Beyond Basics - Master Monochrome Watercolor

1. Introduction: Working with a single color is the ultimate shortcut to mastering watercolors because it strips away the overwhelming distraction of color choices and forces you to face the medium's biggest challenge value and water control. When you aren't worrying about which blues or yellows to mix, you can focus entirely on the core mechanics that make watercolor work. Hi, I'm an Ruth Kara, an artist instructor, mother, Skillshare to teacher and brand owner of brant parcels, where we manufacture handmade, sketchbook, artist way pins and much more. Today is all about the balancing act of water control and value. First, we will build a value chart and practice the act of layering translucent glazes. Then we will dive into two hands on exercises, creating moody, misty backgrounds, crisp pkgrounds and using salt to texture and organic flopt. A final project, an atmospheric landscape of misty hills and a glowing illuminated pathway. The water and paper is ready. Let's start creating 2. Materials Required : Let's see what all materials we need. I'm starting out with a ceramic palette, one well for mixing the colors and another for keeping the darkest of the value. Will have a pencil, which has a sharp edge and eraser. Along with it, keep her washy tape handy. From the paper perspective, it's arches, 300 GSM, 100% cotton, cold pressed paper. I have two smaller sheets where I would be experimenting with my colors going from light to dark and another for glazing, where I would be using the same mix to create darker values. I would be using limited number of brushes for all the exercises, as well as my final painting. I'm going ahead with a Rafael zero brush. This is kind of a mop brush. Either you can use this or you can also use this flat brush. As a wash brush, I have size six and size one, the Vinci Colinski brush, as well as a nice tip Kolinsky brush from Escoda. I have been using it. Now I'm really not sure is the size six or size four Kolinski, but I think, as far as I remember, it is size six. I think it's more than five years have been using this. Keep a board so that you can stretch your paper and the paper doesn't buckle at all. This is the reason I have asked you to keep a washy tape handy. This is all you need from the materials perspective. Let's move on to the next chapter where we are going to discuss about the color. 3. Dynamic Value Chart - Part 1: Here is a practical Blueprint for a monochrome watercolor chart using neutral tint. Because watercolor relies on the white of the paper rather than the white paint to create the light, your value chart is essentially a roadmap of water to pigment ratio. What I'm doing at this moment is picking up a very small amount of pigment in my brush along with the water to create the lightest value of the neutral tint. Though you have basically three values, one is your pale gray, mid tone gray, and deep slate. This can be further expanded into five, like the white of the paper, pale gray, mid tone gray, deep slate, and near black. Again, if you want to further break it down, you can have a breakdown the way exactly I'm doing over here and you can create various values. It can be eight, ten, 12, 15. How many values you want to create, you can go ahead and do that. Dynamic value chart exercise. Instead of just painting flat squares, try these two interactive chart layouts on a scrap sheet of 300 GSM watercolor paper to master your water control. Here are various boxes which I have paint, and now I am trying to mix some water along with my pigments. Every time you go up in these squares, your pigment to water ratio needs to decrease, which means that your pigment should be more and your water should be less on your brush. Now, this can go by around ten, 15% every time whenever you are going up, your pigments should go higher and higher and higher in the process. As we reach the last box, almost we will have the color of the neutral tint. You can further go up and make it absolutely jet black your only paint available on the paper rather than mixing any water with it, I would leave that decision up to you how many sheets you want to go. But this practice exercise is great for anyone who is starting out with watercolor. Creating values in a monochrome watercolor painting, using neutral tint is all about controlling the ratio of the pigment to water. Since watercolor is a transparent medium, you don't use white paint to make a color. Every time you want to use white, it would be the white of the paper or else you will go with a very light value of neutro tin to create that white. Here I'm going into my third box where I've increased my pigment ratio compared to the water in my brush, and hence the color that you see over here is darker than the first two boxes. This way, every time I increase my pigment to water ratio, you will see that the colors go darker and darker. We would be working mostly in a wet on wet environment. You are dealing with a dynamic balancing act between two moving forces, the water already sitting on your brush and the water loaded inside your brush. The secret to control values in a wet on wet is a fundamental law of physics in watercolor. Water always flows from areas of higher concentration, wetter to areas of lower concentration that is dryer. Control your value and prevent your darks from dissolving into a chaotic puddle, you must master the thickness rule. The golden rule, paint thicker than the paper to inject a specific value into a wet wash without losing control, the mixture of your brush must have less water than the paper currently holds. If your brush is wetter than the paper, water rushes out of the brush, pushing away the existing paints, creating uncontrolled rooms, explosion, faded values, also known as cauliflower effect. If your brush is dryer, thicker than the paper, the paper greedily pulls the pigment out of your brush. The value stays saturated, stable, and expands with beautifully soft controlled edges. Now you can see I'm into my second last box, and the colors have become way more darker. It is the darkest value of the mepton which I'm creating at this stage. The last value would be the darkest though you can have further more values where you are just squeezing out paint from your tubes and then just applying it on the paper to create the black. While we work on the last value, let's just understand a bit more about paper wetness. Before choosing your brush value, look at the paper at an angle against the light to see it shine. Each state requires a different brush moisture level to achieve your desired value. The mirror shine. Paint will spread aggressively and dilute by at least 50%, as this is fresh puddle or glass like paper. The satin or the egg the heavy puddle has sunk into the paper. It looks very smooth and uniformly glossy, but water isn't sloshing away. Paint spreads softly but holds its general shape. The mat slate. The shine is gone, but the paper feels cold to touch. It's rapidly drying. Value behavior, high risk of ruining your values, introducing a watery brush here will instantly create backgrounds or cauliflower effect. Now we have a full value chart of Nutritint. Let's use it in our future paintings. 4. Dynamic Value Chart - Part 2: Anemic value chart part two is all about glazing. Let's understand first what is glazing. Painting a transparent layer of watercolor over a completely dry previous layer is one of the most powerful ways to build depth. When you use a single paint and water makes, for example, a consistent bit tone coffee mixture of neutral tint, you can achieve an entire spectrum of values purely through optical layering process. Here is a science behind how it works, followed by step by step mechanics to pull it watercolor particles act like sheet of colored glasses. When you apply one layer of your mix, a certain amount of light passes through the paint, hits the white paper, bounces back through the paint and reaches your eye. When you apply a second layer of the exact same mix over the first dry layer, you are effectively stacking two sheets of colored glasses. The light now has to travel through two layers of pigment particles to reach the paper and two layers on the way back out because more light is absorbed and less white paper is allowed to shine through. The value automatically darkens, even though the paint mixture in your palette never changed. I usually achieve it by adding a large pool of water into my painting palette well and then add the pigments into it to create one single value and then using that value to my advantage for creating various different values or mid tones. Always remember you can only add the pigments onto your paper when your first layer is completely bone dry. Do not try to introduce your pigments when your paper is still wet or has some kind of moisture in it. I have this golden rule of glazing only on bone dry paper. Dry watercolor paint can be reawakened and dissolved by water at any time. If the paper is damp, the gum arabic hasn't fully locked down. The moisture from your new brushtrope instantly dissolves the underlying paint, lifting it up off the paper fibers. Instead of two crisp tack layers, the two colors blend together into a single muddy chaotic mess. Another way to look at it is water naturally moves from wet areas to drier areas. If your first layer is still drying and you introduce a fresh wet grease on top, you are introducing a sudden surge of new water. This new water will violently push the semi dry pigment particles of your first year outward, creating ugly jack, uncontrollable rings known as cauliflower blooms or backrms. Once these forms dry into the paper, they are incredibly difficult to fix. Now we are onto our last layer. This is a very small exercise, which I did introduce to you. You can have more and more of these boxes coming in, and the last box can be absolutely jet plaqTough glazing, I usually use for mid tone to darker areas, as well as creating shadows wherever necessary. We will be using this glazing method in our first painting as well, I will give you a few ideas about your future paintings that can be done very easily with the help of one single monochrome color. Let the paper dry off completely, and then let's have a final look at both of these exercises. 5. Practice Exercise - 1: When learning watercolor, students often get overwhelmed by trying to manage too many variables at once, color mixing, water control, composition, and tonal values. Stripping away the complexity of color allows a bigner to master the core fundamental of the medium. Here is a quick analysis of the same, but before we do that, let's just go ahead and start with our graphite marks on the paper. I would be adding a horizon line. Now, this horizon line is absolutely not straight. It is going to differentiate our sky from the land. The land is basically snow laden, and we are having trees in the distance. Now, because the trees which are at the distance have lighter tonal values compared to the ones which are in the foreground. This is what we are going to follow. It is a simple rule of perspective and what we usually observe. While we continue to draw the trees, let's understand a bit about tonal value. Single most important lesson this exercise teaches is the value, how light or dark or colorless. In watercolor, value is not controlled by adding white paint, but by adjusting the ratio of water to pigment. Simplifying the palette by using only a neutral tint, I usually don't try to actually work with vibrant colors to make the painting work. It's all about the success of the piece that relies on the contrast between the light washes and the darkest of the duck, creating depth. Looking at the two landscapes that you would be doing in this, the distant mountains and the trees are light, watery gray, while the foreground elements are rich concentrated near black dry. This teaches how to use value to create the illusion of three dimensional space on a flat surface, understanding water control via wet on wet. The wet on wet technique is famously unpredictable, which exactly why Wigners need to practice it in a controlled environment. Learning paper moisture, this exercise forces any student to observe how wet the paper is applying paper to dripping wet paper, create soft, highly diffused beads. Perfect for our hazy skies and distant misty mountains, which you would be learning in the next exercise. Applying paint as the paper begins to dry, yields slightly sharper, but still soft edges, ideal for the midground, foliage. Building timing skills. Watercolor is highly time sensitive by working on these small surfaces or you can say on these small squares of Wigner or anyone who is starting out with watercolor. This practically gives you a window of opportunity from when to introduce your pigment before the paper dries, and it doesn't create any harsh unwanted backgrounds. Confidence in edge control. A great watercolor painting relies on the balance of soft edge, bloody, blended transition, and hard itches, sharp defined lines. In the left panel, the misty background trees blend softly into the atmosphere while the foreground branches have sharper, more defined edge. Los takes high reward practice. Psychologically, staring at a blank page with a massive palette of colors can cause creative paralysis for any bigner. Reduced anxiety, eliminating color choices removes a massive layer of decision making. For any bigner when I was also learning, it is like, not to worry about the greens. Why does it look natural, why it looks artificial or if the blues are muddy, they only have to focus on tone and moisture. I also did the same at one point in time. Quick wins because these are small single colour studies, they can be completed relatively quickly. This allows for rapid repetition. A bigner can do three to four of these in single sessions, learning from each attempt and building confidence rapidly. As a watercolor artist, when I was starting out, I really did few of these practice sessions, and it helped me initially a lot. I also try to introduce then some limited color palette. Now, limited color palette feels very natural when you are starting out with watercolors, initially, you work through one single color, and then you move to limited color palette of CPR, ultramarine, et cetera. It strips away the chaos of watercolor and highlights its poetry. Okay. Let's start out with the sky. I would just apply clear layer of water on the sky area and once I have introduced this clear layer of water, I would start out with my neutrotin. I'm going to leave the middle part a bit white. White means I would be using the white of the paper and then adding a misty an outlook for the sky area. I'm taking a lighter value, which is really runny in terms of having less of pigments and more of water and then applying it in and around the horizon line. I would also take a bit of it towards the top right and the left creating some more of the darker tonal values. Though the whole of the painting is done in a light misty effect, at least the sky area. Hence, do not try to introduce a lot of dark values for the sky as it is at a distance, and because of these atmospheric particles, et cetera, we really can't see everything in detail or in really darker values when it appears quite distant from us. In case it is very close to us, which is basically the foreground tree, you will see more of detail appearing over there. Od size six brush with more of neutral tint and start introducing some of the darker values here and there. I would move this boat to quite an extent. If I don't move it, then what will happen is the color will sit at that particular place where I have introduced it rather than it moving towards the left, towards the right, and creating an effect of mist on its own. Here we have to do less work and rely more on water. Watercolor comes with the name water, which means that the color will come next first would be the water. If you can play with water, I can tell you half of your problems are absolutely sold. So start playing with water and start enjoying this medium called this watercolor. I really don't like hardages and hence I would go ahead with my soft, damp flat brush to make this part look more soft and even. I will not introduce any kind of water, et cetera. It would be just a damp brush that would play the whole of the role. We might have to go over it four to five times and six times to just make it softer. But if it doesn't happen and you are not getting or the colors keep moving into the snow area, you can also use a tissue to just cap off any extra liquid or any extra pigments wherever it is flowing. Applying some light tonal value colors for the snow area from the left to the right. Now, even the snow area can't be absolutely in white. Hence, there has to be some amount of lighter value of colors that we have to introduce. Over time, what happens is even the snow starts showing up the ground and it also melts because of which we should introduce a bit of color here and there. You will observe that I slowly build on the background first and then the foreground. Now, why I go from background to foreground, the foreground is the darkest area, whereas the background comes as the lightest of the area. Once this part is done, we will go ahead and start introducing some of the darker tonal values even for our foregrounds. I want to cover my background for the sky as well as the snow together, let it dry off and then start introducing the dry trees for our background. You can always use your flat blending brush for taking off any extra pigments from wherever it is necessary and even blend out the areas where you think that it's important, rather than just sticking to the fact that we have to work in this particular way, use your wit and use your intuition to work with watercolors. Watercolors is one medium where it is more about intuition and water flow rather than you trying to control the medium. Let the paper dry off and then start out with your background tree. There is not much that we have to do in the background tree. You go ahead, take a very light, pigmented watery mixture and then start out with the tip of the brush. You can also go ahead with a size two brush in case you don't have a Kolinski optimoT kind of a brush that I have from the brand escota. Do not think about the brushes that I'm using. I have accumulated it over the years of my painting exercises. You can also keep them for yourself or accumulate it over time or buy it once, or even not buy at all, and just rely on thinner and the thicker brushes for completing any of your paintings. Let's do a quick breakdown of how tonal value function. High water to pigment ratio, the background trees utilizes a very dilute wash of the neutral tint because the paint is heavily tinned with water, the white of the paper shines through the pigment, creating a soft translucent pale gray tone. Value layering for depth there is a subtle variation even within the background layer. The tree farthest back are absolute lightest gray, while the slightly closer background elements are just a fraction darker. This subtle shift establishes depth before the incredible dark, high contrast foreground tree is introduced on the top. By keeping the background pornal value light and soft, it prevents those tree from competing with the sharp dark focal points in the foreground, successfully creating a sense of immense three dimensional distance in a limited space. While you make the background trees, I would like to just add a bit about the brush stroke mechanics and moisture control. The fine detail brush, a long slender detailed brush is used to construct the intricate branch networks. The flexibility and the length of the bristle allow for long continuous fluid strokes without breaking the line. Vertical pull and lift. The trunks are established using a steady bottom to top pull. By subtly lifting the brush and varying the pressure as it moves upward, the line naturally tapers perfectly replicating the organic thinning of the tree trunk. Control fluidity. The paint consistency in the detail tray is kept fluid enough to flow smoothly off the synthetic bristles, yet dry enough to prevent bleeding into the surrounding dry paper. This ensures the fine twig detail remains crisp against the soft background wash. The piece beautifully captures a serene, minimalistic winter scene as you see over here. By keeping the color palette restricted, like monochromatic grays, deep charcoal tone, you can also use the blues like your ultramari or your Prussian blue, even your indigo. This would emphasize shift entirely to form, texture, and light. The contrast between the soft sweeping slopes of the snow covered round and the rigid vertical geometry of the stark winter trees creates a balanced, visually calm piece that actually handles the atmospheric perspective in a great you should understand that atmosphere has a very important role to play in any painting that you actually attempt. The atmosphere where you have the trees way far away from your eyes will be way more lighter because of the particles or the way you see those trees. They are far away from your eyesight, whereas something that is very close to your eyesight, even it be a small plant will appear more darker. I always love to branch out my trees wherever possible, because trees are usually having lots and lots of branches, whether they appear in the background or they appear in the foreground. They are completely dry, and as you go towards the top, the trees will become thinner. The trunk will become more and more thinner. There will be more and more branches that will appear while they are towards the bottom. It would be more thicker in shape and size. I will go ahead and now work on the foreground tree, but before you do that, make sure that your background tree is completely dry. Now background tree drying is very important, or the colors from your foreground tree will move into your background tree, making the whole painting look more messy and muddy. Along with it, the values will also change which we really don't want. We want the values for the foreground to remain more darker and for the background to remain more lighter because of the perspective and atmospheric reasons which I have already stated as we were painting the background. Mm while you paint this tree and the branches along with me, let's understand why slow and control movement is essential for painting trees, managing surface tension and paint flow. Watercolor relies on a delicate balance of moisture between your brush and the paper. Preventing skipping if you pull a fine liner or a rigor brush too quickly across co pressed watercolor paper, the bristles will skip over the microscopic ridges. The texture or the tooth of the paper. This creates broken choppy lines instead of a solid continuous trunk. Controlled capillar reaction moving slowly allows the pain to flow consistently from the belly of the brush down to the tip through capillaryaction. It gives the paper time to absorb the pigment evenly, ensuring a smooth fluid line from the base of the tree to the tip of the branch, achieving organic tapering and line variety. Trees in nature are rarely perfect, straight or uniform, but they do follow a strict rule of growth. They are thickest at the base and taper down to the fine point at the tip. Gradual pressure release. To mimic this, you must start with a slight downward pressure on the brush to splay the bristle, creating a wider trunk and slowly lift the brush as you move upward to taper the line into a razor thin twig. Doing this slowly allows your hand to execute a smooth, gradual transition. Micro movement, painting slowly gives you the control to introduce tiny natural imperfections, subtle bends, knots, and changes in direction that make the tree look alive rather than like a rigid, artificial straight line. Strategic layering moving slowly allows you to visually judge where a branch should intersect with the background element in real time, controlling overlaps because watercolor is transparent, every stroke is permanent once laid down. A slow stroke ensures that you don't accidentally overlap branches in a way that looks messy or structurally impossible, preserving the clean silhuts against the misty winter sky. I will just go over the pencil marks with the help of my brush wherever necessary, and then we will create some dry leaves. You will see how easy it is to create, as well as putting some dots here and there that usually shows the soil which comes up from in between the snow laden places. This you will see, whether it be rocks, whether it be some kind of soil that shows up. These things happen in nature, as nature cannot always have snow laden areas, some of the areas will always always peek through. Making some more small dry plants which are closer to my eyes and they are done with an absolute darkest of the value. I will use my flat brush that is damp in nature and apply it in some of the spaces. Then I will touch my thinnest of the brush in those spaces to create leaf like structure. This tip really allows my colour to not move a lot and only be concentrated in some of the spaces where I am introducing it. The tip of the brush doesn't have lots and lots of water. Hence, it is easy for me to control the color and the moisture on top of the paper. This part is all about water control. You have to introduce some water and then slowly add a thin brush, which introduces very little pigment or drops of pigment here and there. Then you actually go ahead and just add one or two dots of this brush or touch this brush to the paper, some of it will move around because of the water and some of it will become loose leaf like structure. I'm super excited to witness this beauty altogether. I would be introducing some more of these loose leaf structure more in an impressionist style, where we are not adding crisp kind of leaves here and there. It's only simply adding one or two drops, and they look more like leaves, but still not exactly drawing the leaves to the core. That's the beauty of watercolor. The way you want to defect, it will come out exactly in the similar fashion. Go ahead and add a few more plants here and there. You will see that the whole concentration of the tree that is the foreground one is on the left side. I have not introduced trees everywhere, so that the whole painting looks organic and it's not taking the viewer's eye everywhere. It's concentrating on the left part mostly. Okay, I guess I'm happy with how it has turned out. Let's have a final look at it. Don't forget to upload any of these practice sessions. In the project carry, I would be eagerly waiting for each one of them. 6. Practice Exercise - 2: We are on to our practice exercise, too, and here we are going to create a misty, beautiful background mountain, along with a floral field in the foreground. Let's start out with a graphite mark and a basic sketch before we create the final painting. Using the unique behavior of salt on a wet on wet watercolor wash is one of the most organic ways to capture the textured landscape, and this texture is all about adding the fluoro fields in our foregrounds. When salt crystals are dropped onto damp paper, they act like miniature sponges, drawing the water and pigment towards themselves. This create delicate star burst like bleats that perfectly mimic distant wildflowers, frosty ground and dense foliage. There's a very important concept which I'm going to introduce in this part, and it is all about adding the fence. The perspective of fence in this painting is the single most important element for transforming a flat two dimensional piece of paper into a deep three dimensional landscape. Without that fence, the painting would look like flat band of mountains, fog, and fields. Linear perspective and spatial scaling. The fence acts as a linear depth gouge for the viewer's brain by utilizing the rules of linear perspective. The scale shift. Notice how the fence post closest to the right edge is the tall, thick and highly detailed. As the vent travels towards the left, each subsequent post becomes dramatically smaller, thinner and closer together. The visual funnel. Even though there is no explicit perspective line drawn on the paper, your pain automatically connects the tops and the bottoms of those posts. Now, this creates an invisible, convergent diagonal line that point directly towards the background. This instantly mimics how human eyes perceive objects receding into the distance. The entry point, the large crisp foreground post acts as an anchor on the right side. It grabs your attention first because it has the highest contrast, the pathway, because the fence zig zags or the step down in size across the field, it forces your eyes to follow its path inward. It physically pulls the viewer out of the foreground through the middle ground field and deposits them right at the base of the misty mountain. This movement creates a psychological sense of walking through a physical three D space. Beyond its shape, the sharpness of the fence is what makes the background look so distant misty. This is called atmospheric perspective, the contrast room, the fence is painted with the darkest, crisp and most opaque pigment in the entire composition, pushing the background away. By placing a hyper sharp, dark object right in front, it acts as a baseline of comparison. Your brain looks at the sharp fence, then looks at the soft pale bleeding tone of the mountain and concludes the mountain must be miles away because it is so hazy compared to this fence post right in the front of me. Without that sharp foreground anchor, the misty mountains wouldn't look misty. They would just look like faint paint washes. The fence provides the structural reality that makes the rest of the atmosphere believable. Let's go ahead and add that mountain right now. You have seen how I have added my fence. It is a very easy process to make it a bit more lively and atmospheric. I have added a small bird on the second fence. I will go ahead and apply a clear layer of water on the entire paper. Once I have applied the water, I would start by adding a pale wash or a very tone down wash of the pigment and water into my painting. I will start from the sky area and then move into the ground area. In the last painting, you would have observed that we started with the sky area and slowly moved into the bottom part without applying much of water. But this painting is done in a separate way. We are going ahead and parle working through the entire piece. You will see that this piece comes together faster compared to the last one, as well, it has way more details in terms of the fence than the mountain, the foreground, floral fields, et cetera. Okay, I guess I'm happy with how I have applied the color. Now it's time for water to do its job. Watercolor is made out of water first and then color. So let's allow our water to do all the magic that we need in this painting. I always stick my paper to a board so that it's easier for me to move around. I will just take off any extra water pigments that's there on the paper and take it towards the right side so that there are no backgrounds or cauliflower bit in our painting. Before I add any further darker value, I would go ahead and test it on my paper and then start adding from the right towards the left. You have to anyways, add more darker values into our foregrounds. Always remember foreground is closer to our eyes, hence more pigmented value needs to be added there, whereas background is far away from our eyes, which can be more misty and atmospheric. And By the way, when you stick a sheet of watercolor paper to a board and tilt it to move wet paints across a wet background, you are engaging in a beautiful dance between fluid dynamics, gravity, and paper capillary action. In advanced watercolors, water is just a medium to dissolve pigments. It is the active vehicle, the boundary control, and the timing mechanism. I would ask you to just understand a bit more as we continue to paint our mountains, et cetera. The path of least resistance, wet paints will only travel when water already exists, the boundary where your wet wash meets dry paper acts like a physical wall. By tilting the boat, you use gravity to slide the freshly applied paint, but it will seamlessly glide and pull only within the pre wet tracks. Soft versus hard edges because the background is already wet, the newly introduced paint doesn't hit a dry barrier. Instead, the water in the background immediately begins to dilute the edge of the moving paint, creating those signature hypospt radiants that are perfect for skies, mist and distant hills. By the way, after applying the darkest of the values on my mountain, I went ahead with my flat brush and started adding fresh water or clear water into my painting as I did not want the colors to be same or the values to be same everywhere. I want to always play with my values to a great extent. That's one of the reason introducing some clear water changes the value while the paints do come down from the top of the mountain towards the bottom area. You can see how I am adding slow the darker or you can say middle tones at this moment. I would also work with the contrasting dark tones at the end. Again, introducing the darker values or you can say the darker mid tone values as of now into our foreground area. This will become lighter as we are working on a wet surface. If you are working wet on wet, the colors will be one or two shade lighter than what it appears now. In case you are working wet on dry, it would almost appear the same or one shade lighter than what it appears. I would be using salt for creating the foreground floral fields. It's one of my favorite ways to go about and believe me, this way, you can really create something amazing. Always use the resources that are available with you, whether it be clear water splattering into this foreground or going with the salt effect. These are something that you can create textures with and they appear great to the eyes of a viewer who is observing your painting. Now I will go with my thin brush and start adding straight lines. These straight lines will appear as grasses in the distance, as well as in the foreground area. Creating wildflower meadows has always been one of my favorites, but creating it in one single color was definitely challenging when I started out. Here, you do not have a lot of options for creating the wild flower fields, whereas when I created the same thing in one of my spring season series earlier in one of the Kerche classes itself, it was way more easier. I played with the vibrant yellows then some bright reds, greens, et cetera, to create the magic quickly on the paper, whereas what I am doing now is splattering using salt. And creating a similar effect with one single color. When we work with a wide range of palette, colors do a lot of heavy lifting for us. The vibrant advantage if we put bright red poppy against a vibrant rain field, the two shapes instantly separate because of the hue contrast. Even if the wet paint bleeds slightly or your brush strokes are sloppy, the viewer's brain instantly identifies the flower because of the color are fundamentally different. The monochromatic challenge in a single color painting, a flower and the grass behind it are made of the exactly same pigment. If they bleed into each other, they don't look like flowers in a field. They just blend into flat muddy puddle. You have to rely entirely on position, timing, edge control to keep your element distinct. This is something which I have learned is very, very important, as well as the value. The margin for error is zero in this case. With vibrant colors, a slight mistaken value can be masked by a beautiful shift in temperature like adding a warm yellow highlight. In a single color piece, if your foreground flowers are the exact same value as your mid crown mist, your painting instantly loses its three depth and goes flat. You have to master exactly how much water is on your brush to hit the precision tone required. You need a perfect radiant scale for the absolute white of the paper, highest light, through soft, misty gray background and up to the intense velvety dark tones, that is the foreground detail. Now I will move on to create the foliage in the similar way we did create it in our left side of the painting, applying some water with the help of our flat brush and then making the paper moist enough so that whenever we are dropping some dots of pigpens here and there, they would create some bleeds, as well as some of the areas will remain dry. It's a mix of wet on wet and wet on dry kind of method that gives us a perfect outcome for the foliage or the trees, plants, et cetera that are not very close to our eyes, but also not very far away in a distant space. We will continue this process for some more time and then blend our colors with the help of the flat brush wherever necessary. I will just add some music for you to follow along and paint with me. I can see some beautiful blooms that have been created with the help of the salt, and believe me, this is one of the best ways to add the darkest and the lightest of the tones together. Okay, time to add some lines here and there drop in some of the tots. This is basically to show that, yes, there is some foreground roses, I will go ahead and keep adding some shorter lines, shorter brush strokes, that's all. And then you will get an outcome which looks absolutely fantastic. When you add the salt, do not get overboard with the idea that you have to drop in a lot of salt. Now, this point should be taken as a very, very important part in the whole of the painting because we are only going to drop it a bit here and there as the floral fields or the wildflower fields are not created by humans. It just appears in nature. Some of the areas will have more brighter flowers and some of them will not have such bright areas of flowers. So while you create this, make sure that there are some bunches of flower that appears together, and some places do not have it. Which can only happen if you do not sprinkle the salt all over. While I continue to create some more lines for my foliage and then add some more branch like structures, it's for the foregrounds, as you were already observing over here, for my background, misty pads, I did apply these lines while my paper was wet, whereas now I'm trying to add these lines once my paper is dry as they appear more crisp to our eyes. Okay, finally, it's time to start with our fence. Now, this is a very, very important aspect in our painting, as I did tell you even earlier, this would appear the darkest in the value paving way for the lightest of it in the background. You will observe that when something recedes into the background, it needs to go lighter and lighter in value compared to the ones which are in the forgraund. I would be adding some of the barbed wire to this fence so that they come together and they are not actually breaking anywhere. If they break anywhere or they are not straight, it means that they are not attached to each other and will become wobly. If you have this barbed wire, they will appear one after another in a very aesthetic and nice way. Perfect linear direction. The long continuous horizontal wires act like a visual highway. They stretch across the paper, creating sharp, clean, parallel perspective lines that instantly guide the viewer's eye deep into the midground of the landscape. The bird is also sitting in the foreground, hence it is also being done with a very dark value. I'm using the tip of my brush, whether it be for the barbed wire or even for the bird, blending the bottom part of these so that they blend absolutely into the background. I will again add the barbed wire over here moving in, but I would make it a bit more lighter in value dip my brush into water and take off all the extra pigments. You can see how it is being created over here, and slowly, the colors will become more and more lighter as it appears into the background. I'm really happy with how my fgrounds are appearing. Now it's time to add a bit of lightest or I would say lighter tonal value background or foliage will drop in some of the moisture onto the paper with the help of a blending brush and then start adding the colors at now, this is not a highly pigmented value that I'm adding. Some of the areas are lighter and some of the areas are darker in the similar way we have created our leaves for the trees and then blended with the help of the blending brush. That is the flat brush which we have used even earlier for softening up the space. Always remember, less is more. So don't try to work more on top of this. There's a really small piece of paper. We are going to only work through the areas which are absolutely needed. I would add some lines for the background foliage and the foreground foliage, which appears on the absolute right hand side. That's it. This is with the help of my thinnest brush size one, size zero, size two, whatever is available with you, use that for creating this and then blend it into the background area. Simple easy process. Let it dry after this, remove the te pattern angle and have a final look at your painting. Hope you are enjoying it. Do not forget to upload these exercises in the project section. I would be waiting for each one of them. Now let's move on to the final painting in this monochromatic watercolor painting class. 7. Monochrome Pathway - Part 1: Is the final project which we are going to work on, and it has a beautiful pathway. To create this pathway, we are going to first define our horizon line, which basically separates our land from the sky area. We will be also adding a small distant hill, which actually goes into the mist or blends into the mist, as you will see once we move forward in this painting. My sketch is always a framework for a future painting. It helps me to guide through the entire process, and it's easy to manage the colors, paints when I have a sketch already ready to work upon. If I'm really not satisfied with what I did draw, I will use my eraser to erase out that part. One thing that you will see that the horizon line is way below the middle of the paper, I usually place it either lower or higher than the middle of the paper. This is also known as the rule of thirds. It's a foundational structural guideline used in sketching, drawing and composition to break down a blank surface outcome, the blank pate syndrome, which is often said as, and place your focal points exactly where the human eye naturally wants to look. Rather than centering your subject, which can often make a sketch feel static, rigid, or like a formal portrait, the rule of thread introduces movement, balance, and visual tension. Deconstructing the grid. To use the rule of thirds, mentally divide your sketching page into three by three grid, which means nine equal halves. This leaves us with two critical elements for our sketch, four intersection points and four tridlines. If I ever have any confusion about my sketching, I usually go back to this kind of a rule, place your primary subject or the most detailed focal point of your sketch directly on or very close to one of these four intersection points. Over here, I am trying to place it towards the right side, the pathway, and it is actually covering one of the intersection points. According to this rule, you should never place your horizon light directly across the middle of the paper. It splits the drawing awkwardly in half. If the sky is your main feature, place the horizon along the lower one third line. If the foreground terrain, water or texture is your main focus, place the horizon along the upper one third line. In portraits or figures, align the vertical axis of the leaning body or a prominent structural feature along either the left or the right vertical, one third line. If a character is looking to the right, place them on the left vertical one third line. So they have breathing room to look into the open two thirds space of the sketch. When I begin my layout, I usually go light that is either with a two edge or a four edge pencil before committing to any structural contours. It takes 5 seconds but completely changes the weight of my composition. I am adding some amount of my foliage into the foregrounds on the left, as well as on the right, which appears just in and around my pathway. This would be more of a wet on wet painting where we are starting out with a misty background for the sky as well as for the bottom area, slowly moving into more darker spaces. I would add a lot of water on my paper and start expanding it into the dry spaces with the help of my flat brush. This is a very easy exercise. You have to just do a cross swatch and then let your paper have a sheen on it. Now, since this would be more like a movement of water to create the mist, I would like to add more amount of water at this stage, slowly moving into the darker or metones as we continue to progress in this watercolor journey. As I said earlier, and continue to say, nutritent and monochrome watercolor painting is a fantastic idea because it essentially functions as a cheat code for mastering values, structural depth, and water control without the distraction of color theory. In case you do not have this, go ahead with any of the other shades, either it be ivory black, lamp black, or bluish gray, event, you can go ahead with paint screen. The biggest challenge with standard black paints is that they aren't actually neutral when diluted. For example, ivory black often dilutes into a warm, yellowish brown gray, while lamp black dilutes into a bluish gray color. The neutrotint advantages scientifically formulated to scale down from a deep, near black to palest mist gray without changing its hue, because it represents perfectly neutral across all steps of your value scale. What you see on your palette is exactly what you get on the paper. So many of us always tape down our paper. Do you really know what's the important aspect of sticking taping or stretching your watercolor paper to a rigid pot? It's one of the most vital steps because it fundamentally changes the physical architecture of the paper when it gets wet. While it's a common belief that keeping the paper tat helps water flow smoothly, the actual mechanics comes down to a basic law of physics, eliminating valleys to control gravity. Here is exactly why a flat secured surface dictates better water movement. Watercolor paper is made of cotton or wood pulp fiber. When you introduce water, these fibers act like tiny sponges. They expand and swell. If the paper is loose, it cannot expand outward, so it expands upward, causing the paper to wrap, buckle, and ring. The tape board advantage is very simple when paper is firmly taped or stretched to a board. On all the four edges, the expansion is restricted. As the wet paper dries, it shrinks back down, pulling itself completely like a drum skin. This ensures the surface stays flat, allowing water and pigment to glide smoothly and evenly across the page under your direct control rather than grab the whim. Now I have started applying some of the darker values in and around the space where you have the road area, as well as towards the outer parts of the sky. You will see that some area I'm keeping in white as I want the paper to look absolutely misty, gloomy, kind of a feeling. For the scenic beauty, I'm extremely happy with how it is turning out though you might not understand what we are trying to create at this stage, and these might look like blobs of colors here and there. But after the final outcome, you would be seriously happy to paint this pathway where there is light from the bottom of the sky, or you can see from the sky directly falling over makes it look absolutely stunning. I do have a lot of water on my paper that helps me to move my colors in a great way. And since I have already pasted, or you can say tape down my paper to this board, I can seriously move it in all directions and control the direction of water to a greater extent. Some of the areas where I want to lift off my color, you can always use your brush and once done, just allow the paper to dry off and slowly, you can introduce more colors because this has turned out di light. I want to introduce more and more shades, though it seems like that my paper did not dry off completely, but still I'm retouching this area. As you can see, there is a cauliflower effect because of the puddles that we had, so those are things needs to be fixed. In case you are not hamming those issues as I have, you can go ahead with what you have already created. My paper had this amount of water, which actually led to this issue of creating cauliflower effect or back runs. It happens. It does happen in the process of watercolors. These only I always say as happy accidents, and I really accept it from the bottom of my heart whatever happens is for a reason, and if this is happening, that is also for a reason. Let's go ahead and apply some more of the darker values here and there. Once we have applied the darker values, you can use your flat brush or any other kind of brush which can lift up or soften up your colors in few of the areas. Slowly, I will continue to paint these darker areas along the pathway, use my blending brush. It can be your flat prending brush, it can be your round blending brush, whatever is available for showing the pathway, not great Okay, I guess this is something that I am super excited and happy to share with each one of you. You see how beautifully the colors are spreading. You can see how beautifully we are moving in a path that guides us to the final step of this pathway. Okay, great. Let's continue to paint through it. There is less at this moment. We will move on to the next video where we are going to complete this painting. I did break this painting into two parts. As as one single part, of course, it was becoming really, really long, and I did not want you guys to stretch it. You can always break your paintings into various parts and then go ahead with the final aspect of what comes. Great. I guess this is how we have finished it off. And I think just cleaning up the sides would be great. I can see that some of my paints did seep into my areas, which I did tape them, but that's absolutely okay. We always do not need to have an outcome where the white of the paper will be crisp. Yes, these accidents do make the paper sometimes have or seep in the color and create some lines or some dots absolutely random here and there. Not on the painting, but on the date paper area. I'm really going bold at this stage and introducing some mid values compared to what we have used earlier. Mid values are equally important. We need to add these mid tones, as you can say, and create some of these pushes. These are in the photographs, and they have to be way more darker compared to whatever you create in the background. The background here you will see will be way more lighter. Either you can call it a hill, you can call it a mountain. The way you perceive your painting is most important. Keeping a tissue or a paper towel in your hand while painting isn't just for cleaning up accidental spills, it is vital mechanical control tool that directly dictates how much water and pigment enter your painting. In watercolor, your brush acts like a fountain pen, and the tissue is the brake pedal. Here is exactly why keeping a tissue nearby is absolutely critical. Regulating the brush reservoir. When you rinse your brush in water, the metal band and the deep hair of the bristle fill up completely with a hidden reservoir of water. If you go straight from the water cup to your palette or paper, gravity will pull that hidden water down the hairs instantly diluting your paint mix and flooding your paper. Gently fix the heel of your brush to a tissue, suck out the excess hidden moisture, leaving the brush perfectly primed to pick up rich accurate values without accidental dilution. I also use my tissue to control the water on the edges. I continuously go ahead and clean the sides so that there are no back runs. Let's move on to the next part of this painting. 8. Monochrome Pathway - Part 2: Now my paper is completely dried out and I'm starting out with the second dry layer. Now, this layer is very important and vital in our painting. You will see as we progress with watercolors, blending it out in various places to create that misty effect comes handy for any kind of monochrome watercolor painting. I am going ahead and extending my paints to the left, as well as to the right. You will see I will keep either a blending brush like this, which can hold a lot of water or else you can also use a flat brush for your reference. Now, this brush really helps me to move my colors to a great extent and then blend it with the paper completely. The paper already has a layer of color in it, and when I start blending it with this brush, the colors move into the space which is already wet because of the blending brush. Initially, when I started out with watercolors, this is not something that I wanted to create or I wanted to do. But as I progressed, I felt that this is something that can act very handy and create amazing outcomes like the littered pathway or else you can also create some misty, cloudy effects. Watercolor is a fine balance of wet on wet and wet on dry. Always, you cannot work wet on wet nor you can always work wet on dry. Hence, you have to work in between these two factors of wet on wet and wet on dry. I love the fact that I can really blend these two parts together and create something that really suits my soul to a great extent. Believe me, watercolors is something that I can do anytime, and I am already in love with this medium. This medium is something that I cannot tell you. How beautifully it makes me feel from inside whenever I work on it. Okay, trying to create some of the darkest of the values as these bushes or you can say foliage is very, very close to my eyes. They have to be in the darkest of the value compared to whatever we see in the background or at a distance. This is as per the rule of perspective, which we did explore a lot in the first two paintings or the exercise paintings. I have moved on to my liner brush now. This liner brush will help me create something and nice foliage or some plant like effet here and there. I do use it in an impressionist style where I'm not trying to actually show each and every plant separately. I will just go ahead in some of the spaces creating those and then help it blend with my blending brush to the background. This is something that I have learned over time. You do not need to create every part and every detail. You just need to show it in a way which you would like or you would want to create for your viewers. Watercolor art is a style of representation of a photo or place. Why I say this? Because this is an extraordinary medium for representation because it does not just copy a photograph, it translates it into a language of light mood and atmosphere. When you recreate a photo or a place in watercolor, you are moving away from the rigid mechanical replication and instead capturing the feeling of being there. It translates light into true luminosity. In oil acrylic or digital photography, white is created by piling on heavy opaque pigment. In watercolor, the white is the actual paper shining through the transparent layers of pigment. When you represent a place using a single beautiful pigment like neutral tint, the paper acts as a natural light source. It mimics the true physics of nature. Light traveling through the air, hitting a surface and bouncing back to our eyes. This gives you representation, a glowing ethereal quality that a flat photograph simply cannot match. Atmospheric perspective comes naturally. Camera lens often flatten a landscape making everything look uniformly Watercolor naturally mimics how the human eye perceives distance through dilution and edge control by simply adding more water to your brush, you can make a background mountain range recede into soft misty gray. As you move closer to the viewer, you tighten your edge and deepen your value into rich charcoal and neoplts. This organic shift from soft to sharp and light to dark creates an immediate sense of deep breathing space and airness within a frame. The beauty of controlled chaos, when you paint a place in watercolor, you enter a partnership with water, unlike a photograph where every pixel is locked in place, Watercolor moves, blends and settles in the paper fibers in unpredictable way. The soft smoky blooms you get in a wet on wet environment perfectly captures the chaotic, organic texture of nature like moving mist, dense foliage, rolling clouds or ripples on water. You aren't manually painting every single plate of brass or leaf. Instead, you are letting the water create the impression of them, making the representation feel alive and fluid. It strips away noise to reveal the core narrative. A photograph often contains too much visual clutter, unwanted street signs, distracting colors, or busy texture that pull focus from the true mode. Representing a place monochromatically allows you to simplify a complex scene into a clean, striking val map by focusing entirely on structural depth. The rule of thirds and the contrast between deep shadows and bright highlights, you elevate the scene. You strip away the noise and present the view with the poetic quit essence of that specific moment in time. The loose foliage which you create right now on the dry paper is something that is very helpful in a painting like this. Move your brush and apply various pressures at few of the places wherever you think it is necessary and create a few lines that looks like branches. Do not create branches each and everywhere, nor you have to create leaves in all the spaces. This is something that I always say. The impressionist style is not about creating everything in detail. It should be somewhere in between loose as well as the dry effect of leaves and trees where you get the impression of the foliage, but yet do not create everything in detail. This is something that I have done a lot over time. Initially, when I started out with watercolors, I wanted to create everything in detail. Over time, I have realized there is a fine balance between these loose aspects as well as something that you can create in detail. This fine balance, you should always always strive for a better outcome. I will just continue with the foliage and add some background music for your reference. This will help you to just calm down, relax and enjoy the process of creating the foliage. There is less to explain at this stage, using the tip of your brush for creating the branches and applying some pressure for creating these loose foliage part that looks like leaves or bushes closer to you. Already created the detailed bushy effect which we wanted for the foliage, and now it's time to apply some clear water. We will also apply some of the colors as you see me doing it over here and then extend it towards the top areas. Not all the places, I would be applying equal values or equal amount of colors. Some of the values will be lesser, some of the values would be more darker. Though you can put it as even, you may not also put it as even. I like to play with the value to a greater extent in most of my paintings. Hence, I will do this part also in a similar way. The foliage area is wet at this moment towards the bottom part. So I keep on adding some of my colors. These are the deepest of the values and not apply the similar shade or colors everywhere. I choose as I progress, I'm not here to create everything at this current moment. These are the last seven to 8 minutes of my painting, and whatever I create at this moment is going to decide in terms of making or breaking my painting to a great extent. See you can overwork in a painting or you may work less in a painting, but the optimal work is something that I always say is difficult to strike. You might feel that it can come very handy initially, but everything takes a while and everything takes some time to sink in, whether it be watercolors, whether it be understanding any of the other mediums like oils, acrylics, et cetera. We all have our style of developing watercolors. If you are still looking out for that style, I think you can strike it as you progress. I can say I have been working with watercolors almost for seven years now, and still my style is evolving every now and then whenever I paint with colors. Currently I am in between, you can say the loose and the dry effect that you usually get in watercolors, but over time, I may shift out to absolutely loose effect or maybe more dryer effect. As humans, we have this tendency to shift from more, I would say, dry style to more of the loose style or from the loose style to dry style. It all depends how you see how you want to perceive a particular area or a particular view and then replicate it on your paper. Let's add the darkest of the value towards the bottom part on the left side, we will add it as we progress, some of the foliage blues here and there, continue to do it. It's still not complete. We have some odd time about four to 5 minutes before we finish off the entire painting. I always like to blend my colors with the help of my flat brush and move it outwards. Finally, I'm at a stage where I'm finishing off the complete painting, and then we will just blend out the edges wherever it is necessary with the clear water. I do have always two sources of water, one for cleaning up the areas and another for using it for my brushes because I want to take out all the pigments, et cetera from my brushes. Hence, this tissue then two sources of water palette becomes very, very important in any watercolor journey. Tim to introduce the darkest of the dark value for the left side, as you see, I go very slow with my watercolor paintings. Yes, I see how my middle tones have appeared and how the tones that are about to come even for the ones that is just new to my eyes, the foliage should be in quite a dark shade. But if that doesn't happen, I have to go ahead and again, work on these few areas here and there to make it more even and look like it is having that rule of perspective, pretty strong in it. You have to work as per the eye coordination. If the eyes, anything that appear to your eyes, I would say, closer has to be the darkest, and the ones that appears farthest away from your eye has to be the lightest, which is basically the sky first and then it moves to the hill. Then next, it comes to the pathway, far away, the foliage that is a bit far away, and then the foliage which is nearest to the eyes. This is how the whole balance should if this balance doesn't work, then the whole painting will look flat and uneven. We have to bring this plane into a three dimensional effect where the pathway looks like it's coming from the background and moving it towards us. I'm to just work on the right side of the painting a bit more as I feel, again, this part has become lighter compared to what I wanted. Hence, making a bit more darker is very, very important. Continue to work on the loose foliage tots bit of pressure here and there, making it darker, some few lines to show that, yes, there are some of the stems of the plants and then blending it as we go towards the bottom area of this pathway. Know many things might have appeared very iterative and you might have moved from left to right or from top to bottom, creating various values, understanding value chart, understanding glazing, moving from one layer to second layer to third layer, as we have worked out here. And then, again, you can use all the learnings in your future paintings. If you have liked this, please drop me a feedback. I would be really happy to receive what you feel about the whole of these painting parts, exercises, then the final paintings, initial techniques, et cetera. As well as it does help me to even structure my classes in future better. You did paint along with me to go ahead and upload the project in the project gallery, along with the exercises, I would be more than happy to share my feedback and look at what you have created. Let the painting dry off after this and have a look at the final painting after removing the tape pattern angle. You can frame this painting or give it as a gift to your near and dear ones. I think this is one of the paintings which can be even replicated on bigger size paper. Waiting to see you all in the next class where we create something more meaningful and beautiful.