Creating Texture in Watercolour: How to Paint a Birdhouse Scene

1. Intro: In this class, we will paint a beautiful bird house scene with flowers and a bluetick sitting on the roof. The class focuses on techniques that allow you to build texture and realism in your watercolor paintings, which will be transferable to other pieces of your work. I will take you through every part of this painting step-by-step, from the initial drawing of the outline through to every part of the painting process in real time with lots of tips and guidance along the way. This class builds on my previous class on texture, where I show you how to paint different grains of wood. In this class, we jumped straight into the project. If you want some practice first with painting wood grains, then I would recommend heading back to that class first. I really enjoyed painting this scene and making this class, and I really hope you'll enjoy painting along with me. Grab your supplies and let's get started. 2. Supplies: For this class the supplies that you'll need will include: a pencil, eraser, and ruler for the initial outlines. Once we've drawn the outline, I'll be applying masking fluid, to protect some of the areas of the painting. This isn't essential but I would recommend it if you do have some masking fluid at hand. To apply this to the page, I use a silicone color shaper, size zero, which I'd highly recommend. You need watercolor paper, and I would recommend cold pressed 140 pounds, because we'll be painting quite a few layers to create the texture in the painting. You need a good size of paper. I'll be using a block that is 12 inches by nine inches and if you follow the measurements of my drawing, then you need at least 11 inches by 7.5 inches. You will need watercolor brushes, some larger for the washes and larger areas, and some smaller for the finer details. I'll be using a range of round brushes from size 3.0 which is my smallest brush, to my size six, which is a decent medium-size brush. I'll also be using a flat shader, which will be a size 10 for the platform and the roof because it's got a nice square edge to it. You need watercolor paints and as a minimum, you would need a red, a blue, and a yellow. If you have all of your primary colors, you can mix or the rest up. Ideally, you will also have a pre-mixed brown and black for convenience. I'll be using Winsor Newton professional tubes, and my palette will include: winsor blue, winsor lemon, scarlett lake, burnt umber, yellow ocher , indigo, and ivory black. I'll also be using a small amount of Dr Ph Martin's bleedproof white, for some of the areas as a word to create some contrast and a bit more texture. Finally, you'll need a plate or a palette for mixing your paints on, some water, and a paper towel for blasting your brushes. 3. Drawing the Outline: Part 1 - Birdhouse: In this video, we will start by drawing the outline of our bird house before we start painting. Here is the end goal of the class which is our finished painting. This is the outline that we want by the end of this section. If you plan to use the same measurements as me as we go along, as I mentioned earlier, then you will need paper that is at least 11 inches by seven and a half inches.This might look a little daunting, but we'll be going through it step-by-step, so please don't worry. We'll start with a bird house and you will need a ruler for this part. So a little bit of technical drawing, to keep everything nice and neat and in perspective. We'll then add the flowers and we'll be drawing some of them in front of the bird house to bring it all together a bit more. Make sure you have an eraser as well to remove some of those lines. Then finally, you have the option of adding the bird on the roof. When I first painted this bird house, I included the bird on the little perch, which made it a little more complicated to paint. I thought I'd move it to the roof, then you have the option of including this or not if you don't want to. Okay, so we're going to start with the baseline of the bird house, which is a horizontal line three inches across. Make sure you leave enough space above and below for the rest of the drawing. You need about a seven inch space above the line, and about four inch space below. Next, you need to mark the center point on that line, one and a half inches across. Then from that center point we want to measure a five and a half inches up, and this will be the point of the roof. Okay, now measure one inch below that center point on the baseline and make a little mark. Now from that mark, measure one and a quarter inches either side, and again make little marks on those points. Now starting on the left, line your ruler up with that left mark that we just made, and the start of the baseline. This will give you the angle that we want for the side of the bird house. Now draw a three inch line from the baseline upwards, and then you can do the same on the other side. Lining up a mark on the right with the end of the baseline and those other sides of our bird house. Okay, now we want to draw in the roof, so go back to that top point we made and make a mark three-quarter inches below it. From that point, draw a line to meet each side, and just go a little bit over so the roof sits over the house. Okay, next you want to add some [inaudible] to this roof. Draw a small slanted line going away from the bird house about one centimeter, at roughly 90 degrees in the other direction from the downward slant. You can measure one centimeter from the top as well just to make sure that width is the same on the roof all the way along, and then connect both of these to that top marker point. Hopefully your bird house has got its basic shape now, it's really important to get this bits right so if you're not happy with how it looks, just pause the video and go back and redo any bits again that you need to. Okay, next we want to add a bit more to this roof, so it looks a bit more three-dimensional. We just need to draw in three small lines, one on either side, slightly slanted going in, and one at the top going directly up. Then connect those lines together. Okay, next let's draw in the central line from the baseline to the bottom of the roof. This will be where the middle two planks of wood meet. Now we want to draw in a bird home. I'm just going to use this cotton [inaudible] , which is around one inch diameter and I'm roughly lining this up at the base of the roof. You can erase this line inside or do this later. Next, we want to add an apt three-dimension again. At the bottom of the hole we can just draw an a half circle. I start from the middle of the circle and just curve this round. Next, we want to draw in the lines of the wood panels on the left and the right. We want to mark the halfway point between that center point that we marked on the baseline and each side. Then the halfway point between the central point of the roof and each of the sides as well. Then just connect those up. Okay, next we want to draw in the platform at the base. Draw a line about an eighth of an inch below the baseline, about quarter of an inch longer either side than the bottom of the bird house. Now connect this to the house by drawing lines slanting upwards and inwards towards middle. They should go above the corner of that base. Looks like this platform is wrapping around the house. Now draw lines each end about one centimeter downwards, and then connect these up. I'm switching between my inches and my centimeters here. Hope for it's not confusing you. Then finally, in the center draw the pole, which again is about one centimeter wide. Okay, that's the bird house complete, and next we'll be moving on to sketching out the flowers. 4. Drawing the Outline: Part 2 - Flowers and Bird: Let's remind ourselves of what these flowers look like. We have a mix of flowers, buds and leaves. The branch on the right side is coming out from behind the pole. The branch on the left is in front of the pole. Also, some of the flowers are sitting in front of the house, which hopefully brings it all together a bit more and add small dimension to the painting as a whole. We'll start with the stem on the right-hand side. Draw this at an angle up towards the bottom edge of the house, leaving enough space for flower at the top. I did a couple of leaves down here, curving them up to a point and adding a few jagged edges. Then add in this top flower. Let's start with the little triangle for the base, and then drawing the first petal. Then one on other side. Then add in these two buds. Start with a little triangle for the base, then two small petals, which almost form and oval like shape. You can add in one more hair if you have space or anyway you fill that needs it to balance it out. I'm just going to go back and add it back petal to this top flowers as well. Moving on to the left side, let's start with the parts that we want overlapping the house. We know where we want that branch to sit. Start with a flower, a leaf, and the branch that connects the two. Now we can draw in this branch so that it sits in front of pole. Let's add few buds as well. Now we can draw this big branch which comes all the way over to the left, which reaching quite a bit higher than the rest. We can put another flower in front of the house again. Then along that branch just adding new flowers lays buds, so all balances out. I'm going to add a bud here. Stop every so often and stand back to look at it to make sure it looks good. I'm going to add a flower pair covering over with a bud coming off from that stem, then some more buds in this gap here. That's it for the flowers. Now if you want to, you can add a little perching pole to the bird house. Just below the bird hole, just draw a small circle over the center line. Then add in that dimension by drawing two small lines going back with a little curve at the top. Now we have our bird house and our flowers. If you decided not to add in the bird, then you can skip ahead now to the next painting video. Otherwise, let's keep going and we'll sketch in the bird. At this point, we just want to get a rough sketch of the bird so we know where it will sit as we'll be painting this last, so we can tie to this up later. The main thing is knowing whether fate will sit so we can paint around them when we're painting the bird house as that is the only part will be overlapping the rest of the painting. You may want to practice sketching the shape out on a piece of paper fast as it can sometimes be looked a bit tricky to get the shape of a bird. Let's start with the head, so just sketch a rough circle, literal way up from the roof. Then for the body bring this down cover around for the belly, getting quite close to the roof now, and curve the back and slide tail. Draw in the tail. Next let's add in the feet. The left leg will sit in front of the bird, we can see it goes up into the body. The right leg will sit behind the bird. Then just draw the feet covering around the roof so that turning in to it. Next just add in the beak and the eye. Then we can just add in the rough outline of where the details of the battle sit where can mark on defining the size of a fully start painting it. If you haven't already, as we've been going along, and just go around now and erase any pencil marking that we don't want and need to know overlap before we start adding any paint to it. 5. Adding Masking Fluid: The final thing that I'm going to do before painting, is to add some masking fluid to few areas, like the flowers siting in front of the birdhouse, the little perch, and the base of the bird hole, and the bird's feet. I'm using my small color shape of for this, with the silicon tip, it's so easy to use and clean afterwards. Masking fluid is pretty protein stuff, I just hate using it with my brushes. Don't worry if you don't have masking fluid, you can just skip the part. It just makes it a bit easier, to get a smooth flow of paint for the word, and protect these areas that we want to paint later. Now, we just need to wait for that masking fluid to dry and then we'll be ready to start painting. We'll be starting with the word, so grab your painting supplies, and let's start adding some color to this. 6. Painting the Birdhouse: Part 1: Now that we're ready to start painting, we are going to be painting the wood fair. I have added the colors to my palette that I want to use for my brown mixes. Hopefully you've watched my wood video where we practice mixing different browns and painting different styles of wood. We'll be diving straight in here in this class without any of the practice sessions that I normally do. If you want to practice the word and you haven't done that class yet, I'd recommend you just go back to that one. On my palette, I have my winsor lemon, my scarlet lake, my yellow ocher, my burnt amber and my winsor blue, it's nice to have a mix of these colors. You can bring a nice range of brown's into the wood. I'd recommend having at least a yellow, red, and a blue, and ideally a premix brown. If you have one just for convenience. I'm going to start with my burnt amber and make few different shades of brown by adding a little of the other colors. I'm starting with a fairly large brush, my round size six brush for the base of the word. If you follow my work and classes, you'll know I tend to use quite small brushes, so six is quite large for me, but it's probably a pretty standard medium size. Once you've mixed up a range of brown's on your palette, just make sure they are fairly dilute to start with. For the first layer, we just want to cover all of these front-facing wood planks with a mix of pile brown's, these are fatty diluted. We'll be building on this word with a few layers, so make sure you don't start too dark. I'm just starting by adding this yellowy brown, trying to keep these edges on the sides as many as possible. If you haven't east masking fluid, just make sure you're really careful to paint around these flowers and the other areas that we mast out like the patch and the base of the bird held. Use a range of your brown mixes so they can all blend in together. You want enough water on your page and on your brush so that the colors blend together fairly softly, but you don't want any excess water. I'm painting straight over the bird home as I was going to be one of the darkest areas and we'll pay now really dark brown later on over the top. So you don't need to worry about that for the moment. You can use the west who might technique for these to blend in or you can add your paint to the paint like I'm doing now. Wash off your pigment brushless too on your paper towel and then just pull that paint down. That's on the page to meet the rest of it. While we wait for that first layer to draw on a little, I'm going to mix up a slightly dark brown with my burnt amber and my blade. This will be for the platform and the base and for the roof. I'm going to use a flat brush now to get some nice pain edges as it has this nice square edge to it, so you can get nice straight lines and corners. But if you only have around rushes out that's still fine. Nice and neat with this nice crisp edges. Just remember to walk around a silos if you haven't used masking fluid. Now painting this top edge in that platform, this is dry by lighter so we'll go over it so we can distinguish between the top on the front of the platform. Now we can move on to the roof starting with that front part again. Again, I'm using that darker brown mix. We'll come back to this later to add some more detail I need to liaise edges. Now going back to the front of my bird house with my slightly smaller size fore brush. It doesn't have to be completely dry. I'm going to use a mix of rounds to add some streets and texture now, I'm working in the direction of the word panels, which is upwards. Just keep that in mind when you're painting because that will be the grain of the wood. If you want to add in a wood drink you can start to that now. So this is too quite fine in branding in any tool and we can build on this. Next we'll start to add in the knots and build up more on the details of the word and the bird house. 7. Painting the Birdhouse: Part 2: Now we can start adding in some details with some knots and start going a bit darker. I'm going to be switching between a few brushes for this word, my size 6, my size 4, and my small size 0 for the knots and smaller details. When we get to some of the really small details, shortly, I'll be using my smallest three-zero brush. Make sure that as we start painting these grains, the wood, that they are in the direction that the plank of wood is facing, like I mentioned earlier. As we practiced in the wood class, start with the eye of the knot in the center, and build up the grain around it, bringing it back together at the top and the bottom. Once these rings a drying, we can start building these up too. I'm just using small strokes and building up the lines of these curves. Then once we have enough knots dotted around, we can start building up the color around the knots with some slightly paired browns. This can take some time to put on the layers on wood, but I think it's worth it, as you will get such a lovely range of brown's coming through and so much texture, and realize it's worth spending a little bit more time on it. I'm not completely covering these areas when I paint, I still want some of that pale first layer to show through, and that gives it a nice contrast. Keep in mind that we're painting full planks of wood in front of this bad house. We will be painting fine line a bit lighter to separate them. But you can also make more distinctions with the details you are adding. Now I want to start painting on the edges of each plank and really adding some definition to each piece of wood, and you can do this with your dark brown mix. Paint a line in between each plank of wood to separate them. There are some areas which are a little bit wet and I want them to completely dry now for the final details. So we get these nice crisp edges. So I'm going to leave that for a while. I'm working on the platform and the reef again. So you should dot brown to bottom of this platform. If you make this top section dark and then the bottom black then it will stand out more. For the very top of the roof, we want it to be distinguished from the front phase and part of the roof. Then add some more brown if needed to the rest of the roof. Now this plank should be a bit dryer. I'm going to carry on working on them, adding in all of the details, building up the areas around the knots and defining each plank around the edges. I'm going to keep switching between my brushes for the details. I'm nicely using my size 0 or my size 3.0 for the edges and the fine details and a size 4 the large areas I'm painting. 8. Painting the Birdhouse: Part 3: When you're pretty happy with how these wood planks look, we can paint in that bird hole. For this, we want a really strong brown. Make sure you have a lot of pigment in your mix and very little water. I'm using my size four and just make sure you have good control of your brush. We want this circle to be really neat. As it's going to be quite dark and will be a central point of the painting. So the eye will probably be drawn to it. We want it to be really crisp and smooth. If it's not as dark as you want then just wait until it's dry and add another layer to build up that brown. Next, we want to paint a thin line of shadow underneath the roof, to show us the fact that the roof is overhanging slightly. Mix up a blue-y gray. I'm using my on my blue again. But with more blue in the mix this time. We don't want this too dark. If you [inaudible] with a bit more of a diluted mix and you can always go down later, once we see how everything is looking overall. So just add a thin line maybe about half a centimeter thick directly underneath the roof for that shadow. Now I'm going to add a little white to the wood to add some extra texture. This is entirely optional. I'll be using my favorite Dr Ph Martin's bleed proof white. Just adding that to my palette with a bit of water. I'm using my small three zero brush to add some fine details, typically along each edge of the planks of wood as a highlight, right next to that dark line. Then I'm going to add a touch to some of the knots, just to make it stand out a bit more. I'm really not using too much, I want this to be quite subtle. But the contrast will really help some of those features stand down. That is dry. We can remove our masking fluid. So just tight this off quite gently, don't pull it yet as that one even the risk of ripping your paper. Once you've taken off all of that masking fluid, you can go in and just knit knot any edges, that you need to now. Particularly around the bird hole, make sure that curve, where that dark area is, is really Christmas mood. I'm just going to go in and just paint over some of this. Now we want to add a pale brown to the base of the bird hole and to the little parch. This is really subtle. Make sure that dark brown in the bird hole is dry before you do this as you don't want that to bleed in. Then you can add in some extra definition around the bottom of the bird hole if you want to. I'm going to build out the brown around the parch as well, so that stands out more. Use that same pale yellowy brown mix for the parch and then build out the brown a bit darker around the top so it distinguishes it from the front circle. Now is a good time to just take a step back and have a look at what we've done so far and see if you want to add any more details in any way, or add any extra definition and make any areas darker. Once you're happy with the bird house, then we can move on to the flowers. 9. Painting the Flowers: Part 1: Now again, start painting the flowers. For this, you'll basically need a pink or a red for the petals, unless you go for another color, which is absolutely fine, a green for the leaves, and a brown for the branches. I used Indian red for the petals. I mixed up my own green for the leaves using Winsor Blue, Winsor Lemon, and Scarlett Lake. I used burnt umber with a touch of the blue to make it darker for the brown branches. I used a Size 4 brush for the larger areas like the bigger petals and the leaves, a Size 0 for the branches, and a Size 3/0 for the finer details. I'm going to start with the petals. For this, I want a pretty diluted pinky red, so I'm using my Indian Red and I'm going to test this out first to make sure it's the right color and [inaudible] enough for the first layer because we can build this up as we go along. I'm starting by filling in all of the petals with this diluted mix, going over the pencil lines. We're going to be defining these later on as we build up the color. Then I'm going to add a bit of a darker paint around the edges so it bleeds in softly. We can paint all of the apron flowers and all of the buds like this. Leaves, I use little triangles. We draw the base for each flower because we'll paint those green a bit later on 10. Painting the Flowers: Part 2: Now, we've painted onto the flowers, we can mix up our green. If you're mixing this from your primary colors, start with your blue and your yellow to make your green and then add in a touch of red to neutralize and make it more realistic. But remember, you only need a very small amount. If you want to learn more about mixing greens, then you can check out one of my earlier classes, which is devoted to the topic if you haven't seen it already. Once you're happy with the green you've mixed up, add a fairly diluted mix of this to the leaves as the base layer. When it starts to wet, you can add a little of dark mix to the bottom of leaves and a little around some of the edges so that it blends in. We'll wait for those to dry and then add in some veins a bit later on. Next, we can use the same mix of green to paint the base of those flowers, so those little triangles. I'm just using a clean paper towel over this so I can rest my hand on this so I don't smudge any of the paint. Make sure the paint underneath is pretty dry before you do this. Let's get back to our petals and our red paint now. I'm using my smallest size zero brush now, as we're going to add in the details and define it to these petals. To do this, I'm painting along these pencil lines and darkening up these side petals. Then just cleaning the pigment from my brush, taking the water out so it's pretty much dry and then blending that in. I'm also painting some faint lines on the bottom of the front petal going upwards as a bit of shadow and texture. These details are really subtle and delicate. You can also make these back petals a little darker too to distinguish them from the rest. Do the same for each of these buds, so add a little paint along that pencil line that divides the two petals to distinguish the two. Make sure you keep this very subtle just enough to separate the two, but don't make it too dark. Just keep working on all the flowers, building up the color, distinguishing each petal from the others, and adding in some subtle details and texture with those fine lines. Once you're happy with your flowers, let's get back to our leaves which should have dried by now and add in some details there. Again, with my finest 3-0 brush, I'm going to keep these details quite subtle. I'm going to paint a line down the center of each leaf and then paint the veins in. I'm going to use the same mix, add a bit of color to these little green base at the base of each flower. 11. Painting the Flowers: Part 3: Next let's paint the branches in. So for this we want to mix up a fairly dark brown, so I'm using my band amber with my blue and that blue will make it nice and dark. Just make sure you don't overdo as we do want it turning into a dull gray color. Now we can just paint in all of these branches. I'm using my size area for this so I have a good amount of control. We want the branches to be quite thin and neat. Now we have finished the flowers we can paint in this pod that holds up the bird house. For this, we want a brown that is fairly similar to the width of the house. We want to make this look fairly cylindrical, so try and make the sides darker and imagine a bit of a highlight just off center on the right side where it's much lighter. We can now say add some more darker round at the top directly underneath the bird house which will be shadow. Now that part is finished, let's move on to the bird. 12. Painting the Bird: Part 1: Lastly, we'll be painting the bird on top of the roof. For the pallete, we will need a yellow for the belly. I use Winsor lemon again for this. I also used Winsor blue and scarlett lake mix up a purple to make the yellow slightly darker for some texture. You need a blue and a green for the hair. I use both Winsor blue and indigo for the hair and for the grain. I used to mix a Winsor blue and Winsor lemon. Finally, you need a black for the eye, the beak and the fate. You can mix this up yourself or use the premix black. I used ivory blank. I used a size four brush for the larger areas and a size 0 and 3/0 for the finer details, like the strokes of the hair, the eye, the beak, and the fate. Let's start by neatening up our drawing of our bird before we start painting. So define the beak and eye and the edge of the hair that runs along the face. Just make sure this is all clearly defined and that will make it so much easier to paint. We're not going to go into too much detail. We want to keep it fairly simple. Draw in these lines on the wing. Now let's start painting. So we're going to start with wet on wet. So make sure your water is clean and then just cover the belly area with water. You want to make sure you don't have a pool of water on there. It just needs to be wet enough that the paint blades in. Then add a new yellow to stamping this around and letting it blade into the water, concentrating more around the edges. Now to make a slightly dark yellow for some extra texture, especially around these edges, you can mix up its complimentary color, which is purple. So I'm mixing my red and blue now. Then just add a tiny touch of this to a yellow. You don't need much at all and this will make it darker and just gently dab this around soap london. Now switching to my fine 3/0 brush to work on the edges. While you might see some of the add more and just adding some texture with some small strikes. Next, I'm going to make summer green for the back. Again, I'm going to add a little bit of water to the page first and then dough that green on as a first layer. Be careful around this area where it meets the yellow, as you don't want that bleeding in too much. Next I'm going to use my blue on my size 0 brush to paint these lines in at the top of the wings. You can run this blue all the way down to the bottom as well. Now using my fine 3/0 brush, I'm going to add some more definition and color this wing, hereby adding a bit more color to the edge of each of these lines. Making sure to leave out white line as a highlight between each blue line. I'm using the same blue for the top of the head, keeping this quite subtle and using gentle small brush strikes at gradually gets darker towards the top of the head. Now I'm going to start using my indigo, which is much darker for the very top of the head. Using the same strikes. Next let's work on the eye. So I'm using my ivory black for the eyebrow and I'm going to leave a touch of white in there for reflection. 13. Painting the Bird: Part 2: Now going back to my indigo, still using my smallest brush, my three zero. I'm going to paint the blue hairs around the eyes using tiny strokes, leaving a thin white gap around the eyes so it stands out because the indigo is so dark, I don't want it to blend in with the black of the eye. Then around the eye, I'm just going to paint tiny, tiny strokes of hair. Now we can work on the hair around the neck area, curving down from the back in a semicircle and back up towards the back of the head. Then at the base of the neck here, you can paint over the yellow slightly so you can see the hairs and carry on towards the back of the neck, overlapping the green area and then fill in the back of the neck. Then add in some lighter fainter strikes around the edge here on the cheek as extra little hairs. Now let's move on to the beak. We want a gray for this, so you can either mix up one yourself or use a diluted black. I'm going to use my diluted ivory black for convenience. Now we want to add some more detail to the green area on the back. Start at the edge where it overlaps yellow and paint in the fine strokes of hair. Do the same on the back edge. You can use a little bit of water to blend this into the middle now. Continue building on this, adding the small strokes which will give it more depth and texture. Now we want to paint the underneath of the wing with the indigo, or whichever dark blue you're using. You can add some more detail to the wing with this more concentrated blue, which will give it some contrast against the color we've already got there. Now I can move onto the feet, which we want to paint a pale gray to start with. Then you can ask some thin gray black lines on them. Now we just want to stand back and see where we want to add any more details or any more color, so I'm going to add a bit more definition around the beak, and add some more texture into the green hairs here. Once you're happy with your bird and everything is dry, now is the time to grab your eraser and start gently removing any pencil lines that are left. That is our bird house complete. I think we're done too if you've made it all the way through this class and have painted along with me. Please do upload your paintings in the project gallery. I'd really love to see them. I'll be grateful if you could leave me a review to let me know what you thought of the class. Stick around for some final thoughts in the next and final video. 14. Final Thoughts: Firstly, thank you so much for taking this class, and congratulations for completing it. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the class, I'm always looking for ways to improve in the way I put these classes together, and how I enter them. What did you think the pace of the class? Were the palettes and supplies listed at the beginning of each section helpful for you? Did you take the wood class before you took this one? What did you think of having an in depth practice class, like that separate to this project class? Just some questions for you to consider. I'll be grateful if you could leave me a review for the class, it's so encouraging for me to read them and it's useful for other students to see as well. If you have any ideas for ways I can improve the class or for some future classes, if you write a message in the discussions board, I can respond on there. I hope you'll upload your paintings in the project gallery for me to see, and if you're on Instagram, you can tag me on there too. Finally, thank you again for supporting me as a teacher on Skillshare, and I'll see you again soon.