little bit of green for the bush, adding some spots, giving it more texture. And then we can add our lines for the ocean and especially the area below the rocks, giving it more shadow. I realized midway switching to a thin rush just works better. So mixing more of the blue green and adding in the lines, the water ripple lines, thin lines, and then more shadow. Using the same color or maybe adding in a little bit of Van **** brown. We can paint our rocks. So I'm just doing the outline for the rocks and then painting different faces of it, kind of like we've been doing for all our rocks. As you keep painting rocks, you're going to find it more and more comfortable to paint them. Adding some little rock dots. So they're there, but you don't need to get into too much detail around them, more of the van **** brown to get more of these rocks, adding more color. A little bit more of the brown and the rocks for the pathway as well. You can see how that looks. I really like it. It looks more realistic. It's coming together. And then we can work on the section for our lighthouse, as well. Same techniques. So we're going to have rocks, and then we're going to add more details to the little island. Now for the lighthouse, we're going to start from the left and add in a thin line of blue. This is for the shadow for the lighthouse going all the way to the top. Let's use the same blue to add in the blue for the windows as well. And then we can move on to other details. Something I've been enjoying with this challenge and in general, I think with art is creating sketchbooks with my art. I feel like before, I would be very stressed out in making sure that every page is so pretty, but now I'm trusting the process, and I'm just letting it be. I do have a little bit of perfectionism in me, where I need to make sure that each page looks so artistic and pretty and, you know, like, pin interest worthy. But I'm trying to step away from that. So what I try to do also is add these little projects into my paintings, into my sketchbook. And that's been really fun to see adding it as part of a book that I could then carry on, or I could actually note the day of when I committed to doing this challenge. It's a great way to think about your art practice, a way to track your progress and the way to track how much time you've spent on it, the commitment you've made, and to be proud of yourself for doing that. So what I've done now, I loved everything to dry, and then I'm just going ahead and layering everything up. So with the bushes, taking darker green and just going in circular motion and adding in fluffy bushes, Adding a little darker vandyk brown for the rocks, as well. Maybe a little shadows because I feel like it looks quite dull. So brightening up the color with that as well. And finally, we move on to the lighthouse. So I'm starting with my thin brush and then just going to paint a thin line, adding the outline for the windows for each step. I You can even use a black pen for some of the detailing if you find it hard to use a brush. I kind of like to add a black pen because sometimes I am able to get darker colors and smaller spaces to complete our lighthouse using a bright red for the roof. Okay, so this has come together. For the final step, I wanted to add in some words like we did in our day one. And this is such a good progress to see from that painting to where we are right now. Remote your tape to reveal your final painting for today. I'll see you tomorrow. We have just a few paintings left for our 30 days. And you've come so far. I'm so amazed by our journey together, and we've gone through so many paintings. The paintings are gonna get more and more interesting. The final floor are my favorite, and I've left them to the last because they are so pretty and honestly worth framing or gifting your loved ones. Oh 33. Day 28 - Hydrangea: I really enjoyed painting this hydrangea inspired fence with a little bit of beach and blue skies. The whole painting is very blue, and I like that little flower on the side. I looked at the reference image for a very long time. It's actually been I think I saw it last year, and I've been meaning to paint it for a while. It just never felt like the right moment until I sat with this painting, and I felt like, Yes, today's the day. It's perfect with the challenge. It's perfect with how I'm feeling. It's perfect with the vibe we're going for. So we're starting off with our little fence, and all I'm trying to do is equal distance for the fence. We don't need to go all the way through. So if you get even three or four of them, that's enough. And we're going to do the same thing on the other side for the bar between them that connects them. Having a little triangle for each fence peg. And once we have that, we kind of have the painting the fence is one of the important parts, which is going to make the painting look real. Now, let's use clear water and prep the paper before we start with our painting. A we're now going to use blue along the sky right on top and gently blend it into the paper. We can continue to add in more blue for the water. Using blue, we can add in little dots for the waves for the ocean. I Using brown for the sandy section. And you can see how this is coming around. It doesn't have to be perfect because we're going to have the fence, but we want to have at least a good idea of the spaces of what you can see in between those fence. Now, using blue that I've mixed in with a little bit of van **** brown, so it's more royal blue. I'm going to continue with the Hydranger section. Painting out these different sections, you can use a little bit of the blue directly from the pan, as well, so it deepens up even more. But once it dries, it is going to become more softer, dull down, and that's going to be great for us. Using a scrap paper, I'm going to protect the sky and the ocean part. And we're gonna gently tap up rush to add little splatters of blue for the hydrangers as well. I now have switched to my thinner brush, and we're just going to go into adding in some ripples for the ocean. Quick thin lines from side to side. A let's use a dryer and dry out our painting. We've got a lot of little details. I can't wait to bring it all together. For the next step, what we're going to do is start off with each part. So we work step by step, and this makes it easier instead of trying to attempt everything all at once. Starting off with the horizon line, let's just make that a little darker with our blue, brighten up the colors a little bit more, add in more of the ripple lines for the water, the ocean section. Next, for the sand, we're going to use brown and add little dots for the texture, and then go back to our hydran jars and add more of the blow. What generally happens with paintings like this is we expect to control every little hydranga, especially since it's hydrangs. But hydrangs are bushes of flowers combined together, and they usually grow together. It's very hard to see each flower. So we don't need to get too much of those details. We just want to get the overall picture. So just adding little dots, adding little sections can make it look very realistic without going into each flower. I'm using blue directly from the pan, so you can see how it is much deeper in color. Keep adding in those little dots, those little details so that the flowers look three dimensional and stunning. I like how this is looking. The pop of blue is just perfect for what we're going to do next. Our next focus is mainly on the fence. It's just a small little detail, fairly easy to do, and then we're done with our painting. So you can see how we've broken it down into easy steps, just working on section by section, and that just makes the process a lot more easier, and it kind of reduces the stress over painting something that feels complicated. So now what I'm going to do for the fence is I'm using my Burgundy, which is a mix of the blue and red, crimson and erleium and bringing it together and then adding in white so it's much more lighter in color and using that for the fence, I want it to be opaque, which is why I'm mixing in the white. And to add in some layers, we can just take burgundy directly from the pan and mix that along. The white can be gouache white or acrylic white. And based on that, make sure that you change your brush. If it's going to be acrylic white, use a different brush so that you don't damage your brushes. With Burgundy, I'm just going to add in quick lines, little details to the fence. Make it look realistic. Continue this process, complete all the fence. One at a time. A a As I was recording the voice over for today's, I just realized that we're almost at the end of our challenge. We have three more projects, and then we're done. It's amazing how much we've gone through, and it's amazing how time goes by. 30 days goes by so quickly. 30 projects goes by so quickly if you just stay consistent. Going back to the painting, using Burgundy, I'm adding those little stumps in the middle with Burgundy, so it is a little deeper in color. For the last step, I decided to use my black pen and just add in some more details for the fence. If you want in the sky, you can add in some birds because I feel like it looks a little empty and it might look really nice. Let's cover our fence and the sky with a scrap paper and just add in some splatters for the flows. We're done with our painting, I love everything to dry, and then you can remote the tape from all four sides to reveal our painting for today. I kind of struggled with a name for this, but I do like the idea of hydrangeas because that is the flower we painted. And so our painting for day 27 hydrangeas a 34. Day 29 Beautiful Countryside: Y. We are on the second last project of this entire challenge. And I left the best for the last. So we have one of my top five paintings. It's so pretty. It's a little fence with a beautiful sun view. Such a great project. Definitely a lot of colors and very playful. So I've taken my sheet, and I've taped down all four sides, and using the pencil, I'm marking out my fence. I've added in the reference image on the side, so you can just have a look of where I'm placing it. This is just going to make it very easy as we proceed. Just keep in mind that while we have this reference and we're doing the pencil, we're going to paint over it, so it doesn't have to be perfect. It's just a general idea of where our hills are going to be, so we have enough of space. Now, we're going to take our brush with clear water and just paint the entire page out. And once that's done, let's start right on top with our serodium blue. We're adding in gentle clouds, making the Sky, very dramatic. So this is such a good project, especially after everything that we've been doing for the past 30 days. This is such a good step up because we're slowly building your skills. We've been doing projects like this, and this one, you're going to find it a lot more easier now that you've tried a lot of different skies and a lot of different styles of skies, right? You have more confidence in that, and that's what this whole challenge is about. It's building that little confidence by making it a daily habit. Now, I've taken in orange, and I'm just adding it very gently to the Sky. I'm being really careful that I don't mix the blue and the orange, so I'm not placing the orange on top of it. I'm just keeping it slightly below because blue and orange is going to give you a very muddy color. Now, adding a little bit more orange along the hills, the edge of the hills, being very gentle, so I'm not pressing down too much, not getting too much of color, just mixing more water to it. So it's very soft. And then I'm going to go in with my cadmium yellow, really bright, really vibrant. And paint around the edges. I'm leaving a little portion in the middle for the bright sun. What I'm going to do is take a tissue and dab out the center so it remains white. I want it to look like the sun is so bright that you cannot even see it. And the sky looks very interesting, very happy with that. Now let's continue on to the next part. We're going to work on our hills and other details. So for that, I'm going to be mixing in green. You can use ardian green or mix in a little bit of cadmium yellow, make it a little brighter, especially since it's closer to the sun, so it can be lighter in color. And just add in the colors. While we're at it, we can switch around colors, add in a deeper green midway through. And we're kind of making patches of different greens. So some that's just in green directly from the pan, all mixed in, but all with a little bit of water in them. So they're a little diluted. So once it dries, it's a lot more mellow, and then we can layer up. Adding a little green to the side for our tree. And this is just playing around with color. Mixing a little yellow to the green. And you can see I've got a muddy green color. All of this is there in the color chart that I have added to the about section. So if you have any question about colors, please refer that. It is a PDF that talks about what you can mix to get different types of greens and different shades of the color that I'm using for this challenge in case you haven't. And keep that as a reference. I think it's really great to have in mind anytime you're doing your landscape that you have this reference with you. So you can see how I've done the base. We've got all these colors going. I think it's turned out amazing. We've let it dry for a bit, and now we can go into adding in detailed. The first thing I'm going to do is start right on top for the sky. I'm just taking a little bit more blue, mixing water and adding in another layer on top of the clouds that we just did. Next, I'm going to mix my blue and green and get a deeper green color for the hilltop. I'm gently adding in some shadow, adding in the outline for the hills, maybe some grass and so on. A For the tree, I'm just moving my brush in circles. I think that's such a fun technique that we have gone through in this challenge, and adding little dots so your tree looks more realistic in a way. And then we can add even the tree bark with the dark green. You can switch to your thinner brush if you feel like this is a little bit of a struggle, which I understand. So for smaller details, it's good to switch around your brushes. Next, we can work on our main landscape, the area that's closest to us, adding little dots for grass to show that there's texture, and it's not just flat ground, adding little dots, maybe we can add in some thin lines to show that there's grass. You can switch to your thinner brush, which is also really good idea. I've been really enjoying this challenge, and I think also what I loved is thinking of projects that you guys can learn from. So each has something special or something different, so you're layering up your knowledge as well. And it actually pushed me to try things that I normally wouldn't have like doing the ocean. I've done it with guash, but this was definitely interesting to paint it with the colors that I chose because they're very unique. It was more pastel colors. Even this project, I think doing a sky that has this kind of bright white was very interesting because I've done similar things, but these color choices was really fun. And I'm really enjoying the challenge. I think I'm going to do more of these because I think there's such a great way to just keep 15 minutes of your day for it. And at this point of time, I feel like it's so relaxing doing that. I skipped a head a little bit, and we're going to move into our fence and using dark brown, pandike brown, I'm just painting the two fence. And I made sure that it is very deep and rich in color. You can notice the size or the height of the fence have changed. The one that's closer on the left is longer, and the ones that are further away towards the right are shorter. And then we're going to add in the thin line for the wooden Hold between the two. Since we have grass, I'm just going to leave that space in between and connect it. And just add a line or two maximum for those spaces because there's grass. So I do want to show that the grass is still there, and I'm not going to paint over it because I want to make it look like through the grass, you can see a little bit of the fence. Repeating this same thing on either side. Even though I took dark pan dye brown, I feel like it's still really dull. So I'm going to take more directly from the pan and paint the sections again, paint the wooden areas one more time before proceeding. I think we have just a few steps remaining. We're almost done with the painting. A for the last step, I just wanted to look through the painting and see if there's any small details I need to add in, like adding a little line for the hill, maybe more depth for the trees, a little more grass. We can now cover our sky with a scrap paper and gently tap to add in some splatters around the hill. Oh Oh, I love this. I actually love how good that looks. I didn't expect it to look that great. I was like, Okay, it might add a little bit, but oh, wow. It looks so fun. It just gives such a good texture to the painting. Such a small detail, but I think that was perfect. We needed a little bit of those splatters, those little dots around. What I like to do at this point is add a little darker color, especially along the edges at the bottom side of the painting. It doesn't have to go all around, but we want to just make it more dark because once we remove our masking tape, you're going to see the edges. And so if you can make it a little darker, it just looks better. Now taking my acrylic or gouache paint, we're adding little details along the wood, just a little pop of white. And that's going to be perfect. It's just going to come bring everything together, make it look so great. You're doing so well, I have to say, and if you've done your project, do submit them. I've had a chance to look at a few of the projects, and I love how they've turned out. It's so amazing to see how quickly you guys have progressed and how much y'all have learned. And every time I look at a project, I'm just amazed. Even if you personally feel like you haven't done a good job, I always tell my students to give yourself grace because you're getting into it. You're not an expert. You're not talking about picas and you're learning, and that's the whole point of it. You're learning, you're in progress, and you're love to not get it right every time. Even as instructor or a teacher, I try projects multiple times. Sometimes. It takes me a while. So give yourself the grace to learn to make mistakes. And to not get it perfect, sometimes, according to you, even though probably everyone around you thinks you're amazing, you may not see it, and that's okay. Continue your journey and continue doing it for you. So a little thought from my side because I truly believe that we are much more harder on ourselves than anyone else. So I love how this turned out. Beautiful painting. We have just one more for the 30 days, and that one is my favorite, and I've left my favorite to the end. So I'll see you tomorrow. 35. Day 30 Stunning Poppies: Welcome to Day 30. This project is actually the project that started it all. It started the entire challenge and inspired me to paint something based on nature that has flowers. So I love it. There's something so special about it because it really inspired me to create a whole series. It's also one of the more fun paintings, and I'm so excited to get started with it. Are you ready? Okay, so let's take our paper. We're going to tape down all four sites. We've done this before. We are pros at this point. We know how to do this. And now using a pencil, I'm just marking out my hills. So when we go into the first layer, we know where everything is going. It doesn't need to be too specific, but just a general idea is more than enough. Now let's take our brush with clean water, and we're just going to paint the entire sheet, making sure that we cover all the edges, all the crooks and crannies, all the tiny spaces, and keeping our paper wet and ready for the next step. You can use a bigger brush for this. I just use the same brush because if you've noticed in any of my previous classes or challenges, I kind of stick to two brushes just because I find it easier. I'm not someone who likes shifting around brushes or using ten supplies. I love reducing the stress level and reducing the amount of products I need. I just like to keep it simple because I know that inspires me more than needing all these different brushes and elements. Going back to our painting, I've taken crimson, watered it down, so mixed in a little bit of water, and I'm adding a gentle blend for the sky. Once we have that, which is going to deepen the color because it is going to fade out a little bit. So let's just go in with a little darker layer. We can take in some orange. And you can see how I'm not going back and forth too much. I'm just being very gentle with the colors, making sure that my brush is just very soft, right? I'm not really pressing it down too much. Now I'm mixing in my green with a little bit of the red and giving a very dark green color. I know something that a lot of you are kind of wondering is the greens that I mix. They're very unconventional. It's just mixing around different colours to get them, and it can get a little confusing. Like, right now, I mixed green and basically a red. But don't stress too much about it. Just enjoy the process. And you can look at the color chart. It does give you the different greens. And don't worry if you don't get the exact shade. Try to get the colors and try to get the entire painting. Like, focus on the painting and not the specific colors, if that makes sense. I think as perfectionist, we try to get the exact look, and that may happen or may not happen, but that's okay. Just try to get the feel of the painting. Focus on how you're bringing together the colors and how the overall look is. You know, I think with watercolors, the exact copy doesn't happen because different papers, different mediums, different way of painting. So there will be slight differences. Now, you can see how I've done the different hills, just mixing in different greens and then just painting them out. Now we go to our poppies. What I'm doing is using bright red, a crimson red, and I'm painting out the idea of some flowers. It doesn't have to be too perfect, but we want to get some that are very visible and bold, especially closer to us because they're going to make the painting. They're going to be bright and sm. And then you can add just little dots and little smushes of paint. You can see how I'm doing that. There's no other better way to explain it. Is she just pressing down my brush and adding more of that green. One quick thing is as you move away that is closer to the hilt, we can keep this smaller and closer to us, we can make the elements a little bigger. But it's not a specific rule in this painting. So it's just about adding little dots, couple of buds, basically. I'm trying to imagine different flows. So you have the full flower. You have the side view of the flower because it's moving around. Then you have some buds, and I'm just adding all those details based on that. Now, once we're done with that, we're going to mix in our green. I'm taking verdian green and mixing it with a little bit of crimson. So you get a deeper green color. I don't think I mentioned this in the color color chart. So I'll add it. I'll try to edit it out and add this color mix, as well. Anyways, going back to the painting, you can see how the color is a little darker green. It's more deeper in color. And then I'm just painting around the red spaces. It's okay if you leave little gaps because I don't want the colors to mix. So I'm being really careful and intentional to just paint around those red flowers that I added in. I would say this technique is very similar to what we did for the sunflowers. But with the sunflowers, we really try to create distance. Here, we're just making sure that it's like a field of poppies and that's the focus. It's actually just a different, I would say angle of the painting. Now, mixing in red, a little bit of blue, little bit of green to again, get a very muddy green. So you can see how it's a little darker in color. And I'm just drawing basically trying to paint especially the space below. So I'm making that area a little darker. We can add this little darker color in some of the little spots in between. It's just to give it a little bit more shadow, a little bit more depth. Next, I'm going to use a scrap paper and protect the sky and then added little splatters with the green because I'm not able to do too many of these little dots. So I'm just going to use some splatters Okay, this looks so great. Let's do some splatters with the red as well. I think that's going to be great because we're going to have that pop of little dots of red, and then we can let everything dry up before continuing to the next layer and getting a little bit more of those details. So again, protecting your sheet, just gently tap your brush. You can practice it on a scrap paper to make sure that you're happy with the way it looks and then go back to your painting. You can see how the color is getting a little deeper, little brighter now that I've added this splatter. So we're going to let everything dry to reveal what we have, how the colors have dulled down or how they faded a little bit, and then we're ready to go into layering up. For the flowers, I'm going to work on a couple of the individual flowers so they really stand out. And I was thinking of how I could probably explain the shape that I'm using. I would basically be a Cylinder, a cone, not really. It would actually be a cup shape. So a small ye, sometimes you can add in thin lines along the sides to show additional petals. But we're basically just painting little cups for the side view flowers or basically for the flowers, some little oval shapes for the buds. And then you can see how I'm just adding a couple of buds. We want to make them varying sizes, some that are big, some are small, some are more prominent. Now, continue this process, and I'm adding these little cup shapes, especially in the areas that are added in the red. A a a while all these flowers are going around, we're going to add one that's going to be a focal flower. It's going to pop right out of this field of flowers. And so we're going to keep it right on top. And again, following the same cup shape with a little line on the side. It almost looks like a side pumps up like you're telling a person to go left side, if you think about it. And then little oval shapes for buds. Now, we're going to mix in dark brown. You can use Van **** brown. And I'm gonna use that for just a little bottom of the flowers. I'm also going to use it for maybe the center of some of the flowers, and this makes it a little bit more clear because right now it just looks like lots of splotches. And slowly, we can start connecting them down, bringing the stems down. I'm just going straight with the stems. One of the common things I notice when people paint is that they try to bring the stems maybe sideways to make sure that it all connects. Instead, just bring everything down. Even if there's a flower, you can either paint over the flour or just leave a little bit gap. But you're all trying to get all the stems right down. For some of the buds, because we're doing poppies, you can have them turn around. So you can have them in a little handle U shape like the one I just did now. Where it's not just a straight, but it has a little bit of a curve. You're going to see me do this here as well. This is very signature to poppies. And I think it's one of the distinguishing features for them. So we're going to try to make sure that we show that as well. Again, thin lines, we can start adding in some leaves. And we're just working section by section. Take your time, enjoy this. This is the joy of painting, giving yourself that space to just create Slowly a painting is coming together. When I first started, I would rush this process, and it wouldn't give me the best results. So I started taking it slow, doing one flower at a time, trying to just bring them down, using my thin brush so I can really get those details. You can even use a pen if you're kind of struggling with a brush, it's going to look amazing. Adding couple of those buds that are falling down like a little handle I'm going to protect my paper. And just add in some splatters. Yes, I know I removed my tape, but I might have forgotten to do a couple of steps. It happens. And I wanted to share that with you. I could have recorded the whole thing again, but I wanted to share it with you so you realize that sometimes things happen. It's okay that maybe you skip a step as far as you can go back and work on it a little bit. So I realized that my hilt kind of faded into the background, so I wanted to make it a little bit more obvious by adding some lines. I also connected the main kind of highlight flower. To the bottom. And then I had to look at my painting, even though I removed out my tape to see if I wanted to add in more leaves, some more details, maybe some more buds if I felt like some spaces looked empty. And that's okay because it does happen. I was a bit too quick, and I was like, Yep, I've done my painting, removed the tape, and I was like, Oh, there are areas that are still incomplete. I didn't do the stems for everything, but that's okay. We can always go back and just work on it a little bit. Sometimes I like to step away from my painting and come back and then go like, Oh, okay, maybe I can add this. And it's all about trusting the process and having a little bit more confidence in your work. And there you go. This is our final painting for the 30 day Challenge. I hope you really enjoyed this and really gave yourself credit for completing and getting this far. I'm so proud of you.