Australian Landscapes Made Easy

1. Introduction: Hi, and welcome to Australian watercolor landscapes. In this class, I'm going to show you how to sketch and paint four different Australian landscapes in a loose atmospheric style. I'll talk you through in real time the techniques I'm using such as wet and wet and wet and dry. I'll show you how to simplify and sketch a scene in pencil. And also shared a paint, rocks, trees, water, in a variety of different landscapes subjects. Costs aim towards beginners with four for landscape demonstrations. Joe guide you through step-by-step. Their scans, drawing, and tracing templates included for each demonstration help you transfer your drawing over quickly and easily. In this class, I narrate my demonstrations in real-time. I explain every technique I use in the context of the painting, such as layering into wet areas to paint shadows of the tree. We going over the basics of wet-in-wet watercolor painting. I'll talk about what materials you need, your options, which ones I use and recommend. You have some brushes, watercolor, paints, and paper, then you're set to go. So join me in this class. Let's create some beautiful watercolor paintings that you can be proud of. 2. Materials Required: So I want to talk a bit about the materials and I'm gonna be using in this class and the materials that you need. And just, just ones that I recommend to save you some time and make sure that you get some good results to. The paper that I'm using here is a 100% cotton watercolor paper. It's 300 GSM in medium or cold press texture. And you'll find that textured paper, cold press paper has certainly a bit of a grain to it. And this is very useful when we're painting wet on wet painting landscapes, especially because we can get really loose shapes in here, the paper takes longer to dry as well. You get a bit of granulation. Just a lot more freedom and it's more forgiving than using smooth watercolor paper. In terms of the cotton content to do recommend using a 100% cotton paper can be a bit expensive. So if you just have some sketch paper or some cellulose normal watercolor paper that's not labeled as cotton, that works quite well. To just bear in mind that when you're layering, sometimes it can be tricky when you're layering as the previous layers can get lifted up when you're using cellulose. So I'll try to stick with fewer layers. I do go into areas quite often again and again with a bit of water, with a bit of extra paint. And sometimes it's a little more tricky on cellulose paper. But make sure just use what you have. But that's what I recommend. The paint that I'm using here is basically just watercolor tubes. So I use a bunch of these tubes here, different brands. I've also got a bit of white gouache, really important as that helps to imply some highlights at the end. So you can see here some of this dry brushing. I'm bits there, some of the lighter sections here on the side, but to the foliage there in the background. Let's just brought back by some of this white gouache, which are sometimes mixing with some yellow bit of green to create some of these tiny little highlighted effects. It's a great tool that you bring out right at the end. But for the majority of the painting, you really want to make sure that you're using just your watercolors so you can get that beautiful, transparent, the fuel, especially that sense of light that comes through the scene. So color wise, I would really just recommend you using your primary colors. I use bit of yellow hansa, yellow medium. I've got a bit of yellow ocher, got some oranges here. Don't use the oranges too much. I'm going a bit of red. So cerulean blue, which is important for the sky. Also, some of this darker ultramarine blue is important. I use that I mixed it in with some of this green here, this is a bit of darker green. This is actually called, this isn't a color called undersea green. You can use hookers green or any kind of darker green, even a phthalo green would work pretty well as well. You can mix your greens, you can mix a yellow and a darker blue together to get a dark green. Okay? Just keep in mind that if you're, if you're a beginner, stick with fewer colors and it's going to really save you a lot of hassle. Because sometimes when you're just learning watercolors and trying to understand the technique when you put too many colors, it's just more variables to worry about. I also have some earthy colors as well. So over here I've got some burnt sienna and a bit of burnt umber and those are good photographer. I just want to get it a bit of brown in say, the areas of the water, maybe a bit in the background of the foliage and that kind of thing. It's another color that you have to buy separately. You can't really mix it up from your primaries. But again, if you just got your primaries, I think that's going to get you through this course anyhow, it's just the browns can be good, especially when you're painting streaming landscape. There's often a lot of browns and really muted down greens as well. So I tend to add a little browns and greens at times. I've also got some purples here. The purples work well for some shadow areas. And so does a bit of neutral tint. And that's a really good color to use, just to mix up with some of your primaries are other colors to darken them down, use the neutral tint here for the branches and trees in the background. So that's about it for the colors and the paper. Now in terms of the brushes, here are some of the brushes that I use. And over this side I have my mop brushes. These brushes are great for painting large areas. So things like where we've got some sky, we've got a large areas of trees at the back. The water especially works really well. We can get that in very, very quickly and get a smooth, consistent wash by using a mop brush. Mop brushes have a larger belly so they hold more water. Unlike the smaller brushes, these smaller round brushes here, these don't hold much water, but they do get in a lot of details. So if you're trying to get in small areas of trees or grass, or some shadows beyond the rock or some of these trees in the background. These round brushes are fantastic to use. This one as well, which is a flat brush with a uneven edge, just allows me to get in some of these trees in shapes with a little bit more variation and brushstroke. This one I sometimes use as well. It's just an old round brush that I hemorrhage into the palette to make the tip uneven. And that helps us get a little bit of scumbling and brush like shapes for the foliage. So these brushes here, a couple of couple of specialty brushes, this is a rigger brush, helps you to get in these kind of shapes here for the branches. Sometimes if you wanna get in little bits of grass, little bits of grass, you can use that, well. Same with this fan brush. You can use that to getting little bits of grass at times so important. But again, if you don't have these brushes, you can still use and get by with a small round brush. For the first sample, some of the paintings you'll find that I have used a bit of a knife to scratch out a little blade or a switch blade or a craft knife just scratch out a bit of paint. And this works again to create some areas of highlights, different, different bits of grass in there. So it's a different kind of texture helps add to the overall painting. So that's another thing to just certainly around. And you can also use a plastic card that works just the same. And also try to grab, make sure that you have a some tissues or a paper towel or a cloth towel by your side. So I just use an old cloth like that and often what I do is that I'll, I'll pick up a bit of paint on the palette, then I'll dry it off. This little cloth is so important to make your brush the correct level of wetness at certain times. So sometimes you might pick up too much paint. No going in there is going to cause a big message. Draft that brush and you completely fine. You often see me messing around with the tau quite a lot during demonstrations for that particular reason and trying to get that brush the right level of wetness depending on what I, what I want to paint. So it's a really quick introduction as opposed to the materials. And let's continue. 3. Essential Techniques: So I want to go through a number of techniques that I'll be using in this course and some very simple ones to begin with. And the first couple of techniques I want you to understand is wet on wet technique and wet and dry technique. So wet in wet technique is essentially where you have an area that's already wet. And this can be an area that's got a very light wash. For example, I'm just picking up a little, little bit of cerulean blue Save I just wet this area like that. You can see that area of this kind of sheen on the paper. You know that that area of the paper is wet. And what we do here is I pick up another bit of paint, normally a darker bit of paint. Because if I want to just get in a tree or some foliage, that kind of thing, and we're going to drop that in straight there. Okay? And what you're gonna notice is moving that brush around, you're getting areas of these soft inches. So instead of having these sharp edges on the edge right here, we've gone on with the blue, get the softness. And that's because that previous layer is already wet. And usually you go in with a darker, thicker color that makes it less likely to spread and move around and give you a little bit of control. Of course, if you use a little bit more water in that wet and wet mix, it's going to have some more unpredictable effects. You'll move around more and stuff like that. So that's a good way to get in these kind of bushes, things like that. I tend to also use another brush such as a rigger brush, thin brush like this. And with this thinner brush, you can pick up thick paint, very, very thick paint and go in there and getting kind of indications of branches and stuff like that as well. Kinda like this. This of course will spread a little bit the branches. But when using very thick paint, thick sort of darker paint like this, notice it won't spread all that much. Another thing you need to realize is that the longer that you let this area dry, the more control you're going to have. So you might wait into that entire area is about 80% dry. Go in with some darker paint and you're going to find that there's not gonna be too much spread and the paper may already be dry in a few sessions, if not the entire way through. So that's some simple wet in wet technique. This is important because we're gonna be learning in the demonstrations later using different variations of this to create leaves, to create foliage, to create areas of perhaps some water mixing around on rocks, that kind of things. So it's very important to have a bit of a practice with this. And another thing I tend to do as well as I'll get in another bit of water. Width three areas and just have an experiment to see. Wireless ear is completely weird how the paint reacts when I drop in some paint. And in this second section, let it dry a little bit further, go in and see how much that paint spreads and you get an indication of how empowered dry that paper, how dry that previous wash needs to be for you to go in and getting sharper shapes, that kinda thing. So even now if I go in saying here, we notice a little bit sharper. You get these marks that don't don't really have this softness like in the background. Now, wet on dry is a simple concept to understand and basically just means going into an area that's already dry with some paint. So for example, I just picked up a bit of this darker paint here. Okay. There. And I might just go in and get in. Who knows, like a tree shape or something like that. Okay. Just a couple of branches and go over a bit like this. Come kind of branches. And notice in comparison today, say this area here with a green just has a soft edge and blends a bit with the sky. The branches don't really move around. They just stick onto that same area of the page and to address, and that's because that area, that, that bit of paper in the background, this white area is completely dry. The same thing would happen is if we went into this section when it, when it's completely dry here, Andrew in some some, some tree shapes. So I'll go in now it's going to spread a little bit. But once it's dried, it's gonna do this exact same thing. And you use wet on dry technique when you want to imply a bit more form, you want to make it a bit more obvious as to what that shape is. It allows you to define, gives you more control. So in terms of both techniques, they are very important to not saying one is more important than the other. You need to have them in combination with each other. When you have them in combination, you actually get something magical happening. You get this fusion of areas. So you might have a bit of wet and wet here just for some of this could be some leaves or something like that. I'm just putting in here and you let some of that branch, whatever, just mixer, mixer around and do something that could be a larger clump of leaves or something like that. Okay. Then you want to leave some other areas that are perhaps more sharper. So you've got areas blending where you've got sort of dark areas and softer areas. The combination of the, of the two will create very interesting Lost and Found kind of edges. So in terms of the techniques, There's a couple, I think that I'd just the most essential and sort of practicing how to combine them together. In this kind of exercise, we've got leaves and branches. And that's a really important thing to try. Once this is all dried, you can also go straight back into this section and define the branches a little bit more. It's not really going to work so well now because that area in the background hasn't dried all the leaves and stuff like that. But what you can do is kind of practice of what I'm, what I'm doing now is basically just picking up a little bit of darker paint, going through and reconnecting, adding on some more branches and darker branches, going through those leaves and forming connections. Another little technique that I use when painting leaves sometimes is that I grab a brush, that's a really old brush. So something like this here is a very old round brush. And I just completely obliterated. Make it into the palette like this. We've got a very kind of mangled kind of scene like this mango kind of brush tip. Then you can pick that up and you can use this funny little edge to create a kind of scumbling effect like this. Some basic shapes. So this can be some grass, little bits of grass near the bottom of the tree. Okay? Little bits of grass here. Yeah. And by doing this, you actually get these randomized strokes that create a little bit of interest. Not only can you do that with, with grass and stuff like that, but you can also do it for Britain, which you call it the tree leaves. So what I'm doing here, I'm just putting a little bit of darker paint underneath the leaves and that's going to actually create tiny bit more darkness in some areas of the leaves. And this is again, a bit of wet in wet work, what we did up there, but I'm doing it into the trees, adding a little bit of darkness into the trees. You can also go into it and use that mangled edge and get some of these offshoots tried dried edges like this that just look a bit more inconsistent. And remind you of a stray leaves and things coming off. And do this straight from the beginning. Like that. So using different types of brushes in different stages and shapes to create more interesting looking scenes and trees. If you just use the same round brush the entire way through, It's just kinda look a little bit boring. And here's a, here's a little brush called a fan brush. And I like to use this to create also grassy like affix. See, you can just do this. Create a sort of sense of kras coming up in all different directions? Well, as similar to what we did above there. You don't have one of those brushes. You can always pick up a small round brush, something like this, and do the same thing. We've kinda just feather in a few little strokes like this. And of course it takes a little bit more time. You can get similar kind of effect. A really good thing to do as well is to make sure you layer. While I have one layer of this shrubs or grass or what have you, I like to just put in some more darker bits of grass perhaps in here. It just growing through. Again, variation, having some variations of tones and tones running through, it actually creates a lot more interest. You can start and restating as well. Again, like I was mentioning before, restating some of these branches. You might even go into the Can think, hey, that trunk needs to be a little bit larger. So you can increase that. Okay. While that area of the background of the tree, the greeny leaves and stuff is starting to dry. This is where you can form connections and create a little bit more. This is the kind of branches that go through the tree as well. So a little bit of little bit of technique. And in terms of the wet in wet, wet and dry, using some different wet and wet techniques to create different colors and tones in the tree. We practice the better scumbling here using different brushes to imply grass. These are pretty important techniques to keep in mind. What I'm gonna do is I'm going to go through now just a little bit of techniques to create some wet in wet water. And this is something that you may need to practice as well. I think it's important to give this a try. So I'll switch over here to the other sheet that just from the left-hand side. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to just pick up with my round brush. We can use, I'm actually going to use one of these. It's mop brushes and I'm going to pick up it is blue, just a little bit of light blue. I'm going to go into this area here and I'm going to pretend this is some water, maybe some rocks, which I'm going to leave out some white or something in the water. The sides or something like that. Just on the edges here. Just a bit of water. Okay? And what we're gonna do is through that water to create the sense of waves or motion. In there, we pick up a bit of darker paint, darker blue. You can also use other types of colors. You can start with even some greenish color for the water. But the idea here is I'm just picking up a bit darker paint, thicker paint as well on the brush. And I'm dropping that in to create these tiny little impressions on the, on the water. Just like this. Just to indicate a sense of movement in the water. I can go out to the back and just start pretending that we've got some trees or whatever running into the background. Okay. There's some trees or something that is could be a riverbank or, or who knows. Just on that side. We can imagine there's a bit of a rock or something here. Tiny bit of rock here. The bases of the trees. Something here like that. Just getting a few more of these branches coming over k, just for the sake of it. You can see the water starts to look a little bit more realistic when you have these smaller impression, smaller dark areas running through it, rather than if we just colored it the same thing. You can go through it at different stages in wait for it to dry a little bit more. And that will create more of this sort of effect that you can even create little reflections for the trees that just runs. So if you've got the tree running, running in this direction, you want to make sure that the reflection is imitated in that opposite direction like that. Same if the tree is just completely straight, you can just do that reflection straight down like that. Like that, like that. Very simple sort of exercises in terms of creating some soft shapes, creating natural shapes as well. But I think this is really going to help you to understand how to use wet and wet, wet and dry. Remember, like I'm saying like I was saying before, makes sure that you practice wet on wet technique, wet, the paper, wet sort of three little squares, and add paint of different consistencies at different times and just see how it reacts. And that's the best way to learn. 4. Colour Mixing: I wanted to talk a little bit about color mixing. I think it's something that everyone of us, what others am I using? My mixing them? What's the appropriate color to use? And one of the most surprising things you'll find is that you really don't need that many colors. Probably only need three or four colors to complete a beautiful painting of any sort. Now, I'm going to show you the colors I use and the ones that I have just out of convenience. But really you don't need all of the colors that I have here in the pellet. The main colors that you need, basically a yellow, a red, and a blue. And if you can only choose one blue, I'd say choose a darker blue like an ultramarine blue, or a cobalt blue because those blues can be diluted down to make a light sky wash. Whereas if you use a cerulean blue like this one here, and you're going to have a very tough time getting a dark blue. It's actually going to be impossible unless you use a bit of neutral tint with it. So let's have a little go now in terms of just some basic warm colors. Now, I'm going to talk about warm colors. I'm talking about colors that more on the yellowy, orangey, red side of the color spectrum, okay? And we talk about cooler colors. We're talking about colors more on the blue side of the color spectrum, even the purples or even some of the dark phthalo blue, which have kind of a bluish green as well. Those are what we call cooler colors. And I think in every painting you need to find a balance between warm and cool. It's important to have a mix of both. So, for example, I might start out with a bit of yellow ocher. And notice here on the palette as well, you really want to have a palette that allows you to mix the case so that we can have enough water here to mix up a nice section of it if we're going to get in, for example, a really large bit of land or a bit of grass or a bit of sand or something like that, just running across the scene. We want enough of this paint that's mixed up here, K for all the warmer and lighter colors in the scene. For example, the sand or even the sky where we're putting in a really, really light wash in the sky. We want to add in a lot of water, okay, So this is just a bit of yellow ocher. You can add in a bit of this Hansa Yellow. Hansa yellow is just a more vibrant t sort of yellow. And look how much water I'm putting in. It's about 80 per cent of water, if not 90% water in 20% of the actual paint. So I can basically go in here and getting a really large wash of this yellowy, warm color right at the base. And this is just to indicate some of the land because the ground, for instance here, and I'll start now picking up a bit of this blue, cerulean blue and look how much water I'm putting in. Again, it's mostly just water just dropped in there. It's probably 80% water. Most of it is just water in 20 per cent paint enough so that we can imply the blue color in there. And you can see both of those are very light sort of mixes. Okay? So these are just using, I guess I'll really liked combination of mixes of color and allowing them to kind of mix onto the page you can see here as well, there's a bit of color mixing going on between the blue and the yellow. So while we're doing some mixing here in the pellet, It's also important to allow some of these colors to mix here on the paper. Then another example is if I want to add in some clouds, I'm just dropping in a bit of this darker grayish color here. Just a bit of this dark grayish or I could use some purple there even just to create some indications of some storm clouds or something off in the distance like that. And this will all mixing into the blue and create an interesting cloud-like effects. So at times, you want to allow the colors to mix directly on the paper. So if you're implying bits of clouds, features like leaves, trees and that kind of thing. That's really good to mix onto the paper. And at other times when you're just trying to indicate large areas of uniform color, such as the sky or ground, it's best to just mix it up on the palate to create a large mix of it so that way you don't run out of paint and you get a more consistent sort of wash. So that's a little kind of basic step in terms of mixing colors for a simple scene like this, okay? Now, what you can also do, as I said before, mixing colors into paper, you can wait for this to dry a little bit or just go straight into it. But here I'm just dropping in a little bit of green or something here into the background. So this can be, and look how dark it is as well. I'm making it fairly dark so that it comes forwards. So that we also have not just, not just these clouds dominating the entire scene, but we also have some nice little drops or something like that. Little examples of who knows, Just a little bushes and things running through this. Just like that. And again, this is mixing into the paper. And using the side of the brush as well. It's mixing into the paper. And creating some beautiful, beautiful sort of effects you can't get if you didn't allow it to mix on its own. So you can see the yellow just joining in with some of this green and some of this might pick up bit of brown even in dropping a bit of brown in here. And you get some sharper sort of bits and pieces in here as well. That it's so important to use some of this mixing technique and allowing it to mix a wet into wet. So you can already see we've got a, It's almost like a plane, a field of grass with some darker bits of grass in there. You can even add in some really dark beats in some areas if you want to like this just over here. While the paint is still wet. But it's a layering type of layering type of exercise that we're doing here. And the colors are mixing into all kinds of varieties of colors in different concentrations as well. Okay? Another thing to keep in mind is the composition. You're looking at, the cool colors and warm colors. Are they balanced and do we have a good sense of light and dark in there? So we've got the lighter sky, lighter ground. I've got some of these softer and at the same time, these darker bits of grass. And so that's going to increase that sense of depth in the scene. So even if you've got a color like something really dark, like a purple, it doesn't even have to be a green or a, or a, or a brown or something like that. You can really push the, the bits of the background forward. So just these little bits of shrubs and things and just give it a bit more depth. Okay? Another thing you can do as well, going over the top, you can pick up a bit of really dark paint, something like a neutral tint. And sometimes we just started getting an indication of a branch or something coming in from the side, like this little branch coming in. And this makes it look a little bit more three-dimensional as well. As if there is a bit more of this foreground showing through. So using darker colors like this, as does have this kind of effect. Could be like a tree branches and we're putting any leaves. Now, we've used a bit of yellow, we usually use a bit of green in there and we've used a bit of blue for the sky. Now I have green as a convenience color, but you can mix your own greens. And what you do is just pick up bit of yellow and a bit of blue. If you've got some ultramarine blue or some cobalt blue that works best and just mix them together. And what you'll find is when you're applying them in different concentrations, you get different types of greens. So if you use more yellow, more yellow, and less blue, you're going to get this lighter green mix. But if you add in suddenly a bit more blue in there, you're going to get a darker green mix like this. And even more so when you keep adding in that blue starts turning almost like a blue-green color. Get a slightly turquoise Sea type of color. So you can get really quite a different range of greens by mixing your primary yellow and your dark blue together. For shadows, what I'd really like to do is sometimes mixing a bit of blue and a bit of red together that creates a purplish color. And balance that off. You can use that straight as it is. I tend to put more blue end and actual red. Then I'll just mixing a bit of yellow. This is going to create a kind of grayish color, which is really good to use for some shadows. Look at that pretty dark, pretty dark sort of mixing. I just need to add some more water in there, too. Diluted out of it. But you can get some shadows coming in like that, some dark shadows just by using your three primaries mixed together. Okay, something like that. So another thing you can do is mix a bit of yellow with a bit of red to get an orange. And these oranges can be really good for sunset scenes. It's a little bit of orange like that. Lovely orange. And again, if you mix more yellow in, you're gonna get more of a yellowy orange and yeah, okay, more vibrant orange. And if you mix more red in, you're just gonna get a little bit more of this effect here. So a darker sunset scenes. So they'll mixes and try just having the modes of paper and you'll find that you get probably the best explanations when you figure this out yourself by just adding in different mixtures of paint, different consistencies, and experimenting around to see what works. I do recommend using fewer colors to start off with because you have a list of variables when you have less variables in watercolors, you're going to just have an easier time in terms of managing the techniques at the same time when you're playing around the techniques and trying to understand color mixing can be really difficult when you've got so many colors. So once you get comfortable with the mixing your primaries, then you can add some more colors in it, it becomes easier. I've got some convenience colors here like neutral tint, which is really dark color. This just saves me from mixing up. You basically mixing up a gray or something like that when I've got some really dark color like that. Advantage of this as well as that I can just mix it in with a yellow or something and I can just create a darker yellow color like that. Okay, so it's a great little color to use. Also use a bit of gouache, which is an opaque watercolor paints. And this is great to add in some highlights and nearly near the end. So pretty, I would say, pretty basic introduction to color mixing. So we've covered mixing on the palette and also just mixing on the paper itself. Understanding that both are important and crucial, essentially when you're trying to create a watercolor painting. 5. Painting Rocks & Trees: Okay, So I want to show you how to paint some trees and rocks. This is gonna be really important as most natural landscapes are gonna be composed of these two things, as well as a few other bushes, shrubs, grasses, that kind of thing. And there's a couple of different ways that I start with when I'm doing trees. Now the first way is I will put the branches in first. So I may grab a brush, grab a mop brush. You can also use just a round brush. And I'm gonna go grab some brown paint, K. And I'm just going to imagine this is the, the base of the tree, okay? This is the base, right here, the trunk. Just going to go in and then here near to the top, which is where I'm going to start putting in a little bit of some branches come in through the top like this. Okay. Just some little branches. And I'll just kinda get them to come out and notice how I'm holding the brushes. I'm holding the brush near to the end. This is really important so that we can get a bit of looseness in the brushes. In the brushstrokes, they actually look more like branches rather than every hold them too close like this and it just looks too stuck on, unless you're drawing a branch and a very specific way and you want it to, to get that precision in there, I'd really suggest holding my brush near the end. Notice as well how I am drawing these branches. So often what you get is when you're drawing a tree of some sort, you're going to have a larger trunk. I'm just going to enlarge that a bit more. He's coming down perhaps like that. Then you might have a branch off into two trees will always come to these little forks all over the place so you can get them in the main trunk there, then you might get them up here as well. Some of them splinter off just until into even two or three different branches at times. But normally you get this pattern where it just splinters off into two, okay? Kinda like this. And you carry that same pattern over and over again. So here's sort of split into two. Then I'm going to just split that one off to the right like that and another one on there, pepsin, other one there. Okay. Something like that. Now the split off here. So you're just finding each branch like that, drawing each branch with a brush and then splitting, splitting them off into different directions. So they have a basic structure for a tree. Now the other way that I do trees, and I haven't put in the leaves yet. I'm going to show you in this other example, I'm going to get an old brush, just as old round brush, and I'm just really pressing it into the palette quite heavily so that it creates a funny looking shape. And look at that we can get in these kind of cool and, um, indications of of the, of the leaves, clumps of leaves like that. And interestingly, you also get these kinds of whitespaces in-between. Okay? So you can do that leaves first, like this, or you can do the branches first. So I've done the branches person that one. Here's where I'll just pick up a little bit of this greenish paint, this darker paint. And then I can just go in and in some of these leaves straight after. And of course the branches would have dried a touch. And that's going to create a bit of sharpness for the branches. But also because there are some areas which are still damp, you're also going to get some mixing. So the branches will mix a little bit in. So you kinda get the wet and dry effect over this one over here, the one on the right hand side. I just having a look now, we can now go straight in and get into branches. So the first one here, we've done the branches first and then we've added in some of the leaves. Here. I'm just going to go add in some branches. And sometimes I might pick up a smaller brush like this rigger brush and getting the branches because it's just a touch easier at times to get in some sharper looking branches. When you using a rigger brush like this. There we go. Like that, like that. And of course they all come down again all the way to this trunk here. This is I'm making this trunk a little bit bigger, like that. Brown maybe in their touch with brown. And of course, with the leaves. I also like to pick up a bit of darker paint and just drop in some darker paint underneath the leaves. It really depends. Sometimes you got a light source that's coming from the right hand side. So you might choose to just put a bit more. Color, can be more darker color on the left sides of the leaves or the light's coming straight from above. Not want to just put some darkness underneath clumps of leaves like this. So it's really up to you just got to decide where that light sources. And they tried to emphasize, emphasize that in the background. At times, if I want to just put in a rough indication of some trees in the background or just some foliage and stuff like that. I'll pick up more green and just drop that in. Lighter, a lighter wash of green in the background. Then you can see how it kind of blends together so that we've still got, we see the tree in front, but perhaps we have some other shapes, some other bits and pieces in the back. Darker shrubs, that kind of thing here in the background. Okay. Let's bring that down. Yeah. That's good. Okay. So pretty simple in terms of the trees. Sometimes what I like to do as well is while I'm in this section, I'll pick up a bit of darker paints and I'll get in some shrubs. These are just a little, just a little bit of this green paint and darker, neutral tint that I've picked up. I can just drop in a bit of paint here at the base of the trees using different types of brushes. This is just a flat brush, but you can use the edge of it to create these kind of sharper marks as well. Of course, you're going to have areas where it's already dried, are still wet, so you're going to have it mixed around a bit, but it really, of course depends. You can let it dry then go back in and get some sharper marks in there. Indicates some grass. Now in terms of rocks, the way you indicate rocks is to make sure that you keep in mind that light source. So, for example, might use a bit of yellow just to highlight some areas of rocks. Just a bit of the light source. Rocks come in all different shapes and sizes. You get some that are taller, like that. You get some that are triangular shaped, ones that are flatter, ones that are kind of angular and have a point. Can it, so it's really important. Make sure you get in a few different rock shapes that make them all the same. Otherwise it does start to look a bit boring. I'm just picking up a few of them. You might painting in a few of them. You might want to make sure also that some of them are smaller than others. So you don't want to make them all the same size, especially as you move out into the background and the distance here. Just dropping a bit of paint like that. Often the brush will just just the shape of that brush will indicate a rock already. Okay, in the foreground, I tend to make them a lot larger and connect the rocks to each other. Okay, So that might be big rock here. I'm just connecting on to make a larger sort of shape here, here. Here. What have I got that second larger rock here as well. Okay. Largest rock, like shapes, larger one here, the front, for instance here. Okay? And what you wanna do is add in some shadows. I tend to pick up bit of darker, paint me some brown and mix it with some neutral tint. I'm just dropping a bit of paint here to the left-hand side to indicate I'm left on an underneath here to indicate perhaps a touch of Shadow. Little touch of shadow running underneath this. Okay, just a little bit of that shadow. And notice as well that you get some depending on whether you go in while the paint's still wet or you just wait. You can get some sharper shapes, sharper shadows, and some areas of kind of blending of the shadows into the rock like that. The most important things to keep in mind that the light source has to be consistent. So if I'm imagining a light source coming over from the right-hand side, all these rocks need to reflect that shadow in terms of a darker left-hand side. Because we're going to have shadows. And when the light source, the right, the right-hand side of that rock is going to be illuminated and the left side is going to have some better. So we have to make that consistent, that consistent light source. Even go through and adding little shadows that run the left of that rock as well too. Even at times people will like to have rocks that just have a sharper shadow like that depending on the time of the day, this could be later in the day. So the rocks have a bit more of a shadow cast towards that left hand side and I'm more of an angle like this. Okay. Just as long as they're consistent with each other, you're gonna be fine. Okay. So notice some of them ran into each other as something don't, that's fine. And it actually helps with the texture. And sometimes what I'll do is I'll find like a intermediary color, just a little wash of a light color. And I'll just touch on here to soften this edge. Just to soften some of these edges of shadows where I feel that it's not really just soften that edge like that. Some of those rocks. But you want to, might want to leave some sharper and it just blends that shadow closer, you have a full turn, a very light tone, and a mid tone right in the center, for example, for that rock. So it does look a bit more realistic. So those are some basic exercises to try out and they will really help you in this course. 6. Bush Landscape Drawing: Okay, we have this amazing bush scene and it's a classic sort of path. As you can see going in from the left, we've got a few rocks here. I'm going to pick out some of the big ones and use those, the small ones while figuring out along the way. I'm going to show you how to get this in, in a nice sort of loose style and hopefully not take too long in the process. So first thing I'm gonna do is draw a general line here down the center just for the horizon line. Okay, it's just where the trees and the back kinda hit the ground. And probably the next thing I'm gonna do is look at this part now we can see the path is coming around the left side of the scene. So let's go ahead and I'm going to start right at the back. We aren't going to get it to curve a bit around like that. Then here perhaps down through this section we have some kind of a rock. Okay, now I'm going to draw the top of that rock, kind of like this. First the k, and then there's a bit of the side of the rock that we can see just comes down. It's really is a squarish rectangular rock. I'm not gonna put too much effort into the actual drawing of it, but I do want to make it look three-dimensional. You can see a bit of this tree shadow crossing the rock as well. Bunch of the trees run entirely on the right-hand side. A bit of that detail for the Rocky, you can even do some shading here on the left side of that rock as well. If you want to indicate a bit of a bit of a shadow, I suppose on the left side of the rock, top side of the rock. I'm not going to really do too much in saying with that right side, there is a bush, a shrub or something here, which I will get in just a quick indication of it. As you can see here. Now work on some more of these boulders that pretty large. And the thing that I tried to do is look at those boulders and reduce them down to basic shapes. And this one I'm going to eat almost looks like a bit of a squarish shape as well. Okay, so and get the top of it in a bit like this, like that. And then we're going to make it three-dimensional by putting in this side here. And that kind of comes out and touches the ground like this. This shrub here obscures the back of that rock, which is great. I don't have to draw all of it in. But again, there's another kinda almost triangular shaped rock over here. There's so many of them. And really you just try to pick out a bunch of them to emphasize and create a bit of this shadow pattern on these rocks amine over here. There's a bit of a shadow on that rock as well. On this rock you've got a bit of a shadow behind here, over here as well. Kind of like a shadow on the ground actually of this rock. And I'm just looking at ways that we can make it look a little more three dimensional. Behind this rock, we've got this shrub, we've got a, a shrub here as well. So I think just putting in a bit of that indication of that shrubs is gonna be helpful. There's a few more stones in this section as well that I can just get a kind of overlapping running through here in the foreground. That can be the left side of this stone bit of it in shadow like this is even a few more smaller rocks, just just that overlap in this sort of area here. So a little bit of that. Okay. Then we've got some more over here that we're going to draw in and make them look a bit more intentional. So kind of having some that obviously have more of a shadow and some of them that are just kinda pebbles or something in the ground. These large ones, I mean, there's another larger one here that I'm going to draw in as well. It actually goes out a little bit further, little bit further at the scene of a bit short. Actually, it doesn't matter. It's the great thing about these rocks is that they often can be placed wherever you want. Compositional wise, since long as you can achieve some kind of balanced with them, you will be fine. So this one's more almost circular, actually sounds like a circular type rock over here. Then you've got these little, almost like little overlapping ones in the background. Okay, so just putting in a few more of these other rocks in the background here. Notice that I'm shading a little bit as well and that helps. Or later, when I'm just trying to get in the darkness in here comes some kind of shadow patterns. It's going to make it a lot easier when I go on with the watercolors. So if I can sort of shade a bit and create more obvious sense of light and dark in these shadowy areas. Little highlights and things like that. I'm going to just do that. So as we move out into the back, what you find is that these rocks becomes smaller and smaller to the point where you can't see them too much and it almost just Looking like the small pebbles or something off here in the back. Okay, so that's where you can start to improvise, suppose, and start picking out some shapes that you want to put in. For example, over here, you might have one of these slabs of rock in the distance of just behind like that. Okay. And but you might not want to put them all in the same sort of picking and choosing your rocks and be sure to make them look a bit different as well. Don't keep them all the same size or even the same tone. So you can see there I've just drawn another one in, okay, even here in the foreground, you might notice that there is a large rock sort of coming in here and a bit of a shadow on that left side there as well. The path bit of another rock around the rocks are sticking out some shadow on that rock as well. Okay. So on the ground There's obviously going to be some rocks in some areas and pathway, things like that over here, but I'm not going to emphasize that too much. Okay. Main thing is these rocks that are in the way of a path on the sides of the path. I mean, like these Bushehr just getting in this little brush, bushy area like that, lining that out. And then I can start putting in this rock that comes out on the left-hand side. You can see them just lining up the side of the scene and creating a bit of this this kind of leading in. Yeah. I'm looking at just ones that you can simplify down, pick out a few that you want to put in. And if you don't, you can leave them out as well. This is some more areas of Bush and stuff like that. So we've got a lot of rocks and we've got a pretty good indication of a path over here. I think the shadow patterns is nice as well. We can probably get this shadow pattern coming in like this. Okay, shadows of the trees like that. Sun coming in more like this though. There's an actual tree over here and you can see it just goes all the way up. It's just a just a trunk going all the way up. That large one there. There's another tree here that comes up most behind this rock on an angle I like that angle of it just makes it look a bit more interesting. And I'm going to hold the pencil as you can see more on the edge right at the back and start just drawing in a bit of this outline of the tree. Like to hold the pencil right at the end as well because it gives it a bit more freedom. The branches look more natural rather than me just sort of trying to draw everything in. But with too much accuracy, I find that actually it's things look too stuck on and natural. So you can see here just a couple of them going up, some of them in often the distance. It's another branch even up here that just goes off in the distance. Like that. I'm just putting in the branches and the trunks at the moment because the leaves are pretty easy to do or you need to do for the leaves. The main thing need to do for the leaves is layer. So I'm not concerned about the leaves are just more trying to focus on some of these smaller trees in the background because they do help to create a sense of depth and meaning drawing. Remember, remember what I'm doing. I'm using the, the, I'm holding the pencil right at the end. Okay. This way you can get in more of a looser feel, even just trying to indicate where heirs of the leaves and stuff like that. I mean, it's all green back there anyway, there's not much you can do. There. Look, I mean, there's more trees and stuff off in the distance is little rocks. And so it looks like there's a wall of rock. So something over here you can just make out. It's just kind of a rocky area. So I'm just trying to indicates a few rocks and put them on different angles and stuff like that. I don't want these to show through too much. Okay. There's another tree all the way back here, you can see it looks like a white gum tree, the case. So it kinda goes all the way up that branch, sort of scrolling to the right hand side, right on top here, almost on this hilly area. So just get that shrunk that come down. But all the other trees, you'll find that you can actually do a lot of this just with the brush later. But this area, especially it's just one large bit and then you've got tree branches coming up through that section. So have a look and decide what you want to do. I mean, for example, this section, I'd wanted to put another rock here. He's another rock. And I might make this kind of angular rocks so that the end of it here has some shadows as well. Something like that. Casting shadows. There can be another shadow cast around here. So that's it for the drawing. Let's get into the painting. 7. Bush Landscape Painting: And I'm going to go straight into it. Let's get in a little bit of cerulean first, I'm going to go right into the back-end. Like that. Just a little bit of cerulean into the sky. Areas at the top here, you can't really see much sky anyhow, but I do like to have a bit of blue or something up in the top section. Some corners up at the top. This is just a small mop brush. I love using these mop brushes. They pick up so much water. So you can just go in like that. I've got a bit of this stuff here called undersea green, which is a beautiful green granulating green color. And I'll mix some yellow with it. This is some lemon yellow, nothing special. Lemon yellow. And this undersea green because I want to get in some, some lighter greens in here as well. You can see there's also some branches in this section that I'm leaving. Some of them slightly white. Maybe this one here as well, I'll just leave a bit of white there. Okay. I may coloring darker later on, but for the time being, I think it's going to look better and more interesting if I just leave some bits of white on the page. So I'm just picking up this green. Do have another smaller mop brushes as well that I can use. And sometimes swapping between different mop brushes is very helpful. You can get different sense of details, just easier to put in details. So another thing that I do at times is I might pick up a little bit of paint off the pallet and just tap in areas like these to create a bit of softness in the background, to just flick a bit of water around. Okay. It's really quite light at the back and I'm trying to preserve that. And by using some more yellows in here, especially combined with the greens. This is going to make it certainly help a lot more that light showing through. We don't want it to be too dark off into the background. Remember this is going to dry off. Lighter anyway, I'm almost forgotten about this side. You've got to be careful because it does. Watercolors does dry quite quickly in some environments, it's actually a little bit dry in my room and so I'm going to re-wet that area. And as you can see, just help that to run the green, run a bit more into that blue so that it has more of that wet and wet sort of feel like a bit more green in here. I like that lighter color in there, but I think a bit of darkness will be nice too. Running through this section. The opposition of light and dark in a painting is so important. As we move through this area here where the, I guess the foreground, you could call it the mid ground. And the foreground is, I'm going to start picking up a little bit of yellow, even a tiny bit of this yellow ocher. And the yellow ocher is fantastic because it just, it's kind of a muted down yellow. I can drop that in here into the ground, can get almost gets in a bit of the highlighted exit the rocks. But it doesn't eliminate it doesn't, it doesn't look too saturated. I think having too much saturation here can be overpowering at times. So I'm just going through it That's just sort of mixing in a bit of this here. Verify, leave a little bit of white on there. That's fine too. We've got all these rocks, you know that right here. So might be a little orangey. Feel don't feel like you need to keep it exactly. Yellowy color, change it around a little bit as well. In some areas you might want to add in more saturation, tiny bit more saturation like over there. Okay. The goal here is just to create a really soft wash and have it all blend together seamlessly. And i'll, I'll do this by working from the top down and put a bit of creamy color that I'll pop in a bit of creamy color here. Not only that, but just dilute this area. Lift off a bit because I think that's got a bit too much paint in there. I just very, very light wash of this color running through just a bit of yellow and more. Light wash of yellow. Okay. Good. Look around here. Good. Orangey color as well. Just as long as you have some variation of color in there, you're gonna be good to go. And even some burnt sienna, these rocks, some of them have a brownie color on them as well. So just trying to replicate a bit of that, but also trying to maybe exaggerate the yellows in there too. Okay. So there's some of it, Here's a bit more of that brown in this mix as well. Run that through. You can even start putting in a little bit of blue or purple into some of these areas as well. While we're here and I just sort of let it mix together like that. I'd recommend using more of the certainly more of the yellows and lighter colors first. Okay. So say I've got all that stuff in pretty soft area. Now, what we can do is start working a little bit on the trees and little bit on the leaves especially. And look at some areas that I might want to darken. So for example, here I'm just dropping in a little bit of green and let's put in some purple with the green little bit of purple in there, getting a really sharp and darker sort of treelike shape here just for some darker leaves, something like that. Have a look maybe on here as well. I'm just having a look at the scene and finding some some darker contrast that I think might look nice here. I am at this stage, I've stopped using the mop brush and I'm using a fan brush. And the fan brushes, just as it looks like. It's kinda like a little fair there has bristles that are splayed out. And I do like this brush because it just helps me kind of like this one. Here. I do have another that brush as well. That is an irregular shape. It's an angled flat brush. Using these weird sort of brushes, sometimes our chest, I'm able to get in some shapes and stop myself from overthinking how I should put in some of these trees. I also like using things like a small rigger brush. The rigger brush helps me to get in some of these sharper looking branches and trees and things like that running through as well. Okay. But really my main, my main goal here is just to get in some darker leaves running through. While this area is still wet. This area is has a lot of water in it still. And I think we're gonna be able to create a sense of just, just a sense of light and dark in this area of trees and still want to preserve some of that sky. But if it if it does disappear, That's not a huge deal as well. I think what's more important is just having some, some more details with the leaves here in the background. Okay, so very soft sort of shapes like that. Having a look at the scene as well, kind of thinking, maybe I could put a bit more over here. Let's have a bit of this green and purple. The green and purple mix is fantastic. I find that one that you can really getting a good indication of those darker areas. And the purple sort of darkens that green down a lot more as well. So you'll notice in here as well, there's a bit of darkness on these rocks. So that's something that we need to play around with. Two, I'll leave that bottom bit to dry a bit first. So I wanted to just start putting in maybe some darpa looking tree branches, as you can see, just running through all the way in the back. And I'm hoping that some of these will just blend in with the wetness and make it look a bit more natural. If you look just how quickly I'm doing this as well. And I'm holding the brush rod at the end. You find that it's quite quick. And I'm not thinking about it too much. It just tried to look at the shapes in this scene and you pick out a few that I like and go from there. I mean, a lot of these trees are actually quite dark anyway, so there's not the trunks of them are quite dark. It's not really any other detail in there. So let's go through. So starting to slow the dry off bit more green, little bit more green in here. This is just to get in again some more indications of these leaves, some darker leaves in areas. But remembering to preserve that light as well. Okay. I think that's looking good. I want to let that dry off. Dry off a tad. And I'm going to work on, and perhaps some of these shadows and things across the ground. Firstly, what I'll do is start looking at drawing a little bit of this bottom bit, but hairdryer, okay, that first layer has dried and I want to work on getting in the trees and the shadows across the ground, also the shadows of the rocks. And for that I'm going to switch over and start working with some round brushes, maybe that funny shaped angled flat brush. So something like these three brushes. So a number six round brush, this is a number four round brush. And I've got this one-quarter angled flat brush. I might start with a flat brush first. Let's just see how we go with this. I'm going to pick up some warm colors. Really will go with maybe some of this orangey color with this earth, earth hue. So it's burnt sienna and a bit of quinacridone, orange. And I'll add in a bit of this neutral tint. Just getting it down to a nice warm color, hopefully maybe like a rusty color like this. Let's have a look. How does that look on the, the raga. Think that's quite good. That's it. Let's go here. I'm going to just roll with this. The goal here really, I'm just trying to get in the shadows of the rocks, the darkness around the rocks. One guy. So there's some of the rock there in the background and you can always alter. These colors were put in a bit of blue here, so then we can go and make it a teeny bit cooler. Okay, and there we have it. That could be a CEO and top could be the shadows of the trees coming over like this for this tree. Okay. And then I could put in a bit of this color. Let me just getting a bit of that color and put it into the left side of that tree like this. So that it appears that there's a kind of a shadow on the left side of that tree that casts a darker shadow on this rock running across here. Let's have a look. What else do we have? We've got this other tree here that just runs behind that rock. I'm gonna do the same thing. Let's pick up this bluish gray color. I'm just mixed up a bit of that and put in a bit of that to that left side of that tree to imply that there is some kind of shadow there. As we get to the top area here doesn't matter too much. I can just paint it all in the branches and everything. But notice just the brush that I'm using. It's creating a bit of getting these sharp edges. But also it, It's also a little bit irregular, which is good, creates a little bit more interest in that section. So I'm just picking up going to the edges. Let's have a look at this tree here or touch the edge of the tree there. And that little ranch, we can get some of these in the proportion of paint here is still, I'd say about 20, 30%, and the rest of it's just water. Especially as you move up into the back, when you're working with these really dark colors, you find that really there's not much water that you want. You basically just need to use a lot of water in there. And even when you do, you can gain a little bit of paint to get these darker colors in. As if you're using something like a yellow or what have you. It's often quite light naturally and you're not gonna, even if you use yellow straight off the pan, it's not going to be very dark at all. But again, just trying to get in these sort of shadows on the ground, I'm looking around and finding more of this bluish color, blueish rock shadow. I'm going to combine that here. There is a kind of a sense of a step here or something. I don't know if I should have put this one in, but we'll try. Just looking at again more of this darkness and he tried to indicate the shadow underneath this rock. There, there is also another shadow just running across the ground here. Like that. They're right. That we've got this sort of indication of the shadows. I'm going to stop working one of these shadows over on the left as well. Kinda like this. That, Let's get it like that. Now, this may sound more irregular looking ones as well. As you move into the back, I'm not going to really indicate them to too dark, but as we come into the front, this is where you can start changing it up a little bit and that looks a bit like a step, as you can see. Rock as well. There's a bit of darkness here on that left side of that rock. This purply color is fantastic. I loved using this as shadows. Just a bit of purple there and may pick up a bit here and getting a bit on that rock. I think that there's a bit of that darkness on that rock. Then on top here we can have a bit of darkness and then declined, it's okay. Then I can just get another bit of this running across. So let's have a look more shadow coming into the foreground here. That's just simplify this down here. More of the shadow. And that's a bush there. And I need to mix up a bit more paint. Just a cooler color I think would be nice here as well. Because we've got a warmer background, remember, so sometimes it's cooler color. It's going to help to bring out the warmth of the rocks. Just a tiny bit like that. Let's see where else can we get some shadow? Maybe here. And here. These rocks as well, just underneath the rocks and to the left, perhaps a bit of shadow there. This one here could have some shadow as well. Sometimes you just making it up as you go. Making sure at the same time that you're preserving that beautiful warm in the scene. Because if you forget about it, then it stops glowing. So you have to make sure you're leaving. Those. There's warmer parts in there as well. So it's putting in some indications of these rocks looking in here. Now here's another rock, maybe behind that. The more rocks here. Again. Just adding a little bit of color in there, we can bring these out. The great thing about these rocks is that we can put inhibitor Gua Sha afterwards and bring out those highlights. Once again, if we aren't able to leave the mean at this stage, I do find that sometimes just having a nice wash makes it all worthwhile. Even if you have to go over the top afterwards again with some gouache. So over here, for example, there's this shrub that we've obscured. What we might be able to bring it back later on. Just starting to put in a bit more few little brush strokes here to indicate some of these shrubs. I've mixed a teeny bit of gouache in with some warmer color. And then just to get a yellow and a bit of white gouache to sort of bring out some of these shrubs that should be showing through, um, areas of the rock that the area is behind some of these rocks. They are so important like here because they actually bring out the shape of the roundness of the rock. So without having some of these are negatively painted areas in the background. The rocks in the foreground don't really look like anything. We're getting there slowly, but surely we are getting there. Here are some, maybe some other tiny little batters. The left sides of these rocks here as well. Complete that shadow patterns so that it looks consistent. And I'm going in the background. I can even darker and more to help bring out some of those shadows on the rocks can be just a shrub or something who knows? I don't want to get rid of all that lovely color in this light. So just a bit like That's fine. I didn't notice there's really not too much. Then I've added in terms of the, these little shrubs and things in the background. A bit more yellow and a little bit of gouache, yellow and white gouache. I just want a bit more vibrancy in some of these areas. So check this out just a little lick of the brush like this. You can get in a little push the shrub bit more that you can start to work in. Some of these little highlights in areas, not to say bring them back, but certainly you can bring some of these little, you can see tiny little areas of sharp, sharpness back to dry brushes won't dry brushes so fantastic when you're working. Great. Little elements of grass or shrubs and things like that. A bit more yellow, you can alter the saturation of it as well. Just as a very slow process. There's no rush. Take your time. Put those bits and pieces in. The layering of this, really create something magical. So don't rush it. I always tend to use a bit of gouache in my watercolor paintings. The juxtaposition of the gouache with the, with the transparency of the watercolors create something quite magical, my opinion. So I tried to incorporate them both and end up having to incorporate anyway because I'd lose some of the highlights. I'm at times such as here by trying to get in a large shadow shape or something. I think it's better to have that nice a large shadow shape in there. And get that correct and have it look consistent. Then to sort of cut around other bits and pieces. Darkness here at the bottom just changed that around a bit like that. Okay. Good. Let's have a look. Still want to put in maybe some more darker shadows here in the background. These rocks potential rocks here in the background as well. I've not indicated them so well. I'm trying to now go back in there with a bit of brown color. I'm just leaving that top part of that rock. As you can see, the light on top of that rock. Okay. Drag some of these shadows across. But I don't want to overdo it. I just want to make sure that that shadow patterns consistently carried across as well. Okay, good. It's more important that the shadows in the foreground and done properly because it's just gonna be easier for us to see what's happening over here. So you often need to pay more attention to the foreground, bits and pieces. You just some more rocks and things here as well. So more indications of cutting around these rocks, putting those in. Okay. I'm going to get a bit of green and stumble a bit with my brush around this back area, dry brush in some of these leaves. You can see that it's a very subtle, I'm using mainly just a dry brush with some of these leftover green paints. So dry that brush off on the palette, sorry, on the towel. And then I go in that top area because there is a slightly weaker area at the top here that I think would benefit from an additional layer of color. Additional layer, not all of it, but some parts of it. Okay. So you notice I'm leaving I'm leaving areas of the previous wash. And that's the secret with watercolors in terms of layering, you're leaving in that previous layer every single time. So that together they combine and give the illusion of this dense foliage. This green at the top here, this lovely light green. The temptation is just to go in there and paint it all in, but you can't do that. You've gotta, you've gotta leave the of it a bit in that previous wash behind. Even when I go in and do this sort of stuff in it, the kind of stresses me because at times, because you don't want to overdo it. So you notice I'm just using a very soft light brushstrokes in that area. Okay. Bit more neutral tint, a bit more blue, tiny bit of blue. I'm really here. I'm just picking out some darker, really dark bits to contrast. For the rocks and things like that. Just some extra dark shadows touching it in those areas and just leaving it to the rocks in the back, some of them in the background, but sometimes you get just some of the rocks look to put too stuck on or too perfect. So just raffle things up a bit and the end of the day it all works out. Okay. Good. We can get an a bit of maybe dry brush on the rocks just to get in some the texture of the rock, I suppose just a bit of that texture of it. In some parts like that. Like that, that would be to texture. This is a shrub coming down. I'll have to get in a bit of that later. This area here, this rock dry brush here. This kinda brownie color. Dry brush here. Dry brush around here as well. If you want to put in some other trees and a few other trees in here. By all means. Go ahead. You can start using even that rigor can bring a rigor brush back in and I'm sure out some little branches. Branches like these scenarios and bring this down here. Now the one here you can put in another sharp, one like that. And I think this is a great technique to help join things up where you've got just this layering of lighter and darker branches, and then also the direction of where these branches move as well. You notice they go into the left and right side of the scene. These are moving into the right side. So it forms a connection from the left side of the scene to the right side of the scene. But this shrub here and I'm trying not to go over it as well. So I'm kind of just making it up at this stage. I'm done with the reference. I'm just looking at my personal idea of what I want the composition to do. And I do figure, I want some more trees, some more sharper looking trees off in the distance like that. So give this a quick dry and we'll finish it off. Okay, time to finish this off. And what I've done is I've actually mixed up a little bit of whitewash with some yellow and a bit of yellow ocher. And I'm gonna go ahead and see if we can put on some of the highlights for the rock. So let's have a look here. It's gonna be very light touch. But for example, just over here, we might want to get back a bit of that rock face or hear can put on a bit of that in a bit of that one back there. Okay. Let's have a look. It's really just getting a bit of color and texture back into some of these areas of rock. For example, here we can get in a bit here like that. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing we can do is also look at working on some of these little, as you can see, these little rubs. Sum, here is sort of going, going off. It's got to be careful underneath here. It's actually a lot darker, so I don't want to I don't want to obscure it entirely. Bit of water there to soften that off the touch, as well as nice and just a bit of darkness there. Good. Let's have a look Maybe bit here just for this one. Little brush strokes running through like that. Maybe I could get an a few here as well, just a few brushstrokes. I think these little marks can often make a difference in creating a little bit more contrast. What else do we have on really looking around to find some small highlights? And then here, here, now just picking up bits that we might have lost earlier in, I could turn that into one big rock, for example. Join it on like that. My light here, here, there will highlight here off in the distance as well. Okay. Some of the trees as well, I think bringing bringing some of them back in terms of some upward sort of shapes like this. Going through this dark area does help. Again, just emphasizing more, little bit more contrast in some areas that maybe some little indications of these shrubs here in the foreground as well does help to again emphasize this sense of depth and 3D quality. The scene so just appears as they're these upward, this nice upward growing, then flips that wants to be, but it doesn't matter. As you can see here, just these little upward growing shrubs overdo it, but they do often appear in areas through the cracks and things like that. And the quash is a great way of getting some of this back here. But here, I don't think I'll leave that as it is. 8. Gumtrees Details: Okay, so I've added in a little bit of darker paint in the background, as you can see here, it's just a mixture of greens, bit of neutral tint, a bit of purple. Now the thicker the paint that you use, less water, the darker that you can get the color from the background. And what I tried to do, especially here in this scene. We've also got an area in the front that's kind of a purplish color. We've got this kind of cooler purplish color. So I've mixed up a little bit of purple and you can mix this up yourself using a bit of blue and red. And we've got a premixed purple that works to mix predominantly water in there. Okay. So only probably about probably about ten to 15% paint the rest of it just water. You mix that in just as I'm doing here, is that we've got some of this purplish mix color here in the foreground, but leave the bits of yellow loading through there as well. So you want a bit of that shine through. And I also like to, at this point, while the paper is slightly damp, I like to use a knife and I would actually carve out to areas. And this one was just to indicate some tiny little shrubs running through the area. I'm a little bit of texture, especially with these yellowy kind of ones in there as well. You've got to really find an area that's just about dried but not completely kind of like here. Just scratch out a little bit here in this. And you find that this really makes a difference. Seen it creates a bit of texture and interests, but you have to wait for that right moment and at the moment that some of these areas and not completely dried yet. So you kinda get a weight around. You can use a little tiny blue too card as well, like the edge of a card that works as to get that in using this flap, this little fan brush with a tiny bit of purple on their dry that brush off and a bit of tau and then drop that in here. Now this area is still damp. But if we're going in here with a bit of dry brush strokes, so the brushes just basically got a bit of purple and then I dry off the brush on some paper. You'll notice that it doesn't really shift around too much. So you can get in some of this texture. And it's in pieces. Are these tiny bits of cooler areas running through, can even pick up at some other colors and drop them in as well. The important thing is to leave some of these areas of yellow because without the yellow, it's not going to look good. And it's great actually having some of these purpley colors in here because they form a nice complimentary color to the yellows that are in here. Taking my time. Pickup bit of that purple, dry that brush off and just continue feathering, feathering it in. I'm gonna go over that brushstroke once you put it in there. We don't have a fan brush. You always have an option of using a smaller, smaller brush and just doing lots of tiny little brush strokes in there. So like if you're using a round brush or something like that, this is just an easier way of doing it. I'm doing this so that I can get in, I guess, some indications of some plants that are growing up with some longer stemmed plants. And in a way, makes the same look a little bit more three-dimensional. But it also doesn't look too obvious because we were painting wet into wet. So some of this is going to just fading and some of it will little bit sharper. That's why I've got some of these areas that I used a little blade to just carve out as well. In the background, I think what I'll do is just start putting in a tiny bit of green with some of these trees off in the distance. Down some of those already. But I just wanted to put in a little bit maybe like another layer of trees. Tiny bit closer. Okay. Just over the top. Like that. And it feels too much. Remember just to soften edges so that you don't get too many sharp edges or dark areas if you just trying to create a bit of variation here, look at that. This is spread quite a lot. I didn't plan for it to two. So to do that, but doesn't matter. Here, of course we have some more of these trees that we will be branches that were playing around with and using this technique here, like I said, kind of getting an old round brush and just kidding it on a surface and it's rubbing onto a surface here, this kind of splayed look to the brush and I'm going to pick up a bit of green. And let's put in some more water actually intellect green. This is just going to allow me to get in some of these darker bits in the tree as well. We can just pick up, maybe you want. It is actually pretty dark some of these areas of leaves and things. But I'm also trying to preserve enough of the trunks. But they also show through. It's funny because these trunks at the backend actually fairly dark. So I may actually go in with a tiny bit of neutral tint and brown. Let's see what we can do. Just work with these ones. We're going to need some sharpness and details in here. These back, these trees in the background like that. I'm excluded. This little rigger brush allows me to do that. Just get in some areas like that one together. And if that down, I'm going to leave that right-hand side of the tree or the rigger brush may be too thin. So I may pick up this other kind of round brush and play around with this. I think this is actually, this is a lot better. Something like that. There we go. Remember to leave a bit of that light showing through on the right-hand side of the tree. Signified by just this bit of white there. In areas. Let's just work a bit on this branch. Sometimes you just got to leave it and it's that what you put in here. But while it's drying, you've got a bit of dampness in there. You can play around with some areas. Again, it's just more detail in here. The trunk of this tree on the right as well. I'm going to put in some cooler color in here, just through here, left side of the trunks, leaving in a tiny bit of white on the right-hand side in areas. But all the areas but just in some parts like this. Okay. Sometimes you just got to make it up as you go because the drawing can disappear quite easily under all of this. Okay? This is of course, the most important tree in my opinion because it's quite sharp areas of contrast and it's the largest tree in the scene. So everything we do here looks pretty obvious, right? I'm going to join this up and have a bit of darkness running down the left-hand side of this tree, like this. The way down to the ground, that right-hand side of the tree illuminated a touch soft enough. Some of the areas like that probably need to go darker, actually, a little bit darker, bit more bluish purple color in there. And I'm just going to drop some of these scene needs to be significantly darker. I've got in there at the moment. Okay. Good. Of course, we do have some of the branches and stuff like that coming up here as well, which I can just getting a few brushstrokes. This near the top as well. Dark contrasts. Parts of the tree. These nooks and crannies sometimes hide a fair bit of shadow here and there. So you just want to indicate some of that. Some more branches like this, these ones just running up towards the sky like they're like a Y shape going up into the sky. And then little. Ones just splayed out. This actually might be too dark, so then lift off a bit of color and try again. One that's going up towards the sky. They're just these branches going up towards the sky. Okay. Let's pick up a bit more of that greenish color and see if I can get myself in a bit more sharp edge for some of these leaves in the background. This is just a bit of green, darker green I'm picking out and mixed in with neutral tint. And I'm just feathering that through some of these areas of the trees in the background, the leaves, the background to create negatively painted trunk. Like that. We've got a kind of a darker layer of paint off in some areas in the background. And this will this will cause, bring out some extra details. I'm carving out a branch as we speak here. At the top there. We can do it again here. Well, okay. Do it a bit here. Just where the branches sort of show through. Just putting a bit of green on the outer edges of them. A little bit there. Holding that brush at the end does help as well to create a bit more of a softer, softer look, softer field. Okay, here we go. And Destic. I'm good. So I'm going to just work a bit on this tree to the left because I feel like it's lost a bit of detail there. I'm going to pick up a bit of neutral tint and just work. A couple of branches running through this section. Can use maybe dry brush. Dry brush would be nicer, just a little indication like that. But it's not too obvious. Something like that. And we can put in something here, just this, there's a larger bush or something as well in the front like that. Just a few little brush strokes and you won't believe what? It already starts coming together. And I'll put it in a few little brush strokes here as well for this. Some of the branches here for this tree, I'm using just a bit of darker green. You can also use that money brush that I had before, just that this brush to do that as well. Just some scribbling and funny edged areas. Okay. Good. This area probably is too dry in it. And now to put into many of these, but you can see what I mean, the areas which have had a little bit of dampness left in here, you can actually scratch out a little tiny bit of color. Create these little areas here of lighter sections. And I'm especially off in the background here. I think this is nice to do the bits of grass and things. Just scratching a bit of that out. We got pockets of detail. I'm running through this. I'm putting a bit more pressure here to create lift off some of the paint and sometimes you actually scratch off a bit of the paper, but that's no big deal. You can recover a tiny bit of the white tenant, Aaron. Actually, quite amazing. Looking at you can still get on a few these bits and pieces and kind of make them look like they're leading in. So you've got some larger ones here and they kind of lead into smaller shrugs off in the distance. The combination of all these brush, brushstrokes and Marx create an interesting kind of beam where we've just got a whole lot of textures and interesting marks start to come through. I certainly getting there, we're almost there, almost there. So I'll give it a quick dry, completely dry now. And we're going to put in some finishing touches and final finishing touches and really go from there. So the few things I want to do, I've forgotten to actually add on some of these little trees. I'll pick up a round brushes, a very small round brushes. And number three, round brush, a bit of neutral tint. Okay, I'm gonna go into that right-hand side. There are some shrubs here, a couple of tree branches actually are smaller trees just growing here on the, near the foreground. And I'll just put in some of the indications of it, like that. Crossing over the light of that tree. And contrary to the left as well, makes for an interesting looking contrast. And there's actually another one over here too. So it's just neutral tint. And I'm holding the brush right at the end so that it just looks a bit more loose. Says something like that. There's another one. The branches are probably the most important thing. And then just connect them up with some of these bits of leaves like that. Okay. Lee's already in there. I don't want to overdo it. Okay. Good. I think the branches look pretty, pretty good on most of these trees. I mean, the only other thing we could do is of course, bring out some of the branches near the top of this scene a bit more like that one. That one there by just adding a bit of shadow to the left-hand side of some of the branches. Apart from that, there's really not a whole lot else we need to add in there. I think that looks pretty good already. The only other thing is maybe just some more of this bronchi. Bronchi but foliage here. Just using a dry brush. Pick up a bit of paint, dry your brush off on some bit of spare towel, and just drop it in there. And then you get a little bit more foliage, especially for this larger tree that does make more sense actually to have some of these additional foliage. I mean, do fine with a lot of these countries. You don't get excessive amounts of vibrancy in them. I tend to tread a little, little more carefully in terms of the colors, greens that I'm using here to make sure I'm not overpowering the scene. A bit more. Just stumble a few brushstrokes in here that just a little bit. Some leaves or whatever, catching the light. Move a bit over there as well. I think the speed on the left looks quite good. Actually. One thing of, I think it would be nice as just, I think a little bit of dry brushing here for some of these trees off in the distance. I think it touches sharpness. There would be good because we've almost lost some of that detail back in the distance there. So I think a little bit of that will be good. We can also get in a bit of detail here, just putting a bit of a bluish color to k and f shoot through dry brush strokes of this once you may call it the foreground. So just some little light brushstrokes. I'm going to use purplish color mixed with a bit of brown. Just doesn't look too vibrant. And I'm going to go in just like this. Okay, so I've got another layer of detail on top and the slightly darker layer as well. And I'm keeping in mind that we do want to preserve that beautiful, warmer wash running through. But this is just another added layer of complexity over the top that will make it kinda come together. It look a bit more like this Pushy, Pushy sort of seen. Okay. So I'm picking up bits and pieces and when you re wet paper, especially in start doing stuff like this, it does look pretty dark when you go in, but when it dries, it does draw a little bit lighter, but makes sure using a lot of water in this mix, I'm using probably 80% water and only 20% paint, if not less. Bits and bits and pieces. If it's over, it's too dark. You feel it's too dark in areas. Just dab off dab off that paint like that, like a little bit more here. Here. This is just getting some rudimentary sorted little dry brush strokes into that section. Okay. One thing I've not done is in the background these mountains, I'm going to dry brush a little bit of color, brown or something in there. Running through the tops of the heels. Just dark and often little bit in areas, but I don't want to sharpen it off too much because it's going to, again start to draw too much attention to those mountains. I'm just a bit of dry brush perhaps in that background area like that, just a little scumbling marks. I think that even just touching go and some spots touching go. Bring it out a little bit more, but that's it. That's all I'm gonna do. I don't want to draw too much attention to it. Okay. I wonder if I should put a few little birds in there. I can. I'll just I'll just leave it. But let's get a bit of gouache in a tiny bit of white gouache. And I want to bring out some final highlights in some areas of the trees. And especially here that right-hand side of the tree trunk, perhaps a little bit of white in here would be good to indicate the sunlight just hitting hitting the side of that tree like this. Okay. It's just a bit of white gouache. You can this also helps to bring out the branches wet enough, so having a little bit of that running through and you can also indicate some branches that weren't really there before. Like this. We can put another one coming up here or here. Okay, So trick is not to overdo it. Now, this one here in the background and we can bring out a bit of that one as well. Just drag this to the into the dragging that downwards like this. Work a bit more into the tree. Dry brush strokes, nice little dry brush strokes like this. One down as well when they're bring out some more little highlights. Start to look a little bit more like these white gum trees. Okay, good. The amazing quality of some little touch of gouache like that and really bring back the white of the paper. Tiny bit like that. I'm mixed up a tiny bit of yellow week wash as well. See if I can maybe getting a little bit more of those yellows coming back and erase some of these shrubs that we'd lost out before. Where's that brush, that flat edge brush. I can use that again to mix up this yellow week wash. You can mix a bit of white with yellow created. Okay, just to sort of wash, Let's try this light enough. Maybe it's more white, maybe in here. And water. Very important. And this could be like a little shrub or something here. Then we've got another one maybe here. Bringing out some dry brush strokes that might indicate some shrubs. This one just maybe disappears like that. Else. Can we get them maybe some more here? Just running through the middle of the page and we'd lost some of this before, so I'm trying to bring it back. Parts of it back anyway. Like that. More here. Just through these little sporadic strokes. Just drop it in. Useful especially where you've got a really dark areas, it creates some extra contrast, but it's important also to blur the edges a little bit in some areas like this so that it doesn't look too back out and find ways to join it and move some of these shrubs downwards into this area here. So that it's not just separated areas of highlights. They travel through the same thought in this area and then they move and feather, feather downwards until they disappear outwards. I think that's the way to do it so that it looks natural. And even on the gum trees you've got to, it's almost like a yellowy, slightly yellowy color on some areas due to the light. So tiny bit of that yellow in there won't. And we'll be good to maybe a tiny bit here on the mountain and the distance just to get a touch of that light or something coming through, just an indication of it. It's the dry brush dry brush strokes like that. Okay. And I call that one finished. 9. Gumtrees Drawing & Light Wash: Alright, in this video we're gonna be doing this amazing scene of the Australian outback. We've got some white countries of the right-hand side. Mountainous area, rocky sort of mountainous area in the background and a few shrubs. But intermixed with all these. We've also got some of these lighter shrubs. I'm varying color. I mean, I think these photos being slightly edited as well, but this kind of cooler color running through inside the bushes as well as these lovely, yellowish and warmer colored ones. So I do want to get in some of those as well. So let's go ahead and put in the horizon line. And this is the area that's where the sky meets the Earth. So if we look at right at the bottom of the mountains, we want to separate that out from the foreground. So I'm just going to have a look and see roughly where that is. It's not even a third of the way. It's about almost a quarter of the way. I'd say quarter of the way through the page, but have a little estimate and just draw it in like this. Okay, there we go, screaming indication like that. Now. Now what I wanna do is start putting in a little bit of the indication of the mountains is just an area of where I can place them ride in the back like this. Okay. And I'm just going to change. Make sure that you measure up roughly where the mountains finished as well. You can see they go all the way through and then start to dip down. As we get halfway through the page are a little bit further. And just turn into these sort of shrubs and things here like that. So let's do suggest placing those shrubs very gently but not overdoing it. Let let your brushwork do a lot of the explaining. So don't, don't sort of drawing too much, especially with these sort of shapes that are a little softer, a little bit more abstract. K. Just want to place bits and pieces so that I don't forget to put some of the darker bits of shrubs and things as well. But you can see there's almost a line of shrubs running down the center here. Okay, and then there's some lighter ones as well which will live in really the biggest thing that we need to get incorrectly as this tree, this white country, I'm going to start putting it in. And here's the truck. This is the main area of the trunk and it goes all the way up pretty high. So I'm gonna go down and just place the trunk about here. The width of the trunk doesn't really increase all the way up. It's roughly the same width. And we can go up, and of course there's a bit of wiggle room here. You can change things around a bit. For example, you can see this Y shape as the branches split off into different areas and what have you. So you can change things like that up. If there are little variations, don't stress over it. Okay. Chest, look at how the branches split off into two, maybe three other separate little branches. And you're gonna be able to basically get in a nice indication of these branches. The branches in the background, you can see a few of them as well. They're pretty dark. So there's not a whole lot to to get in, but the main ones, just these bigger ones, these bigger limbs that go up. I think we've got to really put some effort in there to draw them in. Okay. So this one coming off at this side. Again, I'm just trying to simplify this down a bit. Okay. Limbs gets smaller and smaller. And you've got this one here which kind of goes off in different directions as well like this. Okay? Of course we can change it a bit of this up as as we work through the scene. Now the main, main bigger ones. So let's get those in teaser. Just bring this one down like that, and then I'll have these coming off the edge like this. Okay. Let's have a look also. Down the back end of the scene. There's a smaller tree all the way back here, smaller gum tree. And this is where we can just of course indicate less details. I'm just getting in some of the branches are getting in this one as well, just next, next to it like this. Notice how this one comes a little bit further down the horizon line, whereas these are just right on the horizon line like this. And no fingers only they know people in this scene. So we have to make sure that the trees gets smaller to indicate that sense of perspective in depth in this scene because we can't use figures. We can add a figure in there to create that sense of depth. Sometimes that's a bit of a trick that I do. And I'm putting a figure here or there that gives an indication of everything else, the size of everything else. So you can see, I'm just trying to draw in a few clumps of these bushes. Roughly down the side. Okay. And again, I'm just roughly indicating whereabouts they lie. I mean, even here, like this larger branch, you can see it sort of going into the scene like there. Then we've got some other trees and stuff here in the background as well. I'm just going to work on these touch like that. We've got another tree here, like a darker sort of tree, a shrub or something at the front. Lot of darkness and larger sort of shrubs. Know. A lot of it is just indicating where I'm placing the darker sense of darker areas. But I think that should be okay. I don't want to overdo it and draw too much in there. This mainly that tree on the right hand side I think is important. Let's reshape this mountain. I think I've chopped it down a little bit here for some reason so I can just keep it a bit more of a kid like that. Alright, I think we are ready to get started. So I am going to begin by using a small, It's more mop brushes is a three slash 0 my brush. And we'll be picking up some warmer colors to begin with. So I'm going to go with some yellow ocher. Okay. My kind of go-to color to start off with is some of these warmer hues, especially in the background. And I like to pick up a bit of this other stuff as well. This is just a bit of burnt sienna that I can chuck in. Their main thing though is just getting in a light wash of yellow ocher near the top like that. Okay. They're just moving through. And let's go ahead and work a bit of this down the page as well. We do have some of these other little shrubs and things here in the foreground. And some of them are quite vibrant. They're almost, they've got more saturated color in them. So picking up a little bit more yellow, this is a bit of a tiny bit of fancy yellow. Then I'm adding into my yellow can mix and look there as you can see, just these little bits of tiny bits of yellowy jobs here coming through. Okay. He's yellowy shrubs and we need some of this. We do need some of this and go to preserve it. In this kind of acts as the light, the scene. Lots of really coming from that right-hand side of the scene. Mckay. And even on the right-hand side of the tree here, the odd say this very, very, very, very light wash of yellow. Just mostly water in there. I'm just going to lighten that up a bit there in some areas, but not really too much. I want that white to show through on the paper. And let's go ahead. I'm going to start putting in some of the greens and things. So you can see here there's actually some bits of green that run through this entire scene. You've got these shrubs and things here. The back in which I can start to just work my way in. Little trick is to use an old round brush and do this kind of thing with it. Okay. So it looks horrible. Just pick up some green and use that just like these to get in clumps, clumps of the tree, the leaves. And by doing it this way funnily enough, it starts, it actually looks more like a clump of brands, a clump of leaves than it does if you were just to use a normal brush. So I'm putting a bit of that in and look at that. You get some sharpness in there as well. Loved that. So that down make it just almost like you're abusing it. But we can go across and look around here, this little bit of this nice tree. These, these are tiny bits of darkness in here as well, which I'm going to do. Drop that in there and move that down a bit. Some of it may bleed into the the tree trunk as well. Don't worry too much about that. Just try not to get too much of it in there. Let me go. And you can see there's even some of it up the top. Remember, you can go over this again one more time later if you feel like it's too much or not enough detail in there. So go in there like that. Let's have a look. What else can we get in here? Maybe a little bit of green in the background as well, and then we can shift a bit of it down the page as well. But notice I'm just leaving the trunks of the trees. I'm leaving that white on the trunk. Okay, or the yellow in some cases here. So I'm going to move this down, move some of this green down. They move some of it into here, especially, I want to double this green down, just use a bit of yellow ocher. I'm mixing a bit of yellow ocher into this green, It's a darker green. And a shift some of this into here. I want some more yellow ocher, perhaps in there as well, just to darker yellow ocher and some brownie color here. Maybe you guys just a bit in there to fill that space. But don't don't be afraid to leave some little specks of white in areas as well. There is a bit, a bit of tops of trees and stuff here as well. So I'm gonna just dropping a bit of sharpness in here through the middle of these trees, especially a bit of that over there as well. Just to get a bit of this indication, these shrubs running through and hear over the top. Just having a look, where else can I potentially add enough of these brushstrokes? And same time remembering to preserve the outlines of these the tree trunk. You just want to negatively cut around some of the branches and take your time with this. And I'm sort of looking at the reference photo as well to make sure that I'm on the right track to just creates this sense of light and the tree when you've got this color running into the background like that, but this darkness running into the background. And of course, later on I think I'm going to be using some cooler colors as well in the tree, the tree trunk. For the time being, I will leave it. How it is. What I wanna do is just work a bit on the sky or have not putting much into the sky. I'm using some cerulean blue, pretty heavy handed at the top case, I want it to be darker at the top, just marginally darker. One thing you wanna do as well, It's just be careful with these leaves. You don't want to make them all turn into this bluey color for the sky. So I'm cutting around them as well to leave some of that green in there. Leave a bit of that green in there. But at the same time, we want to make sure that there's enough blue there in the sky to indicate what's what's going on. If in doubt. Just make the sky lighter. If in doubt just make the sky a little bit lighter. Preferably have the sky lighter. And the same time. Still preserve that sense of these, these trees branches and the bits and pieces sticking out the leaves. But again, we're going to be dark in the leaves right at the end. So don't worry too much. Let's go in there like this area is kinda dried already, which is great. So I can just go in and dropping, dropping into this Cerulean, into the background like that. Very light blue as we move further down as well. So you don't have to worry about that, have to worry too much as you get further down like here. Just again, look at that. I'm just cutting around some of these trees and bits and pieces and then leaving the trunks white. Let's get a bit more here and move that through that top of that mountain as well. Like there. There. There. Okay. So we've got some lovely sort of wash running through this running through this area, this sky wash, which I quite like, keeping it fairly light as well. So let's move further down around here though. I do notice that it's difficult to see exactly, but this certainly yellows. And there's also some kind of almost purplish color running through here. Some cooler color anyway. They're just leave the colors of the native plants in here, just running through the shrubs. So I'm gonna go ahead and put in the yellow first, rid of that yellow like that. Some of the areas might leave, just, just leave it white. And what that's gonna do is it's going to allow me to get in a little bit of wet and wet worked through here. Most of this, funny enough, is painted wet into wet. I'm going to pick up two of my special little brushes that I love to use to create sort of little, little bushes and things like that. This is a flat edge brush, a angled flat brush, and a little fan brush. I'll use this one. Let's use this 1 first. And what you got to realize is that there's actually a lot of darks back here. Firstly, I want to start darkening perhaps a little bit of this area here just with these mountains out in the back. I want to just want to get in something in here to create some darkness near the base of the mountains here. Not only that, some areas at the top of the mountains as well, you've noticed there's just a bit of roughness up there. So jumping in a bit of that. This is really touch of and burnt amber plus a little bit of neutral tint. If we're just darken it down a little bit. If you don't need to, just add a bit of tiny bit of blue in there. Look at that. I'm just kidding in a little bit of this color in there, maybe a tiny bit of orange as well. I'm looking at it. If I can pick up a little bit of orange genetic get almost like a rusty color perhaps in some areas. But leaving, obviously leaving a little bit of that light on top as well. Some of this will be just dry brush it on. Later on. Here we go. I'm going to pick up a bit of ultramarine blue and drop that in here with some, just really mixing up a few different colors. But I've got some ultramarine. I've got a bit of green perhaps over here, the corners, then a bit of brown as well. And we'll drop this in. Maybe a bit more old Ciara will be more ultramarine and a bit more purple in there as well to create extra darkness. It's not dark enough. Just grabbed some of that neutral tint and mix it in that will certainly darken up some of these these bushes. And you notice some of these areas are pretty dry already, so there's not much bread that you're going to get. So you might want to also give these areas a little spray of water. So I just like this little spritz of water with a spray bottle. And that's just going to liven things up a bit for you so that you can add in some of these sharper bits and pieces that aren't going to shift around too much. You can see that there's look at that there's some little, I can't tell what they are, but there's tiny little shrubs that you can see running through this section like that as well. You know, I'm not mixing a bit of purple to just create something else running through here. I don't want it to all look the same. 10. Killarney Drawing & Light: Okay, so we're gonna be doing a reverse slash stream theme here. And this is a town called colonia over in Queensland, one of many small rural towns around Australia. And they all, in a way look quite similar when you go out to the creeks and streams, we've got areas of these rocks and trees and bits of grass and foliage all interacting. And we're gonna go ahead and try to get this one in and use some loose watercolor techniques along the way. So let's go ahead and divide the scene. Let's divide this bit of paper now this is a portrait based scene. I'm going to divide it at roughly about halfway through the page, kinda like this. Roughly again, just placing that line halfway through the page. I'm putting it there because that's about where the trees in the back areas so to stop off and then you get some smaller trees that come out like this. Notice how I'm holding the pencil as well. I'm pretty loose with it. I'm looking at how I can just put this a bit, this large bushing and get also some indications. Maybe you have some branches and things coming up. Mainly just want to get in a bit of an indication of the sky here as well. So you can see just a lot of these bushes and things off in the distance. And the important thing with these is just to get a bit of layering going on. So leaving some lighter ones at the front and then going a bit darker at the back to get a bit of a contrast in there. Now, over here you can see there is the start of this river or a stream here. So we can start by getting in a few rocks. Started off a hears get off a few little rocks near the edge of the streaming by putting the rocks at the end like that near the edge of the stream. What you do is that you create this kind of barrier and edge, okay, to sort of outline where it starts, where the stream starts, where it ends. So we want to do with the rocks in the background is just make them a bit smaller. As you move forwards. Did you get slightly larger? We've have a look at this one here. This is a, another larger rock here and it's obscured by bit of grass or I'm bush or something like that, just behind. So a lot of this stuff there is actually quite light. I'm just gonna go ahead and put in a few more rock, smaller rocks here in the distance like this. And here's a little bit of darkness on that rock here to the left. That okay. It does take a bit of a bit of another rock behind that as well here. Let's have a look, maybe some smaller ones over on this side as well. Again, just kind of lining the edge. Now the thing we got to figure out is where the light source is coming from. I can see it's it's roughly coming from the top right, even just from the top of the scene. So it's almost coming directly above. Okay. If you picture at some of the rocks have a bit of shadow underneath, they look like shadows on the left of the rock. But actually because the rocks on a bit of an angle and the top part of the rock is actually casting a shadow or the knee. So it's more so coming from the top. And I always try to figure out that light source earlier on. Because what that does is that it allows you to plan out all your darker bits of painting instead of leaving it right to the end. So again, look, here's another rock in the water and I'm picking out little bits of detail I think that I want to add on bits of darkness on the rock. And I think some darkness at the bottom of these rocks, as you can see, they the kind of anchor it onto the ground. So you might even notice that there's a smaller rocks in the middle of the stream, that kind of thing. You can go ahead and put in a few of those as well. You don't have to follow this exactly. Is over here on the left-hand side, a large shape here. It's like a tree trunk really. There's a fern kind of coming out over here. And you get these sort of tropical looking, much tropical looking, lots more lush, lush foliage over and Queensland. Just putting in a few of these shapes, these kind of ferns and they're really just look at it. It's really just a little triangles and I'm just pointing the triangles around, getting a bit of this indication of that burn and there's bits of grass and things growing up over here is what looks like a log. And I'm going to work on this log of B. It actually may enlarge it touch. And I'm going to just pick out a few. The little details in that log, the main thing is just getting in some darker areas of the log. For example, over in here just underneath it, I think is really important. So having that contrast with that top area of the log, it's almost quite abstract. You can't see exactly what's going on. But once we get the watercolors in a bit of gouache, bit here and there. You can be able to carve out this kind of shape in there. So I'm kinda go and put in another rock here and another rock and yet another one. You can start just having a bit of fun placing a few of the shapes in here. As you move into the foreground, you're going to find as law, few larger rocks. But before I do what I'm going to work on a bit is just get on some of this bridge or this area of the tree here that goes up is this really large tree. Some branches of course, which I'm going to leave most of it just with the watercolors, but I'm, I'm just planning out how far those trees go over and I'm making sure that in my mind, I'm making sure that I plan to leave some of this lighter and have some darker foliage out there in the back. A lot of this stuff I think I'm going to leave it to later on. For the watercolors, I think that the rocks are probably the main thing that we want to make sure we've gotten enough details in there and planning for the rocks. And often you find that the rocks actually give the streamer sense of a bit of context. So let's get into another rock here. Okay, just another rock, funny shaped one like that. Change the shape of them a little bit. That's going to help. Again, just darkening a bit at the bottom of that rock. And there's a nicely kind of angled one here. I really liked this one. It comes off. It's got four sides. Always try to do that kind of thing and look at it and see how many sides or what kind of shape is it? What can you reduce it down to? This one here? It looks kinda like a like a box shape, kind of irregular box shapes. So just simplifying this down. Of course it's not exactly box shaped so we have to miss it. Miss it around a little bit so that it doesn't look too. I too, stuck on man-made object or something like that. You can see here. I'm just putting in a little bit more of this rocket, the base. Okay. Let's just draw that in a little bit more, okay? Some smaller rocks in here as well. Keeping in mind that these rocks we can change them up later as well. So don't feel that once you draw them in, you have to stick with that. And you can't change your mind later because that's that's the complete opposite. You can change it anything. But I do like to get into a bit of detail and use this to relax, plan out what I wanna do. So that later when I actually pick up the brush, I don't have to think too much about all the planning. Well, the little rocks go, the shadows and things like that. I can just focus directly on the watercolor techniques. It can be a struggle at times in watercolor where you are just doing your best to focus on so many things at the same time. And the more you can simplify that process and allow yourself to focus on some of the important things. The immediate things like in the moment when you're doing some painting, picking up some paint and putting it into a wet area. Focusing on that and taking a bit of that mental load off, my planning really improves the quality of the paintings. So I find that often with the amount of planning that I have on that I spend actually doing the drawing always results in a, a better put together painting. And I don't have to think too much. I always try to leave a bit to the imagination as well. And not, try to, not try to draw everything in. Here's some more bush and things like that. And there are bits of rock that we can chuck on here. This is kind of like a bit of the, the bank and the river bank. Okay. You can even see some little rocks underneath the water. Okay. I won't emphasize that too much, a lot of it. And see, the water is a kind of a greenish brownish color. It's mixed in with all the mud and the dirt and at the bottom of that creek and then you've got some of the reflection reflected greens in the water as well. So. I think that looks good for the time being and a decent sort of drawing. Let's go ahead and get started on the painting. And I'm gonna be using a couple of small mop brushes to get in this first wash. First wash, I would say is one of the most important washes because it allows you to really plan ahead and get an older light areas first get a nice soft, Impressionistic feel. So I'm gonna go in with this mop brush. This is a three slash 0 mop brush. And let's go ahead and put in. Let's go ahead and put in a bit of a yellow first. The great thing about the yellow is that it's always very light, so you can just start off with the tiny bit of water I'm sorry, tiny bit of paint and a lot of water in there. Okay. So if you look at it, it's mainly just mainly just water in this this wash. I'm going in with some of the yellow first because I know when I start putting in the greens, it's gonna be very difficult to get any of that yellowing. So I like to just put in a bit of that first, especially as we come down here, we've got some perhaps greenie areas, light green areas at the front. And let's put in So for example about here, could it be this kind of green and looking grass? So I can just drop that in a little bit like that. And of course I still have a lot of those rocks, so I can just drop in a bit of colorful those rocks as well. Okay. This point we are not trying to detail at all. We're just putting in color. Okay? It'll get to color and we're letting it and merge together to form an overall, a very impressionistic sort of feel. Okay, so don't feel like you need to get in any detail. Okay. But try to visualize the light in here, the light that's coming in the scene, especially in the back here, a bit of that light on the rocks. Perhaps some of it reflected into the water as well. Um, I'm gonna go ahead and put a bit of this yellowish color, yellowish, greenish color now into the this tree here on the left. A little bit of that. Look how soft and light I'm going here. It's very light. It almost looks too pale. And the mistake here is to start thinking, hey, it's not dark enough. I need to go a lot darker. What you wanna do is just go with it, go with this softness. And then we can drop in more of that color and the greens and stuff later. Notice I'm also leaving a bit of why it's from the paper. That really helps. Again, just to create a bit of contrast but a spark when they're in the top of the scene, I'm dropping in a bit of spirulina blue, trying to get into those areas. There's nooks and crannies at the top here where there's no yellow. And then let that infuse downwards while everything is still wet so that we have some combinations of sharp edges and some soft edges in there. As you can see, sharp and soft edges. Just get rid of those funny bubbly bits. Right? So I'm going to continue working down the page. And again, looking at some of these areas of light in here, there's actually been a green light, greeny color for some of these ferns and stuff, which I'll have to drop in there. I'll go just add in some more of this yellow ocher in there. Okay. Where that tree stump is. What you can do as well. We start putting in a little bit, tiny bit of color into those background trees and that just, for example, you might do something like this. This is just a bit off. I'm darker green. Again, I'm picking that up. I also like to mix in a bit of blue or a bit of purple into the green. It just creates a slightly different and darker green off in the background as well. We get some variations of what's going on in here. But at the same time, remembering to leave some of this lovely warm hello in there. Okay, so that it's not all, it's not all just green in there because it really is a combination of greens and there's even a yellowy sort of sunlit area. Well, I like to imagine it anyway. Sometimes when you're simplifying things down in watercolors because we look at this reference photo, this so much in there. If we simplify it down, we also need to change it up and add something else that's different in here to make the watercolors work with its simplicity. So look at that, just a drop of this green in here. Now I can pick up a bit of this blue, this ultramarine blue, and drop that in with the green. And all of a sudden I've got some darker bits here in the front. Like that. Good how it just melds in and darkness in there. Okay, bit more blue, bit more blue with that green. Here we have another kind of darker, sort of rainy area in parts. And test take just a little bit of that. I'm going to move into the water a little bit too while we're here. Let's go ahead. I'm going to drop in. Sport has gotta be a bit darker really. I'm going to pick up some of this green and let's, let's drop this in here. Green and maybe a bit of brown. I want it to be do you want it to be a mixture of green and browns in here? So I'm just going to drop this in. Notice I'm also trying to leave in little bits of white. And they can be for rocks, imaginary rocks in that air in the background as well. This area of green, It's pretty light. I've got mostly water in this mix, probably 30% paint that's kinda like greeny brown color. Okay. You've also got a bit of, you've also got a bit of a yellowy color for some of these rocks that you can look at that I'm just going to drop that in very quickly. Like this, so that it doesn't all just disappear under the green case. It's just something like these little bits of that running through. You might have a bit of it because of this brush. A little bit of this yellowy area here near the front. And work again based on this topic or this greeny brown area. Again, this is mostly just water. May be 60% water, and the rest of it is paint. But one thing I wanna do is make this significantly darker than all this area here at the back. And you notice some of these sort of lighter color starts to seep in. That's good. Let it, let it do that. And that creates a kind of suggestion of reflections. Reflections here. This will seep down, especially, especially if you've got the paper on a slight angle, which is how I normally work. I keep erasing some of these lovely white highlights. Don't do that. Just remember, leave some parts of it wide like this. This can be some more rocks we will put in later. For the time being, I just want to cut around some of the rocks, some of these areas, and leaving some of these white parts in here. This is why it's important not to draw everything in. Because sometimes you just get feeling while you're painting of what you want to implying there. So here I'm just putting in a tiny bit of blue, bit of coolness in here. This is just a bit of the sky being reflected in the water. Okay, so tiny bit of blue in here. Not much, just a bit and encouraging it to mix around a touch. Okay. So just more so at the bottom parts, then we're going to go back into the green again. Here. Look how I just mix it in with the yellow as well. Let the watercolors do what it wants to do. One of the most important thing is not to force it to not mix with each together and stuff like that. You got to let it let it mix and do its thing. Even if it doesn't turn out the way you intended, There's a degree of abandonment. In watercolors, especially when you're painting the sort of River, river scenes or abstract looking scenes. Right? That's pretty good for a first wash. So far. What I like to do is while the paint is still wet, I think continued just working on this area and implying some small details. For example, I might like to put in a bit of some splatter or something like that here. So I've just picked up a bit of a little bit of paint, maybe a bit of white paint here that I've gotten the palette, just wet the brush and just tap, tap the brush a bit like that. Okay. And that's going to create a little bit of interests over into the background. Okay, you might get a bit that goes a bit far up, so I just wipe some of that off with the brush. Now I can start going into that area again, it started to dry a little bit, which is interesting because now if I start putting in a bit of this darker paint, this is a slightly thicker, darker paint in here. You notice it still spreads. Certainly still spreads, but it spreads a lot less. Okay, so you can go in here and put in a little bit of detail, little bit of the tiny bit of brushwork in here. I like to use a rigger brush at times and such moments. We don't want to get too much detail in there and too large sort of brushstrokes. You might have a bit of that branch or something going up, as you can see, something like that, right? Might have a few more that I liked here. This wall, we'd be melting. They're just tiny bits like that. This bit here I just want to soften off that, touch. Them look a bit too harsh. Now you can work a bit more on the ones to the left. So I've got a bit of darker, neutral tint to paint on here again, there's a kind of a bit of this branch or something moving up there. There's maybe one here. And I'm using very dry paint in this brush is pretty dry. I've just picked up the paint almost straight from the palette and dry the brush off a little bit, then gone, gone in here. And what this does is that it stops the paint from spreading too much. So you still get a bit of a soft edge here, which is really what I want. But at the same time, you're getting some sharp edges as well. And especially up here in the foreground. Sharper edges really look quite good. And you compare them in juxtaposition them with the softness of the background washes. This stuff is just wet and wet work really. In the water. You might wanna do something like pick up a bit of green but a darker green. Mix that around and we can even get in a few little ripples on the surface of the water. Just dry off that brush pickup a little bit more of this. Pick a green paint, dry off that brush. Just dropping a few little strokes like this. And this will help the color to mix. And Milton, is that area is still wet. That now I can put in a bit here as well. Here. Some sharper, sharper, shorter strokes like this near the front as well. That okay. Again, just more wet and wet work while the paper is still is still dry. Okay. I'm liking that section, how it's moving down the page a little bit in always encourage it as well by using a spray bottle, just giving a little spray there and hopefully that some of that paint moves downwards. Okay. I'm darker paint in here, just to slightly dark area. We're going to have to leave a lot of that actually for later in a and another dry wash over the top of wet on dry wash. But I think this is a good place to start. And I can also start putting in a little bit of, little bit more of this greeny color in here. This brush, little bits of shrubs and stuff like that there as well. Okay. This area at the bottom, I just want to re-wet it a bit like here to help the building green to mixing blue. I don't want to just throw all that blue in there, but just encourage it to mix a bit more. If you find that there's, you can lift off a bit of paint as well. If you put too much in there, you can do that as well. Another thing you can do is just wait for that to dry and lived off a bit of paint. Ok. So really at this stage, we are just fiddling around and getting in some small details or sometimes like to pick up some of these other brushes. I've got to fan brush and I've got this kind of angled flat brush and mess around with some of these colors. And use this brush to getting some more irregular, irregular sort of brushstrokes. And remembering the plan here is that I wanted to leave this, this tree here on the left-hand side, negatively painted. I'm really being careful here not to eliminate all of that beautiful soft edge here. And we can have some sharp edges in that, near that tree as well. See here to bring out the light here on that tree. But I don't want to over do it. So she appears softer, soft enough that edge a bit. Often off that edge that you get a bit of this sharp edge there on that tree. And that should be enough to signify that this tree here on the left is in front of this darker area of trees in the back. Again, you've got these softer, sort of warm areas here for the trees and you can start going downwards a little bit and bring some of the darker green bit with you. And I'm going to take a bit of blue. There's a little tiny bit of blue. Do have some purple, which works well. Surprisingly, and just looking at these darker trees, darker areas at the basis there. Then I can drop in. You can pick up this small rigger brush as well. If it spreads too much again, you can mount and modify that change. Just lifted off a touch. But some of these little hair is here in the background with their smaller trees there you can barely see them. Just a few little lines like that. Signify those trees or bushes or whatever. Often the distance. You'd be surprised just how much you can indicate with a few little, little brushstrokes, especially in a fairly abstract looking seem like this. You've got areas that are homeless, dried, but the same time, they're still very little bit damp. So when you go back into them with a bit of water, a bit of darkness, you get these kind of inconsistent areas that bloom a little bit. And that actually creates a nice little, nice little effect, sometimes a little theory sort of effect and in areas. So it is actually, it is actually a good thing. It have some of that going on. Mixing, dropping in painting here. The main thing is that we want these trees here on the left hand side to be more detailed. I've already done that with some of the brushstrokes in there for the actual branches and stuff like that. But some darker bits like this, for example, just a few little brush strokes that might round like this. Sealers shop. A little brush strokes that I'm dropping in here. Another very quick just indicating some darker leaves and things running through in here. This helps to move. Bring this area of the scene a little bit closer. This bit of branch or something like that, I could and just reemphasize a touch like this, okay? Again, to create the illusion that this, this bit of trees, the left is coming forward slightly. You can redefine the branches as well if you feel that you've lost. The general shape of them can happen when you're working wet into wet this it can be quite easy to lose some of that detail in areas. So I always redefine if I need to, especially if the paint is still wet. Now, go ahead and play around with it and see what you can get out of it. Over here. I'm just going to soften off the area a little bit. I've put in too much paint, just lift off. Okay. It's not done until that piece of meat, that area of paint dries. Okay. You've also got to know when roughly to stop in terms of all this area of a wet and wet because there is a point where you just have to let go and do your thing. Realize the end of the day, there's only so much detail you can get in with one wash. At the moment, I'm trying to work a bit on this trunk. Little bit on this trunk. I'm just a bit of the darkness underneath here. And it's not too much I can really do in that section. Actually. Having a look, having a look around, see what else we can potentially do in those areas. A little bit lighter as well. The right side and left side, it's helping. What I'm doing there is I'm trying to push that back a little bit, but still have a few spots of darkness in areas to just draw out the light on those trees. Okay, here we go. Softness in here. Fantastic. Good. What we can do is start working a little bit on the rocks and some sharpest areas in there. But I'm going to give this a really quick dry. 11. Killarney Details: This is dried off now. And what I wanna do is start putting in some of the shadows in the areas of the rocks. We're going to define some of the shadows. Not only that, we're also going to put in some grass, some small details with me. We're going to use a bit of gouache in there as well. Let's pick up. I'm gonna be neutral tint here, but I've also got some purplish color. So I'm going to mix up a kind of general grayish color or dark color and mix your primaries together. Or if you've got a dark color, you could just use that experiment around. So over here, actually warm up this shadow, a little bit of neutral tint with some of this brown, maybe a bit of red in there even. And here we've got a bit of rock. And I thought I would just make this one pretty dark. That you can see. There's one area that's really dark and I'm just dropping that darkness straightaway. Got another bit of rock here, here underneath. So I'm just picking some really dark areas in here that we can just draw out the darkness and remember as well, the light's coming straight from above. You want to put that darkness right underneath the rock. Like in here, in the little nooks and crannies below. That little bit of darkness underneath the rock on the creek. It actually helps to anchor it and draw attention to that, to it being a rock in the first place. Okay. So I'm using this kind of funny aged flat brush because it's actually giving me a kind of irregular brush brush stroke. And I don't want it to look too neat and tidy. So really just looking at putting a little broken edge or some darkness underneath some of these white spots, some of the areas of the stones out the back. Here, we can get in a bit of that as well. Like there there and there could be another rock there and there. Okay. I'm touching go as soon as you as soon as you've got an area that you're happy with, just move on. I'm getting a few little brush strokes to indicate that shadow. And move on. The more you fiddle around with it I find the, the less convincing it. You can look in this style. So really think about where you're putting those shadows in for me, I'm just looking more so at the bottom of the rocks, getting in a bit of a bit of darkness there at the bottom. You might have rocks that are a little bit darker as well. You can just make some up. But look at that, just putting in a bit of darkness in them. Some of the rocks might be pretty dark themselves, so you can color, you can really just color the entire rockin to bring it out. But as you can see here, I'm just picking out a few and taking my time. Just get a bit of that. A little bit of darkness underneath them. Look at the patterns of shadows as well. You said, certainly get some that are join, join moreover onto the rock. And I kind of part of the rock is actually slightly darker in the other areas, but not as dark as this shadowy bits. So actually have to go back into that later. Here, look at that. There's another rock here is a little bit of that. I'm holding this brush down the bottom of it as well so that I can get in a little bit more detail. And cheese so many rocks in this, this area here at the bottom. And the trick is really just to look at how to apply them. Put them in with the brush very slightly and look at the reference and just look at the pattern of how the rocks tessellate and join on with each other. Use the whites of the paper, a little bit of leftover bits in here as well. Now this is some rock here. I'd forgotten about that. A couple of rocks here in the water. That could be one there as well. That could be one here as well. Just using any of this white area that we've left. It's why I said these little, tiny little white and magical bits like this sparkle here they bring out. You can bring them out to make it look like something, like a rock or anything really tweak even you could just carry that one across a bit like that. Then that could be maybe like part of a branch. Even though you could indicate. Okay, so a lot of this stuff you'll find, it's actually quite abstract. And you're just drawing out pieces. This is like a negative painting as well. In some spots. Especially near to this rock here where we've got perhaps a bit more darkness in the water, meaning that you can get some nice little tooth like that running across the water. It just indicate the emotion of the stream. I think I'll, I'll actually dark and dark in that area of the stream a little bit at the top. So I'm going to pick up some of these brownie green color. Really light wash of it. Yeah, not too much. You can see and just start to work a bit of that upwards. Bring it, obviously bring a tiny bit of it down here like that. Let's kinda tossing out whether to use this larger brush for this one. I think I'll just use this one and cut around those rocks. And what I can do is just slightly dark and over the top like that. And get another very, very light layer of a darker sort of water running through here. Sits mostly just water in with this green mix, but just going over it slightly. Some of these areas. And I'm going to leave some of that green up there, sorry, not green but still leave some of that. Dry a wash off the top. Just carry it over and look at that and leave some of that going through that previous wash showing through. Now you're getting this beautiful duo duo tone rebar. Kind of look. It might not seem like much, but every layer adds detail. Interest. Put it a bit more of a here, even if you use sort of a quick strokes like that. Something here. Yeah, it's put in a bit more in here. Just trying to find areas that I can bring out might add some darker bits in the water as well. You can actually see some slightly darker areas in the water that I it would be nice to indicate once this dries, I don't think you'd be able to tell too much about what's going on. I'm fantastic. I think some nice dry brush strokes in the background would be nice too. So I'm mixing up a green and a bit of purple and blue here. Move some of these brushes, they started to fall onto the palette. Look over here, for example, I'll just draw off that brush a little bit and I can get in some of these little brush strokes for this background area. Just to indicate some trees, the bottom of these trees running through that. Can you just going upwards? So this is just a little bit of dry brush work. Okay. Indicate these these little trees running up and notice how I draw these lines in a slightly broken fashion as well. I don't try to connect the lines completely. And strangely enough, it looks better when you do it that way rather than try to draw in the exact shape. The branch of every single branch, it looks out of place in a scene where you've got all this looseness in here. So some of these softer brush strokes and things as well. A little trick I use is also using a fan brush like this little fan brush. And I'll pick up some of this darker color. And we could get through here like that. Another thing you can do is use when some areas are still slightly wet, you can actually scratch off a bit of the paint. I don't know if it's to move on here. Maybe this year you can do it here as well. You can scratch off a bit, a bit of paint here. You kinda gotta do it while the, while it's wet like here. Okay. You can get in some little highlights running through. You have to do all the paints wet. That could be. I made a brush, grass or something like that. They're running through near the water. He's a bit of grass. Just add some texture, sets a little bit of texture and in spots here is another bit here. It's in pieces. All makes a difference. And here we can do things like put in a few brush strokes for the trees, these like leaves and things coming out. They're not leaves, so they are leaves. They're basically kind of now we call them pine needle leaves, which are the sort of have all these little little pointy things sticking off different areas. And I'm just using this fan brush because I think it's just going to save me some time for me to indicate a bit of that. This bit up here as well. Sometimes just a slight indication like this makes a difference. Suddenly you can see suddenly you can see what's going on. Fingernail in there at times as well. That helps scratch off a bit. It's a very, very light wash of green and brown that I'm using here just to go over the top and indicate a very light layer of these pine needle leaves or whatever you call them. These can see you can use a smaller brush, like a little round brush to do this. But I'm using a larger fan brush because for me I think it just saves some time. Stopped me from overthinking what I'm doing. So look at that. Things are starting to shape. These little bits of it's in pieces. Okay. Let's see what else can we work on? In here, I will start picking out maybe some details of the burn or something in here, maybe some grassy areas and lighter grassy areas. These dark areas as well for that trunk. I'm going to mix up a bit of brown and a bit of neutral tint. And let's see if I can maybe draw out a bit of that. The darkness really just bring out the darkest area of the scene here and have a few bits coming out there. These kind of little sporadic marks. Not only that they helped to bring out these lighter colored almost 20 areas of these firms or whatever in there as well. You can see kind of sharp shadow here on the ground. Area of darkness. Good. I can start putting in a few more indications in this area. So quite dark in there, so I don't want to mess it up. These rocks. I just want to get in a little wash of brown or something on some of them. For example, like this one. What else do we have in a little bit of yellow on that one and give them a touch of color. You don't have to color them all in. But just to make sure just to join a bit of that light onto this sharp at darker area of the rock. So that doesn't look too. Doesn't go just from light to dark all of a sudden. So really just picking up a transitory color transition color in-between the darkest and lightest color and trying to merge it around a little bit. As you can see, soften that edge a little bit and hopefully make it appear more natural. Slightly more natural looking. See just soft in that shadow. Dark bit softer. And this one a touch. I'm even just painting over the top of it a little bit does help. Okay, Fantastic. This one's really need a bit more darkness at the bottom base. We are almost done here. I think what we wanna do is put in some little bit of white gouache and a bit of yellow, a bit of greeny color to finish things off. Hey, I've got a bit of white gouache here and I'm just mixing it up. Mixing it up with a touch of perhaps a yellow or green. It's green in here. This greenish color going on with thick wash, maybe the yellow as well in here. And I'll draw off that brush. And then what I can do is just sort of go into areas like this off in the background especially and we can recover, not doing that, that's a bit much, but this just recover a bit of that light. We might've lost or just sort of change things up a little bit here in the background. You can even have bits of branches that are slightly illuminated. The trick with this is not to overdo it. It's very easy to go overboard here. I'm just going to pick up a bit of this, almost like this yellowish bit of color. And I'll start to indicate few, little strokes here. Especially near the river bank. Just run them upwards like that. He kind of blues some parts of it and really naff it merges the river with the rocks. I didn't really like that bit, but something like that that you can also put in a little bit of it into the water as well, some small little overdo it, but bits like this running through the water. Again to create a bit more variation in the water. It's almost creates a slightly misty effect in areas, but you've got to be careful how you do it. Not too much. Here in the, in this section, you can just dry brush some of these leaves on these little fine leaves or whatever you call them. Just go ahead and nuts. They're just in a few bits and pieces. I try not to overthink it in these ones because you can just sit here and draw them all in. But it's not going to look good. So layering of this is important and just trying to make sure to get some of them in. It'd be like this. Just to change it up a bit. And it might have been highlighted. Grass and stuff just flowing onto that tree trunk like that. Here we again have this kind of whatever you call it over here. This I thought I'd just getting a bit more be more gouache in that area that in a few more brushstrokes, if you think you've gone overboard as well, don't be afraid to just dab onto that area and lift up in a few more strokes like this, running through. And sometimes I get too obsessed with using that same the same brush. And so it's always good to switch over, use something different every now and then someone go, use this smaller rigor and pick up some of that white gouache and green and getting a few of these little, these little things that stop putting a few. Let's have a look at that fan brush. I think I'll start putting it over here as well here in the foreground. Just a feather. Some of this scene, especially near this river bank I think, would be nice to have some under this over lapping and doing its thing. Okay, here in the foreground. Just pick up some of this green that I had before. And dark and actually I didn't want it to be that dark. That off. And just soften and putting some of this some of this color in here sound like a yellowy sort of wash color there. Just dropping everything green as well. To keep things interesting. More over here, just picking up a little bit of grass and stuff growing in from the sides. It's not really in there in the reference photo, but I wanted to include it. Okay. Maybe putting a few bits of grass or something just growing by the riverbank. Um, to like that. Okay. Good. And I think I'll call this one finished. 12. Uluru: Today we're gonna be painting this scene of LRU and amazing iconic scene that people often think about when you mentioned Australia. And this particular scene here is during the day time, probably a little bit after the midday because you can see the shadows cast the left side. So we're going to have possibly a light source running a little bit to the right hand side, probably top right-hand side, moving across to the left of the page, I think the shadow is make it look a lot more interesting. So let's go ahead and the first thing I want to do is put in the horizon line. And this is quite a little bit more simple here, the horizon line is roughly a third or just a little more than a third of the way down the page. So I'll say around about here. Okay. Little more than a third. He'd make it a third. That's fine as well. Now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna stop putting in the general shape of Iraq in the background. And I'm trying to just start out really with a basic shape. Once you wanna do when you're drawing is makes sure that you are looking at the curves of the line, the angles of the lines you can see here there's just a slight angle going upwards. We don't want to make it too large as well. Because we make it too large. It's just going to dominate the whole scene. So I do want to make it around about the same size as what I see in the reference photo. So there's a lot of well, there's just enough sky up the top there. So the rock probably takes up about a third of the, of the scene where the sky is. I'm going to go across, Let's just carry this down and I'll go across a bit extra like this. Sometimes, especially with these iconic scenes, you have to pay a bit more attention to the structure of the actual landmarks because they're gonna be recognized unlike a generic rock or a generic tree or something like that. So you have to take a little bit more here. And I'm coming across here. You can also see that there are these little shadows. I can go ahead and start putting in a little indication for some of these shadows coloring in a bit of the rock like this. Okay, just where I want to indicate for the shadows to run. Okay? And this really helps because I don't have to think too much later when I'm adding in some darker color. Okay, little bits of shadow here. And then we can see like another one that's sort of cut across the top like that. It's quite basic the shading that I've put in here, because I do want, I do want to leave a favorite for the watercolors if possible. But that's basically the indication here. We can tidy it a little bit with an eraser. I can just go around and just reshaped some of the areas that I feel need to be besides little more clearly. So just again, tidying up just a sharper edge. And again, the reason why I'm doing this and being a little bit more pedantic is, is because we've got an actual structure here that can be recognizable. So we just got to make sure that we kidding in the basic structure and making sure you're even on this side here is larger side, it just that's the highest point on that right-hand side and then kinda comes down around about here. So just try to get it in like that. So that's, that's the main part of the drawing really. I mean, here in the foreground we've got a large tree there. We've got a bush here. We've got lots of these little bushes that just run through. And there's favorite green, It's kinda like a duller green running through all the way in the background, but there's also a lot of this yellow. But a grassy areas and shrubs. Though. I'm actually going to leave that up to the watercolors. So you can see it's a very simple drawing of the moments really just to give me an indication of where to go with the brushwork. So I'm gonna go in with a mop brush and this is a, let's have a look. This is a three slashes or 0 mop brush. The first thing I'm going to do is work a bit on the sky, just going to pick up some cerulean blue and very light wash of cerulean blue. And what you can do as well, you can also just pretty wet some of these areas like here, just with a bit of water, then go straight in with the blue. That way. That way you get a little extra bit of white, I suppose in the sky if you want, indicates some lighter areas of clouds. I find that just helps to get those clouds in some softer, softer sort of clouds as well. Around the top, I tend to put a little bit more blue, little bit more darkness at the top. Then as I move down. I soften it off with some more water, just add water straight in there. And you can see I've added in some of these sharper clouds as well. Okay, so I'm just trying to get this quiet light as I move down. A lot of this is kinda painted wet into wet with some of these clouds indications there. See I'm not going straight into that area of whiteness. I'm just going to leave that you can see just bits of the white kind of poking through the sky. And that's just a great way to paint skies by leaving out a bit of the white there. So I think that's about all that I want to do for the sky. It's pretty, pretty simple. At this stage. I'm just a quick little indication and notice I'm cutting around the background rock, so I don't want that to turn blue. I want to make sure that I'm preserving some of that sort of reddish warm color in the background. So what I wanna do now is start putting in a little bit of a yellow. For that. Really, just looking at all the lighter colors you can see I've got the sky and now I'm going to start working on the lighter areas here in the foreground and the yellow there is actually not as bright as, as you think it's, it's kind of like a creamy yellow. It's almost like this. Okay, so if you've got a yellow that's quite vibrant, I'd suggest you kinda dull it down a little bit and then go straight in like this. And you notice even in the background, there are these kind of bits of green areas as well. But I do just like to go over the top of all that with a bit of this yellow because one thing you find is that it actually just disappears a little bit later anyway, in, when we get in some of these greenish color in the background, we want it to mix a little bit so that there's not just that pure green color, we just have a mixture of different yellows in here, um, that may create some lighter green areas and little bits of interests. So I always like to get in the yellows first and these type of things, especially here in the foreground, you can see that there's some of these, these little killer brushy sort of bids. And I'm not trying to get in all of that what the paper is, why I'm leaving some bits of white in there. You can also start putting in a little more yellow in some areas, but really it's quite light wash. So you can see a very light wash. Simple, that's probably the easiest part of the whole scene, just painting these the software bits, but you have to really make sure that you're going quite light. You don't want to go too dark. You can have because this is just the lightest part of the scene. He doesn't look like much at this point. I'm going to start picking up a smaller brush and looking at what else I might want to add in here. Now, probably the, one of the most important things is this rock in the distance. And I'm going to be using a bit of this Quinacridone, good orange mixed in with perylene read. Okay, I'm going to just have a look at what it appears to be. This is even a slightly brownish, rusty sort of feel to it as well. So I've got some of this GFR, but it's another paint I've got kind of a brownish color, granulating Brown. And I'm mixing, mixing this all in and just making sure I have interesting kind of mix here in the background, the case. So it's not just, it's not just red. And there are also some other earthy tones in there as well. So the hues that I'm just going to go around and you can see some of it is blending into the sky a little bit, but most of that sky wash as pretty much dry. So I may get a little bit of a theory edge in some areas. But for most part it should create a sharp edge against the sky. Not that's what I want. Okay. So coloring it in the k and we're making sure that that reddish brown color permeates all the way through the beast instead that rock. And you also want to make sure that it's darker than this yellowy color here in the foreground. So take your time. Get that the right on into that. It's not too it's not too light because we do need a bit of darkness in there. And I started to just modify it a bit. You're not picking up a bit of burnt sienna and seeing if I can drop in some of that burnt sienna in here. Okay. Some of this, some of this darker colored. I've got to be neutral tint here, I think here on this side. And I can just pick up as well, use that and mixed it in. C Viking, get myself in it. Some of the striations on the rock. Little bits like this. Little striations, but it's kinda tricky to get them in now it's all the, the paper is still wet. But little bits like this you certainly can work in. While the paint is still wet, the paint is still wet. I'm going to just wet this background area a little bit like this and try to lift off at some of this paint here. To lighten off a little bit. I'm mixing a little bit of yellow in there as well. I just want to get in a bit more of an orangey color. So this is just some little bit of yellow ocher. And as I introduce some water in here, what happens is that you get these gloomy effect in some parts, okay? So I want some inconsistencies on this rock. I don't want it to just write it all in one nice looking shape. I want there to be some highlights and some blooms, some interesting things going on in there. Okay. I'm just lifting off a bit here. Let's put in a little bit more yellow. A tiny bit more yellow. You can, you can see there's parts of it are blooming a bit and doing its own thing. Okay. Am I, I'll go back into that later. There's definitely a lot more work that needs to be done there. But what we'll do now is start working a little bit on the greeny kind of areas in here because I know this is all starting to dry. And if I can get a little bit of this stuff in here, this is really going to blend together and look quite interesting. Software in the background, a little bit of this green. You can see that at all just kind of melts together. Okay. Of course it's fairly light still wet. I'm just going in at the base there in getting in a quick indication of these distant greens. Greens near the horizon line goes back here and you can see it's quite soft, certainly quite soft. You ever feel like the brushes too big? Simply just pick up another smaller brush. I've got myself a couple of other smaller brushes here. I've got a number four and number this is number eight, round brush. And I didn't know what this one is just a number six round brush. So you can go in there and make sure that you've got a brush that can imply just enough of what's going on in there without overdoing it. But misstating. The great thing about these round brushes that they already matched the shape of what we're trying to paint, which is these little these little bits of bushing and things coming through there. Okay. So just going through just a bit like that. Yeah. As you can see, and I'm not getting too precious about each individual thing. I'm drawing in each, in each interval. Drew Bush. Look good. It's still quite, you look at the back, it's still quite light out the back there, there's a a little tree or something here on the right-hand side which I'll just scribbling like that, just scratched it in. Somewhere there. We can move our way down. And sometimes what you might want to do as well, It's re-wet the certain areas. So I might just spray into this area at the bottom, re-wet that. This will help the paint to remain wet and more fluid as I moved down the scenes so much stopped putting in a bit more green here, a bit of green here, here there's a bit of a row of these trees and then there's like some yellow showing through. So I'm making sure I'm getting indication of this scene. And I want it to appear soft as well. Because these trees and shrubs, they do appear quite soft and they have very edges, especially where they meet that yellowy sort of grass. So I do want to make sure that I'm implying that make sure you use some browns in here too. It's not just all green. So there's just fiddling around with a few different colors as even some grays and very muted colors, I'd say. In these Australian scenes, you don't often get really, really vibrant looking, vibrant looking leaves and trees and things like that. You do find that the colors are quite close together at times and more muted. So here I am. I'm just putting in some more on the left-hand side. Bit more, meaning ME of yellow and mixing that in as well to put in a yellowy green color here. And just cutting around again more of this. Area here, and you can also just indicate bits of darkness underneath some of these shrubs and things as well. So you can see here, this is just a bit of black that I've got here as well. So cutting around this almost like a bit of negative painting in a sense, but this is all wet into wet, most of its width to it anyway. And you're leaving out, making sure that you're leaving this beautiful yellow in here. You don't want to get rid of all that yellow because I'm amazing. One of the amazing parts of this scene, just the light showing through a bit of this green, bit more of this green. Over here on the left-hand side, I'm going to start getting in this tree here. It's again quite subtle. So I'm gonna put in a little bit more yellow actually in this side and blend that in a bit with some of these green for the, these tiny little trees and things here off in the distance like that. And always remember to make those trees smaller in the distance so that you don't have too many large trees out in the back. You want to great This feeling of decreasing size and decreasing complexity as you go further back. So all this, as you can see now it's starting to come together. Starting to melt in a sense, together in the scene. So just really looking through this area and thinking, what else could I potentially add in here? Are there any other brushstrokes that might be beneficial? I love using this little brushy, this fan brush. It helped me to get in a wide variety of brushstrokes. These little, sort of little brush strokes like this. Ok. So much like drawing a whole bunch of blades of grass which is dropping in some color. You can even dry brush, dry brush and a few little areas in as well, and don't overdo it. I'm just trying to put in a few little strokes like this to just indicate. Okay. And let's have a look. You can always lift out as well if you feel like there's too much color in them, you just want to add a little bit of interests. You can lift off a bit of color and then pick up some more, go back in there. Like this. Okay, good. And I can put in a bit of darkness here is always have a blend of soft and hard edges. Okay, so that we've got some variation of brushstrokes and these techniques showing through. Sometimes you just got to let it dry and go into it a second round. This ONE, there's only a certain amount of detail that you can actually get in with one wash. So you've got to be patient and you've certainly got to be patient. Not only that, you've got a bit of gouache at the end there that you can play around with and adding some further bits and pieces. So like I just, I love using this little brush and putting in some of these lighter bits and pieces. Sometimes I can pick up a bit of gouache as well, just added into the yellow. Again, this will that helped me get colors like these little how should I put it? These little pink areas that cut over the top of the darkness came while everything is still wet, it also looks much better. I'll try to do this while the paper is wet. So we get some sort of softer, grassy, softer areas that run through the darker areas and just mixes and goes through. Some artists don't like using gouache. I'm in there watercolors, but I love to combine the two. You need a little bit of white gouache for this. And it's really quite amazing what you can achieve. You can just get this kind of weird miss the effect. It creates a bit of softness once it's dried as well. And it goes very well. Actually. You can see what I'm doing. A little bit of this, a little bit whiter down the front as well. So again, change up the contrast. You've got bits here, these two shrubs here. So bit of that going in, there might be a bit here, even just. Carry that over. Use the reference as a reference. Don't try to copy everything. Just, just look at the shrubs and think, okay, maybe I can move that sharp they are, maybe I want that one there. That looks good. Let's put that one in. Don't feel like you have to put everything that's in there. They're just instances of bits of tree and shrub and what have you. So I'm going to remind myself not to overdo it as well. Okay, we might have some more greens, some darker green here. The great thing with this gouache that you can go over the top again afterwards. Of course, I think this tree here would be nice with, again, a little bit of wash running through it, just a little bit of white gouache here on the side. And we have small round brush I can pick up as well. And look at detailing some of these trees, just slightly a bit of the green that's mixing a bit of darker green here, the side. And let's think, what can we do? We can perhaps mix up a bit of this green and say, make some of these trees a bit darker. A little bit darker. It's kinda just changes around and makes it a bit more varied as you can see in the distance. Actually some of these trees and shrubs are a little bit darker. That they also have a bit of a shadow to the left-hand side of some of these, some of them as well. So it does pay to add a little bit of that in from time to time. That helps create this nice sense of light and dark running through. While everything's wet as well. It's just a an amazing time to do this stuff. Because it doesn't overwhelm. Want to. You don't want to eliminate that beautiful soft feeling here. Times I even just get rid of some of these hard edges in areas so that it just combines better. Okay. Good. I'm going to put in some of the shadows for the Rockne I just hear in the back. Let's just put in That's pretty dark. I mean, it's almost sometimes the darkest pit of the scene, isn't it? Using a bit of this, It's really just black. Lunar black that I had leftover going to just put in this large shadow here on the rock and notice the paint I'm picking up as well. It's pretty getting that brush really dry. So that when I go through, it doesn't it doesn't create a super obvious sort of edge where I'm where I'm trying to create these striations because a lot of time with these rock striations, they don't appear. You see this sort of come and go in areas and some areas that be sharper smears, they're not here. Here. You want to leave the red rock as well? Trying my best to just pick up in or you can even pick up that red, a bit of that brown and just mix it in with the black. So it kind of is a warmer black. Carry that cross. This. I'm using a lot more paint than water here, but still ensuring that it is transparent, always remember that you have to keep it transparent. You don't keep the watercolor is transparent. You will lose that magical feeling to it. So it's getting a bit of ease, bit of the darker color here. I'm just trying to darken off some spots as well near the base here. And we've got to crevasses and things in the rock. It all really just joins up, doesn't it? With the ground slightly in areas. Okay, good. I have another bit coming up here. That little bit here as well. Shadows here. I'm going to find some areas just a dark and a bit more at the base. That's good. Here in the back. Let's use a little pocket knife to scratch off sharper, sort of little indications of these shrubs. As you can see, you can get some individual ones just coming off like that. And it just gives it a bit more texture, a little bit of interest in there. You don't have to do this, but I've offered to do it like doing this at times just to get in a different kind of texture in here. Okay? Maybe some here on this tree coming in on the left as well. That little bit of texture. We need just a little bit of that running through like that. K. Let's have a look. I just want to bring out a bit more of the rock and a bit more. I might use some wash, some areas as well. So I'm going to mix up a bit of white, tiny bit of this white wash, and a tiny bit of that tiny bit of that white to get a warmer color. Now, just see if I can put in a bit. In some areas, I want it to be quite more read. Some parts. It's just going to modify this touch like that. Good. Just trying to bring out the details of the rock. The more you spend, more time that you spend doing, is this, the better it's going to look. Me. I try not to fiddle around too much with it, but when you have a landmark like this, at times it does pay to, um, to try to get in those little features a bit better. So that's why you can see me using a small brush here and just trying to work on these rocks, bit more downward strokes just to get these little striations of the rock. 13. Class Project: Your class project is to sketch and paint a watercolor landscape. This can be seen featured in one of the class demonstration videos, or based on one of your own photographs or scenes that you've observed outside. You can also refer to the skin drawing and painting templates attached, which will allow you to trace the drawings if you choose to do so. I recommend drawing each scene. Freehand. Growing is an important step in improving your painting skills. Provides you with an opportunity to compose and plan your painting. Completely drawing lightly and loosely in pencil so that it won't show through in the final painting. This is especially important for background details such as mountains. Once you've finished the drawing, usually watercolors, steps, and processes included to complete your whole painting.