Atmospheric Spring Landscapes: Secrets To Create Oomph Factor In Landscape Painting

1. Introduction To Class: Painting landscapes with watercolors can be at times frustrating when you struggle to understand how, where and when to create depth in your paintings or what are the right supplies to begin with, this has been one of the main complaints of all beginner artists. They rush to quickly wanting to create a beautiful final outcome without really understanding the concepts behind achieving them. And trust me, I do have been there. But overtime, taking keen interests and understanding the medium, the concepts involved in landscape painting and consistently practiced them helped me level up my landscapes. Today, I'm here to share with you my tried and tested tips and tricks to perfect your watercolor landscapes enough for the challenge format and help you achieve that wow factor that might be missing from your painting. Hi my creatives, my name is Neil him Roy. I'm a watercolor artist and an art educator based out of Bangalore, India. Over the course of years, I've shared my own learning experiences, tips and tricks in the form of online and offline workshops with fellow art enthusiast joining me for the first time and don't know much about me. I go by the name, address, needs, RC underscore curve on social media such as Instagram, where I share all my daily art practices and experiments. You could also find my presence and other social media networks such as Pinterest, Facebook and YouTube. The link to riches given on my Skillshare profile. Welcome back to my class, atmospheric spring landscape secrets to create womb factor in your watercolor landscapes. In this class, I will be explaining you the concept of atmospheric perspective, why it is important in a landscape painting, and what is the relationship between atmospheric perspective and tonal values. Once you get the hang of this basic fundamentals, we are then going to paint for beautiful spring inspired landscapes. Before we begin with our projects, we will first discuss about the basic supplies needed, planning the projects, watching out colors, and practicing the elemental composition in a thumbnail format. This will help you to be confident and prepared before painting your final project. The glasses curated in a way to benefit artists at all levels. Someone who is looking to build your watercolor landscape skills, then I'm here to help you. I'm very sure that by the end of this four day challenge, you will not only be able to attempt any landscape reference with ease, but will also learn to add depth and textures to create that vow are all factor in your paintings. If you are someone who wants to understand these concepts and level up your watercolor landscapes. Then this class is for you. Join me in the next video where I share a detailed overview of the class. 2. Class Project Overview: Thank you for joining in the class. I'm thrilled to have you here. Let's take a walk through of our class structure. To begin with the class, I will take you through the supplies that we are going to need in detail discussing about the quality of paper difference between artist grade and student grade paints. Russia still have and any other necessary accessories required to complete their projects. Next, I will explain you the concept of atmospheric or aerial perspective and how this effect can be achieved in a landscape painting to render depth and move. I will also walk you through the basic watercolor techniques section where you will broadly learn the foundational watercolor concepts of wet on wet, wet on wet on dry and dry on dry. As a big node, understanding these concepts and applying them are very important to build your watercolor skills. Especially when it comes to controlling the wetness of your paper, paint and brush. I see bigness struggle a lot. So in this technique section, I have got you covered. Now let's discuss about the class projects. The class is set in a four-day challenge format. You could paint all for class projects or just paint your favorite ones from the class, the choices totally up to you. Each day we will be creating a new project, highlighting the key elements of spring, applying basic watercolor techniques along with atmospheric perspective. Day one is going to be all about painting bright blue clear skies with fluffy clouds, lush green valleys, and a stream flowing in between them. The perfect onset of spring. Before we start on with our projects, we will do a quick color palette study and learn to mix colors if it is not present with us. Next, we will be going ahead and practicing the techniques so that you are confident to start on with your main project. They do is going to be about painting beautiful, vibrant sunset sky with dandelion fields. We will learn to create depth and texture into our models by applying salt and splattering technique. Similarly, D3 is going to be painting a misty morning seen at a daisy me do with butterflies strong enough to pollinate. This is one of my favorite projects from the entire class. I really loved how these daisies have turned out. Here. We're going to focus on painting whites with watercolor without using our white watercolor paint. The four is going to be all about painting this dreamy sunset along with lavender fields here we're going to incorporate a little bit of linear perspective along with atmospheric perspective to give the painting its depth and definition. Are you excited to paint along with me this beautiful spring landscapes? If yes, then do join the class and meet me at the next lesson where I will be describing more in details about what are the right kind of supplies that you should be using to create your projects. 3. About Supplies: Hi. Before we begin with the class projects, let me quickly take you through all the supplies that we're going to need for creating our projects. First things first, let's quickly take a look at the kind of people that we will be requiring for our class. The watercolor paper that I'm going to use for this class is from the brand Saunders Waterford series. They are from cent could put mills paper. Now this particular waterfall series is their premium acquittal paper. Here are some other details which are clearly mentioned on the paper, e.g. the texture of the paper which is cold pressed, not green, fine color of the paper which is white, blank, natural. And here are the dimensions of the paper, which is ten into seven inch and archival, great quality, acid free, machine dried, cold pressed and 100% cotton watercolor paper. Now, this is how the texture of my grain fine watercolor paper looks like. Now, if you want, you can always size your sheets according to the size that you want to paint on. If you want, you can cut the sheets into this sizes. Now, especially if you are using some loose sheets and you have a large chunk of paper, you can clearly cut them into your preferable sizes and paint on. For our class, I'm going to use this full size of my paper, which is ten into seven inch. That is this size which is roughly close to an A4 size, but there is no pressure. Feel free to use whatever size is suitable for you. Now whenever you are purchasing or buying your watercolor paper, always make sure that your watercolor paper is 100% cotton and at least 300 GSM as the thickness of the paper. This sketchbook that I will be using for swatching colors and the techniques creating the thumbnails is also made up from 100% cotton, 300 GSM watercolor paper. This sketchbook is also made from Saunders Waterford paper. Ideally, it is recommended that whatever paper that you are going to use to create your final project, that same very paper you should use to practice your techniques beforehand so that you get the feel of your paper while practicing the techniques and know how the paper is going to react to your water and paint. Now, in case if you're not having a sketchbook handy with you and you do not want to waste your good watercolor paper on swatching out your colors. And the alternative to this is having this cheaper grade watercolor paper. It need not be PER hundred percent cotton paper because you are just going to test out your colors. You can cut this kind of thin strips of paper and test your colors before you go ahead and create your final painting. Now that we have known a lot about a paper and what kind of paper we should choose. Let's take a look at the colors. The colors that I'm going to use for this class is from the branch and an art supplies PwC watercolor range. This is a premium professional watercolor range from the brand. If you have taken my other Skillshare classes, you would know how much I love this brand because the colors are so highly pigmented and give such beautiful vibrant finish even after drying, the paintings look absolutely spectacular. One of the major difference that you would notice between artists grade supply and a student grade paint is though, final outcome of the painting after it dries. Student grade paints are generally made up of lots of fillers and gives the appearance of a chalky finish when it dries. So if in the lessons to follow, your results do not match to mind, Do not be frustrated. It may be because you are using a student grade paint, which has lots of fillers and hence the vibrancy of the paint goes dull after the paper dries. So my advice to you would be to make your watercolor learning journey to be easier and smoother and less frustrating. Always try to invest in basic good-quality watercolor supplies and that way your journey will be much less frustrating. Now the next apply that we're going to talk about is our brushes. So these are the brushes that I'm going to use for our class. Don't get scared. I won't be using all of these brushes, but to be exact, only these few brushes I'm going to use throughout our projects. The brushes that you see here, a mix of natural or synthetic and natural limitation brushes. Let's take a look at the functionality of each of these brushes. The first one is from Princeton Heritage Series. Now this is a synthetic brush which is of size number three. This brush has a very nice pointed tip, which when it comes to a very nice sharp pointy tip, I will be using this brush for a lot of detailing into our paintings or where I need to create fine lines are thinner lines. I will be using this brush. So let's take a look at our next brush, which is this white brush. This brush is from Silver Atelier quill mop brush of size number 20. The Brazils of this brush is made up of gold hair, which is a natural hair bristles. And that is the reason the brush is so soft and holds lots of paint and water. I love this brush because it has made my life so much easier when it comes to blending colors wet on wet. So it's a very good idea to have a natural hair brush in your watercolor brush collection. Next, I'll be using this round brushes from my absolute favorite, silver black velvet. Three triple zero as series. So I'll be using my size number six and size number eight round brushes. The next brush that I'm going to use is this brush from Princeton velvet series. This is also a synthetic soft brush. This is a full word, greener brush, a speciality brush. See the complex shape. The complex tips help you to achieve different kinds of texture, especially when you are wanting to paint some loose grasses nanometers. This brush comes in really handy, serves the purpose of your regular fan brush or to create some textured animal hair. The next bruce that you would need is a square wash brush. You could use square wash brush or a Hake brush. Now, here are some other alternative brushes that it's good to have in your collection. But let's take a look in more details about this square wash brush from Princeton Neptune series. This wash brush is from squiggly limitation series. It's very soft and mimics the abilities of natural hair brushes. Apart from this, you have this angle shader brush from Princeton Aqua light series. This is also a very soft brush. Now, this is particularly useful when you want to go with some inclined or slanted strokes. This brush will come in really handy when you want to lift-off colors in a very angled stroke or the same angle shader brush. You can have it in a smaller size, which is three by eight size. Now, this is a synthetic version from Princeton velvet does series. Now, these are some additional brushes that you can have for creating the angle of incline strokes. Either you can have this flat brush or your angle shader brushes. Now the next brush is this liner rigger brush from Scheme money, our Fibonacci series. This has been my recent favorite. One of the main advantage of rigger liner brush is this long pointed tip that you can see. It helps you to create very long pointy strokes. So this is an optional brush. You need not have all these brushes, just your regular sized round brush of size number one or two would do the job of going with some fine thinner lines. If you do not have a liner rigger brush, do not worry, but it is good to have different kinds of brushes in your brush collection. I'm a hoarder or brushes and love hoarding different kinds of brushes. Moving on to our next up play, which is having two jars of water. One should be clean jar of water and the other jar should be with the orange water from your brushes. Next would be your tissue paper or your tissue travels. Keep them always handy by hillside. Whenever you are going for watercolor paintings, this is an important asset for you all and I almost forgot talking about this important supply, which is your masking fluid. This is from Leo Frank bar guys. This masking fluid is particularly odorless. The use of this masking fluid is to preserve whitespaces when you are painting tricky subjects with backgrounds where you use lots of colors. This masking fluid comes in real handy and we will be using this to paint our project three. You will also need masking tape to tape down your paper on all four sides. Now instead of masking tape, you could also go ahead and use your washi tape. Now if you're using loose sheet of paper, you might want to tape down your paper on a non-absorbing surface such as acrylic sheet board. To create preliminary outline of pencil sketching, you would require this pencil. The pencil that I'm using here is a mechanical pins in using 0.3 MM HB lead, then eraser, this is a normal eraser. There is another kind of eraser which is known as kneading eraser, which looks like a dough. Literally you can need it like a doe. This kneading eraser you can use to lift off any excess graphite marks from your papers simply by just going over the paper surface. This is really, really handy. Next would be your scale or a ruler. If you are someone who is not very confident drawing a straight line with free hand, then you can always take the help of your ruler. I think we have pretty much discussed about all the supplies that we're going to need for creating our projects, except one, which is our palate. The palette that I'm using here is a 42 wealth palette and it is made up of polycarbonate plastic. And you can see I've arranged my colors ranging from pinks, reds, yellows, greens, reds and blues, browns and blacks and some pieces shades already on my palette. So this palette is a 42 weld palette, but it is not necessary to, for you to have such bigger pallets. You could go for smaller balance the plastic pallets of 12 or 24 wells totally up to you. This is from Shanahan Art palate. Now, instead of this kind of plastic or polycarbonate ballots, you could also go ahead with the ceramic palette, something like this. And main advantage of using this palaces. It does not leave stain after you wash them. Now you can see on this ceramic palette, I have some salt captain here. Some are bigger particle, rounded, bigger rock salt particles, and some are this table salt, which is fine particles. We are going to use this to create textures. These where the overall list of materials that we are going to need see you at the next lesson. 4. Understanding Aerial Prespective: Let's now take a look at what is atmospheric perspective and how does it affect our landscape painting? Atmospheric perspective, also known as aerial perspective, refers to the effect atmosphere has on appearance of objects. When you look at them from a distance, you'll see objects further back into the distance less clearly and they're colored changes in value saturation and hue. This creates a greater illusion of depth and distance and helps to establish the mood and feeling to your landscapes. For an artist to create the feeling of depth and distance, you can use two types of perspective, that is atmospherical linear perspective. Linear perspective refers to how distance affects the shape of things and makes the objects appear smaller as they recede into the distance. Whereas atmospheric perspective refers to how the atmosphere affects the color of things we see. Let's take a look at this example. You can see that the hills further into the distance become progressively lighter and lighter in color as compared to the ones which are in the foreground. Okay, so now let's understand the science behind why this fading of objects at a distance happened. Now Let's understand this with the help of this example. So when we look at objects between us and the object are the presence of millions of particles suspended. This particles are generally the water vapor, moisture, dust particles and pollutants. So the light scatters from this particles, and the more scattering effect from this particles is, the more hazier the objects in the distance appears to us. And because blue and violet light is scattered more than other wavelengths, objects further away appear to be in these colors, then objects closer to the viewer. Now that we have known about what and why of atmospheric perspective, let's come to now, how can we achieve atmospheric perspective in a painting? We can mimic the effect of atmospheric perspective by using Greer and more neutral colors in the distance. By mixing more blues into those objects which are further away and to the objects which are close to the foreground, we can keep the value contrast higher. So that was all about atmospheric perspective. Now, join me in the next lesson where we will talk more in detail about the relationship between aerial perspective and tonal values and how you can alter the tonal values of your color to create depth in your paintings. 5. What is Tonal Value and Why It's Important?: Since you have been hearing me talk a lot about tone and tonal value, Let's now discuss what exactly is tonal value. Tonal value describes how light or dark a color is independent of its huge cubing, the colour appearance, e.g. red, blue, green, valid, et cetera. As an artist, out of all the factors that you need to take into consideration, judging tone and value isn't essential part in evaluating, assessing whether your painting style is loose, bloody, or detailed and precise. If the relative tones in your scene are true, you can produce a believable sense of space, light, and form. As an artist, you should be able to recognize by the different values of light and dark of a color in watercolors, it is very important to assess first the tonal graduations of the reference or the scene that you are going to paint. Because the transparency of watercolor means you need to make evaluations about the tone at the beginning of the painting process. Because with watercolors, once you give a form a certain value, it is impossible to make it lighter. And this is the reason why in watercolor paintings were reserved the white areas of the paper for the lightest tones in our scene. So what do we mean by tonal value scale? This is a system to organize a values ranging from black to white. As you can see, I'm layering the intense tone that my black can have using a very controlled amount of water in my brush and reactivating my paint. So this is the darkest my black can go. Now I'm going to lift this black and form an original colorful mix to this original colorful mix, I'm going to add a drop of water and mix it thoroughly. So this, I'm going to now lay down on my paper. As you can see, it has toned down a bit. It has gotten a shade lighter. Now, I will go ahead and wash my brush and add again a drop of water to the same existing colorful mix. I'll mix it thoroughly and now I'm going to lay it on my paper. You can see it has ten down, even more. I will keep on repeating the same process until I have a color which is almost close to the people, right? If you're a beginner and you are just starting out with watercolors, I would highly recommend you that you do or tonal value study of all your existing primary colors and secondary colors to get the feel of the range that you're color can go for doing this exercise, it will be extremely beneficial because it is important to think of value first when beginning a painting. Because without clear, light and dark values, you are painting will not work no matter how beautiful your colors are. So here we have our nine step value scale describing values changing from black to white. For my Payne's gray, this is the range that is possible for my color to sway from the darkest, intense tone to the lightest, almost like people right? Now let's get to know about the terms that is used to describe this values. Please do refer to the numbering system that you see on the screen and not what I have written on the paper because I have written in the reverse order where I've started one from the black and nine being my highlight or draw white. So that is not how you're numbering should be. Your numbering should be starting from the darkest tone being the ninth. As you can see, this nine variations in tone are very easy to observe with our naked eye. And it helps us to analyze and break down any scene that we would want to translate into a painting using this tonal value range. Now, let's compare my permanent violet against this Payne's gray and see if it. Goes full range. It's a good idea to practice making your own watercolor value scale because it helps you to learn the proportion of water needed to create lightness or darkness for any one color. And we can also use this chart for our future reference to evaluate the values that we want to paint for a painting. So here I am practicing my watercolor value scale for my permanent violet. This is the color that we will be using in our upcoming projects. Hence, it will be a good idea to start with the value scale practices, to know water, the color tones that I will be using to paint a particular element from our references. And here too, we observe that even a permanent violet gives us the full range value of nine to one. Here one thing that you must remember is that not all colors will give you this full value scale of nine. Some colors are less saturated and a lighter. So in those cases you will have shorter value scale. Hence, it is a good idea that you go ahead and create or practice this tonal value study of all the colors that you own. Doing so, you would be aware of value scale that your color is having, and hence, you can plan your paintings accordingly. Now let's take a look at a classic example of how we can create depth by controlling the tonal value. So here we are going to create an exercise of a simplified scene of a range of mountains. And we will illustrate the right and the wrong way to use values to generate the appearance of depth. Now let's take a look at our very first example in which I'm going to create a range of mountains which are in a distance. And for them to be in the distance, they have to be in the lighter tone, the same principle that we have already seen in the atmospheric perspective rate. Once I'm done applying my lighter tone, now, I'll be going ahead and using my darker tonal value and create this Mountains in the foreground. Now let's take a look at a second scenario where I'm going to reverse the situation. I'm going to start with the darkest mountains in the background. And then we'll paint the lighter ones at the foreground. So here's what happens when the distinct mountains are painted in the darker shade, they'd jump out at you and the perception of depth. So confused rate. So the first scenario is the right way to illustrate the depth in your paintings. 6. Basic Watercolor Techniques: Part 1: Before we jump start our projects, Let's quickly take you through the basic fundamental watercolor techniques. Here in this lesson, I will walk you through the Broad, fundamental watercolor techniques which we will be using in this class. Wet-on-wet means applying wet paint over your wet paper surface. So let's take a look how we can do this. I will begin with first dipping my paintbrush in water and using this watery paint brush, I'm going to layer my paper with uniform even coat of water. I'll go over my people sofas as many times as required with my wet brush so that my paper stays wet for a longer period of time. Now, with the help of my **** brush, I'm going to go and reactivate my dry paint, making it damp or wet. As soon as my brush loaded with paint touches the wet paper surface, the paint starts spreading beautifully on the wet paper surface, or wet on wet technique painting results and very soft, wonderful and spontaneous effects in watercolors. And hence, this is one of my most go-to watercolor technique. Now let's take a look at this again. Technique, which is a very important technique, which is controlled wet on wet, wet on dry technique. Here we will be controlling the amount of water which is there on a paper, paint, as well as on brush, which is going to have a big impact on how the watercolor behavior is when painted with this method. Here in this first example, you see there is an uneven layering of water, too much of water on my paper. You can see water flowing through my paper, creating pools are puddles. Now the next step is to load my brush with paint. The brush tip is full of water. So using this watery paint, when I drop it on the wet paper surface, you'll see the paint is flowing on the wet paper areas uncontrollably. Do you see that the paint is flowing without any control on the wet paper surface giving you less control over the way the paint is behaving on the paper. This is not the correct way to go for when we want to exercise control over the wetness of our paint as well as offer paper. This will give you a very messy outcomes, especially when you are going and painting skies or any other backgrounds where little details that are involved. Now let's take a look at this second example where I will be exercising control on the amount of water that I'm layering on my paper. When your paper is perfectly coated with water, you will observe this reflective Shean when held against light. This is the indication that your paper is perfectly coated. Another way to remove excess water from the paper is still damp your brush, dry on tissue paper, tissue towel, and just go over those areas again. This will ensure that your paper is just optimally wet. Now go and exercise water control on the paint. See here, the water that I have on my brush tip is very minimum, just so perfect that to reactivate my paint, I will start spreading it across my wet paper surface like this. And you can see how beautifully it spreads. Now, observe here this loaded paintbrush when I agrees it on the dry part of my paper surface, I am obtaining this dry brush strokes, but the very same when I use it on a painting on my wet background, you will notice that you will be able to smoothly, without any introduction of bleeds are blooms when there is too much of water on the tip of your brush. What I mean to say is here, you will be exercising control on how the paint is going to behave on your wet paper surface, thereby giving you the full autonomy of controlling the wetness of your paint on your wet background. This is the technique which almost all beginners fail to understand and control the amount of water that they have on the paper paint as well as on their brush. Now here in this example, if I had my brush tip loaded with too much of water, I would have introduced unnecessary bleeding into the tree-like shapes that I was doing on the wet background. And hence the shape of the tree which looks so fine and integrate and yet soft into the distance would or wouldn't have been. So if there were bleeding and they're very fuzzy edges to it, once, you know, to control the amount of water that is there on your paper paint as well as on your brush and make it exactly do what we want to do. You will easily be able to master the wet-on-wet technique and create beautiful, stunning results. Let me show you here another example of how you can exercise water control on your paint and your brush to create a smooth, well blended, dramatic sky. Going ahead and layering my paper with an even coat of water, making sure there is no uneven standing or pooling of water on the paper surface. The brush that I'm using here to let the water on my paper is soft quill mop brush, which is made out of goat hair. Now, this brush will tend to hold more water and paint and to create water control when you are going to go on a limited area or the smallest surface area, it is recommended that you go for a smaller size brush, e.g. here I have switched my to my size number eight brush and look at the amount of water that I have in my brush. Every time that I will wash my brush, I will debit to dry on tissue, paper, tissue travel, and Lord the paint on my brush. Now when I load, I see there is too much of water. I will dab it on the tissue paper. And here you can see that I have exercised water control on the amount of water that was there in the paint. Understanding to control the amount of water in your paint, paper and your brush comes only with practice. So do not forget to keep practicing these techniques prior to start of your project because this will give you an overall idea of how you can control the wetness and find the right balance while painting. Now, observe your, how I'm playing around with my tonal values. Here at the left corner, I'm going ahead with a very light tonal value. Here. I have used my blue gray mix. Now towards the right, I will confine with the darker tones that I'm using of the colors. And now to create the shape of the clouds. Observe, I have not watched or loaded the paint with water. I am just using my damp brush and picking up the color and loading it on the paper, creating the shape of the clouds that I want here. If you do not exercise water control and use too watery paint mix to paint clouds over here, you would get feathering or blended edges to your clouds, which would have been difficult to control when your paper is wet and your paint mixes too watery. So in that way, yard shape of the clouds wouldn't have stayed when the paper dried out. You can play around with the shape of the clouds as long as your paper is wet once your paper starts drying out, e.g. here at this bottom section, the paper has already started to dry out. You will see if you start letting the paint, the paint is not going to smoothly blend into the background. Here. You must stop and not go any further. So this is why understanding the wetness of your paper and your brush is very important when going with wet on wet technique. Now let's take a look at the next technique, which is us flattering technique and see how water control over here also plays an important role. Here too. As you can observe, I'm going with wet-on-wet technique and creating a background. Now, once I'm happy and satisfied with the background, I will be going and washing my brush and using the wash brush. I will be just tapping the brush on this wet paper surface and you will see that you are getting blooms on your paper. So this creates a very beautiful dreamy texture. But since I have used your bigger brush here, I got bigger blooms. Now when you switch to a smaller size, brush size number six over here, and exercise water controlled by dabbing it on paper. You see you would get smaller blooms. 7. Basic Watercolor Techniques: Part 2: Now let's take a look at the next technique, which is also an example of wet-on-wet technique. But here we will be creating texture using salt. Here too, I will be showing you how the salt texture will vary when your paper is having too much of water or when you have too much of watery paint mix on loaded on your paper. I'm here now dropping the salt on this patch of wet paper that I have. Now I will let it dry. And in the next example, I will be showing you though, controlled way of creating this salt texture by controlling the amount of water that you have on your paper as well as on the paint. For the second example, I'm going ahead and creating a wet background, but I see that my brushes already having too much of water. So what I will do is I will try to squeeze out that extra water by squeezing the water out from the bristles of the brush. Now, with that wet brush, I will load the brush again with paint and smear it on the paper going to and fro from top to bottom. This way, I have created a very controlled background wash. Now I will be going and splattering the salt. Now, wait for the solid to dry up. And then we will compare the results between both of this technique. While we wait for a paper to dry, let's take a look at the next technique, which is wet-on-dry technique. As the name suggest, here we will be sharing our wet paint over dry paper surface. In this case, a lack of moisture on the surface means that your paint won't be able to bleed into other areas, which will allow you to paint with more detail and create more heavily saturated colors. Here I will be outlining my flower petal. So the outline that I have created is on the dry paper and you can see how saturated the color looks like. Now, when I start filling the shape of the petal and I use a little bit more watery paint here. You'll see I have achieved to obtain that smooth, well blended edges inside the petal. As you can see, wet-on-dry allows us to obtain more detail and sharper edges and well-defined shapes, e.g. this flower petal, which I have created using this technique, the paper has dried and you can clearly make out the difference between the salt textures where we had no control on the water. There we have produce larger splattered blooms of this salt, which looks well blended because it has started to dissolve in the very wet background. But wearables, the one which had water control limit has more defined crisp edges. Now let's take a look at the next technique, which is a lifting technique. Lifting technique essentially means removing the wet paint when the background is still wet. To do this technique, you would need clean damp brush where you have to exercise what are controlled by dabbing it on tissue paper and then apply pressure to lift the paint from the dam surface. You can lift the paint and expose though underneath white of the paper only when the background is wet. Lifting technique is also dependent whether the color that you are lifting is a staining or a non staining pigment staining pigments are generally hard to lift from the wet paper surface. It will not expose the complete white of your people. Let me show you this with the help of an example. Generally, all blues are very highly staining pigments. Here I have my Prussian blue and now I will try to lift it using my damp brush. When I tried to lift off this glue paint, Did you see that? I was not able to lift the paint completely of the people. There is still that undertone of blue visible. So this is the difference between lifting technique, between staining and non staining pigment. Now that our paper has dried. Now you can see up close the texture that you received when there was water control, but that's all texture and where there was no control of water, can you see the bleeds that we have got? It doesn't even look like that. We have splattered salt over there. So this is not the right way of doing so. This is almost similar to that of the blooms that we have received on the paper when we had used too much of water. And hence now you see how important water control is. Oh, I almost forgot to show you who are very last technique which is dry on dry technique. This technique means you are going to use dry paint over your dry paper surface, thereby obtaining very dry brush marks on your paper. See here, I have this **** dry brush. I'm going to try to lift the paint over here, but since the paint has no water to it, I will not be able to load my brush. For this reason, I will have to dip the tip of my brush and reactivate the paint with little amount of water in it. Now, before I go and load it on my paper, I will use the tissue paper, tissue, towel and dab it nicely so that all that extra water is absorbed. Now you see we are getting this dry brush marks on the paper. So this brush marks can create a lot of textures based on which object or element you are painting, e.g. you can create this dry brush marks on the bark or stems of the tree to create some textures. Or you can create the textures on the mountains as well. So these are the broad overall techniques that we are going to use unimplemented to create our projects. 8. Plan Of Action : Before we get started with our painting, Let's first try to break down our reference and simplify it. First, we will begin by determining the horizon line of our reference. So you can see here, somewhere around here is my horizon line, where both sides of the valley mountains are merging. And then you have your distant background. Here is your reference of the horizon line. Now let's begin by marking our lightest and the shadow parts. So your tours my right is the area of the mountains which is under the shadows. And you can see towards the distant background is the idea of the mountains, which is very brightly lit, but it's very faded out. Here comes our aerial perspective in play. Here is the illusion of distance using different tonal values. You can see here, right? Because of the sky, it is faded out in the distance, so it is having that bluish gray color. Now towards your foreground, you can see the colors are becoming more brighter and greener. It is the brightest area where it is receiving maximum of light, right? So these are the areas which is directly under the influence of sun. Can you notice the cross mark that I have created? So this is the part that I'm going to eliminate from our landscape. I'm not going to complicate this subject. We're adding those for the more details. So when you turn this painting into grayscale, you would be able to see the tonal contrast of colors over your and plan your tonal values of each of the colors. Once you have this gets simplified and your tonal values done right? The next is to plan your techniques. Join me in the next lesson where I'll be sketching out this reference. 9. Day 1: Color Palette: Before we begin our project, let's take a look at the color palette. The first color that I'm going to swatch is the sky color. This is Taylor Blue, a warmer blue, yellow, blue, red shade I'm using. Instead of this, you could also substitute it with cobalt blue or ultramarine blue. The choice is totally up to you. For this background mountains, I'm going to create a grayish tone of blue by mixing my tailor blue along with some brown. So here I am using my brown red. But you could also use your Bunsen burner or burnt sienna and create the same. This is how I'm going to use. Now. I have already a blue gray color, which is nothing but a mixture of my cool blue along with white. So when you use white, you turn your color into opaque color rate a paste, it'll shade your form. So that is what my blue-gray is all about. It's a pistol shade with that blue grave and you mix your reddish brown, you get this bluish gray color. Next is my leaf green color. Now, leave green color is already available with me. It's yellowish green color. Now, if this is not available with you, here is the alternative you can mix and your lemon yellow, I have my lemon yellow, which has the pigment BY A21, but your lemon yellow might have a different pigment. So check out your pigment information labeled on your tubes and pans. This lemon yellow, I'll be mixing with my green here, the green that I'm using, sap green. You could use any green which is available with you. Try to create a color combination which will resemble very close to my leaf green shade or any yellowish green that you might formulate with your colors. Next album, swatching out my burnt sienna or burnt sienna. When you add an indigo or any darker shade of blue or even Payne's gray or black, you turn it into a darker shade of brown. Witches CPR. 11. Day 1: Onset of Spring- Sky & Mountain: Welcome to day one project. Let's get started with the sky. For this guy, I'm going to go with wet-on-wet technique to layer your paper with a flat wash of water. You may either go ahead and do so using a mop brush, ora hake brush. The advantage of using a mop brushes that the tip of the brush would allow you to reach for this kind of curves or crevices that you have outlined on your paper. So I'm quite comfortable with using these brushes because I is more brushes for layering flat wash on my papers, especially when I have such kind of mountains or any areas where I need to go around the tricky shapes where it might be difficult to going around with a flat brush when coating your paper with water, always ensure that you are going ahead with an uniform code of layering. As you can see here, my paper is uniformly coated with water. Always make sure that there are no pools, are puddles of water getting accumulated on your paper because that would result into a very uneven layering of color on the paper. So always try to move across the brush uniformly on your paper surface to reactivate my paint, I'm using my spray bottle. This is a very effective way to reactivate your paint, ensuring that you do not have too much of water. As you can see, my paint mix here was little dry, so I added in just a drop of water. Now using the tip of my mop brush, I'm layering my paint pigment onto my paper. Here. I'm going to leave out some vital spaces in between to denote the fluffy white clouds onto a bright sky. To create the movement of clouds, always ensure that you are going with very free handedly or loose strokes. As you can see, I have held my brush very loosely over your and with just the tip of my brush, I'm moving around the colors on my paper. Your brushstrokes need to be fluid to have this very softer looking clouds. I'm going to switch to my size number eight brush and try to give some shape to those clouds, especially those white clouds. And you can see the bleeds happening over there. So I'm just going to use my damp brush and lift out those colors from there, creating some shape to the clouds. When lifting off the colors from your people, always make sure that every time you lift the colors of you are cleaning your brush, washing your rinsing your brush into water, and dabbing it damp onto your tissue, paper, tissue towels so that all the lifted colors are removed from your brush. While you are added, ensure that whenever you are lifting out the colors, especially for clouds, be very soft and try to do it very loosely because the more soft and loose strokes your brush will be creating more of a spear and softer, the clouds are going to look. If you create too much of pressure, you are going to create very hard lines, which really doesn't look pleasant at all. So I always prefer to go with very loose strokes and do this when the paper is still wet enough for me to do so. To create some depth into my clouds. I'm going and wetting around these areas with a very damp brush. I have used my mop brush and with my mother, silver black velvet size number eight brush. I'm going with very light tonal value of my indigo mixed with little bit of burnt sienna to create some smoother edges. I'm going with the tip of my damp mop brush and blending those indigo mix very light handedly, but retaining the shape of the clouds as well. This will give us the depth that we want in our clouds. To ensure that whenever you are trying to create depth and not produce any hard edges, make sure that whenever you are going and letting your colors use a very lighter tonal value, and then use the dam tip of your brush. But remember that your tape should not be loaded with too much of water. Let me show you here another cool trick that is by using our damp tissue paper, you can create this beautiful fluffy clouds. The trick is, use the dam tip of the tissue paper and dab it very soft handedly lifting of the colors from your paper. This will work only when the paper is wet. Now, if you're wondering why I have used this damp tissue, the reason being generally when we use your dry tissue, it creates a very hard edges to your clouds. And that's my personal preference that I do not like those hard edges. That is why I have devised this technique. Now, moving on to our background element, which is this background mountain. For that, I will be creating my blue gray shade that we have already seen in our color palette section. For the color mix, I have used one part of my cool blue consisting of pigment BB 15 plus one part of my white Titanium white to say PW 6.1 part of my burnt sienna, which consists of the pigment BBR seven or VR1 01. Using the pointed tip of my size number eight, silver black velvet brush, I'm going with the outline of the mountain. This is the first step. The same thing which we have seen in the technique section. I hope you guys have practiced it. Once I'm done with the outline of my mountain, the next step is to use the wet on dry technique and create this semi dry brush stroke patterns as well. So you need to have an optimum consistency of your paint. I'm going here with very loose strokes. And you can see with just the tip of my brush, I'm creating some dry brush lines marking the ridges of the mountains. Here. It's not necessary to make the mountain to detail because this is at a distance and it's quite blurred out when you see it from the foreground. So too much of detailing into the mountains is not required. A little basic is just sufficient to create that rough texture on the mountains. I'm going here with dry on dry technique using my very dry brush with my damp color and I'm just grazing my brush tip along the paper, you can see those drivers patterns. You're applying the principle of atmospheric perspective where all the objects which are near to the horizon at a distance will always tend to replicate the color from it. Nearby surroundings here are sky, is this beautiful, soft blue, so you're at a distance, the colors will get replicated because of the scattering effect of light. And hence, the resulting color that our eyes perceive will be into that bluish gray mixed tone. So one of the critical step out here is that when you are letting this blue over that blue gray mix, which is our base layer, ensure that you are going with an optimum water control in your paint, as well as on your brush as well, because too much of watery paint will make the paper wet. And hence, when you start layering this blue onto that gray, you might be lifting off the base layer as well. So exercising water control on your paint as well as on your brush when going with this wet on dry technique. To create the texture on the mountains will give you an added advantage, where you can use the tip of your brush to create some broader and dry brush patterns at the same time. Now, I will be creating a watery paint mix to create some broader strokes are lines on my mountains. Now with just the tip of my brush, I'm going to go with very free and loose random strokes, but I will be going with unidirectional strokes where the slope of my mountain is. To create a more realistic backdrop, we are going to create Dull or a muted green mix by mixing my sap green with that of my blue gray mix, which we have already created for creating the textures on our mountains. I'm just going to go ahead and mix my green into that blue gray mix. Mix little bit of your burnt sienna into it and create this duller green. If you have observed the color mix that I have created on my palette is not too watery. Now I'm loading the tip of my brush and sharing that I dab off the extra water that might be present on my brush, on my tissue paper. And just go with those free strokes using just the tip of my brush. But here the strokes that I'm creating is in-between those white gaps that we have left. Just go ahead and fill it in random position, but do not cover the entirety of that blue gray mix. Confined this green and strokes only towards the foot of my left mountain, as you can see here. So this would indicate that the glaciers at some part has starting to melt. Once you have completed the spot, take a break and I will meet you at the next section where we are going to bend greener valleys. 12. Day 1: Onset of Spring: Green Valley's & Meadow : I hope you are refreshed enough to start back. I'm starting with a value which is towards the right. And this is the reference. As you can notice in the reference, a portion of that right side valley is into the shadows. And hence, I have used this muted tone of bluish green mix, but this is a very dull kind of green. I have mixed little bit of brown, little bit of green and blue into this mix to create this color. Going ahead with very, very medium tonal value of this green, you can see it's not too dark. And in between, I'm going to go and fill with some indigo strokes, leaving certain gaps in-between. I'll rinse my brush and I load my brush with that of leaf green, which is yellowish green. And just the layer it from the top, dragging it down below, something like that in-between, I will go and start filling with some strokes of my indigo. This will indicate the darker shadow parts, which is towards the ground level. Now I'll be starting with the mountain. Towards the left. I have started from the base using sap green, filling in tough and keeping the top unfilled. Now, I'll load my brush with that leaf green and try to blend both the greens together, but ensuring that I do not use too much of sap green and bring it up into that leave green towards the top. Now, if you're wondering why it is, because this top part is the area where the sundries or directly hitting upon. So this is the area where the maximum light is getting reflected. And hence, we have denoted it by using our light yellowish green color. Now to add in more characteristic feature to this mountain, I'm going and adding in some loose brush strokes with my burnt umber. This will indicate the presence of scattered rocks and pebbles. Here at this point I feel there should be some more light green apart. So I'm using my damp brush and light handedly lifting off those darker greens. When I lifted off the greens, I had also lifted off the brown pebbles that we had created. My paper is still wet at this point. So using my synthetic brush and controlled wet-on-wet technique, I'm going to layer this dots of browns of varying shapes and sizes towards the base of this foothills. Now to create a very soft and well blended look, it is necessary that you do this step when your paper is still wet enough. It should not be completely dry or else you will get, you notice rocks and pebbles standing out very prominently. Using my same synthetic Princeton round brush size number two, I'm going to start creating some bindings into these mountains. Observed my brushstrokes here, I'm creating a fatter belly and pointed tip indicating the shape of the tree. Now, this step is totally optional. If you are happy with how your mountains are looking, you could totally skip this step. I like to add in details because I feel this little, little minute details give realism to your paintings. But if you are NOT IN for it, you could totally skip this step. Now, if you have created the spines, the next step would be to blend the base of the spines into our mountains. So use just the dam tip of your brush. Do so. We have successfully completed our midground. Now it's time to start a foreground, which is a grassland. For the grassland, I'm going to go with wet-on-wet technique. Now, if you're wondering why for this particular foreground, we're going with wet-on-wet technique. The reason being this area is much bigger. This grassland has a much larger surface area. So if we were to go with wet-on-dry technique, there might be chances that our paper might start drying up and the colors will not blend well together. To avoid these problems, I'm going to go with wet-on-wet technique. Now, if you have observed when young leaves proud, the color of the leaves will resemble close to this, yellowish green in color. And as the leaves mature, they will turn into sap green and then but yard with age, they will turn into darker shades of green. So keeping this concept in mind, I have started with the middle or the grassland with the base coat of yellowish green. And then with my sap green, I'm going ahead and creating some brush strokes to indicate some depth and texture into our grassland. I'm going to repeat this same process for the entire grassland. But occasionally I'll be going ahead and changing my brush strokes to indicate a sense of depth into the painting. So keep observing. Now towards the base of this grassland to give it a more realistic feel, I'm going with this curved lines with my darkest tonal value of sap green. Now, instead of sap green, you could use your greenish brown mix by mixing a little bit of burnt sienna or burnt umber into your, this greenish mix and create this sense of depth into this grassland. Brushstrokes when done right, and kept very loose and bold, can create a lot more liveliness and energy into your painting. And that is why most of the brushstrokes in realistic painting you would observe will be very directional. This gives us a sense of direction and hence, the 3D aspect of the painting comes to life towards the base am going ahead with a mixture of my bond Tom bar to indicate the soil or demand. Here at this point, my grassland at the top is looking very flat, so I will just go ahead and include some of these bulged curves, slanted lines of sap green. Now you see it has gotten so much of that shape. Towards my right grassland. I'm going to go with wet-on-wet technique as we have done before. I'm mixing in my greenish-yellow with that of sap green to create this very warm green yellow. Now switching to my size number six, silver black velvet brush. And going ahead to add some directional strokes near to this base of my right grassland. To create the illusion of depth into this grassland towards the base, I will go with just the tip of my number six brush loaded with my burnt umber mixed. And I will start layering it into the base so that it blends into the greens. Making sure that I do this step when my paper is still wet. Once your paper is or the area has started drying out, this brush strokes that you are creating will leave very ugly marks, are dry patches on your paper, which will not look very appealing to your eyes. Here at this point, my paper has dried out already, so I'm going to go ahead with rewetting this particular area of the paper. Because we will be going ahead with wet-on-wet splattering technique to create the wildflowers. Now, going ahead with the re-weighting technique, always bear in mind that do not apply too much pressure on your brush over the paper. By doing so, you will be lifting off the base colors which you do not want. You have to slowly and gradually revert the surface without lifting the colors. Time to create some magical Blooms by splattering water onto your wet background. Now instead of water, you could also go ahead and use your watery colored paint mix. Use bright mixes for to create bright floral meters. Now, it is due to the nature of watercolor that in wet it tries to blend back together. My blooms have already started to blend with the background, and hence I splattered one more time. Now using my filbert greener brush, I'm just going and creating this glass-like shapes. The tip of my brush is practically dry, so I'm just loading with my control the paint mix of sap green and creating this grasp fully ages Neo just near to those darker green areas. Whenever you are going with the grass foliage, go with different directions to denote the movement of the grasses in wind. For this rock, which is towards the edge corner of my paper, I'm going with dry on dry brush strokes. First I started with my burnt sienna and then I'm layering it with burnt umber. Now using the same darker mix of my burnt umber, I'm going to add in little details towards the base of this middle. Now it's time to move on to our middles, to the left. It's going to be the same process that we have done for the middle on the right. So keep observing. Starting with wet-on-wet technique with yellowish green initial layer. Towards the base, just along the outline shapes of this rocks are the stones that I have already created. I'm just going to go ahead and fill those areas with this directional strokes using my burnt umber mix. Join me in the next lesson for the final completion. 13. Day 1: Onset of Spring - Stream & Final Details: For this meadow to, I'm repeating the exact same process of what we had done for the medial, which is onto our right. I'm layering my sap green, making sure that when the layer of brown is still wet, I'm going ahead and letting my greens into those darker shades of brown and blending it on to the lighter areas. Towards the base of this middle, I'm going to go ahead and layer some more of that dark brown. I have mixed little bit of my indigo into my burnt sienna. Now, if you want to create your own mix of your darker brown shades, always go ahead and add either Payne's gray, that is, you're black or DR. Darker shades of blue, you would get a darker brown shade. Now before the top layer of the medial dries out, I'm just going to go with a watery mix of my sap green and layer it. Now at this point, this part of paper is wet, so it's a good time to go ahead and do the splatter and tactic. Now here I'm using my lemon yellow to splatter, but if you want, you can just use your damp brush and splatter water over there to create blooms. Here the blooms will be little colorful that is yellow in color. Or else you can just go ahead and splatters some pinks, reds into yummy dough to indicate some wildflower over there. Now, you're using my comb brush or the filbert greener brush. I'm just going ahead and creating this grass leg patterns over here when my background is still wet. Now it's time that we move on to our stream. For stream, we're going here with wet on wet technique. I'm going ahead and creating a very watery mix of my turquoise blue instead of turquoise blue, you could use any shade of lighter blue, preferably cool blue. Now, if you're wondering why I'm using turquoise blue for these glacial stream. The reason being, most of the times when the glaciers start melting, it erodes the rock or the mineral particles which are present in these mountains does giving this color. The minerals actually give out this bluish green color of the water. And hence, I am going ahead with this turquoise blue. If you want, you can add in some of that Taylor blue and mix it with little bit of viridian or emerald green and create bluish green color of your mountain stream. As you'll come to this broader part of the stream here, I'm going to replicate the movement in water by using this curvy brushstrokes observed my brushstrokes over here. I have left certain white gaps or spaces in between to create the illusion of that. For me, ripples that are formed are the frothy area of the stream. So I'm not going to use your white paint or white gouache. So I'm just going to add some more depth into this string by adding in some darker tones of my blue here I have used my mixture of peacock blue, which is also a cool blue, and just going along the sides of the middles and filling in the darker shades. I have led to my paper dry out a bit and add this date when the paper is almost semi dry, I'm going ahead and adding in some rocks over there using my mixture of burnt umber mixed with a little bit of Van **** brown towards the base of this rocks I'm going in and adding the darker shade. Towards my left too, I have another piece of rock or bolder. So for that too, I am repeating the same steps as we have done for the one which is on our right towards the base, I'm going ahead and feeling the darker colors and on the surface of the rock, I'm going ahead with dry brush patterns with my bond sienna towards my left. Them we do has dried out completely. Now I'm going to go and reweighted very light handedly using a very watery brush. I will wait for the paper to absorb the water and then I will splatter the pink flowers. I waited for my paper to completely dry out and now I'm taking off the masking tapes at an angle. I'm being patient enough. Do not try to remove your masking tapes when your paper is still wet. Always wait for your paper to dry out completely before you go and remove the tapes. This will also ensure that your paper has not warped. And here is the final look of a painting so refreshing and beautiful, right? Perfect spring like with this, we have successfully completed the one I'll see you next with that day to project. 14. Day 2: Planning & Sketching: Now this is what we are going to paint for D2. Before we get on with the sketching part, let us first plan our painting. The first thing that I'm going to start this with, my sky, as you can see for this guy, I'm going with wet on wet technique for sky. We are then going to move on to our distant background mountain. We are going to do this by manipulating the tonal values of a color, going with the lightest shade. And then we are moving to a foreground where we are using the brighter and vibrant contrasting colors to create greater impression of depth and textures into a landscape. Now let's get started with our painting. Before that, I'm going to tape down my paper with the help of my masking tape. Let's get started. On the right hand corner of the screen, you can see the reference now you could pause the screen over here and use this reference and sketch out your outline. Or you could watch the entire video of my process and then you could pause the screen where I have completed the outline and go on to make yours. Now as an important rule, I always tend to mark or gauge the area where I want my horizon line to be. And then I start creating the other elements. So just follow along me or go through this entire video. And then once you have reached the end of this video, you could pause the screen and create your own outline. Now it's time to create the fence into our foreground. Here, I'm going to implement the linear perspective because the fence is going to recede back into the distance. So I'm going to use the smaller shapes to indicate that distance and depth into it. So here you go, and this is my finished sketch. So you could pause the screen out here and create your own sketch. Once you are done with your sketch, it's time to get started with our watercolors. 15. Day 2: Color Palette: Hi, welcome to day two. Let's quickly get started with the color palette. First, we are going to begin with the sky colors. I will first start out by swatching out the cloud, especially the dramatic dark clouds that we are going to paint. So that is going to be with my permanent violet. Now, the permanent valid that I'm using here has a little bit of granulation. The next color would be mineral violet. Now, when you mix permanent violet along with your neon pink here in this case I have swatch dot oprah pink. You would get this shade of mineral violet. The next color that I'm going to swatch is my Indian yellow. This yellow is a very warm golden yellow. Instead of this yellow, you could choose to swatch yard any cadmium yellow deep shade that you have got with you. Now, when you mix in this yellow deep, a little bit of your titanium white, which is consist of the pigment p W6, you would be closely having a color which is very similar to that of your Naples yellow. Naples yellow is the color that we're going to use to create the sunset colors near to the horizon line of the sky. So here you'll see it has the pigment BY 35, which is the yellow pigment, and PW six, which is the white pigment. So this is what I'm going to use the yellows for my sunset colors. The next color that we are going to need is this bright, beautiful, yellowish green, which we are going to use a little onto the mountains, the midground mountains and layer it with our foreground mountains. Now, you can create leaf green by mixing your lemon yellow along with your sap green. Remember to mix two parts of lemon yellow and one part of sap green to give you this bright leaf green mix. Now, another green that I'm going to use is greenish-yellow. You could create the same greenish yellow color, which is a little warm green. By mixing your warm yellow, which is your Indian yellow, or you could use your permanent yellow deep and mix it with your sap green. Remember to go again with two parts and one part of your green, two parts of a yellow, I mean, so here I'm mixing the color so that you get the idea of how to create the shade. So I'm going to mix my colors together and try to be very close to the color that is my greenish-yellow. So YouTube could follow the same step. Keep mixing the colors until you are satisfied and create the shade which is very close or similar to that of mine. Now, I'm going to swatch my color, which we have a mixed. And here I can see that the color is very close, but it needs some more of that green. I will go ahead and mix some of their sap green onto this mixture and see we have got our shared very close to that of a greenish yellow. Now another color that we would need is burnt sienna or red brown color for the fences. So get your colors ready and meet me at the next lesson, where we will be going through the techniques. 16. Day 2: Techniques : Now that we have our colors ready, let's get started with our day two techniques. We are going to first start with a tonal values, especially the ones that we're going to use to create this background mountains in order to create that illusion of depth. So I will be using this mineral violet as well as my permanent violet to mimic the effect of atmospheric perspective. As you approach the foreground, you see the colors are getting more brighter and more saturated. So this is what we are going to do. Let's quickly swatch out first tonal value for our mineral violet. I'm exercising water control on my brush and loading the color on my brush and swatching it here. So this is my dark value of mineral violet. This I'm going to use to create drama and depth into the clouds of this guy. So this is the first value. Now I'm going to take some of this original pool value and then I'm going to dilute it and thin it down by adding some water. So the tonal value that I have got here right now is almost towards the lighter end, lighter end of the tonal value range. So you could say I would be using this value such as highlight and low-light value. So now let's get started with the techniques first and we starting with this guy, which I'm going to go with my favorite wet on wet technique. The first step is to let the paper with an uniform wash of water. I'm going to go ahead and do this. Remember, the wash should wait uniform, there should not be any stagnant water or pools are puddles formed on the side or edges of your paper. Now I'm going to load my brush with the Naples yellow. The Naples yellow that I have on my brush is in the lighter range value, as you can see. So I'm just going to go ahead and smooth out the paint, leaving some white gaps in between. As I go up, I'll be using the tip there. The color value will be much more lighter than what I will be initially starting at the horizon line. We will be using lighter tonal values at the top of this guy, because there we are going to go with complimentary colors such as violets and blues. Now violets and blues when mixed with the yellow, will form a very muddy or a greenish tint. So in order to avoid that, we are going to go ahead and use a combination of analagous colors. Now, orange and yellow, the analagous colors that I'm going to take is my pink. The opera pink forms a beautiful coral, orangeish pink shade when mixed with this both colors. So I'm going to share my Skype with this shade and look at my brush movements over here to create the clouds. So round, so colored half circular strokes and then spreading it out on the other side. While doing this tape, make sure that you are very flexible with your wrist movement, especially when you are creating clouds, because when you are flexible and very loose, the way you have healthier brush strokes are going to be much more fluid and there is going to be much more movement, fluid, long stride denoting the movement in the clouds. Hence, it is very important that you are not very stiff with the hand movement. Now, do you observe this bleeds that is happening around here? This might be because there was too much of water. So an easy way to prefixes to move around the tip of your brush around those areas to have this clean, smoother ends, but do this step when your paper is still wet. Next, let's get started with our midground mountains. But before we start them at ground mountains, we have completely missed our misty mountains in the background for which I'm going to use the lighter tonal values of my mineral Violet and permanent violet. So let's get started with our mid grounds. Do not worry, those misty mountains are very easy. We can directly see that technique when we are painting our main project for the midground mountains over here, I'm starting with wet-on-dry technique. Why? Because I need the colors to have more contrast and to be rich. That is the reason I'm going here with this wet-on-dry technique, but when I'm blending or mixing two colors and making sure that the paint mixes little watery so that the colors blend well together when there is wetness and the paper. Now I'm going to switch to my size number three synthetic brush from Princeton Heritage Series took off all that extra moisture from the brush by dabbing it on tissue paper, tissue travel. And now I'm going to start creating this vertical lines. Longer and shorter ones to create or indicate the fine since these are almost pushed towards the background, but not exactly in the background, but not too in the foreground. Here, the details can be little blurred and the shape can be something like this. You need not go and have a very detailed looking pines over here. And that is the reason I'm going ahead with this vertical shorter, longer, and shorter strokes because I wanted my underneath of the pines to be well blended into the background. I created the shapes when the paper was still wet. So it blended well. Now coming to the middle. So this is how I'm going to start with my middle. You can go with wet-on-wet or wet on dry. I'm here showing you the wet-on-dry process because I'm painting here over a small piece of paper or a small surface area. But if your surface area is larger, like how we are going to do it in the final painting, then I might suggest you that you go with wet on wet technique so that you have much more time to let your colors blend and play well together. Now this middle is at the foreground. So here we will be creating some long grass shapes. So for that, I'm going to show you two techniques. One by using my disfavored greener brush and the other by using this squid and mop brush. Sorry, this is not secreted. This is goat hair, mop brush. This is a natural hair brush. Now the brush tip is just little damp and you see how I'm creating the strokes, long vertical strokes by freeing the ends of my brush tip. So this is how you can move the colors and create the strokes. Make sure that you load your brush with some darker tones and create this same patterns. Now, the very same can be done using my fieldwork greener brush. So instead of this kind of comb brush, you can also go ahead and use a fan brush. This will give you the same effect that I have got using these two brushes. Now quickly, I'll grab my other brush, which is my size number six, silver black velvet brush, load the tip with little water and splatter it around this middle. This has to be done when the paper is still wet. Because if the paper starts drying, you will not be able to get this blooms. So in order for you to get this blooms, make sure that you do it when the paper is still wet enough. Now, instead of this blooms, you can also go ahead and use the salt there also you will be getting similar kind of patterns. Now one more technique is to wet just the tip of your tissue paper, something like this and dab it randomly at certain places like this. So when you go and wet the tip of your tissue paper, you are creating softer edges instead of creating univary dried out the edges. So this is actually a lifting technique which you are doing with the tissue paper. At this point, you can also go ahead and splatter some salt, as I've already mentioned. For the technique to work, your paper's still should be wet enough. If the paper has started drying, you will not get this dispersed blooms. We have almost covered all the broad techniques. Now I think just this one technique is left that is wet on dry technique for the fence that we will see at the final painting. See you at our next lesson. 17. Day 2: Sky- Part 1: Let's get started with this guy. For this guy, I'm going to go with wet-on-wet technique, but before that, I made sure that my masking tape is well stuck or glued to my paper. I'm going ahead and layering and uniform coat of water on my paper, making sure that I cover each and every corner till the area where my skies, if necessary, go over these areas again and again, ensuring that you are going ahead and spreading the water uniformly. Because the more you spread the water uniformly across the paper, the more time you will have to paint wet on wet. I think I'm satisfied with the layering of water. I will check it out. Yes, there is the reflective sheen uniformly across the paper, so I will just stop here and it's time now to go ahead and load my brush with paints. I will dip my brush in water and dab it dry on tissue, paper, tissue table. This will ensure that my brush has no extra amount of water in it. Does exercising water control. Now, I'm loading my brush with Naples yellow. Look at the tonal value. I'm going with very light tonal value over here. And observe my brushstrokes. I'm going very light handedly and just going ahead with this long strokes, leaving in some whiter spaces in-between. Now also, my brushstrokes out here. I'm going with very soft, loose handed, horizontal brushstrokes over here using just the tip of my brush. And as I move across the paper upwards, my tonal value of Naples yellow has gotten a bit lighter. Now towards the horizon line, I'm going ahead and letting it with yellow deep color, which is a little yellowish orange shade. So if you have orange, you could also go ahead and use a medium to lighter tonal value of orange and do the same sometimes, even if you exercise water control, you would see that the empty spaces that you wouldn't have left in-between would be all blended. This is because it's the nature of watercolor to go along the flow of water since your background is wet, it will tend to blend out. So you could lift those areas using the lifting technique. By looking at the paper, I can feel that the top part has started to dry out. So I will just go with an even coat of watering around this area, making sure that I do not touch too much into the yellow. And even if I touch, I just blend it right? You must be wondering why did I do this step? This is because I wanted my sky to look smooth and well blended. And since the paper was drying out there, where chances that I could develop some hard edges when I started to layer with the pain since we will have to also go ahead and create some dramatic clouds, right? That was the reason I went ahead and reweighted the area. Now you can see the blue that I led was blue-gray and so nicely blended into the background. Interesting thing to note here is as I approach towards my yellow, the blue went very lighter and hence it did not give any greenish-yellow. And also because the yellow that I have used here is Naples yellow. Next I've started with my clouds. So for that, I'm using a mixture of oprah pink along with my yellow deep. And you can see how beautiful this coral, orangey pink color is looking great. I love using this color for clouds. And look at the shape that I'm trying to create for my clouds. I'm using just the tip of my brush and going with this half random circles using just the tip and flicking it very gently, applying very light pressure and releasing the pressure. As I want those strokes to go through and make sure that you do not apply too much pressure at the tip of your brush because while doing so you might be lifting out the background colors. I changed my brush to my smaller size, number six, brush from silver black velvet. Now using this brush, I'm loading it with the darker shade of mineral Violet and using the same shapes that we have created earlier, I'm going ahead and creating a dramatic layer to the clouds by adding the darker tones. This brings the very much depth needed for the clouds. I'm going to repeat the same step using my permanent violet as well. This I will be using to create the darker layer of clouds at the top. I love painting sunset sky, especially the ones with this kind of dramatic clouds. This has been my go-to subject these days to paint with. If you're following me on Instagram, you could see my feet filled with such kind of bright and beautiful skies. To find inspiration about the colors that you could use alternatively to paint your sunset sky, you could browse dramatic sunset sky pictures on Unsplash, pixabay, or even pixels. These are copyright free sites. So find your own reference, select the color combination that you want to give it a try. And you could alter the colors of this very project as well and give them a try. One important if for you here is that when you are painting dramatic skies such as these kind, where there are multiple colors involved, which might be complimentary in nature, start to combine the colors which are analagous and harmonious and nature by layering them one after the other, and then use your complementary colors. In doing so, you will avoid the challenge of creating the muddy mixes when the complimentary colors clash with one another and form those kind of mixes. The perfect example is this particular painting where we have started letting my yellows, oranges, pink, then my blues and then my violence does creating a harmonious blend. Us guy has right time to move on to our mountains. Let's get started with the distant background mountain, where the principle of atmospheric perspective will apply. I'm going to go ahead and use a very lighter tonal value of my mineral violet. I have mixed little bit of opera to match the color to that of my sky, especially the one which is their near to the horizon line. Now, with another brush, I will switch to my size number eight brush. And using this **** tip of my brush, I'm going to share the water at the base of the mountain. Doing this will make sure that when I start with my mineral violet from the top, the base will get automatically blended. The colors will flow down to the base, thus creating the misty effect that I want. So here I'm going to go with the combination of wet on wet and wet on dry, wet on dry for having the outline of the mountain very crisp, undefined, but wet on wet when I start filling the mountain and blend it to form them misty effect. Using the dam tip of my brush, I'm just going to push down the colors towards the base of the mountains which is already wet, thereby creating this very soft blended Mr. looking effect. And that's it. We're done painting our distant background mountain. Join me in the next lesson where we are going to continue painting the rest of the elements. 18. Day 2 : Mid ground Elements- Part 2: Continuing with my mountains, which is just below the mountains at the top here, I'm going with my little darker tonal value of permanent violet. I'm going here with wet-on-dry technique because I want my mountains to have that defined outline or shape. And towards the base, I'm just going to go and use the same method that we have used in the very first mountains. Okay, We're using a watery brush. I'm going to go and pull the colors down towards the base of the mountains so that the misty effect is more pronounced here. Now, another reason why I went with wet-on-dry technique to create the outline of the mountains was that the people behind the mountains might be still wet because you just painted your first mountains and there the wet-on-wet technique was used to create them as defect rate. So that was the reason either you exercise water controlling your brush or wait for the first layer of the mountains to get dry to start your second layer. That way, you will be able to control the bleeds. Now moving on to the mountains which will be closer to the foreground. So these we are going to paint with a combination of lighter and darker green. First, I'll be letting the base coat of the mountains with this yellowish green. This is the leaf green that I'm using. You could check out the color palette section to know how we have created this mixture of leaf green in case you do not have this color handy with you. Now, here, if you have noticed, I'm going with wet-on-dry technique but combining watery paint mix so that my pains are flowing more easily onto my paper. And also, this would allow my paper to be wet for the period that I want to go ahead and let it with the darker shades. This will enable me to give this Mountains the well blended look with some darker and lighter green strokes. Now, I would go ahead and create a darker mix of green by just mixing my green with blue or even your violet would do the trick. So just go ahead and label this darker tones of green onto the top side of the mountains in some inclined strokes like this, but do not cover the entire mountains. Leave some of those lighter parts also to show through. And you can see I would have covered too much of that darker green sheets. So I went ahead and lifted out some of that colors. Now towards the mountain on my right, I'm going to layer with this base coat of greenish yellow mix, the same color that we have used to create the base coat for the mountains on my left. Now here, layering with a base coat of lighter tones first will give you the added advantage of creating the darker tones to your wish to create depth. Because once you lead your people with darker tones, you really cannot lighten it, right? So that's why it's easier. And as a best practice, it is easier to first start with your lighter tones and then darken it out. Now, I'm layering my dad warm greenish yellow towards the base of the mountains with this same long slanted strokes that you can see. And here I'm starting to lead the darker tones from the base of the mountains going upwards, leaving in-between some of those lighter colors to show through. I'm really not happy with how this is looking, so I will just go and clean it off using my damp tip of my brush, lifting the colors when required and creating these strokes where required. Now, one beauty about wet-on-dry technique is that if you know how to vary the amount of water and work your way, controlling and manipulating the paint to listen to you. You wouldn't be able to still achieve this well blended look that you can go for wet on wet technique, but this is possible only when you know how to control the water in your paint and work it to your advantage. Now can you see the effect that we have obtained by using the lifting technique, we have created the illusion of two separate mountains right? Now. We are going to take this into advantage and load the base of the mountains with darker tones. So this would give the illusion that There are two separate mountain ranges, and the one which is closer to the foreground or is under the shadows is the darker one. Now can you understand this small little things that you observe and try to implement in your landscapes can make so much of difference and bring in that depth and the feeling of distance that you want to create in your paintings. I have prepared a mix of my darker green using my sap green and violet. Now, since the paper is still wet over here, I would go and create this long and short vertical strokes to create the illusion of pints. But this will be very well blended into the background because this is exactly what I want. Now during this part of the painting is exactly the point where you would want to exercise water control. If you go ahead with too watery paint mix at this stage, you will create unnecessarily bleeds into the background mountains. And that is kind of ruining for your painting. To have better water control. I am now dabbing the brush on tissue, paper, tissue travel, and going ahead and creating these sharp tips of my pines using just the tip of my size number six silver black velvet brush. Buddy, if you want, you could also go ahead and do this step using yard pointes, synthetic brush. Time to get started with the middles. For the middle, I'm going to go with wet-on-wet technique. Why? Because I need to cover a larger surface area. Going ahead with wet-on-dry would also be possible, but there would be the challenge of where certain areas of the paper will start to dry out sooner than the others. So in order to avoid that, I'm going to go with wet-on-wet. In this way, I will have more time to create the depth and allow the colors, especially the lighter and the darker tones of greens that we would be using to look well blended and soft. Now towards the base of this darker mountains to our right and the starting of the middles, I'm going to go along the shape of the middle using darker tones. After I lead my darker green, I realize that It's looking a little dull. So I switched that part to my sap green. Now towards the base of the paper, you can see I'm going ahead with this long vertical strokes, little inclined to create the movement in the grass blades. Now switch to my filbert greener brush to create the glass-like patterns. If you have a fan brush with you, you could similarly do this step here. See the amount of water control that I'm exercising. Your paper is just optimally wet. If you use too watery paint, you will create a kind of patchy blooms in-between the middle. You do not want that, hence, you go ahead with this controlled paint mix of your darker green to create depth in the grasses, am going ahead with a medium tonal value of green and also with the darker tonal value, this would create the depth that is required. Now it's time to create the magical textures onto a middle. So I'm covering the top part of my painting with this papers that I prevent any unwanted splatters near to the sky or the mountain region. I want the splatters to be confined only along this region. So you could either use this technique or splatter some salt at this point. Now my paper is drying up a bit and I realized that the grasp patterns that I had created using the darker tones have almost gone like they have well blended into the background. So I am here going quickly with my filbert greener brush again to create those darker patterns of grasses. Notice how beautiful those bloom effects have occurred, right? So in order to pronounce them more, I'm dabbing my tissue paper to create the soft blended fuzzy edges to this balls. This almost looks like Dan de Leon's. Meet me at the next section where we will be going ahead and completing our project with the final details. 19. Day 2: Final details - Part 3 : Welcome back to the last and the final part here we are going to paint the fence. Here in the middle of my paper has totally dried out over here and that's very, I'm going ahead and creating the fence using wet-on-dry technique. The mixture that I'm using here is red brown mixed with little bit of mineral violet. So you get this nice undertone of violet to your browns. I really love using this brown mix. While I'm filling the fence with my red brown mix, I'm making sure that one side of it or one part of this fence which is facing against the light, is darker in color than the other part. I'm going to repeat the same process for this horizontal parts of the fence where the top part will be a little darker than the bottom part, or you could do vice versa. You could darken the bottom areas and keep the top areas lighter. Now here, if you observe the fence poles looks too out of proportion rate it looks so standing out. So in order to cover them, I'm going ahead and creating this grass like patterns near to the base of the fence using my mixture of sap green mixed with little bit of violet. This is a darker grasses that I'm creating out here because this is very close to the viewer's side. Hence, to create that depth, this dresses would be fine. Now, using my white paint, Titanium white, this is watercolor itself. Instead of watercolor, you could go ahead and use your gouache. I'm going ahead and creating some dry brush patterns, very soft and light handedly with the tip of my filbert greener brush. Switching to my synthetic size number t brush. And I'm going to load my brush with this darker values of violet mixed with my red brown to create this darker patterns towards the fence poles. If you notice here below the foothills of that green mountain valley and the middle, that pleases kind of looking empty. So it's looking very weird to me. So I'm going to add some filler elements over here, that is some vegetation or growth to create this, I'm going to match the same tonal value to the one which is there on my right, the pine forests that we had created on my right. Remember? So I'm going to use medium tonal value and create the shape of shrubs or bushes over here. But I think I'm not liking this growth of bushes over here. Instead, I think I'm going to switch to pints because in this landscape on my right, I already have the pine shapes, right? So I think this will be better complimented if I lead or towards the left also, the spine shapes landscape painting. What one thing I have observed and noticed is that sometimes when you try to copy a reference, not all the elements that you try to create a new composition will exactly fit well. Sometimes you have to use your own imagination. Also. It's okay to accept and you know, go ahead with your instinct and your gut feeling. So don't be afraid to try out new things. Learn to experiment, trust your instinct and overall trust the process and enjoy it. I really liked how this S-shaped up now it feels complete. Our painting is finally complete. Paper is also dry time to take off those masking tapes from all the foresight. Here we go. We have successfully completed a D2 project. I can't wait to see your creations. Please feel free to upload them in the projects and resources section under the class. I will see you tomorrow again with a new project, which is one of my favorites. 20. Day 3: Planning & Sketching: Hey guys, welcome back to D3. Today we are going to paint this beautiful daisies along with some butterflies and learn how to create that beautiful diffused Andres, along with this misty background. On the right side of my screen, you could see the reference. So let's plan it out and break down a reference and simplify. The first step is to simplify a reference. Not everything that you see in the reference has to be painted in the same way. So you could, once you learn the techniques, you could use them to break down your reference and proceed on planning how you want to create those parts. E.g. here, this background there in the reference there was bouquet effect. But instead of the bouquet effect, I chose to go ahead and create some splatters to give that magical effect. From the reference. I chose to alter the positioning of the flowers here for our project, I'm going ahead with this. One means central Florida, which is going to be placed somewhere around the center position. Then along with it, I have created some butterflies and the sidelines of those smaller version of the daisies. So this is how we are going to proceed on with the painting. So let's first get started with the sketching. So I'm going to show you how we are going to go ahead and sketch out our daisies. First, I will begin by marking the positions of the disease, so it will become easier for us when we start creating the disease. Now, I'm going ahead with an oval shape. You can see the center Daisy is little bigger than that of the other daisies. So I'm marking here the center part of the daisy, something around like this. And then from now here, I'm going to start out by making the petals. Now, in case if you're finding it difficult to create your petals, what you can do here is let me show you. You can use geometric shapes such as a circle and then outline the petals using the circumference of the petals. So this will ensure that all the petals are off almost similar size based on how you have created your circle. If you want your flower to be positioned in a different angle way, then it's best that you go ahead and create a oval-shaped like here. What I have done here. And use that oval shape as your guide to make the arrangement of the petals. I will continue to go ahead and make this petals until I have the entire flower. Once done with the overall outlining or the shape of the flower. Now it's time that we focus on the center part of the flower. The center part of the flower, just around the base of the petals. You'll have to go with this kind of long elongated stroke, loading the tip of your brush with some darker tones of brown and then create this illusion of the darker purlins at the center of the flower. So similar way, I will go ahead and create the shape of the other petals as well for the marks that we have already created. Once done with the overall shape of the flower, you could now erase the guided, so cool or the shape that you had created. For the top corner most flower, I'm going to change the orientation facing slightly tilted towards my right angle. Okay, so I'm just going to erase that shape and make an oval shape in outlining towards my right. And here I'm repeating the same exact process to create the shape of the petals. Let me show you here another technique of how you can create this half bloomed floss or the flowers which are about to open up fully. So here is the step. Now here just around the half, I will go and create a semi arc. And then from there, the center of the flower. Now I will start to fill it up using the shape of the petals, something like this. Once done with the final shape of the flower, erase those outer marks or the circle that you had created. Now you can go back and you fix those petals which might have gotten a raise. So instead of your normal eraser, you can go ahead and use your kneading eraser as well. It's simple and easy rate. If you want to incorporate this kind of have bloomed flowers in your painting, you can feel free to go ahead and do so. I will just quickly show you how you can create the bird. First, you go ahead and create the shape of the PTO, and then create a semiotic round shape. There you can create some abrupt lines over there to indicate the petal edges and that's it. And then join them with us. Stop. Here, I'm just going to go and fill this bottom part of the paper with those leafy grass shapes and join the stock of the flask. Now let's create the shape of the butterfly. Butterfly shape will be streamlined, okay, So you create a slanted line and then the body. And now for its wings, I'll just go ahead and create a shape like this. Once you are done with this basic layer of the wings, you have to just create the overlapping wings next to the previous one, something like this and that's all your butterfly. Flying butterfly is ready. I will go and create the outline of another butterfly using the same very process. And with that, we are done with our sketching part. You could download this sketch in the projects and resources section of the class, or pause the screen out here and start your sketch. I'll meet you in the next lesson. 21. Day 3: Color palette: Hi, Welcome back. Now that we're ready with our sketching. So let's quickly take a look at the colors that we are going to need for creating the project. First, I'm going to start with my warm yellow here, I'm using my Indian yellow. But if you do not have Indian yellow, you could substitute it with your permanent yellow deep or cadmium yellow deep, any warmer shade of yellow, but makes sure that your yellow is transparent and neater. So in this project, I'm not going to use any new colors. These are the colors that we already have been using from our very first day. But remember that whenever you are choosing your yellows for this particular project, go and choose your yellow, which is transparent in nature. This is going to help when we go ahead and do the lifting technique to create the sundries. Next coming to our greens, I'm going to use your warm yellowish green and our sap green, these two greens we have already use for our project, one end to another color that I'm swatching out is indigo. Now this indigo, you can mix it with your sap green to create a darker shade of green. So in case if you do not have a darker shade of green, you could mix two colors and create your own shades of darker green. Next, let me show you the tonal value that we are going to use for our indigo to create the shadows in our flower petals. So this is tonal value that we're going to use. I'm going to create lighter value of indigo. I'm mixing a little bit of Prussian blue along with my indigo, mixed with a little bit of my blue gray. Now here, if you do not have blue-gray, not to worry, you can just go ahead and add a tinge of your white watercolor pigment. It makes sure that you are using titanium white, which has little opacity to it. I like your Chinese right? Now, another thing that you must remember is to use indigo, which is non granulating. I did not quite like the results with granulating indigo and hence my solution. Here I'm showing you the example of the tonal values that we are going to work with using our Indigo for the flower petals. So here is the recap of the colors that you're going to need for creating the project. So get your colors ready and join me in the next section where we're going to learn the techniques. 22. Day 3: Techniques: I hope you are ready with your colors. Now, let's quickly get started with our techniques section. I have already sketched out my flower. I've sketched out only one flower for the technique section because it's going to be the same process that you are going to use to create the other flowers as well. Or if you want, you could further simplify this reference and paint just one flower, that background along with some butter flights. The choices totally up to you how you want to go ahead and create this project. To start with, I'm going to first start with the background. That is how to create the diffused Andres along with that dreamy misty background. Okay, Then we are going to see how you are going to paint the flowers. I think butterflies. We can leave it up to the final project because those are really easy. We're going to go with wet on dry for the butterflies. In the final project when we start painting, you can have an idea, but first, let's break it down into two parts. The main background, Let's create that first and then the flat. Let me show you a quick fix. So when you have this graphite marks, you could take them off using this kneading eraser. Just roll it over the surface that you want to lighten the graphite Max, and it's easy, it's very simple and it's Hazel free. Kneading eraser comes to great advantage when you want to lighten the pencil sketch just before you start coloring. Can you see all that graphite marks are here in case if you do not have a kneading eraser, just go with a very light pencil sketching of your flats. Okay, now starting with our background, so we're going to go wet-on-wet. I'm going to lay flat wash of water on it. Now, the flower that we have already sketched out on the background will have to be masked using the masking fluid. Because this will be really tricky if you want to go ahead and do with the help of negative painting method because the daisies have this very light petals. So going around this very thin, narrow petals might be difficult. So to ease up the process where it's best to use the masking fluid. Before I begin, I'm trying to reactivate my Indian yellow, but looks like L squids freshman. So here I have my fresh Indian yellow. Now look at the tonal value. I'm going with a very light tonal value of Indian yellow and going with the slanted strokes. Here, your brushstrokes is very important, especially how you lead the background wash will clearly denote how your sundries will look like. Using similar strokes. I'm going to go ahead and start layering with my greenish yellow. Now observe that I have left some gaps in-between. Now here we will be going ahead and layering it with my sap green as well. Now remember to leave in between those gaps. Those gaps are very, very important. Do not go and layer your greens too much into it. To create that soft diffuse background. It is important that you do all of these steps using wet-on-wet technique. And when the paper is still wet because the moment your paper starts drying up, it will become very difficult for you to get the colors to blend with each other. So practice this technique before you get started with the main project. Now, I'm going to switch to my angle dagger brush to do the lifting technique. Every time that I will be lifting of the colors, I will be rubbing the tip of my brush on my tissue paper. This will ensure that my tip is residue free. And here at this point, if you notice, I'm applying pressure just at the beginning where I'm lifting of the color because that's the starting point of Sandra. So my underneath of the paper why it should be visible? But as you lift the colors, you should release the pressure to get that soft blended sun rays streaming into kind look. Once you are done with the lifting technique, now quickly go ahead and start layering the bottom of your paper with some darker tones of green. Now observe my brushstrokes. I'm very light handedly applying the colors and very light pressure I'm applying to live the colors and flick it to create the glass-like patterns from the bottom of the paper. So this is how we are going to create this. Now it's time to go ahead and create this flattering effect. So just splatter around the greens where you have just lead your darker greens. So that would come out more prominently. Now here, apart from this flattering technique, you can also go ahead and drop in your salt if you have, if you want to create some more of that textured effect. You can go ahead and drop in your bigger granules of salt. Once you splattered the salt, you'll have to wait for the background to dry out completely. So let the bag down dry out completely on the site. We will start on the other side with a flower. At this point I'm going to go and prepare my indigo color mix, the one which we have already seen in the color palette section. This color mix is what exactly we are going to paint petals with. First, I'll begin by creating an outline. You'll have to work here very quickly and have an understanding about the water control that you must exercise. I'm going to go here with controlled wet-on-wet technique. See here I firstly the outline and then quickly use the watery brush tip and then I'm just creating this brush marks over here. Let me swatch out the tonal value of indigo that I'm using to create this flower petals. This is for your reference so that you easily understand what is the tonal value that I'm using here. I'm going to pretty much use this same technique to create the petals. Now, what you need to keep in mind is to see the arrangement of your petals that you have outlined. When you see that some petals are under one another. Those under petals are the ones where you need to go ahead and layer with little darker tones of indigo to create the shadow of the petals which is on top of the other. Okay, So that's the only point that we will have to keep in mind to keep it realistic. If you are someone who is always skeptical about painting florals or are not very confident about going ahead and trying florals, please do give it a try. Even I used to think the same way, but ever since I gave it a try, I founded that using your basic watercolor knowledge and observing the reference can be really helpful when you try to create subjects which is not your genre. So trust me on this, give it a try and you are going to love this experience. Coming back to our project. Now I hope you're observing the brushstrokes that I'm going ahead and creating for my petals. I'm not going and completely filling it out. I'm just somewhere. I'm creating those strokes and filling it gently with very low water loaded tip of my brush, but it shouldn't be too watery as well. You should find your perfect water mix over here. Refer back to the basic watercolor techniques section about the water control that I have described over there. And you will be good to go. Done with my petals. Now it's time to go ahead and do the center of the flower. So for the center of the flower, I'm first going to go with my Indian yellow. This is how I'm going to go ahead. Now at the base of this Indian yellow, I'm going to go and adding some brown, red brown mix. Now along the sides, I'm just using the tip of my brush and fringing it along. Using just the tip of my brush. I'm just going to blend those areas because I'm not liking it, how it disappeared. I'm just going to go for little perfection and this, by using the tip of the brush, I'm just creating this sharp pointy tips around this petal. So this will give the flower its look. And now using the very same tip, I'm just going and letting some dots over there. Since the background is wet, it will be evenly blended in, into it. Now, I'll be going ahead and creating the stalk of the flower. I'll be using my mixture of sap green and indigo. Indigo I'll be using it to layer the darker side of the stock where the shadow is falling. For that, I'll be using the darker indigo and using just the tip of my brush, I'm going to go and create the leaf like this. We're almost done with the techniques of this painting. It's super simple and easy rate. And when you break it down into simpler parts, it becomes much more easier to approach it. For the butterflies. I have not shown you the technique out here. It's simple and easy. We're just going to go with wet-on-dry technique. We will see that in the final painting. 26. Day 4: Color Palette: Hey guys, welcome back to day four. And this is what we are going to create for the full project, this beautiful lavender field with that purple sunset. So I have renamed this file to be as lavender dreams. Now let's quickly take a look at the color palette for this guy. I'm going ahead and swatching my blue gray color now if you do not have blue-gray as already mentioned in day one project, you could make a little bit of Titanium white pigment, watercolor or gouache into yards. Cerulean blue are cool blue, which consists of the pigment PB 15. And you could get a similar blue gray shade. The next is Naples yellow. This Naples yellow and blue, gray or both, tens or paste, two shades which both have white pigments in it. So when these two are used together, they do not form that greenish mix being yellow and blue, they rather form a grayish kind of makes. So it's a perfect combination when you want to go for skies using complementary colors and layer it with other complimentary colors. Next color that we would be using is our cadmium yellow deep. And this is a very bright and beautiful yellowish orange color. The next color that we are going to swatch out is my opera pink. Now oprah pink might be renamed as neon pink and many other brands, especially in White Nights. So you could check out that. Next is my permanent violet. In all of the colors that I'm swatching. As you can see, I have already noted that the name of the color and the pigment information. So always look for the pigment information when you are selecting your color, rather than by going with the name. When you mix a permanent violet and UOP wrapping, you create a very bright and beautiful mineral violet. So when you mix both of this violet and you're prepping, you get the pigment, which is similar to my mineral violet, which consist of PV 23 as the pigment. Next, I would be using my leaf green color. Now, leave drain you could mix by mixing your lemon yellow and sap green. Another color that you would require is your Payne's gray or you could use your black. I'll see you in the next section where we would be discussing about the techniques. 28. Day 4: Planning & Sketching: So before we begin with our project, the first and foremost thing that I'm going to do is Steve down my paper using this masking tape. So let's do that. Our paper is all taped and we're ready to start the planning process or the sketching. Now, let's take a look at the reference. So this is the reference that I'm going to use to plan a painting. Now you can see our horizon line is separating the sky and the lavender field. So for this parallel lines of the lavender field, we're going to implement the concept of aerial perspective, where this lavender fields are converging at a point which is known as the vanishing point. Now you can see the lines are either diverging or it is converging at one particular point. I hope by now you know where exactly in this painting will come the aerial perspective and play the distant background mountains is exactly the point where we are going to apply the principle of aerial perspective. See the distant background mountain is faded into a tonal value, which is closer to that of the sky color, since the sky color is also in the range of purple, pinks, we're going to apply the same. And first, we're going to go ahead and create the outline. So I have divided my people and to one-third. One-third will be this guy and the rest will be the lavender field. Since you're the focus point is our lavender field. So we're using that as a majority of the people. Now, if you want, you can go with free hand. But if you're not comfortable going with free hand, then you could use your ruler to outline your horizon line. And now it's the time that I have marked my vanishing point. I will go ahead and create my parallel lines. Once you are done with your parallel lines now, you could sketch out your distant background mountains to remember to looping the concept of aerial perspective here, your mountain should not look bigger in size because they are receded back into a distance. So it should be in this size. So get your sketch ready and let's meet in the final section of our project where we will start painting our sky. 29. Day 4: Lavender Dreams- Part 1: So getting started with my sky, I'm going with wet-on-wet technique for my scaling a flat wash on this part of the paper. Now using my **** quill mop brush, I'm going to load the tip of my brush with this creamy consistency of Naples yellow. Remember, do not go with two watery paint mix over here right now. And I'm going ahead with this very light to medium tonal value. And to darken though sunset use around the horizon line, I'm going to layer it with my yellow deep, which is almost towards the shade of orange by mixing a little bit of Oprah pink along with my yellow deep. Here too. If you have observed, I have directly loaded this opera pink with my yellow deep, did not go and wash the brush. Now I'm going in washing the tip of my brush, loading some more of that Naples yellow at this top part of the paper, I went with little watery paint mix because I want the tonal values to be lighter since we will be working with complimentary colors at this top part of the sky. I'm loading my same washed my brush with my blue-gray and letting it with this line slanted strokes. The tonal value of my blue-gray, how light is that color? I'm going to darken little more just at the top part corner. As soon as I come down into the yellow, I make sure I go with a very lighter tone. Now, I'm going to load my brush with this mixture of opera pink with a little bit of Naples, yellow. Now see the beautiful pink color that we have got. It's a very pretty pink. I love using this for my skies. Now I'm going to load my brush, size number six brush with this bright rose mixture and then mix it with little bit of overlapping. Now, going ahead with a very creamy consistency, not too thick, not too watery. It's just the optimum medium consistency that I'm going width and layering this wide angled, slanted strokes with my brush tip. As you can see, I'm a little quick Gautier because I'm quite used to it. So I have already shown you in the technique section how you can be flexible with your wrist and, you know, create this long slanted brush strokes. To paint my dramatic sensors, skies. I always prefer to go with Beta1 **** technique. This is my most favorite technique here. I make sure that I exercise water control on the amount of paint that I have on the tip of my brush while creating these strokes to create the dramatic effect of the clouds, making sure that my paper is still wet enough for me to do so. Because once your paper has dried out unevenly, you would see that these colors are not blending into the background, thus giving you those rough, patchy look to your sky. So it is essential that you know the wetness of your paper when your paper is about to dry out and when it is wet for you to perfectly plan your dramatic skies. Or else you will always face the problem of your sky drying out too quick. Hence, it is ideally recommended that you practice the technique section on the very same paper that you're going to try out your project. Doing so will give you an idea about the wetness of your paper, how long your paper is able to retain the water, and which way you will be able to work for a longer time, or how your colors are behaving on the paper? Is it going down? Is it giving you brighter results that you want to achieve? So all these factors will play an important role if you know your people well. I'm really liking how my sky is shaping up. It is all because of the brush strokes that I'm exercising, the more fluid and quicker you are with your brushstrokes, the more dramatic or movement in the clouds you will be able to recreate, but makes sure that you are really flexible with your hand movements and lose. Now it's time to paint a lavender fields. We are going to follow the same parallel lines and start layering our colors just the same way that we have seen in the technique section. Here. I'm using my quill mop brush to spread the water evenly. Remember this is a natural brush, so it has a tendency of holding more water. I'm going here first with this three lines running along the sides of each other. I will create them first, and then I will start creating the others. Now, I have started from the bottom of the paper to follow along the parallel lines. Using this size number eight mop brush and layering my leaf green mixture into the field. So as you go near to the vanishing point, your lines must narrow down. Here. You need to be really wary about the water that you have. You cannot be having very runny, watery mix over here. At the same time, you should not be applying to thick paint over here because your paper needs to keep the moisture retention levels. So it is advisable that you start working with medium consistency, watery paint mix, just like how I have it on my palette. Now, I'm going again with my quill mop brush wetting down those areas all over again so that my paper is able to stay wet for a longer time. And also ensuring that these greens that we have lead is blending against the background very nicely. This step out here is very important and crucial because if you forget to wet your paper at this time, you will always have the risk of having your paper dry out before you complete your fields. That's guaranteed. So make sure that you are doing this step, right. Do not load too much of water as well as do not skip this step. It is very essential. Now with the very light tonal value of my Naples yellow, I'm going ahead and starting from the vanishing point, I'm starting to fade it out into this side, the bottom side of the paper. Now I'm loading my brush with this little watery paint mix of opera pink. If you want to have your lavender fields, little bit of that violet ish tinge, then mixed little bit of your mineral valid or your permanent violent into your pink. And you can have those purplish hue over here. I'm going here with this medium tonal value of my overlapping. But once the paper will dry out, you will see that this pink will be very faded. So go with a medium tonal value at this point and use water control when you are near to the vanishing point because you do not want your watery paint mix to bleed into the sky. So exercise water control when you are going to close to that vanishing point. Now, I'm loading my brush with this watery paint mix of opera pink and layering it on the fields because this will help me to keep my paper wet for a longer time. But I will have to be quick because this will also have a limited time value till when the water is going to stay afloat on the paper. So you need to understand your wetness of the paper really well for you to execute and plan this step. Now I'll quickly switch to my size number eight, brush and clean off this pinks which have blended into the greens. I'll go and use the lifting technique of tier. During this lifting technique, you might be lifting off some of that green paint from the background. So do not worry, just quickly go and use your leaf green mixture to layer back those greens in between. Now just like we have seen in the technique section, I'm switching back to my this quill mop brush and mixing my mineral valid along with that bright rose and wrapping that I had. And I will just go ahead and keep dabbing it. As I go closer to the vanishing point, my dabs are going to get smaller. You can see the paint is so beautifully blending into the background. This is what you will achieve when the paper is optimally wet. Now use a smaller brush to have this dabbing strokes near to the vanishing point. I'm here using my silver black size number six brush to create those dabbing strokes are near to the vanishing point. I'll quickly switch back to my quill mop brush, which already had my paint loaded in. So if you want to go here with your permanent violet instead of this mineral valid, you could go ahead and do so. That will give you those violet, lavender fields here. I was matching with the color tones of my sky, and hence I decided to go with this. I have already created one purple, lavender fields on my Instagram using the very same process. If you have followed me on Instagram, you would be able to see the process. I will show you at the end of this video about that painting. So it is just about the selection of the colors instead of mineral valid. If you choose to go ahead with your permanent valid, you would get your lavender fields closer to that of the violet shades. At this point, I will really be quick in creating this dabbing strokes to create these patterns of violets into the field. Because if your paper starts drying out on the left side of the paper, it will become very hard for you to go back. We wet the paper again, lay the paint, so that is quite a hazel. So try to be really quick out here at this step. Practise it prayer before you get onto a larger piece of paper. Do it on a small piece of paper, practice the technique section. Well, and then you will be good to go. Now, I'm done with creating that background. Now it's time to go load your brush with clean water and start with this splattering technique. This has to be done when your paper is still wet. So you can understand the importance of the wetness of the paper in this patent painting rate. So these are the critical points. You will not get this bloom effect on your lavender field if your paper has dried out. So be very particular about this step. Make sure that you are keeping your paper wet by using your watery paint mixes when going for lettering technique. Here at the bottom part of the paper, which is closer to our viewer. I can go ahead and use the watery tip of my brush to create this bigger blooms into this part only of the lavender fields. So bigger blooms will be confined only to the bottom part of the paper. Because as you go into the distance you are bloom should get smaller and smaller according to the principle of linear perspective, right? So that's what we are following here. I see my paper is still wet, so I will take my chance. And this lines in-between the lavender fields with my sap green just to have a little greenish component into my painting. Okay, so my paper is still wet, but if you feel your paper has dried out, skip this step. No need of going ahead and doing this because this will only give you hard edges if your paper has dried out. Join me in the next section, we will go ahead and complete a painting by following the further steps. 31. Spring Bonus Color Palette: The colors that we are going to use for this bonus project, are more is going to be the same color combinations that we have seen in our previous projects with few here and there extraditional colors. So this is the class project that we are going to paint today. And if you would go back and recap our color palette for our previous projects, you would see that most of the colors you would already have in your watercolor arsenal, or you would have learned how to mix them. So this project is also going to be using the same colors with some few exceptions of one or two colors that I'll show you how to mix and create them. I'm really excited about this class project, so let's dive into it and create a color swatches. The first color that I'm spatching out is my Naples yellow, followed by by yellow orange. Now, all these colors we have already learned in our previous class projects color palette lesson, how to mix them and create them in case if you do not have them with you. Now, the next color that I'm spatching out is my favorite opera pink. In case if you do not have opera pink, you can go and use your Azerin crimson or your any brighter shade of pink, which is available with you. The next color that we would be requiring is a lilac. This we are going to use it for the sky. So to prepare this color is very easy. As you can see it mentioned on the tube, it consists of a red pigment purple and a white pigment. So if you already have a purple or a violet pigment, which consists of PV 23, mix it with any of your reds which consists of P R 122 or a similar shade. Along with some of that titanium white PW six. In varying proportions, you go mix and see whether the color is closely resembling to mine, but make sure to use little of your white, not too much of white. And you would have your color. The next color is my blue gray color. Now, this is a pastel blue, which I love using it for the sky. We have already seen how to mix this and form this color in case if you do not have it. So refer back to the color palette lesson for the class project one, you would have the details over there. The next color that I'll be watching out is my bright rose. Now, instead of bright rose, you can opt for Azin crimson crimson lake or rose madder. The next color is my mineral violet. Now, you can always mix your own mineral volet by mixing your bright pinks with that of your purple or blue. The next color that I am swatching out is my sap green. Now, most of the basic watercolor palettes would already have this green present in it. So go ahead and swatch it. Now we will form a darker green mix by mixing our sap green along with my permanent violet or mineral violet, and you would get this very dark shade of green. Which we will be using to create our background foliage. Now, this is how you are going to mix your darker shade of green. So here I have already have sap green. Now, if I mix in it a little bit of my pins gray or neutral tint, I can also create a similar shade of darker looking green, as you can see here. Here, it might not be that properly visible on the screen, but I'll try to bring it up close, so you can see, you can turn any bright pigment into a dark or mutated pigment by either going ahead and mixing its complimentary color or mixing a little bit black or indigo or paints gray neutral tint. Any of these darker mixes of black into it to create your darker versions. So the next color that I'm going to swatch is my permanent red. Now, in case if you do not have permanent red which consists of pigment pr209. In case if you do not have this single pigment red, you can also swatch out your other reds and find a closely resembling color to this red so that we can create a combination of an Aserin crimson. I'll show you in a while. So when you mix your permanent red with your bright rose and a little bit of your permanent violet, along with burnt sienna, you get a very beautiful Pearline maroon color, and that's the color that we are going to use for painting our cottage. So that is all from this color color section. Join me in the next lesson where we get started with a main project. 32. Misty Morning- The Sky Part 1 : So, let's get started with the project. I hope your colors are ready. Now before we get started, I will quickly tape down the paper on all four sides, and then we will proceed on to creating our pencil sketch. Let me now quickly show you the reference. So this is the reference, and I'll be pinning this on the screen as well so that you can take the outlook over there and then draw it or sketch it as per your own convenience. So I'm going to get started with my sketching process. Now, if you can follow along, you are welcome to do so or just watch through the entire video and then go ahead and do the sketching part. Now, I'm proportioning my sky and the foreground element. My sky is going to cover up the majority. Hence, using my ruler or a scale, two thirds of my paper is going to be the sky where I'm going to again partition it into midground, and then rest of it is going to be my foreground. So I'll go quickly start sketching out the background foliage, as well as the sweet little cute cottage that we have over here. There is really not much to explain at this point. Here, I'm just going ahead and with the help of my slanted lines, I'm structuring the cottage. Now, you may follow along and start the process, but I would best recommend you to watch through the entire process and see if I have made any further changes so that you can incorporate it directly into your final sketch. Now, we will be adding in some of the windows. Now, if you're someone who is very good at drawing perfect straight lines, then feel free to go free hand or else, take the help of your ruler and your pencil to get the sketch ready. Cute little cottage is already, and I have went ahead and just blocked in the general shape of midground foliage, which is behind the cottage. And the rest of the area, we will be going ahead and painting the sky using the wet on wet technique, so let's get started. So I'm going to get started with my sky as the first element, and I'm going ahead with wet on wet technique. Wet on wet technique means applying wet paint over wet paper, but I'm also making sure that I do not go wet around the areas where I have sketched out the ground foliage. So make sure that you go around the area, even though You can still come till the cottage line. But I would recommend you not to come and paint till then because here we will be using some greens and darker greens for our midground foley. So it might become a little tricky to handle the lightness and the dark contrast that we would get. But if you already paint the sky, you would be layering on the colors of the sky, your greens. So your greens may not look as vibrant as they are in general. So that is the reason I'm just going above the area of that midground flie. Using the dam tip of my mob brush, which is size number 20 from Silver Attila series, I'm going to load my naples yellow, but make sure that you are exercising water control at this tip and using just the tip of my brush, I'm slowly going to start spreading this naples yellow from my left to right. As you can see, the right will have a little bit more intense tones of my naples yellow. The idea behind depicting this morning scene was the beautiful spring sunrise morning. Hence, the light source for my painting is tours right. But if you want to change the source of light, you could feel free to do so. You could also shift it to the left and paint the cottage on your right. It's totally up to you how you want to arrange the elements. Here, at this point, I realize that the topmost part of my paper is almost getting dry. So with the help of my bigger mob brush, I'm going and layering again a coat of water over there, but make sure you are not using too much of water over there. So here is the tip to ensure that even the bottom part of the paper or the sky that you have just painted remains wet. Goo over with your damn tip of your brush. Spread over the colors over there too. This will help the wetness to be retained. Now you can start layering the sky, the topmost part of the sky using the liliac. Now, I have not started from the top, but in between, and I have used a very lighter tonal value of liliac. In order to have a perfect analogous harmony of color blends in the sky, I'm going to layer it with a mixture of opera pink and lilac and start blending it into the base layer of that naples yellow, as you can observe out here. When creating sky with multiple colors, I always try to go first with a lighter wash of values, and then I darken it using some darker tones of my values. But make sure that you are correctly analyzing the colors and layering it because you don't want to create muddy mixtures in the sky. For example, the sky has complimentary colors such as this blue gray and my maple yellow. When you mix blue gray and maple yellow together, you would form a grayish band in between. In order to avoid the grayish band, I mixed in the analogous color of opera pink with liliac mixed into it because opera pink when mixed with yellows, forms a very beautiful and nice looking pink. So it gives a very harmonious effect to look at in your sky while you keep your blues led on top of your lilac or pink. Are you able to get me? So this is how I always create a analogous sky. At this point, my paper is still wet, so I'm just going to quickly go into little bit medium tonal values of my opera pink mixed with lilac, and I'm pushing it into the blue while blending it into the yellow. Observe my brush strokes out here. I'm going very smoothly using just the tip and the belly of the brush and very gentle strokes, and you'll have the perfectly blended sky. Now, the Naples yellow, when it starts to dry out, is going to fade out even lighter, so I'm just going to go in and go with mid tonal values of my Naples yellow once more, very gently flicking it onto the side, but not going too much into the blue. Now, I'll be quickly switching to my size number four silver silt series. This is a synthetic brush, and using just the tip of my brush, I'm going to mix in my mineral violet with a little bit of my blue gray and start the layering process of the clouds floating in the sky using just the tip. Observe my brush strokes out here. I'm not going with full strokes, but half broken strokes in between. While creating those strokes, I also ensure that I keep certain of that yellows to come out beautifully in between. You cannot cover up the yellows, leave certain spaces of yellow in between while you are painting your clouds. This gives a very beautiful effect. Now, to create the depth into the clouds, towards the base, I start layering my darker tones of permanent violet and using the same color mix of blue gray and permanent violet. I start layering the broken staggered strokes using the tip of my brush here and there at the top and in between, making sure that I'm not covering the lighter areas too much. I want the light to show through in between the clouds, hence that step. Now, if you observe the reference, you would find the clouds to be very fluffy and light in color. So I'm just trying to retain the same effect, if not entirely copying the reference. Now, I'm going to retain the clouds on the right corner because our cottage is the main element, which will be focused on the left. So I'm just keeping it to that and very loose and fluffy clouds towards the left. Cure, my paper is still wet to create this fluffy clouds, which are well blended. But if your paper has started to dry out, you need to go over the whole re wetting process over again. So that's all for the sky. Now we will move on to our midground element, which is our foliage. I'm going ahead and mixing my greens. In the meantime, my sky is getting dried. I will see you in the next lesson where we will start painting our mid ground. 33. Misty Morning Mid ground- Part 2: Okay, so let's get started with our midground element. I'm going to go ahead and lay a controlled amount of wet wash near to this cottage area, ensuring that the water does not enter into the outlined sketch of the cottage. Now, you must be wondering why I am going ahead with controlled ton wet technique and why not wet on dry. The answer lies, we want to create the mist defect starting at the base of this cottage and at the starting of the medoide. That's why we are going ahead with ton wet so that once I start layering my sap green over here, you can see here. As I'm starting to lay the sap green, it will create a very beautiful feathering or bleeding effect when the pain starts to disperse into that wet background. I'm not going too much into the baseline. I'm leaving the white areas, the wet background over there, pulling my colors towards it and leaving the rest for the pain to just do its job of flowing and dispersing. Now, if you would have observed, I'm playing with different tonal values of my Sab green over here. First, I started with a medium tonal value of Sab green, and then as I'm moving towards the sky, the top area, I'm going ahead with darker colors. Remember the reference. So, this is the effect that I'm trying to achieve. Now, playing with different tonal values will bring so much depth here. Always remember to go with first the lighter tones, and when the area is still wet enough, go ahead with your darker tones. This will ensure that you have a very well and soft blended background foliage. Now, notice that as I'm moving towards the sky area, I'm going ahead with wet on right technique because this part of the paper, I had not pre vetted it only near to the base and around the cottage area, I had layered it with water first because I wanted to create this bleeding mist defect. And now with just the dam tip, I'm going ahead and creating this soft bleeding blends over here. So what I would recommend you is to first observe this step, what I'm doing out here, and then go ahead and start the process because you'll see me struggle a little bit with, you know, dry, patchy areas here and there, because the paper will have started to dry when I would be going ahead and adding in these darker tones to my greens. So to bring the illusion of depth in here, and because there is mist near to the base line of the foliage, we are retaining the lighter tones of my sap green, but the greens will start getting darker as you move towards the sky. Okay? So this is how your atmospheric perspective effect will come into play. From this part onwards, you will see me change the shape of the trees quite a lot because I wanted some more toletries, but feel free to add your own imagination. Now, I'm here aiming for some toletries, but if you would like, you may also go ahead with some medium hide shrubby foliage over there, just like how we had initially painted. But make sure whenever you are doing this step, remember to use different tonal values of your greens, start first with the light near the base, and then the medium tones, and then at the top will come your darker most tones. Now, with my rigger brush, I'm just going to go ahead and create this little leaves protruding out. Okay, that effect of the trees is what you see, the outline of the tree. I'm just going to refine it a little bit more. Using this fanning strokes from the brush. Use shorter and longer strokes with the tip of your brush to give this tree its natural. Over here, you will see me go on increasing the height of the tree and creating this dabbing strokes with the tip of my brush to create the effect of that foliage. As the tree is drying out, I realize that I need to go with a little bit more darker tones, the darkest tone probably with my greens. But here I notice that this area has started to dry already, and it's giving me a patch look. So I need to go over this entire area all over again with Sap green layer it, And then start putting the darker tones. So this is what I'm going to do here exactly. But when doing this step, please be a little mindful about the water content that you will be having at the tip of your brush when going ahead and rewating these areas all over again, go with a light tonal value of your green first and then start putting in your medium tonal values of green and then your darker tones. This will give the depth that you wanted to have in this foliage. This bonus project is a culmination of all the techniques that we have learned in our previous projects from project one to project four. So just go ahead and recap if you are coming and joining the bonus lesson after a long time, or if you're someone just starting from the bonus lesson, it would be advisable that you go back to the previous lessons, see through it, and then come and attempt this bonus lesson. This tree that I'm creating over here is with wet on dry technique. I'm using just the tip of my size number six brush and creating those lean and short strokes, stubby strokes to create the stubs of the tree. As you shift to the rightmost part of your painting, here in this foliage, you are going to create a bright green glow coming from the sun, that is just rising up. So here is the most important part where we play with the atmospheric perspective knowledge. Since it is closer to the sun rising, so this part of it will have that golden glow. Time to get started with a cottage. For our cottage, I'm going with wet on right technique. Here the color that I'm using. We have already watched it in the color palette section, how we can make this color. It is made by using combination of four colors, that is your permanent tray burnt sienna, and a little bit of your opera or bright rose, whichever Okay. Towards the corner of your cottage, there will be much more hues. First, initially, you go and color block the areas, and then towards the center, we are going to go and use a medium tonal value, keeping the base of the cottage free with the white space retained so that we can blend the colors and create that misty effect over year two. Once you're happy with the blend of the mixture at the center part of the cottage. Use tissue paper and dab it near to the base. So you'll have that misty effect over there. Okay. Now let's move on to painting a roof for roof. We are going to use a little bit more darker shade of brown, mixed with a little bit of red. So here you can also go ahead and use your brown red if you have that readily available or mix it with your pearlin maroon, a little bit more of burn sienna, and you would be able to get the similar shade. Now, for the roof to, I'm going to go with similar technique. I'm going to use little watery dam brush and pull the colors down. Here at the slope part, I want it to be a little lighter while the top part of the roof is going to be darker. Now, using my liner brush, I just went ahead and created those lines over there to give it some kind of form and shape. Now, using dry brush technique, you can go ahead and create some more textures on the roof that I'm going to add in towards the end once this area has dried out completely. Now I'm going ahead and painting the chimney. I observe that once the layer has dried out, the cottage is looking a little faded out. I want the cottage to grab the attention of the viewer, so I will darken it a bit and create the shadows just underneath the roof and at the side corners of left and right. So here you might have this dry pad. What you do is use your watery tip of the brush and just drag the colors upwards. So this will ensure that you have a smooth, blended effect retaining the misty effect towards the base of the cottage. So that was all about creating your midground. Your midground is ready. Now, time to get started with our Fo ground. I'm going to go with wet on wet for my Foe ground. So I'll see you in the next lesson where we start our Foe ground. 34. Misty Spring Morning Final details: Okay, so it's time to get started with a foreground. For a foreground, I'm going to go ahead and create a lavender field. Now, if you have already seen through projects two and project four, you would have already have some idea how to go ahead and paint a floral meadow. Now look what happened over here. As soon as you led that water over your foreground, the colors from the cottage will start bleeding into the white areas. So make sure that your cottage is absolutely dried out before you start with your foreground. Okay. Paint this lupins or lavender field, I'm going to go ahead with a mixture of my bright rose and my mineral violet or permanent violet over here. Now here, go with a light tonal wash of your bright rose or opera pink, whichever you opt to go with, and then add in some little splatters of your permanent violet, just like this or with just the tip of your brush, go on and layer this. Now, using your bigger size mop brush, I'm just going to go and blend this areas out smoothly, something like this. There is water over here in this area. So obviously, your paint will start dispersing very smoothly and towards the base of your paper. You go with this upward vertical strokes creating the shapes of your lupin or your lavender, okay? Now, here, I'm going to use this dual tone mixture of my bright rose and my permanent violet over here and creating the varied strokes, smaller and bigger, smaller when it is farther into the distance and bigger when it is nearer to the foreground, which is near to us. So here is, again, the effect of perspective coming into play. Here, observe my brush strokes. I'm leaving in certain white gaps in between. This will create a glow and also will enable us to go and fill in the greens later on when we are done filling it with our purples and pinks. At this point, you really need to be a little quick, and with my damp tip of my brush, I'm going with vertical strokes wetting the base of the paper so that when I start laying my greens into it, it does not form any dry patchy areas, and it is well blended and soft. So go ahead with some medium tonal values of your sap green and towards the innermost corner or the base of the paper, go with stronger values of your greens, more towards the darker shade, because at the base, it is behind the shadow, so these are the shadowy parts. Now, with the same tip of my mob brush, I'm just going to go ahead and create the thinner and slender strokes of the grass shapes where in between those whiter areas. Now here, you need to be a little careful. And when the paper is still wet enough, you need to go ahead and add in your darker tones to the base of the greens as well. I'm switching to my comb brush now, and using the medium tonal values, I'm going to flank the colors upwards into the white spaces or gaps, but not covering it fully, you also need the white to show through. While the paper is still wet, you are welcome to go ahead and create the techniques that we have seen in Project two and Project four, the splattering effect of salt and water into the floral meadows to create a very dreamy effect. You are welcome to go ahead and create that effect in this meadow two. But here, I wanted to create a little differently, retaining the shapes of the lupin. That's why I did not go with that effect, but that effect is very simple and easy to do, and it creates a beautiful effect. So if you want, you can go ahead and refer back to those two projects and recreate the same. Now, here you can see that my paper has started to dry out, and it is giving me this dirty, dry patchy look, which I'm not really liking, but with the help of my comb brush, I'm just going and creating this flanking strokes to create the effect of grass in here. So somehow I'm just able to cover it. But if your paper is Fully dried, you will not be able to do this tip, and it would look very nasty and dirty. So make sure that you are a little quick in doing this because this is the same problem that you would have encountered in project two and project four. If you're not fast enough and you do not know the wetness of your paper, then this problem will keep on arising. To avoid going back and forth this re wetting technique. I would advise you to first watch the complete lesson and then go ahead and start in this way, you would know what are the next steps to be done simultaneously, and you can paint along. Now I'm going ahead with my co brush, adding in some darker values of my bright rose mixed with a little bit of my violet and using this cob brush effect, I'm trying to create the shape of the lupins. Time. Okay, now, time to get started back again with our background foliage. You know the reason because it's looking very untidy over here because of too much of re wetting technique. The colors have all faded, and most probably I would have lifted out all the colors. So starting now, I'm just going ahead and reapplying the colors onto the wet background. I have reveted those areas all over again with the light mix of my sap green, lighter value of sap green, and then started again layering my darker values. Here, make sure not to come back to this point and do this step like I am doing. So when I was doing the mid ground foliage, I have been continuously telling how to lad the colors so that you get it right in one shot. Okay, now, my meadow has dried out totally, and I've switched to my size number two brush. This is a synthetic brush. Now, using this brush, I'm going to add in my very light tonal value of indigo into the windows to create that effect of shadow into the windows. The innermost corners will be a, and then you will fade the colors out to be lighter towards your right. This is the same step that we are going to follow for both the windows. Now, I'll be going and repeating the same process for the left window as well. The left corner of the window will be darker than that of the right. So keep this in mind and then go ahead and do this. Now, once the windows are ready, we will let it dry in the meantime. I will just go ahead and start adding some birds into the sky, and then we will come back to the windows and paint some white grills onto it. Okay, now time to add in the grill, so I'm here using my detailing brush and using white guash to do this step, but you could also use your Posca markers or any wide gel pen to do this step. I'm here going with a ruler, but make sure that when doing this step, you use either a ruler or free if you are very comfortable drawing straight lines. Otherwise, the windows are going to look crooked. I'm going here with Free and to create the panes for the windows. If you are not confident at this step going and then use your. Using the same brush. Now I'm going to go ahead and add in some dry brush strokes onto this roof to create some textures. Here, make sure that your brush is not having any water. It is absolutely with just the color loaded in it. Hence, only then will you get this dry brushes. Adding these textures onto the roof where the final steps. Now once it's completed, you let your painting to dry out completely, and then we will be taking off the masking tapes. Now, while taking off your masking tapes, always be gentle with it. Do not try to rip it off and especially let your paper very properly or use your hot air gun, anything which is available with you to dry it out fast, and then only do this step. So with that, our bonus lesson comes to an end. I hope you have enjoyed painting along with me as much as I did creating this bonus lesson. I can't wait to see your creations. I'll see you soon in the next class. Okay. 35. That's a Wrap: Congratulations, you have made it to the end of the class. Once you complete your projects, please do upload them in the projects and resources section under the class. If you're uploading your projects on Instagram, please do tag me. If you have any questions or queries. Please feel free to post a discussion under the class. I will be happy to help you out with answers. Last but not least, if you are loved. Hi class, please do consider leaving a review. This would help my class reach a wider audience and also keeps me motivated and energized to bring more such contained to you and future. That's all from this class. Do share your ideas or suggestions that you would like to learn from me. And I will try to make it into a glass until then stay safe and happy painting.