Cozy Fall Scene in Watercolors

1. Intro: Cozy Fall Scene in Watercolors: Hello, and welcome. My name is Emily, and I'm an artist and instructor based in Madison, Wisconsin. In today's class, I'll teach you how to paint this cozy fall scene using watercolors. In this tutorial, I'll teach you how to create a soft background using wet on wet techniques, and then add dimension to your painting using wet on dry. You can use the template included in this tutorial to print or trace the design directly onto your watercolor paper. So get your paints, brushes and paper ready, and let's get ready to paint this cozy fall scene in watercolors. 2. Supplies: Alright, so let's talk supplies for our cozy fall scene. The first thing that you're going to need is some watercolor paper. So I actually printed out the template that's included in this ertorial onto a piece of eight by ten watercolor paper. I like to use arches, watercolor paper. It's cold pressed and 140 pounds. I like to buy the A three size, and then I'll actually just cut it in half and cut it into eight by ten size pieces. Um, if you are using your own paper and tracing, I would suggest maybe an eight by ten size. You can always go smaller if you would like. However, it might be a little bit tricky to get some of the details and if your pumpkin and your cup are too small. For brushes, you are going to need a variety of round size brushes. I am using both a size four round and eight round from the company silver Limited. These are black velvet brushes. And then I also chose one slightly smaller detail brush, not too small, though, still a size two. This is a Rafael brush. Any small detail brush will also work. You will need some tape to tape down your paper to some sort of flat surface. I am using a corrugated plastic board that I bought from Michael's and cut into smaller pieces. You can tape directly onto your table or you can tape onto a different waterproof flat surface. The tape that I'm using, I'm using a tape called Kiwi Hub. So all of these names and brands will be included on your supplies guide. Kiwi Hub is a tape that you can find on Amazon. Otherwise, you can always use a different type of tape. So you can use a green frog tape. You can use a blue painter's tape, whatever sort of tape that you have at home that's suitable for paper and will help leave some really clean lines. I find that this kiwi hub tape really protects my paper, but also make sure that I have really nice crisp lines afterwards. You'll need a paper towel, a cup of water, maybe two cups of water if you don't want to run back and forth to clean out your water. And then at the end of the class, I'm going to demonstrate how to make some steam coming out of your coffee mug using a white charcoal pencil. Now, this is optional. If you don't have a white charcoal pencil, you can try using a white colored pencil or some white guash. But I will be using a white charcoal pencil, and you will need a variety of watercolors for this class. So let's talk about the brand of watercolor paints that I'm using and the specific colors. For watercolor paints, in my palette, I use Daniel Smith watercolors. If you use a different brand of paint, that's totally fine. I did swatch out what my colors look like on paper so that you can choose a color that you have at home that's fairly similar to the color that I'm using. I'm using a Thalo blue a quinacridone burnt orange. So unlike a normal orange, it's a little brighter in color. This one is more of a tone down orange. It has a little bit more brown hue to it. It's not as bright. And thraconde red, piamanite genuine. This is a granulating color. So you'll notice that it's a warmer brown. It has more reds in it than a cooler brown. Undersea green, which is another granulating color. This undersed green actually has some teals in it. It has greens, of course, and it also has some brown hues as well. So if you do not have undersed green, you can mix a green maybe by adding a little bit of brown into a brighter green that you have at home. New gamboge, indigo, and carbazleviolet. So before we start painting, I'm going to move some of my things aside. We need to prep our paper, meaning that we need to tape it down. Now, if you are also painting and printed out or traced out your template, you notice that there's going to be a thicker edge along all four edges than what your window pane is on the inside. That's on purpose because I do want to leave a ring around our painting. So this is the final piece once I took the tape off. So I do want to try to tape about a fingernails width here, all around my paper. And I want to try to tape so that the window pane around the edge of the window pane here is about the same width. So if you notice this T in the center, it's about the same with all the way on these three edges. There are no guidelines here for you. So you're just going to eyeball it. So rip off a piece that's the same length. I like to start on one side first. So I'm going to kind of eyeball it. The right distance, I'll lay that side down first and keeping the other side up so that I can kind of move it if I need to. And now, the nice thing about this kiwi hub tape is it is a little bit more transparent. You can see through it a little bit better than your painter's tape or your green frog tape. And so that kind of helps I find it helps me to line up my tape a little bit better. So it'll be more or less lined up. With the edge of your blanket here, you notice that that edge kind of cut off, so I'll try to line that up. Got a little dog here under my tape. That's okay. And then one more along the bottom. 3. Wet-on-wet Windows: Alright, so we're going to start by painting some wet on wet in the four window panes that you see. So I'm starting by using a size eight round brush. Really, you can use any larger capacity brush that you have that still has a nice fine point to get into those corners. I'm using clean water to paint and wet the upper two window panes. I'm making sure to be cautious here that I don't go over these lines. And I do really want to make sure that I'm wetting the entire area. So I do like to go back to the beginning where I first started and re wet that area just to make sure it's really nice and wet. And I'll do the same thing on the second pane. Now, I'm doing the upper two panes first, and then I will paint the lower two panes. If you feel like your paper dries a little bit faster than arches cold pressed, you can do one window pane at a time. I am using a really high quality paper, and so I'm not concerned about my paper drying too fast. Alright. And then, like I said, I'll go back to that first pane, go over it once again to make sure that I have an even wetness in both window panes. All right now I'm grabbing a little bit of pal blue. It really can be blue. I'm just using a really light amount to just add a little bit of color to the upper portion of that window pane. If you don't want it to be a nice bright blue sky, you can always use a different color for this little accent color at the top of the window pane. If you want it to be a little bit more moody, you can use a darker blue. You could also use a magenta or more of a fall color as well. Alright, so I'm going to switch brushes to a slightly smaller handled brush, so this is a round size four. I did get it wet just to get some of my orange pigment. It's a burnt orange, quinacridone burnt orange. But I do need to make sure that I have mostly pigment and not that much water on my brush. You have too much liquid on your brush at this stage, when you're dotting in some of these fall leaves, you're going to notice that your orange is going to spread too much. So although my brush is wet, it is not soaking wet. I do have a paper towel in my left hand, and so you might notice me dabbing my paper towel, my brush to my paper towel to get rid of some of that liquid on my brush. I'll do the same thing on that first window pane. So I'm using more of the edge of my brush, not necessarily the tip of my brush because I want a larger blob. And I do want to have some of that blue background space come through. So I don't need these little blobs to connect at all. Now, if I'm wanting to switch to a different color, say, a yellow, I'll clean my brush off, grab some of that pigment. And then I just want to make sure that my brush isn't soaking wet when I add that color to my wet window pane. I'm using a little bit of a brown. So this is a piaminite genuine. It's a reddish brown. I'm not wetting my brush. I'm using the amount of water that was left over from the yellow. I'm grabbing a little bit of that brown directly from my pan. And then I am adding a few brush strokes to mimic branches. I am leaving some space in between these little brushes these little branches, just so that some of the leaves can kind of shine through. Nine. Now, I'm not adding extra water here because I want to make sure that that line stays where I put it. If I were to add water to my brown there, it's going to act just like my leaves, and it'll expand a little bit more than I'm wanting to. Now, here I'm just touching up some of those browns. So I'm taking a damp brush, and I was drying it off just a little bit before I softened up some of those branches. Now, here I'm taking a little bit of some undersea green, so that's a brownish green. I did add water to it, but once again, my brush isn't soaking wet. And I'm adding a little bit of a tree line to the base of these window panes. Now, you can kind of control using a dry brush where this green goes. But once again, just make sure your brush isn't sopping wet. Alright, now we'll do the same thing for the bottom two window panes. We'll wet it first using our larger capacity brush. This time, I just need to make sure that I'm painting around the pumpkin and around the glass and the bottom two window panes. Once again, you'll notice that I'm going to re wet both window panes so that they're equally wet before I add any of my pigment. Alright, now for the pigment on the lower two panes, I'm going to use primarily greens and some oranges. So this is going to be more of my tree line. So I'm adding the green first, and I'm making sure to leave a little bit of space where I want my oranges dotted in. I'm still using the same orange as I did in the trees above. So this is the quinacridone, uh burnt orange. As you're adding your greens and oranges here, just make sure that you extend the color all the way to the edge, making sure that you've got a nice hard edge on that window pane instead of a soft edge. At this stage, what I'm looking for is I just want some blurred colors. I want some darker tones, I want some lighter areas. And then I want to make sure not to over mix my colors. So I still want some of those oranges to shine through, and some of the dark greens. I don't want to blend them together. And at this stage, you can add any extra fall colors that you like. So I'm dotting in just a little hint of red here as well. Now, I don't want to spend too long on this left panel because I did wet my right panel. So I want to go in with my green first. I'm starting on this left hand side where you see the template of that branch in the upper right. That's where I want to stop my green slightly before that. I do want the oranges of that branch to be able to shine through. So I don't want to bring my green up too far. I'm going to do the same technique that I did in the upper branches down below where I'm using the edge of my brush, not the tip of my brush to make some kind of more blurred leaf shapes on this branch. And, of course, the closer that I get to the edge of the branch on that right side, kind of the larger these clumps of leaves are. I can always add in some extra accent colors like my reds. I'm going to keep the darker colors, like those darker reds and darker oranges. I'm going to keep those closest to the branch. That's where the darkest colors naturally would be. And if I have any lighter yellows, I might keep those towards the ends and the edges of these branches. So now you see me coming back to that left window pane. I've grabbed some of my brown. That's my Piamintite brown. Once again, I did not wash my brush, so I'm using whatever liquid is on my brush because I do want these branches to stay in their linear shape. I'm pulling up a little bit of pigment here because using a dry brush, just because it kind of got a little bit too dark for me. And now I'm grabbing a little bit of purple along with my brown. I know I want to use some purple in the base of this painting where the cloth is and the mug. And so I want to add a little bit of purple in the background just so that I can kind of have some common colors throughout this painting. You'll notice that I'm going back over these tree trunks with I'm lifting some of the pigment there, so I'm drying my brush off and lifting some of it off. And then I might go back after I lift some and replace it with some more pigment. While things are wet, I do try to my best to kind of rework that area until I get it to a point where I'm happy. And so I might rework the area two, three times before it gets to be too dry. And then I just have to let it sit and dry. 4. Wet-ton-wet: Objects on Windowsill: Alright, so here I'm testing out in this upper pane if my papers dry enough to do a second layer on these leaves. As I started doing the second layer, I noticed that the paper isn't quite dry enough. It looks dry, but it is still spreading a little too much for my second layer. So I just lifted that color up, and I'm going to move on to some of the foreground pumpkins and some of the foreground area. I kept this in the video just because I wanted to share with you that sometimes we do have to test out the dryness of our paper. And if we notice the color spreading too much, we just need to stop and pick a different area to work on. So instead, I've decided I'm going to paint the first layer of my cloth here, my little towel underneath my mug of coffee. I mixed up a muted purple, so I have a purple that I added some brown too, and that kind of gives it this more musty purple color that's more indicative of fall. I'm just doing a single layer of color, so I don't want a gradient. I'm just painting even color on this whole cloth. So while this cloth is still wet, I'm gonna drop in some darker pigment in some of these creases. So I'll take that purple pigment that I mixed and I'll add it to some of these crevices around the cup where it would be more shadowed. And without wetting my brush, I'm going to grab some indigo from my palette. So that's my darkest blue. You can use indigo. You can use Prussian blue. You can use a different darker blue or even a gray, if you'd like. And so here I'm going to add just a little bit of that color to some of the darker shadowed areas of my cloth. I'm doing all of this while the cloth is still wet. Once this cloth starts to dry, then I've lost the chance to drop in some softer shadows and then I need to let it dry fully before I add a second layer wet on dry. All right, I'll do the same thing with my pumpkin. So I've mixed some water along with my quinocradone burnt orange. And now I'll paint that first layer on my pumpkin. This time, just like the cloth, I'm painting wet on dry. So my paper is dry, but I do want to drop in some darker pigments. So I'll try to paint this first layer fairly quickly, but also making sure that I am bringing my paint all the way to the edges. I noticed they got a little too dark towards the top of my pumpkin, so I just grabbed my paper towel to lift up a little bit of color there. And then I grabbed some of that burnt orange directly from the pan. I did not add any water on my brush. I just used the amount of water that was there already because I don't want that orange to spread too much, so I want to make sure I don't have that much liquid. And I'm kind of tracing along those ridges of my pumpkin. If I need a little bit darker of a shadow, I can always take some of that purple that I mixed for the cloth and add some purple along the base of my pumpkin. After adding the shadows, now I can wash my brush, dry it with my paper towel. And now I'm using my dry brush to lift some of the highlights in the centers of those little sections of my pumpkin, just to make sure that I've got a little brighter of a highlight there. Alright, we'll move on to our coffee mug. I'll start by mixing a very watered down indigo. That's going to serve as my base color. So I'm adding quite a bit of water and then just a little touch of indigo. You can choose to paint your mug, whatever color you would like. Remember that the base layer of that first wet on dry should be a lighter transparency. I am going to paint the whole mug, but I'm going to try to leave the little lip of the mug and the upper lip. I'm going to try to leave that without any color. I want that to be as bright as it can be to serve as the highlight. Well, the mug is still wet. I'll grab some indigo directly from my pan, so I'm not adding any water. I want a very opaque indigo, and I'll add that to the upper rim of my mug, as well as the lower base of my mug, the left side of it, and the handle. So I'm trying to add some shadow using that opaque indigo. Once I've placed the indigo where I want it, I can use a dry brush to help blend those edges and kind of soften up any edges that got too dark. I can also grab some pigment and add some vertical strokes. Those vertical lines are going to help resemble some reflections of that curved mug. And you'll notice that I'm still keeping a little bit of a highlight along that leftmost side of the mug, so that's going to help give it more of a cylindrical shape. And then with my smallest brush, I'll go into that really tiny oval in the center of my mug and add some darker indigo to the center of that mug. I'm trying to keep that outside ring free from any color. That's going to act as the highlight on the top of my mug. Alright, so now I'm going to check on the dampness of my window panes. I know that they're not soaking wet. There's no glare or gloss anymore, but I still feel them to be slightly damp, and I want them to be a little drier before I paint my second layer. So I'll continue painting that first layer of wet on dry and those nice soft edges of wet on wet with the pumpkin stem. So I started with a brown on the pumpkin stem, and then I added in a little indigo towards the base just to give it a little depth. 5. Wet-on-dry: Creating hard edges: So now that we're done with our first layer of wet on wet, where we add all of our soft edges and highlights and shadows using soft edges, now we're going to add our second layer, wet on dry. And this is where we're going to leave some of those edges to be hard edges. Hard edges just basically means that we have a very clear definition between the paint, and it's going to be a solid line. We're not going to blend any of the edges. So I'm going to start with my pumpkin. I mixed up a medium transparency of that orange color, and I'm just going to add a layer of color on top of those trace lines along the pumpkin. And I might add a few extra little texture lines as well, but I'm not going to soften up any of those edges. Now I'll move on to the little napkin underneath the coffee cup, and I'll do the same thing, adding a wet on dry. So my paper is dry, my brush is wet. Now for this wet on dry, I'm actually using the same color that I used for the first layer, but it's going to automatically sit and show a little bit darker because it's added on top of that first layer. So if you're noticing that your second layer is looking a little bit too intense, your color might be just a little bit too dark of a color or too opaque of a color to be a second layer. Our second layer wet on dry, we still want to have some transparency to that layer because we don't want the contrast of the two layers to be that intense. So like I said, I'm still using the same color that I mixed up for the napkin. And I'm just adding some harder edges. I'm kind of going and adding a little bit of texture, but I'm also following the lines of that napkin underneath. Now that I'm done with a second layer on my pumpkin and my little cloth, I'm going to work on the second layer of my leaves. So I'm using the same orange that I mixed for the second layer of the pumpkins. So it's still a medium transparency. It's not overly opaque. I still want to be able to see the colors that I laid down underneath. And so that's why I still need a medium to medium light transparency. And I'm adding some leaf like shapes, but more just blobs. I'm keeping these misshaped blobs to be a little smaller towards the edges of the branches. And then when it gets closer to the stems and the branches, then I'm going to make those little blobs a little bit larger in size. Once again, this is still wet on dry. So my paper is completely dry and my brush is wet. Another important thing to note is that when I start painting these little blobs for leaves, I'm keeping them pretty separate from each other. And now, when I look at this branch, I just painted. I'm noticing that it looks a little off. It looks weird. And I think partially because none of those blobs are really touching. So I took my paint brush and I connected some of those blobs, connected them the ones that are closest to the stems and to the branches. Now, while these blobs are still wet, I can go in and I can drop in any additional colors that I want. So right now I'm adding some of that purple that I used for the cloth in the foreground. And I'm also I can add in any red or any yellows or any or a different shade of orange just to give these branches a little bit more color. And I'll add a second layer of wet on dry to the lower left pane. So I'm using my undersea green, which is a brownish green to add some tree like shapes to the foreground or to the background here. And I'm still using the edge of my brush. It's still very fairly transparent green. Here, the more transparent you have your green and your colors, the further back in the distance they're going to look. So our goal here is to not have very dark, intense colors because we want those shapes to fade into the background and not be what our eye sees first. We'll move on to our tree trunks and giving them a little bit more definition. So I have a watered down medium to medium light transparency brown, the same brown I used for the tree trunks in the wet on wet layer. And I'm just adding some vertical lines here, trying not to have that brown be too dark of a brown because once again, I want those tree branches to fade into the distance. I don't want them to be what your eye sees first. I Oh. 6. Dry brush technique for the shelves: So we're going to mix our color for our shelf. I'm actually just mixing a few of the colors I already have on my palette to create a warm gray. So this is the brown from the tree trunks, along with that purple from the cloth. And I'm using a dry brush technique here. So I have a size eight round brush, so it's a little larger. I'm using the long end of the brush, the edge of my brush, and I'm trying to keep some of the texture of the paper and have some of that texture of the paper shine through. So although my brush is still wet, it's called dry brush because we want to be able to see some of that texture. I'm going back with a little bit of indigo towards the top edge of that shelf there because I want that edge to be a little bit darker. We'll do the same thing on the upper shelf. So once again, I'm using the edge of my brush and keeping my brush a little bit drier and a little bit lighter of pressure so that you can see some of that texture in the paper below. Once again, I'll go back in. This is some indigo directly from my pan. So it's not watered down at all. It's a very opaque indigo, and I want my shadows under that pumpkin and under the cloth to be the darkest so far in my painting because that's where the darkest shadows are naturally going to be. You can see I added a little bit of orange into the shadow. Adding orange to that indigo color is going to kind of connect all of the colors that I've been using up until this point. And, of course, I always go back in and I'll lift any colors that got a little too intense or if they mixed poorly. So right now I'm just lifting some of those colors away. Mm. 7. Painting the window frame and final details: So I'll start mixing my color, my darker color that I'm going to use for the window pane around the edges of the window pane. I'll start with some indigo, and I'll add a little bit of brown. I tried adding a little magenta. And then I'm also going to add a little bit of purple, a little bit more brown. Really, I'm wanting to add to create this sort of dark wood color, but I want my dark wood color to be a little bit more purply. Than that. So mix a shade of color that you're happy with. I still have water in this with this color. So it's not as opaque as I can get it. And that's important because I still want the main focus to be on the coffee mug and the pumpkin. And if my window pane is too dark and too opaque, if there's no transparency to it at all, then your eye might focus on that window pane. So, I'm still keeping quite a bit of water in this color. I'm using a size eight brush here, and I'm using part of the reason also why I'm using quite a lot of water here is to make sure that my edges are really nice and clean. If you don't have enough water mixed in with your pigment, your edges aren't going to be very nice and clean. I am painting the window pane all the way up to the tape on the edge. This is partially why we taped our paper down and made sure that we were taping at the same distance so that this window pane around all of the edges is going to be the same width. Oh A oh We'll use the same color to add just a few lines to that edge of the shelf, just to help that edge stick out a little bit more. And then we'll finish the details of the window pane using a slightly smaller brush. Alright, so I'll use the same color that I use for the window panes, and I'm going to add that color to a few of the darkest shadows in my painting. So I'll add a little bit of that color under the napkin and then under the pumpkin. I might also add a few brushstrokes and some darkest shadows to the stem of the pumpkin, maybe a few in the napkin itself. And then whatever sort of extra little details that you might want to add to your painting, this is a great time to do that. So I decided that I was going to add a little heart to the coffee mug using the same color. You're more than welcome to add whatever design you would like to your coffee mug, whether that's poka dots or initials or any other little cute memento. 8. Additional Tutorials: If you enjoyed this video, I also have a variety of online tutorials on my website, emilymarwatercolors.com, as well as Skillshare for Skillshare members. And I do sell completed physical watercolor kits where it comes with everything you need to paint at home. Visit emilymarwatercolors.com.