Art Journal Landscapes with Nikalola

1. introduction: Hey, guys, it's me. Nikki GOP, also known as Nikola, and I teach your on skill share all about our journaling. So for a long time I was pretty intimidated by painting landscapes. I kind of thought they had to be soft and pretty, and that's not really my style, so I just never tried. So about a year and 1/2 ago, I was sitting at the lake with my kids, and I had my our journal and a set of water colors that were actually tropical colored. So not exactly what you would pick to do a landscape. And I just painted the mountains in the lake and the water and the shoreline, and it just like something click. That watercolor really, really translates the things you see in nature so well, and it made me want to try more and more landscapes, so I don't consider myself an expert by any means. I've only been doing this for a year and 1/2 but every time I posted a landscape, I got really positive feedback from people. How did you do that? How did you do that? And I realized I needed to make a class about it. This class is going to be perfect for all skill levels, whether you're experienced in watercolor or just a beginner. And even if you don't have an art journal, I believe that these techniques could be used in any kind of art that you are making. I'm for Montana, where beautiful scenes are everywhere. But I'm convinced that the strategies and techniques that I talk about in this class will be able to be translated to the scenery that you're seeing out of your windows. So I'm going to start off today with a quick overview of my favorite supplies for painting landscapes. And then we're gonna jump right into an easy squeezy warm up that I've done with second graders. So I promise you'll be able to do it, too, just to give you an idea how these paints behave and flow on your page. Then I'll do four demonstrations for you. The first demonstration will be kind of my order of operations and general concepts. The second demonstration, I'm gonna focus on showing you my approach to sky. The third demonstration will be all about trees, and the fourth demonstration will show you how I approached painting snow. I think they will each give you a little something that you can use in your landscape paintings. You can watch the demonstrations or you can pain along with me in your art journal. I won't be able to teach you everything I know because so much of illustration you got to do it to learn it, and you have to make a lot of ugly landscapes to get one that you're actually happy with. But that's OK, then, as a class, we're going to make postcards out of our artwork to send to someone we love most of all, I hope this class inspires you to see the world in a new way. There's not just one way to paint a pretty feminine landscape. There's a messy, paint splattered way to paint it, and I hope you enjoy watching me do that for you. If that sounds fun, I hope youll joining the next lesson 2. supplies: Okay, so we're going to keep the supplies really simple today. If you've taken my other are journaling classes. You know that I love my little pouches supplies, and I use them at home and away from home. Um, I definitely have my favorites, but today we're just gonna keep it pretty simple for these landscapes. This little travel book is a cute one. It's filled with watercolor paper. It's a really fun one for traveling doing landscapes, but typically for my day to day painting, I used this nine by seven mixed media book. The paper can take quite a bit of water, and it's still pretty affordable. When I went to order a new book for filming this class, I accidentally got the 9 12 size, but I just went with it. And so I'll do on my demos today on these nice, big pages. If you're a beginner, though, I would totally recommend starting with smaller sheets of paper so that you aren't so overwhelmed with that vast expanse of a page. Next up, I have a few sets of these travel watercolors by prima marketing. All these supplies will be linked in the class description tab by the way, and today I'll be using the woodland set because it has a lot of colors that you see out in nature. They're kind of muted and moody, and they're good for sky water and trees. The most key supply, I think, for making her wherever, though, is this water brush pin. They are the best. You fill the barrel, depend with just plain water, and then you squeeze a bit of water out of the bris. Lend into the paint tray to kind of activate those colors, and then you can just paint squeezing out water as you go. If you want to lighten the color, you just add a little more water and it's totally portable. The other really important part of my kit. You saw there was a piece of paper towel. It's really good for cleaning off the color that's in the brush. Bristles maybe from the last time you painted, I'm gonna show you here how easy it is to get that color onto the page. It just really, really makes watercolor accessible and easy tohave kind of your water and paint in one. Have a lot of people out and about, asked me. What are you using? Is that really watercolor? Because so convenient. It's almost like a marker. And like I said, I don't usually rents may brush or dab it on the paper towel unless I am switching from like, thes blues to maybe like a red. But then you can even flick the barrel of the Russian ads splatter to your designs as I'll show you. So the next thing I add to my watercolor illustrations is a black ink pen. This is permanent ink. It's a brush tip, which means it's kind of flexible on the end, and it's really, really fun to draw with. I buy these in vogue and then last but not least, I add white ink to my drawings with a unit ball signal pen. It's just basically a white gel pin and thereby these also kind of in bulk from Japan. So that's a fun one. And then I'm gonna be making these reference photos available that I am using for my landscape so you can paint along with me, or you can find landscapes of your own to draw and paint. But if you would like these as downloads, you can go to the project. Resource is, and these are just in the They're just files there for you to download, and you need to look at him on your phone or computer, or you can print them off, feel free, do whatever with those. Once you've gathered your supplies, let's start with a warm up. 3. warm-up: Okay, I'm going to show you a quickie little warm up with your paints that I have de mode with second graders. I'm gonna paint four quick little landscapes using only 1/4 of a page for each one, just so you can see kind of how the paint behaves and how just a few rush strokes can really translate into pretty little scenes laying down a quick swash of blue. And you're immediately given the feeling of a Laker and ocean. I usually do the blue a little bit darker towards the horizon and drag the color down lighter and lighter toward the bottom. And remember, you lighten it up, giving it an extra squeeze of water. I don't trace that horizon line first. I just swiftly make that line level and trust my brush. Then Aiken dab in more of this darker color leader. I try to make confident brush strokes, and the only way to get more confident is to do it more and more and more. You can see I'm kind of blending those two blue colors together, And then as the water color starts to dry, they kind of bleed together, and you never know what's gonna happen next up? I'm going to do a golden yellow squash that will kind of represent the sunset or the sunrise over the water. And again, I didn't mask that line. I'm just trusting my wrist local kind of straight across and leaving the tiniest white gap in between the two so that they don't blend and mix and make green. It's kind of hard to tell, but I'll zoom in here and the closest thing I have to and oranges this tan ish color, and I'm just gonna streak in some of that as some sunset clouds. Now, you could add this to any page in your art journal and journal about your day at the lake or at the ocean, and it would communicate a lot right there. And I want a little more darkness right at the horizon so you can always go back and clean it up a little, But then let the paint do the work and let it kind of bleed around wherever it wants. And I'm already going to be done with that when I'm gonna call Good. So there's next many little landscape. I think I'm gonna start with this green in the corner, and I'm going to do a green swash that kind of represents a field of grass or something. Um, we got a lot of road trips through North Dakota Montana, and this is kind of looks like flat as a pancake and green. And if you make sure that green is darker at the top of that swatch, it gives it a feeling of depth when the radiant is from dark to light. So you saw it clean out my brush there, and I'm gonna come back in with a confident blue line is a barest of white lines between, and I'm just going to drag that color up in a real messy, abstract way. I love how this looks like a big North Dakota Skye. You don't have to do much more than that. I will take my blue may get a little darker. Just you kind of wonder what is way up there in the distance. But basically there's many different ways you could. You can translate a landscape in just a couple colors. Don't be intimidated. This is so fun. And like I said, I did it with my son's class years ago. I'm kind of outlining where maybe a cloud would be just to make sure that middle chunk stays lighter. But honestly, you don't draw cloud. You just draw the absence of blue. And as this is drawing him like, maybe it needs a little more green in there. Maybe that's a little washed out. Watercolor typically dries lighter than when you lay it down, so you can always work light to dark and less detail to more detail. So I think I'm ready to I don't know. I mean, here's some more green. Let's do another green version. This one's a little bit more like an all of green, just with some colors that are on my palette and another Robin's egg blue sky. But this time I'm leaving a gap in between because I want to make 1/3 swatch of color that will be like a line of mountains in the distance. That's where I live in Montana, and there's always the faintest line of some mountains in there. And best case scenario. You'd wait for this to dry quite a while before you would add in that, but I'm gonna show you are well quickie. This is I'm not putting down tons of water, so it's not super super wet. And I'm just going to take some of that gray, get it activated with some water. And I'm just going to do a real quick, just a little bulges, something right there on the horizon. And if it bleeds with the green, it kind of turns into the grass color. And if it leads into the sky countries into the sky colors, you kind of want to be mindful of that. Now I'm gonna show you another beach scene with three colors. We're gonna do this sand, which is the tope color. We're gonna do a turquoise for the water and we're gonna let those to bleed together so you can see how sand touches water, water touches sand and one more bold line across the top. And voila! You have a beautiful Caribbean landscape. So these air just my warm ups. I want you to feel confident that if you learn nothing else than this from this course, you will feel brave to just get some color on the paper and let it translate to a landscape . But next up, we're going to do the first demo 4. demo 1: watercolor layer 1: okay for this first demo, I am going to be painting and illustrating this scene from a place in paradise, Montana. I pulled over and took this picture of where the river runs through between some mountains , and it was just a really pretty spot. And I'll try to do my best to talk through my thought process as I go, it's the first thing I do is I squint my eyes to see the area in colors, route and shapes rather than what the objects are like mountains. So here on my iPad, I can actually do this blur feature and procreate. So kind of the same thing that happens when I squint my eyes is I can see ah, block of blue, a block of brown for the mountain, a little yellow stripe and then some more blue for the water. So the first thing I do is get some blue on my brush, just like we did in the warm up and just kind of swab in a bunch of blue for the sky. And one rookie mistake people make is they paint all the way to the edges. For some reason, I feel like that makes a painting look tighter and more constructed rather than just free, free flowing. And there's not really much of a cloud in the sky here. But I am just trying to make this look like the big Montana sky without painting all the way to the edges. And if you just can't help yourself, maybe even put it. He's a tape around edge to really keep yourself from painting all the way to the edge. But I really like that loose artistic edge there. And now I'm going to get some, uh, blue on my brush again for this swash of water right here. And this is a little bit darker. Blue has a little bit more movement. There's a few other colors in there You can see when that picture is blurred. Um, I've had there. You can't really. You don't really start to make it look like water. Yet you're just kind of trying to mimic those same fields of color that you see on the screen, and you can get the same effect by just blurring your eyes. Just squint your eyes and make it all kind of run together. I just wanted to show you this with my iPad so that you get an idea what I'm doing. So the front edge of this water is quite a bit darker, So I'm dabbing in darker blue towards the foreground. Here and foreground basically just means the front of the picture and background is, of course, the background, the stuff that's further away. 5. demo 1: watercolor layer 2: so I let that dry a little bit and no, I'm coming back in here and you can see how the watercolor kind of dried with these cool little bleeds and balloons, and I'm just leaving it like that. But the next tripe I want to add is this grassy shore on the other side, and I'm doing it this bright yellow because that's the closest that I have to that color. Right now, I'm dabbling in a little tan, but I'm not worrying so much about Is that exactly what the shore look like? I'm more just putting down these first layers. Like I reminded you in the warm up. Watercolor usually dries even lighter, so you're kind of just sketching it out at this point. Then there's a little bit of a green stripe before it heads up the mountain. There's a lot of growth there on the other shore, so I kind of want that yellow and green to kind of bleed together and again. I'm being really looser on the edges. I'm not deciding to draw every last little thing. I'm kind of being a little bit more abstract with it, and there's a little bit of the hillside. That's kind of bear with no no trees on it. So I'm gonna leave that a tan color, and now I'm coming in. And this is where you might get a little nervous. I'm taking a gray color, and I'm just kind of drawn that line of the mountains and getting that first grey washed down. I like to kind of get a feel for it as I go like, Is this story color? Yeah, I think it's the right color. And if it wasn't the right color, you can actually take your paper towel and blot it right out of there. You don't have to get it absolutely right. But most of the time it's close enough and you can see it kind of just absorb that blue. That was behind it from this guy. That was totally fine. But I will notice right off the bat if there's any really dark streaks and I'll start to kind of block them in right now to give that mountain dimension as it dries, it will all kind of bleed into each other and dry. So even if I make it clearer now, here on this screen, the other thing that's standing out is this front foreground area where there's these, uh, kind of weeds and grasses, and I can also see these little trees on the opposite shore line. So now is when, if parts of your painting or a little bit dry air you concert to add the next layers. So I like to kind of just work around my painting based on what is wet and what is dry. See, I touched her right there. It's still pretty dry, so I'm gonna start blotting in some trees, thes air just the first layers, and I'm just using my brush as if each brushstroke was its own tree. And I want that edge to be a little bit greener, not so bright yellow, but literally go so fast and just just pretend that you're just kind of just making a mess of what all this stuff is growing. Here. You don't have to draw every single treat. You just you kind of trick the eye into seeing that there's a whole stand of trees over there, even though you're not during every single one. And these water brush pens I phoned have a very good shape for imitating trees, especially evergreen trees like we have around us. They're kind of kind of pointed at the tip and then, um, thicker at the bottom. So at this point, I am dabbling in a little bit darker here and there. But who knows how it will dry these air? Just the first base layers of trees. And then as it drives, we can go in and get tighter and tighter. But I really enjoy, um, kind of cleaning up that edge in making sure that horizon line does look straight. At first, it might not have been very straight, and I'm just kind of mixing colors here on my palette. And now this front area. I really want to make sure this is the darkest thing on the picture. I don't want this to draw your I and I want you to be looking across the river at that mountain side, so this front edge is very dark. I'm extensive brown into the green, and I'm just kind of making this little area we were standing on and again, I'm not doing it with a perfect edge on the bottom. I'm just kind of letting it trail off and I think that looks really ah, sophisticated and realistic to what things look like a nature. So I'm just roughing up that edge so that it's not just this perfect shoreline. It's kind of a rough shoreline and just dabbing my brush upward to get all that scrubby stuff that's going down there. Okay, the more you can just keep it rough and loose, and then those layers dry. You can always go back into more detail, and I really like adding water or spatter at this point because I don't know what makes it look more alive and all that little There's gravel there. There's little things drawing in the, um, growing in the undergrowth or whatever. But spatter just is another way to get a lot of energy and movement into the peace. So where I'm spattering onto this mountainside, some of it will land on wet, watercolor and kind of blue mo, and then some of it will land on drier patches and actually stay like a spatter. So I'm going to come along this mountain side edge with my tiniest, lightest brushstrokes, and I'm just making this edge a little more jagged because we know that a mountain is never just a perfectly straight line, so I'm holding it very loosely, and I'm just tapping down my brush. This is just kind of a medium greenish brown color. It's gonna dry a lot lighter. So I just wanna break up that edge there so that you don't see it doesn't look too perfect and then kind of smooth out at the base of all those trees so that they don't look like they're just standing in thin air. And I'm looking at my reference photo and seeing areas where there are darker clumps of trees, and I'm dabbing these in and you'll see me Mex 101 shades of green for this one mountainside. I don't want them to look the same. I don't want, like nature has so many colors and so many variations of colors that it's not like Oh, a tree is forest green. Pick this forest green color and paint it paint a tree. It's like layer in all these shades of green and brown, and it looks more realistic, but we are not going for photo realism here. We're just going for a vibe, and I like the vibe of this hillside. What has a lot going on? So a mix of little dabs and then little horizontal slashes to kind of bleed it all together . And you, you're starting to get some dimension on this hillside. Sorry, my head keeps coming in the way of the camera. I had to clip it out one time because I leaned absolutely in front of it. But, you know, better luck next time. So down here on the shoreline is the darkest of these trees. They're the closest to the camera, and they are actually a little bit bigger than those ones way back on the ridge. So now I'm gonna more aggressively put my brush down and make taller trees still just using the tip of my brush. I'm not really drawing a tree at I'm just dabbing it in and your brain can still figure out that. Okay, she's drawing trees, even though we have never drawn a trunk and a and branches yet. So on this front, little bank to I need a little bit more darkness again. I need to dab in. It's it's dried lighter. And now I want to overlay some more of this dark scrub grass and whatever is all going on in here. A little bush. And like I mentioned every time I'm kind of grabbing another hue off my palate. Maybe let's make this color a little bit green or a little brown or no, I'm gonna flick my rush upward to do this grass that you see growing right in the foreground. Just a little bit of grassy growth right there. So what's next on this hillside? Now I'm using again the very, very tip of my brush and just kind of doing little cross hatch mark. So these are a little skinny lines, and I'm turning some of those brush strokes into more of a tree shaped with by going side to side, so that makes it look more like a big, tall evergreen tree. You'll mix up a little darker green and kind of go here on this hillside dab in some more dark trees. It keeps, as you can see as it dries. It just keeps kind of washing out later, and I'm like, No, it looks to washed out. Need adds more layers, so you get to decide when your dentist office I really enjoy the process. My toddler will just be painting at the table with me, and I just can work on a painting for for maybe 1/2 an hour. Um, I didn't clean out my brush there because I wanted to add a little more movement in the sky . So to go from dark green to blue, you do need to make sure your Russia's clean. And there were these wisps of fog on this hillside that I wanted to make sure felt very light. Okay, so I wanted to add a little bit more yellow color, actually, to the water. There's there are streaks where you can see the bottom is a little closer that I wanted to paint in there. Okay, I'm just gonna continue adding a few little grass brush strokes to really make it feel layered and dimensional. You can see even these lighter colors can layer over those darker ones. If you come in later, you can keep adding more dimension. No, I'm gonna make a greenish tan here. Little bit of brown to and I just think this hillside just needs a little more darkness, so just keep your rest lose. Keep your brush, loosen your hand, and we're just dotting it in their dabbing it in there. I like to move all around so that it doesn't start looking like, you know, a computer did it. I just kind of move left to right up to down to mix it up and make it look random, because remember, this is out in nature. It's not a perfect hillside, but I want to draw some trees here on the bank on this side. So it was kind of draw a line up and down and then little slashes across and have a very simple tree. Everyone's landscapes. They're going to look very different. We all have a different eye and a different sense for what would look good. And I don't want you to necessarily compare yours to mine. But rather what do you see when you look at this? This hillside I love the rugged look I love when it really looks wild. But maybe you prefer when it looks softer, prettier. So now I'm done with the watercolor, and I wanna come back in with my black ink 6. demo 1: ink: and there are some water color people that feel like this is not true. Watercolor. If you're using ink, but I don't care, I'm holding it very loosely. Not like I'm writing a grocery list and holding it like it's a paintbrush, and I'm just kind of scratching in some lines where I can see landforms and it's a very spotty line is not a solid line, and I'm just kind of making this jagged edge to really give it some more dimension and then another one of my favorite movements to do with my Russia. These zig zag lines, jagged lines. This is more like leaves and grass, so I'm using different, uh, lines for this kind of stuff. But it's a lot of just little lines mixed with bigger, wavy lines. I can't even say where I learned this style. I just I just kind of feel very intuitively that I can I can trust what my hand wants to do . So I did some fluff your trees over there, but I also want to scratch in a couple more pine trees and bushes. So on that front edge of the of that others bank, you see me giving a little more definition to those trees because they are bigger and kind of darkening that that, uh, water's edge and some of them are pine trees all got to do some of my scratchy little pine trees. But when it comes to this hillside a really like doing just thes lines really close together really fast. Um, I don't even know the name of it. Hatching cross hatching, I'm not sure, but it's a way to give certain areas darkness, and it's a way to really show a lot of texture. So I keep my all the lines kind of up and down, and here I'm crossing over that top mountain line that I did to just keep that really rough . This is something you could practice on scrap paper. If you don't feel confident. I don't want you to be scared of messing up your lands. Give, though, because honestly, there's no such thing is messing enough. Just go for it. Just practice. So these little batches of straight of unknown lines you start to imagine maybe those are clumps of trees. Maybe those are little shadows where the sun isn't hitting. Sometimes I do dots sometimes I do exes, But this is just a really neat way to give it a lot of extra kind of messy texture. And this isn't exactly according to my reference picture, I'm not looking at it and just getting really worked up about Well, is that actually dark right there, Just kind of having fun with it. At this point, I would never show someone this and say this is Ah, photograph of paradise Montana. It is just my interpretation. So lots of these weird. I don't know what they would be called. S s shaped lines just kind of zigzagging here and there. And my favorite part is we need some white in here, so white is usually in water color. You have to leave it white, or you can never get white again. But I come and last with my white, you know, ball pen. And I wanted to see some of these wisps of clouds that were kind of overlapping over the mountain. So it looks kind of funny to put these cartoony cloud right in the middle of it. But that's kind of my style. So I'm just going with it, and I'm kind of overlapping it over those black cross hatches, and I like it. The water needs a little movement in there with some white, and then maybe that horizon line. We're not really horizon, I guess. But the the bank of the water, and then sometimes all highlights some of the mountain peaks again with this white pen. And if you'll notice, I'm holding my white pen. Also, even though it's just a ballpoint pen, I'm holding it looser like I hold a paintbrush. Not in this tight grip. Well, here I am, but experiment with different ways of holding your brush and how you feel more painterly rather than I have to get this perfect. I'm drawing a perfect mountain. That's not the vibe we want. So even though this front edge is the darkest part of the painting, I want to at a few little highlights to this shoreline and maybe back here. Maybe there's a few spots where the light is really shining on the mountain. I don't know, and at some point you have to just say, I think I'm done. I think that's good. I like it. And here is how it turned out. Up close. Next up, we're gonna focus on the sky 7. demo 2: So in this next video, we're going to talk about the sky part of your landscape because skies are really some of the coolest things you can do with watercolor. This reference photo you were using today is just the view out my front door, the little mountains right across the street for me. And the main thing you need to know when you're looking at a sky is really not that different than any other thing. You blur it until you can just see colors kind of in general, and it gives you a better idea what you need to do with your paint. So as you can see again and blurring it on my iPad just as if I would blur my eyes. And when I'm painting skies a lot of times I use what's called a wet on wet technique where I get the paper really, really wet. See, I'm cleaning my brush first cause they're still green from the last painting. But I wanted to be a pure blue color and whoops my papers going the wrong way. Let's do this up and down instead. But I'm gonna put down some blue on this paper just a big wash of blue. You can see there's still a little bit of green in there, but that's gonna get diluted. And then you just dab in more colors to make this huge wash of color blue where you wanted you blue and gold, where you wanted to be gold and pink. We want to be pink, so the paper on this one is going to get very, very, very soggy. You kind of keep squeezing the brush so that there's lots of water coming out of the tip, and you just want to let all these colors bleed together. No watercolor paper would be much better in this case than this multimedia paper, but it's going to be fine. Um, I wanted to be a little darker at the top, fading into more medium blue, and you just can kind of mess with these colors on the page to see how you want them initially. But really, as it dries, they all kind of do what they want to do. They're actually sometimes they kind of push one color out of the way in, take over from another angle. So before I move on to the foreground in that line of mountains I only color close to a pink I have on here is this burnt red color. So I'm gonna squeeze a lot of water into it and make sure I get a streak of pink and you see already that the pink and the blue are kind of interacting right there. Now pull it down a little further, but are already being aware that there is this line of mountains right there. And then I'm going to just kind of forced thes Tuta interact here. They don't want it to be a a stark line where the color changes. You know what kind of purple ian there as they as they blend. I don't clean my brush. Old Doc got China purple e on my brush, and I wanted to stay really pretty in pink here at the bottom, right? As the right at the mountain line there and a little higher up. Even Timmy watercolor just really, really shows what this guy actually does. You couldn't. You couldn't do it with any other medium. And then I want to make sure there is some yellow right at the line of the trees. So yeah, basically you just keep kind of tweak in those colors a little bit, but then at the end of the day, you're gonna want to let that just dry and see kind of what happens. As the page dries, you're going to see where the water kind of pulls up. You're going to see areas where it dries way lighter. It's always kind of a surprise, with watercolor in between your layers and again. I'm not touching the edge, and I'm even making a sky a little mawr, expressive and colorful than the picture itself. And you totally get to do that when you're the artist. So I'm in a speeded up here while I do this snowy foreground. It's actually a blue color. Don't think that you need to paint it white because it's snowy in the reference for you can see, it's a very dark blue fading to a lighter blue. So as it's drying, I'm noticing that I just want to make sure there's a little more yellow in that sky so you can kind of keep tweaking it as as it's drying. What does this guy need a little more of? And now I'm gonna do the gray line of the mountains. So again I'm leaving a tiny little white line between the ground and the mountains and also the mountains and the sky. I'm just putting in this first gray blob just as kind of like a placeholder, and I will make it more defined as we go now. I cleared it up on my iPad, so it's not so blurry and it's completely dried now. So now I'm gonna go back in and do those, um, layers on top that I did in the first video. So it's darker along the bottom. I'm using this dark gray and lots and lots of dabs of my brush to make those trees in the front of that ridge and making sure the bottom edge of those mountains are very dark and heavy. And then coming back with my brush to do all those little trees along the top edge of the mountains. There, this is what actually meets the sky. It's kind of a jagged, a jagged edge, and there's a dark patch on the hillside. I don't want to make sure comes through, but a lot of these techniques are the same. No matter what I'm painting. It's just lots and lots of layers, going from light to dark, from less detail to more detail and but splatter, usually going down at this stage just to keep that looking kind of lively. There's actually a second ridge of mountains further back there that are kind of a medium grey you can add. At any point, you'll see me pausing and thinking, What is this thing need next? Um, every time it kind of feels like my first time, but I guess it's ready time for black ink. And I'm doing lots of little dashes and dots along that mountainside just to communicate the texture and the just roughness of that of that land form there. And I like as you saw in the other one, I'm not drawing individual trees. For the most part, I'm just drawing it more as a texture. But here I am. There are a couple taller ones here that I do want to kind of scratch in there. I is just a very loose, scratchy, uh, rendition of a tree, and your eyes can still translate that to a tree. Even that's not super detailed. There's a line of fence here that I'm doing almost last. Listen, wire kind of draws the eye along the horizon, and it wouldn't be complete without some white, too. Show the snowy texture on that hillside, possibly some snow on some of the trees. Branches been doing a lot of the same strokes that I did with my black pen. I'm doing again of my white pen just to really accentuate and adding a little snow line to the top of those wires and then kind of scribbling in the foreground to show that it's snowy. So, yeah, a few more details and I'm about done adding a little doodily cloud to this guy. And there you have it, and this is how it turned out. Next up, we're gonna deep dive in to trees. 8. demo 3: waterccolor: Okay, So this is my most requested tutorial. We're gonna talk about how I paint trees. This picture of trees that I'm blurring right now is something I see every day on my walk. I know I'm lucky. Um, and I'm doing the same process of getting those background layers and first gonna swab in that sky. It's pretty pale blue. I'm gonna just kind of sketch and where I want the road to be keep things pretty light the background of that grassy field. I want to make sure you could see yellow showing through, and I'm gonna clear it up. So I can really see what kind of details I need to add in these first layers. But first we'll get a little ridge in the background and some splatter in the field and just kind of layering colors. I'll slow it down a little here while I'm dabbing in these trees because the trees are the same as in the previous tutorials. Just some of these go a little higher and we're making sure that you don't. You don't vary your brush strokes very much. You don't want any of these trees to really stand out, but by just stacking. If you on top of each other, you get the illusion of a little tree back there and kind of continuing on with that horizon line and that there's a second little ridge in there that's kind of a darker, bluish gray, gabbing those trees along to break up the edge and then pulling some of those dark greens down into the grassy field. And as I move around the page from top to bottom from side to side, I just making sure that I'm not painting over a spot that's still really wet. Otherwise, you don't get this definition, but once it's dried to touch, you can start streaking in other layers. And sorry I had definitely pokes, and in this one again, I guess I wasn't used to my camera angle for this one. But you just keep using that tippy or brush and getting more and more detail. So now I am actually doing what you would consider a tree, and basically I used the very tip of my brush and I do a little trunk and then kind of go side to side with some very, uh, casual branches to each side and take it slow and and use a light hand because, like I said, the usual dry lighter and you can always make a more defined later. But if you didn't really like how it turned out, it probably will end up a little more muted. So I'm kind of equally working on these grassy patches also, because I don't want this field toe look like blank with trees standing in it. I want it to be kind of a rich tapestry, you might say of all different colors of green, all different colors of brown gold spatter. I mean, it's all going on in that grassy field, and I'll keep kind of coming back to the edge of this road here because I really want to make sure it has, like, darkness and depth there. Now I can see that there's a whole stand of maybe six trees or so right there. And you Can I even get nervous sometimes before I do this part, but you just gotta dive in. So once it's dry to touch and picking up this start gray, which is just kind of ah, neutral to start with, and I'm starting at the base of the tree, and I'm just trailing it up in a loose way up towards the top. You can see my line breaks at one point. That's okay, and I just kind of very loosely holding my brush and dragging that trunk up. One of these tree trunks leans over to the side at the top, so I want to make sure I get that one. And then as the paint on my brush gets lighter, I can get some of those trunks that are standing further back. And now it's time to start adding these branches, this one on the left, the branches definitely angle upward. So I'm making sure that my tip of my brushes kind of continuously pointing in, you know, an angle direction off of that trunk. So just alternating little branches. I'm gonna mess this up a lot as I go when it looks too perfect right here. To me, it doesn't look like a rugged trio nature. It looks too perfect. So these first little layers. I almost hate doing those first layers because it looks like I'm going to sit there and draw every branch, and I'm not. You'll see every known that I mashed my brush down and just get kind of a blob, and that is to kind of represent like a clump of needles or a shadow. But we're just going for the loose shape of a tree in this gray will dry quite a bit lighter, and I'll be able to go in later with green and brown. I'm gonna darken up one side of the trunk here and add some dark grass around the base just to give it something to stand on in this field. Lots of dots. What's the dashes? And then the tip is just kind of a little dab of the brush. Now I have some green on my brush and administer kind of dabbing it in, and some of it will land on some of that gray paint and kind of bloom out, and some of it will land on the blue sky and be a little blob of green. So I'm doing this while some of that gray is still wet so that it's not so distinct. So it does kind of bleed here and there and is more irregular the way a tree would be in nature, and I'll do the same on this next tree. This one is a lot fuller. So I'm I'm smashing my brush down quite a bit more to get that shadowy feeling of big clumps of pine needles and branches and foliage. And I'm realizing I need to go a little taller than I originally went. Well, you could always go taller. You can always go more narrow at the top of a tree and little spindly ones towards the bottom and again, some darker grass at the base just to give it a little more visual. Wait, So now I'm gonna add some brown kind of to the grass down here. It's just a constant play with what is What is this painting need this one hiding behind here. I'm doing more horizontal. Ah, brushstrokes. It's just every tree is a little bit different. And when I have a reference photo, I definitely I'm looking more at the way that tree actually grows. But when I'm doing it by memory, I tend to A lot of my trees tend to look the same, this one that tips over. I just think that gives it some movement in personality. It's growing at an angle, and I'm just using, like, a gray color for that. So, yeah, this is kind of how I approach these first layers of the watercolor, right? Um and I'm never quite sure what it needs next, but this one is an interesting shape. They're growing very, um, very high, very sharp angles upward. And I was excited to do this painting because it looks so different than the way I normally paint trees. But I just really encourage you to look at the trees and see what direction do you see, the branches growing out and just be casual and loose. I'm not holding my brush very tight. It all. I'm not holding it as if I was holding a pen. I'm being more painterly and time prison spatter to kind of add some of that extra texture and dimension to those branch spaces and the base of the trees there in the in the meadow. One more one back here with some grey. I'm gonna define this one back here a little bit. With a little darker color, you can always come back in and make things a little bit more defined as they dry like that . And some of these in the background will even make just a little bit more triangular, even if it's still just a couple brushstrokes. Your brain translates that to be a tree back there. You don't have to draw every single one, and you really want to be careful that you're not making them all look the same. You want to break it up. You want to use different colors. You want to use different, uh, brushstrokes, even if you can, to make it look more irregular like nature. So I speed it up again as I add even more layers to the edge of this road, more layers to the grasses and let those trees dry a little bit. It's just kind of an upward flicking motion, and and it's still needed darker shadows right here, up close to the to the camera. So I'm blotting in some more greens and greens and browns. This was a challenge for me to make sure that that field looked sunshiny, and yet you still get the darks of the of the shadows, and it looks like I could come back in here and add a little more definition to these trunks. A little more definition to the branches. You don't want it to dry and get all gray and boring. You want to make sure you still are seeing some of those details of the little delicate branches, and you'll do that by adding layers. It really gets defined once I add Inc. But we're not quite ready for ink yet. I just want to add a few more touches in here, and I really want to make sure I'm getting Corinne in these trees because this was taken in the summer. It was not. A wintry seen road needs a little more definition, and then we'll let this dry and get going on ink. 9. demo 3: ink: Okay, So the ink is where these really start to pop. I can see right away that the edge of this road still needs more definition. So I'm going to scratch in some lines for grass. And then I think I'm ready to start the fence. So I am not doing this super scientifically and exact, but I'm just kind of scratching and where these fence posts are, And then, um, I'll go back in there and add some of these crossbars and wires, and I'll just emphasize over and over and all my classes that I am not a photo realistic painter. I just want to get the general feel for this rural scene here, and to me, the general feel is rustic and rough, and we're just scratching in some of these details. And your I definitely still recognizes that that is a line offense right there on that metal. There's horses that graze in that meadow. So now I'm coming back up here to the trees and just kind of mimicking the same lines I did with my paintbrush, except now with black ink. So we're making some of those branches a little more defined or were making new branches Now with this black Scratchy Inc and kind of zigzagging backing for to kind of bulk up that middle area. Some of these trees I'm not drawing individual branches. Still, I'm just kind of doing these lines that suggest a bunch of branches. So some I go off to the side. So my just kind of do like horizontal scratch lines across that trunk. Little dashes, little dots. The only way you're gonna make a beautiful tree is to make 101 ugly trees, and I just really want to encourage you to dive in and paint the trees that are around you . I'm painting evergreens because that's what's around me. You might have more leafy trees around you. I don't get as much practice with those, but I promise it's a lot of the same processes. It's starting with looser shapes and adding more and more definition and at and using your black ink to make certain accents really pop. You're plenty of artists that would draw it first with the permanent ink, but this is just my process. I go from very loose shapes to more tight, scratchy sketches over the top, so it's hard to know exactly when to be done, but I think that's it for the trees for no, I'm gonna work on this ridge and I'm just dotting in little teeny tiny textures just to kind of hint at the trees that are on that far away Hillside. And I'm holding it way back on the barrel. If you can see I'm holding my pen, I'm using it as almost like a paintbrush, not gripping it like I'm about to make a grocery list. So that's my most classic tree is just kind of a quick line down the middle and lots of scratchy lines across it. You'll see me do that many times in my illustrations, and now it's time for white ink. So in this field, the sun is landing on certain blades of grass and kind of on that top where the fence and you just kind of try to see where he could use a little lightness in with the dark spots. That's where you'll want to use your white pen and these trees air looking somewhat heavy, and I want to make sure there's some lightness still peeking through and some little light dots on the mountainside. I left that blue sky peeking through a lot of places, but with this white pen it another way. You can kind of go back in here and add just the hint of sunlight coming through. Makes those trees look a little more airy. Lots of just scribbles the matting. Little accents on the trunk. There the sun is shining on that side. And then kind of my trademark were doing symbol. Doodily clouds wisps in the sky, some cracks on the road. Anything to add more the sense of movement to the painting. And I think we're about done. So this is how it here? No. And our last demo today will be of snow. 10. demo 4: watercolor: okay For the fourth and final demo, I'm going to do a landscape that is snowy. And what kind of focus on how I'm gonna handle that. The photo credits go to my husband. He took this awesome picture when he was out on a job driving around. And I love it. So I'm gonna my iPad here blurred again so that you can kind of see what I'm seeing. When I squint my eyes and look at the landscape, I'm kind of breaking it into those same color block chunks and I see blue at the top. So I'm going to start blogging in some blue sky and the main thing to keep in mind any time you want to seem to stay feeling light and fresh is just remember that you can't ever go light again. So leave things light and really think twice before you add on darker colors. And then you can always, always, always go darker. But for this guy, I'm just going to do a fade from like a big robin's egg blue sky down to those white wispy clouds again keeping the edges really loose and expressive. And there's these shadows falling across the snow, so those will be a darker gray color. But other than that, I'm not going to touch that snow at all. I just wanted to be a zweiten as the paper, so I have very, very little of this light blue on my brush And I'm I'm like, sketching At this point, I'm just I have some faint idea how I want these blobs to be, But I can always come back in and make it a little tighter. But right now we're just kind of figuring out where some of these where some of these blobs will go. So I'm gonna make thes pretty dark right off the bat, and then I'm just not going to touch that snowy area really at all. After that, I'm just gonna want to try and stay crisp and white. Don't overthink it. So now there's this chunk in the middle. That's a pretty dark gray kind of the tree line area. And so I'm gonna come in here and just with very rough, expressive brushstrokes, I'm gonna block in a bunch of color back here and I hold my brush really loose. You can tell I'm just kind of swapping it in there. I'm not being real particular yet because as we've experienced, it dries way lighter and you can always go in and make it way darker. But right now we're just kind of going for those loose shapes. This is one of my first times ever painting anything like this before, so you can't see here, but I'm a little I'm a little uneasy. I don't know if I'm gonna mess this up, but I'm willing to take a stab. How hard can it be compared to all the other things we painted? So there's kind of these gray, fuzzy shapes back here, and I know that they're trees, but we don't even have to completely communicate that their trees yet. We just want to get thes blobs kind of start seeing. I'm feathering it in a little bit because I just don't want them to be crisp shapes and one of them to be more of shadows. And then we'll just keep making it more and more detailed as it dries. So you just want to make sure you can still see through some of the paint. In some of the areas, you see the light, the light paper behind it because that really gives it the feeling of the snow. I want a little more blue in this sky. There's just a lot more going on in the sky then I originally put down, but I think even having the sky look really light like that really helps convey that it's wintry. It just looks cold on this page. Yeah, I like that better. So I will be speeding it up a bit as I do all those trees, because I've kind of done that demonstration many times over, and I do. You want to take all your time, but it's just a series of layers. You'll see a lot of the same processes that you've seen before. I let this dry and then I come back in and I'm just building up and building up and with medium grey and breaking off the edge of that tree line there and kind of mimicking how old the branches air growing but leaving some of that snowy light color showing through. We don't want to be so dense and dark that you don't sense that whiteness on the hillside, and this painting does have some too sensuous treason. It you can see I'm very lightly outlining some of those branches. They're honestly a little intimidating, but I liked how it kind of touched the sky where this guy was wet and it kind of bled and made it look like little clusters of ranches. But honestly, just I hope you will be brave and just not feel so like this is such a serious commitment. If this page gets ripped out or thrown in the garbage, or if you turn the page and try again, this is This is just great. This is all practice. Painting should not feel stressful. So already those trees I first did were dry, so I can layer in some darker ones over, and you can kind of see how that hillside is building on itself. I love that I love how it slowly starts to take shape. It doesn't look so flat and one dimensional, but you do not have to drive every tree. Okay, so I've been a little bit avoiding doing this railroad crossing thing because it's kind of the center of attention, and it's kind of a focal point. I don't want to mess it up, but honestly, so much of this is the same. You just go loose and light at first, and then it kind of just comes out before your eyes. I'm just blogging and gray here and there. I don't even know what it is. I'm drying. I've never seen a railroad crossing this close up, but I'm just kind of mimicking those shapes that I see you so dragging my brush, pressing it here and there where I want the line to be darker, thicker, building up little blobs here and there. And it's like emerging. But this isn't a class on painting railroad crossing. So you know so much of this, you just have to experiment. Whatever is in your painting, give it a try. Try not to be intimidated, and I know right now that I'm going to be doing the red details. Absolutely last. There's a little red in each of those lights, and there's a little red on that crossing gate arm. But if something is feeling like there's a lot of pressure, save it for last. So these darker details in the base of this unit here it's very weird to be painting something you don't even really know what it is, but somehow it still kind of communicates that it's some sort of industrial, heavy duty thing. So the train tracks are also kind of, Ah, a focal point. And they are a little bit intimidating as well and laying them over this white snow, and you only get a couple shots. Otherwise they could look really bad. But I'm using these really light washes, and I'm realizing, Oh, they should be a little further apart. They really even more apart. And guess what? You get to kind of you get to kind of tweak on and work on the spacing, and it ends up just looking like kind of shadows, where you where you first laid down your brush strokes. It's totally fine. And I love how that splatter on the snow really looks like the debris that the train the train turns up. So definitely experiment with splatter. And now we're about ready to add black ink 11. demo 4: ink: Okay, so I'm starting out with the hardest part. I'm gonna add the train tracks here, but I'm using. I'm holding my pen practically at the end of it, and I'm just very slightly sketching this in and adding a little stippling around there. I just It's almost like rip the band Aid off. If that was the scariest in this case, I'm doing it first, but it end up turning out, okay, and I'm just adding some dimension to just a few of these trees in here. I'm definitely not doing this to every single one, but it's almost like adding, I don't know, eyeliner or something really, like makes these trees pop Lots of my script scratch Jaggi lines, thes air, some branches coming in from the side. And you can kind of add more detail to some of those muted trees in the background. Maybe I'll add a little more detail to this railroad crossing thing. Like I said earlier, it's a little bit weird to not really know what this looks like, but I think I did okay. And after we're done with blacking, we will add white, and that will give me a chance to just add a few more little snow details. But, yeah, artists definitely have differing approaches. Some people like to do their permanent ink first, but I just find that I can tell kind of where it needs to go. After I've blocked in the colors, I can see what areas need a little bit more dimension. I can see what areas need a little more definition, and it's fun to just add layers like that. So, yeah, a little more dimension around the base of that, uh, railroad crossing, scratching a few more trees make that hillside look really rugged. This was just out in Timbuktu. Very, very wild country. The most texture I'm giving here is just a few dots in a view lines. I really want that white snow to still look white and pure, and now it's time for the red crowding a little red to the lights there, and then a few little dashes on that arm, and it just kind of draws your eye. It's kind of cool. It's only read in the whole picture. Hey, here's where the last little opportunity to add some snowy texture comes in a mounting a little snow on top of these on top of these little eyes for the railroad crossing thing, you have been really hard to paint that and keep it white, so I don't mind adding it at the end here and add a little more sparkle to the snow. And then some of these trees need a little more snowy detail, just kind of mimicking the waste. No would land on the branches. It lands on the horizontal branches, not so much on the trunks, and then some more dots in there, here and there, just toe add texture. I really love this step. It just kind of makes the whole thing glisten and gleam. I'm just looking at that reference picture and just seeing where I see light areas, it might need a little extra sparkle, and it's kind of hard to know when to stop, but at some point it feels it's just starts to feel right in general. Stop a tiny bit ahead of overworking it, and if you much later realized a while that really still need something, that's fine. But it's easier to overwork something and then a few wisps in the sky. So this is how this one turned note. I hope you had fun painting along with me. Next up will do the class project 12. class project: So for the glass project, we are going to make four postcards for someone we love. Um, I My paintings turned away too big to send us a postcard, So I shrink lying down in my copier to 60% and printed them on card stock so I can just chop them up and make them into postcards. But if you used a heavy water color in a smaller size, you can totally just cut up the originals. If you're not sentimental and want to save them, I kind of like to get more than one use out of my artwork. So I was looking into maybe making some of these landscapes into, perhaps puzzles in my shop or stationary. But until I do that, I I thought there would be cute during this weird world we live in to send to people that are stuck at home. So I am turning them to about five by seven size. I'm not worrying about it. Being too exact will speed this video upward while I chop the others. I just kind of wanted to look little more professional. Snip off the edges where the copier caught the coils in the copy And then I'm going to take these cards and flipped them over on the back. They need to have a little room to write a naturist and then room to write the greeting, too. My family. And so I'm gonna take one of these little clippings and use it as a little template. And this is not an exact science, but just basically draw line on there and then at a stamp and you're good to go. So I would love it if you posted your final paintings or your final postcards in the Project gallery. I think it's so fun when we can all be inspired by each other and let us know who he wrote to. I have a few different senior citizens in mind, but honestly, I've never met anyone that doesn't like snail mail. So let's bring back snail mail and we'll be happy to go check the mail. All right, I hope you love this project. Let me know if you have any questions or comments in the discussions 13. good luck!: okay, that's it for our eternal landscapes. I hope you learn to time and feel inspired to start adding bits of scenery to your our journals. Or however you're making art. When you get your first landscape, turn into a postcard would be sure to post it to the Project gallery from your laptop or desktop computers so we can all encourage each other. Be sure to leave me a rating and review here and skill share so other people can find this class war. Tell a friend you can follow me on skill share so that you are updated when I come up with all the next classes. And you can also follow me on Pinterest or Instagram for all my daily artwork and goodies in my Etsy shop. I've made stickers and magnets of my landscape drawings, and they might be of interest to you. If you have any questions, please post them to the comments so that we can start a discussion. I'm here for you. Thank you so much for taking my class. Guys, I appreciate every single one of my students and I wish you the best, A lot going forward