Easy Abstract Landscapes in Watercolor for Beginners

1. Welcome!: Welcome. I'm so glad that you're joining me for this course because you are going to learn to make some pretty incredible landscapes out of watercolor and just your favorite paper. You can do this in your notebook. You can do this on really nice watercolor paper. You can do it, it really as small as you want or as large as you want. So just have fun. And remember, we're going to learn some really new techniques here that you probably will be using for a lifetime. This is my absolute favorite way to paint. I'm so excited to be teaching it to you today. And it's so much easier than you think you will get up and running on this kind of technique. So, so quickly, you'll be mixing up colors and just experimenting and just going with your imagination, which I love to encourage because what are we without the imagination? So in any case, I love this technique because it is so simple and it is not really thought out. It just kind of go with the flow. It's very organic and you use what you have. That my friend is like the essence of watercolor. It's not making it that hard. It's just making it natural and something that just comes from your imagination. Now, even if you don't have a great big imagination, you can still do this because literally things will appear before your very eyes. And I'm going to show you how to get there. I hope you come in and take the class with me. We're gonna do a few different kinds of these. And I think you're gonna be really happy with the result. So I'm really excited to get started. Let's go. 2. Materials and Supplies : So for this course, it's going to be pretty simple. You don't need a lot of fancy things. I just love a flat brush around brush and a plastic card. If you have a palette knife that'll work too, you're going to need some to paint and some really nice paper. Now, you can use your watercolor notebook. You can use a £140 paper. But I also recommend if you're gonna do what I want, a heavier paper, so I usually use £300. This is actually a block of paper that I have, and it is by Paul Rubens, so it's not really that expensive. I think it's really great quality paper, it's a 100% cotton. So always try and use a 100% cotton for these if you can. But again, if you just have your watercolor notebook or your sketchbook, that's fine too for right now, just use what you have. You're gonna get a feel for how much water you can actually use on these things. And versus the paper, I find that if the paper is not a 100% cotton, it doesn't really like the water can bounce off of it a little bit or it can warp a little bit more. But again, that has to do with the kind of paper you choose. The price of the paper sometimes does reflected and what the paper is made of. At the end of the day, just use what you have at first because you're just getting used to things. And you're going to find that you're going to have some favorites and some not-so-great favorites. I even recommend getting a paper sample pack from a company that specializes in watercolor papers or going to your local art store and seeing if they have a paper pack so you can try out different things. Or you can also buy smaller versions of paper, like maybe paper cards or things like that that you can just experiment with just to get a feel for what papers are like. I also recommend if you are in an art class, maybe your art teacher will put together some sample cards for you to use and that will be really helpful in sampling out different papers. If you find that you really want me to talk about paper further, I can always do that on another video. Just let me know and it'll be a suggestion that I will definitely keep in mind. As far as paints to paints are going to work the best for this. Pans are a little hard because you've gotta get parts of the paint onto the surface. So if you're just using a brush, you can do it with a brush, but it works better if you have some depth of color and pans are going to be a little more difficult to get the depth of color. Not that you can't do it, you can, but it's much easier to YouTube's. And also the palette knife or the plastic card is going to be essential because the more rough it is as far as not being a specific paintbrush, then the easier it will be just a smear that paint right on the paper and see what you get after that. You'll also want to use a spray, water brush was really, really handy. Two glasses of water. And maybe even see what colors you feel like using. I suggest just starting with one color at first. For this, you don't need a big variety of colors. But if you want to choose, maybe a blue is really, really nice and each shade that you want, and perhaps we'll go with a yellow down the road or a green just to kind of shake it up a little bit. But you don't need a lot. Just start easy and just remember, you're just going to get in there and have fun. If you want to tape your paper down, you are welcomed to. That is just done with painter's tape. Or you can use like craft tape or something. This is me just establishing a border on mine because I wanted to use a really big sheet of paper and break it up into blocks in order to paint this. But you don't really have to do it that way. You can use little paper cards and you feel free to like not tape them down if you feel really comfortable with it. But again, the 300 GM paperweight is better if you're not going to tape it down. A block is always great because blocks obviously don't warp. They stay put. But I also take the border down just as a preference for things like this because we're going to use a lot of water, it's going to bleed. And it's kinda nice to control. Have a little bit of control over where your paint is going to go. All right guys, let's get in and get started. 3. Demo 1: Painting Abstract Watercolor Landscapes: Sheets. So for our first sample, we're going to be painting in an abstract landscape that it's a really simple, just one color and choose one color, a brush, and a plastic card. And that's pretty much all you need with some water. You can either do this on your watercolor paper or you can tape some sections out on your larger pieces of watercolor paper. It is up to you. First, we're gonna take a plastic card and just kinda get it wet. Now this can be a palette knife, a plastic card, or your paintbrush, but I'm just adding a little bit of water to the paper with my paintbrush right now, just so that I can kind of the surface started. Now if you notice, I'm just painting one line across in order to get this effect and just doing the top wet, the rest is gonna be dry. And that is so that we can control where the paint goes. I'm using a decent amount of water, but just to get a nice gloss and I'm rubbing it in really, really well without fraying the paper. Then I'm taking the card and getting some paint. This is to paint watercolor. And now I'm just going to press the card onto the paper. Now remember it's slightly wet, right? It's not sopping wet. And you can tell because it's traveling but not too much. If your paint is traveling too much and you don't like it, then you just have to let it dry a little bit. I used it damp. You can still see the sheen but it's not sopping. And I'm staying pretty close to that line where I didn't have it wet. Now I added a little drop of water so that now I can start blending it out a little bit and playing with it. Now remember there's no right or wrong way to do this. You're just gonna go with the flow. Just start making some marks, either horizontally or vertically. Like I'm doing whatever it is that you feel like doing with it. Just kinda play. As you play, you're going to get a feel for what actually works and how things look. Now to me, I'm seeing trees. I'm seeing kind of a streaky sky. I don't wanna go too crazy in the sky, so I'm leaving a lot of white in there. And I dipped my flat brush in some water just to blend things out. And I'm gonna go ahead and get really brave and just blend this up to see what happens with it. If you notice, the paint didn't entirely blend together because it wasn't overly wet, but there is some dampness on my flat brush. Now I'm just dabbing through. If you notice that this is the area where I did not make it wet and the reason why is because I didn't want everything to bleed in together. I wanted to have a little more control so that I could actually bring the paint down. Then I can always water like this. If I add water, I have the ability to blend out and kinda get different variations of color. Now, some of this, I'm leaving some whitespace. And some of it, I'm not, I'm just doing some just kinda playing with some really, really light shades of the same color. And that's kinda why I encourage you to do just one color at first because this is like a first layer for me right now. And it's kinda fun to not have to worry about how colors are mixing together or not. So right now I'm just taking a little cloth and I'm just going around as things are drying, I'm letting the first base layer just kinda dry up because if I added more paint to this, it wouldn't necessarily get darker. Sometimes it can just kind of cake up and not really do anything. If you're like that base layer is already wet. If I just add more water to it, it could just bleed out. And I like what I'm getting here. Now. I'm using the paper towel to remove some of the paint in the sky. This is a technique I do often when I want to just have some variety in the sky if it didn't get streaky enough. Or I want to control how much whitespace maybe even create some depth of color where just by removing some colored areas. And that really helps me get that dimension, this different dimensions within the paintings. I'm taking the plastic card, again, adding some more concentrated paint in the same color. And I'm going to try and enhance some of these areas where the color is actually pretty dark already. But I want to start working in some shapes and seeing what I come up with. Maybe this is going to be a building, maybe this is gonna be trees. What do you see in that at this point? That's really what we're striving for you to see as an artist, as you're going through this and you're doing yours, what did it do? Depending on the pressure that you used, the paint that you use, how much water and the paper. Depending on your materials really, they're going to shape differently. So this is the time when you get to play and just have fun. Now remember, if at anytime you don't like it, you can always take a paper towel and literally just kinda blotted out or what your paintbrush like I just did and blend a little bit more. I'm looking for texture. I think that texture is amazing and watercolor, and it's one of the reasons why I love watercolor, because they can literally just kinda play with the water, add a little more paint, and then go back in and remove some with a paper towel if I wanted to. That to me is just like it's organic. It's amazing and it's so much fun to do. So I'm taking the flat brush. Again. It's kind of tacky damp. It's not super, super wet. This is a flat brush from Princeton. It's one of my favorite from the Elite Series because it doesn't hold too much water and it's great for a more precise things like this. I'm actually smearing the color on just to see what I get. And I'm seeing some like building shapes, like maybe a house and some trees. Or maybe something a little more industrial. It could even be mountains, the startups mountains, but definitely a structure there. And I'm just bringing some pieces up playing with the fact that the flat brushes making these nice little lines. And that's kinda giving me a little more structure in the painting. But like I said, this is, I did not use anything to get this picture. I literally I'm just putting paint down and I'm going with it. Maybe stand back from it if you don't see anything yet or add a little more paint, you can always start again. So don't be afraid of what you're doing here. I think the big thing that we wrestle with as artists, especially when we're experimenting, is the fear of messing it up or not liking what you get. But you're going to have a lot of times that you're not going to like what you get before you like what you get. So just go with the flow and just play. That's what I want you to do right now. So in this part we're establishing the foreground or the lower part of the drawing. The painting now has a structure of top that's abstract and some of a C and an O paintings, buildings or maybe structure, right? And trees. But the bottom part is not yet developed. Maybe it's going to be water. Maybe you're looking at this and it looks like a reflective surface or maybe you're looking at it and it looks like ground. Remember we're doing one color here, so the blue doesn't necessarily mean it's water, but I'm just experimenting again with the shapes. Now you'll notice that I am playing with depth of color. So as the color is more on the horizon line, It's deeper as it goes up towards the top of the painting. It's a lighter. As it comes more forward, it's getting slightly lighter. I didn't really worry about mixing it with water. You could even mix your foreground, your real foreground with more water and see what that looks like. But I'm just playing with my imagination and just doing what feels right. It's really hard to, to tell you what's right and wrong in an abstract because there is no right and wrong. There's only what you see as an artist. And I think when you really embrace that fact, you'll realize that whether somebody likes a painting or not, that's really subjective. It has to do with the subject and how they feel about it. But in any case, that is my abstract for the first one, I hope you guys enjoyed it. It's pretty cool and I think we did a good job. I can't wait to see what you guys do next. So before we go into the next one, should give this a try and leave me a sample in the comments so that I can see how you did. I'm excited to see it. 4. Demo 2: Painting Abstract Watercolor Landscapes: So how did you do, for example number two, we're going to just start like we did on example number one, wedding the top with our flat brush. Just a little bit of water here, but as you can see, I kinda tinted it so that you can see how much water I was putting on. It's just a nice glaze and I let it sit for a minute. I'm not too wet to dry. I'm adding a little bit of paint with my flat brush instead of the card this time. And I'm just kinda deciding where I want to put the paint in. Now this is entirely up to you. You can do my example or you can just choose on your own, but a good place to start the horizon line. Because right on the horizon line is kinda like where you can establish the depth of color. It makes the most sense. Probably depending on how you are with your color or what color you chose. Probably it's going to be the strongest in the beginning, like This is. So I'm just gonna go ahead and go straight across and just establish some kind of horizon line is a good start. You can start with this guy, you could start with below. You can start with the foreground, whatever you want to do. But for this one, I'm just going to start with the horizon again. It's really simple way to start. I feel like I get my inspiration from that point. Now in the last one we started up, this one I'm going to start down and I'm just kinda playing here. This is wet on dry. If you noticed, I had What the top and not the bottom on this one. This is wet on dry. Now the reason why I'm showing you this is because you're going to see I have a lot more control in mixing the colors. This is just adding a little bit of yellow to my blue and it makes this amazing green. I love to mix my own colors. It's really, really fun. As I add a little more blue, it makes a little more teal blue as it mixes with the green or the yellow. It just kind of gives me a nice range of colors. So I'm just kinda playing here. I'm playing with the idea of I know nothing. Not looking for anything. I know nothing. I'm hoping it turns out. And I'm feeling one with nature in a way, right? Because you've got the greens and the yellows and the blues. And this could just be what the Earth looks like underneath. It could be a foreground, it could be anything. But remember it's abstract, so don't worry about it. We're going to see what it turns out to be later. There's never a picture in my mind when I do these, I just kind of look in play and then I'm like, Oh, I got an idea, and then we start shaping it. So this is just what it is right now. I mean, what does it look like to you? It could look like blobs of color, I don't know, but to me, it definitely looks grounded and earthy and like lush spring is happening, which is happening right now where I am. And that just inspires me. It's just a great thing. So now I'm taking the brush and adding more blue, same blue. And I'm kinda trying to decide what I'm gonna do up the top right. Probably landscape, I would say since this is a landscape tutorial, will it be more abstract? Well, this is entirely up to you for this example. I think I'm gonna go ahead and shape in some mountains. And I'm just taking this side of the flat brush and I'm just kinda shaping out what I think would the mountain. I shook the brush just a little bit so that I could get like a little bit of a drag. And now I'm just kinda getting some of the more diluted color and adding it in, trying to decide where I'm going to put it. You can't really do it wrong. It's just really up to the artist as to what you want these mountains to look like and how you want to add texture. I'm using the side of the brush in a fan shape to add texture. And I'm trying not to be perfect with it. I'm trying to kind of blop it on a little bit in some areas so that it's lighter and darker. And again, remember that top of the paper had dried a lot even though I dampened it. But if it were all the way wet, this would not leave whitespace. It would bleed in. To get whitespace. You went to leave those areas dry and then just paint around them. If you don't care about the whitespace or you want to lift the color to get whitespace, you can do wet on wet. I've just dampened the paper because I like the paper is slightly damped and then dry. It just has a better effect for me than bone dry paper. I like to work somewhere in-between. That is just my preference. I would highly recommend that you try both. Now I'm adding more layers of color as the background dries because it's a very light wash. I'm just picking up some more of that tube paint fresh out of the tube. And I'm my paintbrush is very, very dry at this point. It's just got a little bit of water still left in it. It's not a highly absorbent. Paintbrush. I'm using it like I would if I were using a plastic card or a palette knife. I'm just using the shape of the actual flat brush to establish some additional shapes. I'm gonna do some lines up, some lines across and just kinda playing and see what I end up with here, trying to sporadically do them if I can. I tend to like paint. I don't know. For some reason I tend to try and paint evenly. It's just not a good idea because you just don't want everything to look the same. Now we're going to let it dry just a bit and see what we're gonna do next. Maybe with a round brush, I would say let's pick up the round brush and see if we can turn those stubs into something, maybe trees. That's what I would think. Teresa be nice to anything. There are so many ways to lay in trees. I'm using a very thin, round brush and I'm just kinda roughly taking some paint and forming some pretty basic Christmas tree kind of looking things. This is a lot less abstract than normally, but, um, it's kinda like somewhere in-between, right? Because you look at it and you definitely know those are trees. And now you're starting to see there's a horizon line, there's a mountain, there's there's some specific things. What's going on underneath that's up to you. It could be the section of the Earth. It could be the reflection. We could actually paint some reflections in there if you wanted to. But I just love how it looks so far. I'm actually playing right now. Remember there's blue lines for the trees. So I took the yellow paint and I'm now making the trees with the yellow paint just because I think it looks really cool and I know that it's going to mix together and make this yellowy green luck. And that kinda goes with the whole theme. So basically remember I'm still just using to paint colors. I'm using a blue color and I'm using a yellow color. And as I mix them together, it makes this really amazing green and all the shades in between. So you don't need a lot of pink colors in order to do these abstracts. A lot of times in fact, especially when you're just getting started, I don't recommend that you use more than three pink colors because three painkillers will definitely mix to give you such a huge range that you literally can't control yourself. You will be out of your depth. So, so quickly with all the shades of three colors can make. So be really careful with that. The limit is, it's great to have convenience colors in your palette, but you really don't need them. You just need three amazing shades that you love to work with and that can really take you everywhere. One day. If you want to talk about paints and colors, then certainly just asked me and I will give you some information about how I mix my colors and how I do granulation and all those crazy fun things. And I really have a great time with color. I love using it, but I still pretty much stick to the same three. The rest that I use are just convenience colors just when I want to live in something up or play a little bit and just get out of my comfort zone. Right now I'm just basically taking a nice It's a Neptune round brush that holds a decent amount of water. It's not overly saturated. But I love how this just mixes color on paper. This is a technique that a lot of artists use more advanced stages where they mix color on paper. That happened as a result of the blue being there first and then taking a second color and mixing it together as I went along and then adding little more of one or the other just based on my eye, that's mixing on paper. And it's pretty cool. It's a fun thing so you'll learn something else here today. Now remember in your shape of your trees, they can be any kind of trees. I'm just doing these trees because I don't know. I guess I just kinda felt that way at the time. But you can do round trees, you can do bare trees, you can do what? Ever you want, bushes, flowers, whatever makes you happy. I suggest that you try it and do it or do the trees that I'm doing. If that makes you happy and you like it and it's easy and you want to practice these trees than Awesome. Now remember when you start to layer paint over paint, it will mix together. So if you want to get the result that I'm getting, I'm not using this same combination of those two colors. I noticed on one of them, I mixed more yellow. I used the yellow a little bit brighter. Another one, I mixed a combination of the blue and yellow and I mixed it on paper. And that's what's giving me these different colors in the trees. And then sometimes they go into the another tree and I actually add a little more. And that just helps me not have everything look the same. I think one of the things that we do with trees often in the beginning is we paint the trees with the same color. And that's what that second color is for. It's to add depth of color and it's to add variations like a little variety. Now just a little splash of color here, and we are finished with our second sample. I hope you guys enjoyed it and learned some things. And hopefully you will show me what you came up with soon. Happy painting. 5. Demo 3: Painting Abstract Watercolor Landscapes: So for our third sample, we are going to be using a flat brush and painting mountains with a moon. So the easiest way to paint a moon is just to load a really nice juicy flat brush and go in a circle. So let's just do it. Ready? Are you daring? Here we go. That's my easy way to do it. Adding a little bit of water and just do it a circle. It doesn't have to be a perfect circle because you can always go back in and kind of just shake it out like I'm doing this is wet on dry, meaning wet paint on a dry surface. I didn't not wet this because they didn't want the circle to just disintegrate. I'm using an indigo color. You can also use a Prussian for this. This is a beautiful, beautiful color to use for like moonscape and those kinds of landscapes. But this is, I just, I love doing this. It's really fun. I would just do a whole practice run of circles. If you really wanted to get good at them, you can shape these, not just for moons, but also use them for roses and flowers and petals and everything. So now I'm just using the flat brush again and it's kinda roughing in some mountain shapes. Now, I'm purposely leaving white-space because our mountains don't always just, they're not always one color. You want it to have different melting colors. You just want it to have action and activity. And in order to get that, you cannot just slap on one color. That's where it just becomes flat and lifeless. So if right away really quickly, you want to get depth and dimension. Leave as much white-space as you can and use different weights of color, right? So some of it is darker and then I wet the brush and I let it get a little lighter. And then I skipped spots and I use different angles on my brush in order to get different shades from my color. This is the beauty of painting with one color is you don't have to focus on what color should I paint next and where should it go? You're just leaving the light. And it's a great way to learn how to control your painting and control what your outcome will be. Because now you're literally doing layers. You're waiting for things to dry and you're seeing what that does. You're experimenting with some wet on wet paint on wet. You're experimenting with wet paint on dry. And now I'm just able to go back in and just kinda enhance certain parts of the painting just based on my eye and what I think it should look like. Now there's no right or wrong. There definitely is not. Remember, this is your painting. So you do it exactly the way you want to. You cannot do it wrong. You just just do it. Just do it, let it fly, let it go. Why not? Who's watching? Nobody's watching. You're just in here with me. Painting. We're just painting together. Alright, so now I'm doing the, the reflections. Now if you noticed, I didn't go through and paint water in. I just left to dry and just left the white of the paper. I'm just doing something really simple. I'm painting and painting some reflections. It's slightly lighter than the original. And my brush is very wet doing it very roughly. Because if you looked at reflections, they're not all one color, they're kind of spotty, right? It looks more natural fits body. If it were just perfect, it wouldn't look right. This is a good example. We want it to be spotty, we want it to have white through it because that would be the reflection of the light on the water. You have to leave all that stuff. Otherwise, it's going to look really flat and you're not gonna be that happy with it to get a more professional look, even though this is a beginner professional look. Just don't try to be perfect because the imperfect is the most interesting thing. Now I just took some water on my flat brush and I just basically wiped it around the bottom so that I could simulate water. And I think it worked out really good. I also took the exact same thing. And I just kinda went through and smeared it as a sky like a, an evening sky, more like a twilight. And it really did work. I was surprised. I thought maybe I wouldn't like it that much, but this is a great way to add in a sky after the fact. And a lot of times you'll think, how do I add in this guy before that, this is a great way to do it now. Alright guys. So that's our third sample. I hope you guys enjoyed this class and you had a good time with me. If you want more samples, happy to do those for you. Just leave me a comment and let me know that you enjoyed the class. Be sure to come and join me for another one here on Skillshare very, very soon and happy painting to you.