Drawing & Painting Made Easy: How to Draw & Paint a Leaf in Watercolor

1. Welcome!: Let's learn how to draw and paint a leaf in watercolor. I'm Nicholas Winton Bell. I'm a self-taught artist for many years now and are also some art on Redbubble as art prints and on various products which you can find at what Endo ahd dot rate bubble.com. I'm also a teacher here on Skillshare. I believe in creating art without boundaries. Almost everything around me inspires me to create. But most of all nature, this gloss, I will show you step-by-step how to draw and paint a leaf in watercolors. We will start off by drawing our leaf. They analyze the reference photo and practice various binding techniques before we start to bind our leaf in watercolors. This class is suitable for the beginner and intermediate artist. 2. Supplies: For this class, you will need a piece of watercolor paper with a thickness of 300 GSM. Painful to draw your image width and some watercolor paints. I'm going to use a number six and thin round watercolor brush, clean water pipette tau and white gel pen. I've uploaded the reference photo of leaf in the reference section of this clause. Please download it. We are going to refer back to eat on a regular basis. See you in the next lesson. 3. Drawing the leaf: I've printed out the reference photo of a leaf. As you can see, it's almost an oval shape with a pointy tip. Just keep in mind when you start to draw your leaf. Don't just do straight around lines. Might, should give your paints a little bit inward and outward, as you can see on the reference image. Just to make for a more natural leaf shape. I'm putting my image just above my pipette so that I can refer back to it. Whenever I need to. Start to draw our leaf shape. I will start with the point depth-first and curve my pain cell shapes inward and outward according to our reference. Following the shape of a leaf, keeping a free flowing motion. Continuing around the bottom and belly of our leaf. Connect the pencil line to the top part of our leaf. Making a curvy line to give some movement and character. You can make your leaf shape and size you want. This is merely a tip as to go about drawing new leaf. We are dealing with nitrogen and nothing in nature is perfect. 4. Painting techniques: Before we start painting our leaf, I would first like to go over some painting techniques with you. We're going to use various binding techniques when we are painting our leaf. We are going to use the waiting week technique, weight onto dry lifting technique to accentuate the highlights here that you can see on the leaf. We're going to do some adding of clean water to bind, to collide these nice blooming effects. We're going to use some splatter to add more naturally fit to the leaf. And we are going to use a white gel pen for the white spots on our leaf. First we are going to practice the wet in wet technique with the pipette. Then drop some weight paint on the wet area on the pipette. We're going to start out binding with the weekend week technique, painting the body of our leaf first. With the wet on dry technique. We are going to use this when we start to paint the dark area on our leaf, everything else on our leaf will be dry. We will take up with paint and start to paint this dark spot on the leaf. I will demonstrate this quickly, die quick back and paint this on the blank area that has already dried. We're going to use the lifting technique to create these nice illuminated areas are now leaf. To make those areas a bit lighter, we are going to lift some point with a clean, damp brush. Brush gently over the areas that you wish to light it. It's a back-and-forth motion. Do not screw up at your pipette. Remember to clean your brush regularly between lifting. Be gentle, you don't want to damage the fibers off your pipette. We're going to create watercolor blooms on a binding by dropping in droplets of clean water with our brush. The clean water will push the paint the side, creating the spout blotchy areas. E.g. here is a weak binding. Dyes your clean brush and water and touch the brush to some spots on the wet area to create some blooms. Use a toothbrush for the splatter effect. Dip it in paint and start flicking it over your binding to get some nice splatter effects. Remember to practice first on a scrap piece of paper before you start on your binding. Use a white gel pen to create the white markings on your leaf. 5. Wet on wet, painting the first layer of our leaf: Type your watercolor paper down to your surface. This will prevent the paper from buckling and from moving around while spine delayed start by wetting the paper first. We are going to use the wet on wet technique. So take your watercolor brush, dip it in some clean water and started within the leaf shape on your paper. Mix up some yellow pine with a Dutch off Brown. The brown will saturate the yellow a bit and make for a lovely yellow brownish color. Start deploying the bind to the whole area of your leaf. This is our first layer. Take some more yellow paint, just darken the mixture slightly with more paint and less water and stored by dabbing the paint onto your leaf with your brush. This will also create a lovely texture on your leaf. Okay? I can look at the reference file. Notice the green areas on the leaf. To imitate that, we are going to take sap green, add a tiny bit of water and stored by dabbing the green pipe onto our leaf. Whilst the find the store wheat, we are going to darken some of the areas on our leaf. Mixed up a more concentrated mixture of your yellow pine, but adding more paint and less water due to sign with your green paint as well. Just stay k not to paint over the highlighted areas that you can see on the reference photo when you paint job. Okay. 6. Wet on wet, painting the second layer of our leaf: Our first layer of paint is now dry. We can now start to find the brown areas on our leaf. We are still going to use the week in Week technique. Genki reweight your leaf by using a clean brush and water, taking care not to disturb the paint layers underneath. Look at the reference photo. Notice the brown areas on the leaf. Mix up a mixture of brown paint on your palette and start applying it on the dot part of the leaf. I had some brown areas to the bottom part of the leaf as well. Darken the brown mixture of paint by adding more paint and less water. Apply a second layer to the top part of the leaf whilst the bind, install weight, remember to dab the paint onto your painting. This will create a nice texturize effect. When you look at the reference photo, you will notice some spots in the brown areas on the top part of the leaf. We will imitate this by dropping in some clean water without brush on the brown areas where you would like to create this watercolor bloom effect. Take a clean brush with water and touch the tip of the brush to your pipette. The water droplet will push the paint the side, hiding this nice blooming effect. Okay. 7. Wet on wet, painting the third layer of our leaf: Let's work on the bottom part of the leaf, intensifying the yellows, greens, and browns. Add more paint and less water to your mixture on your palate to create a darker consistency. Again, tie keen not to paint over the highlighted areas. 8. Wet on dry, painting the first layer: We are now going to apply the wet on dry technique. Before we start to paint, we can soften the sharp edges on our leaf with clean water and damp brush. Mixing mixture of rate bind with a touch of blue on your palette and deployed all the red areas on your leaf according to the reference photo. Mix, a darker mixture of red, blue, and a touch of black paint to create the dark spots on your leaf and painted around the red area. 9. Wet on dry, painting the second layer: Darken the mixtures and deploy a second coat on the rate and dark areas. 10. Applying the lifting technique: Let's do some lifting. Take a clean damp brush and start lifting the paint off the leaf by Genki, brushing the brush over the areas where you would like to lighten the pint to imitate the highlighted effects as on the reference photo. Remember to refer back to the reference photo for guidance. Be gentle and Tycho time. Do not scrap it. The pipette, we don't want to damage the fibers. Remember to clean your brush regulatory in-between lifting. Otherwise, it will just smudge the paint that you have lifted back onto your paper. Okay. Use the lifting technique to write the steam off the leaf as well. Okay. 11. Painting the veins on our leaf: We are now going to paint the veins on our leaf by mixing a dark brown, taking a brush that comes to a fine point while skillfully binding the veins on our leaf more or less way it's indicated on the reference photo. Find the faint shadow along the stem of the leaf as well. Okay. 12. Painting the shadows of our leaf: It's now time to paint the shadow areas of leaf. Take a look at your reference photo and not with the Shadows lie next to your leaf. To paint dark shadows, we are going to mix a shade of brown and darken it a bit with black, dark and the tip of the leaf with this mixture as well. 13. Lighten the darker areas on your leaf: Light and the dark areas on your leaf. By applying the lifting technique. 14. Applying paint splatter to our leaf: Let's split this some paint onto our leaf with a toothbrush. This will add more natural effect to our final piece, Mosque of the art, areas of the leaf with pipette to protect it from any splatters. Best way to do this is to treasure leaf and to cut the leaf shape out, leaving you with the H's that you can drive over your leaf binding, leaving the leaf area exposed. Mixed brown and black to create a dark mixture of pint, make sure that bind mixture is not too watery. Depth the toothbrush in the mixture of paint and start to splattered paint over your painting. 15. Applying white gel pen: Let's add the white spots with white gel paint on our BCE. Refer back to the reference photo to draw it in the correct spot. 16. Masking tape removal: Let's peel off the masking tape. Be careful not to rip your pipette. Take it slowly and be gentle. 17. Recap: Let's recap what we've learned in this class. We've learned how to draw our link. We've also learned how to analyse our reference photo before we start to paint our leaf, we've learned and apply it and practiced various painting techniques. We started with the wet in wet technique for the body of our leaf. Deeply hated some watercolor blooms. In the width area on the top part of the leaf. We've learned how to use the wet on dry technique to create the dark areas on our leaf and lifted some bind degree hide these lovely highlighted areas on our leaf. We've also learned how to use mixed media. In this instance, a white gel pen. You can hide these lovely watch sports. We've done the splatter technique to create a more natural effect on our leaf. And we've learned how to apply the shadows to our leaf to make the leaf stand out and to create a more 3D effect. 18. Thank you!: We've now reached the end of this class. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I did. Please don't forget to upload your class project. In the class project section of this class. I would love to see what you create. Leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. If you've got any questions, feel free to ask. I'm here to answer them and please make sure to praise the Follow button. On top of this video says you can get notified when I post a new class. Thank you for participating. I really do appreciate you guys a lot. Your participation and support helps me to create more of these Skillshare classes that you enjoy. Until next time. See you in the next class.