Effortless Watercolour Landscapes - In Three Simple Steps

1. Introduction: In today's class, we're going to make painting watercolor landscapes super achievable. By the end of today's class, you'll have created at least three amazing landscapes with a dreamy and effortless feel, everything from a seascape fruit to an urban scene, and all by using the same framework. This framework follows neatly the rule of trees, three simple steps, Tree different sizes of brush, and only three colors. Of course, you can expand on this. You can adapt it. You can simplify even more. But from this simple framework, you'll gain a huge amount of confidence and suddenly find yourself filling out your sketchbook with beautiful, effortless landscapes, which look masterful, but don't take a huge amount of stress to create. In fact, each of these landscapes takes less than 10 minutes. But I won't tell anyone if you don't. For the first landscape, I will break down every single little step from preparing our page through to each layer of wood color. In the next two, we'll go a little faster. Still, you'll be h to follow along. But I'll show you me making some mistakes and how I cope with it, and we'll see how changing our colors can change the mood. I'm known as Toby Sketch Loos. You can find over 30 of my classes now on Skillshare, including other beginner watercolor glasses like this. And you can find me across the Internet. I'd love to connect. So please have fun. Enjoy this class and share your project when you're done. 2. Supplies: So the first lesson is really simple. What supplies am I using. Now, don't take these as rules. These are what I'm using. And we'll see how this affects the process as we go forward. But if you don't have three different brushes, that's fine. It's the principle, the ideas that I'm using that are important, not the exact equipment or the exact colors. Here's all the supplies I'm using today. First thing we've got a Canson sketchbook is just an A five or half letter sized sketchbook. With some watercolor paper, and this is lightly textured cold pressed watercolor paper. Doesn't need to be a sketchbook. It could be any paper, and it could be bigger or smaller as well. I've got three brushes. This is a 1 " flat, a half inch flat, and a size three round. A couple of clips. We'll pop those on our sketchbook if we need to. I have just six colors today. A cobalt blue, a scarlet lake, organic for million. This is a hansa yellow medium. Then we have Indian red. We've got a burnt sienna, and we have Mon globe. Now, all of these colors are listed below. And what I just used was lots of long words for very specific colors in a specific brand. Really, what I suggest is blue, red, yellow, a nice sort of warm brown, a cooler brown, and something more neutral. And even that you don't need to be that specific. Just use whatever watercolors you have. That's what I'm using though. We then got little bits and pieces, got some kitchen roll, some masking tape, obviously a big thing of water. And lying off to one side, we'll use a bit of a pencil, just to give you some guidelines, some ideas for how we proceed. 3. Your project: Your project, should you choose to accept it, is to create your own dreamy landscape. You may wish to share the ones I'm doing, but in your style with your tools, on your paper. Or you might want to take these simple processes, adapt them, maybe simplify them, maybe add more colors, or use different brushes, and share with me what you create. I would love to see your project, say, please do. It's a huge and rewarding part of t, and, of, of participating on skill share. 4. Prepare your page: Next, we prepare our page. If you have some masking tape, then I think this is a really lovely touch, and we'll see at the end of our painting just how crisp and happy that makes our paintings appear. And like that, we're ready to prepare our page. So the preparation is really simple. What I want to do is make a little window. So forgive the noise of the masking tape. All I'm going to do is make myself a sort of rectangle in the middle of my page. Now, this isn't absolutely necessary, but what it does do is when we take off the masking tape at the end, it gives this really beautiful clean edge, and it just makes our watercolor jump out. If you are careful with your masking tape you at the edge down nice and sharply, don't push it too hard all the way around because what you want to feel to do is have a little corner that you can lift off at the end. And last one there. And that's what I'm going to work in. I'm going to work in this little sort of A six or quarter letter size window or portal. 5. Pencil marks: An optional stage, using a pencil to gently mark out our shapes. This does help us with envisioning our scene. If we don't have a clear idea in our head. I don't usually do it. So equally, if you want to be brave, and not use pencil, then go for it. So now is the sort of optional stage where I'm going to use a pencil just to mark out the shapes we're going for. And so we're going to have like a horizon line coming across our scene. Then we'll have a little sense of some rocks or some land. Make this little bolder. It's easier to see. But we don't want this to be too bold, though. So if you are using a pencil, because you've just marked in a few areas bd that you can see, but try and keep it nice and light. We don't want these pencil lines to show through. Here's a bit of our our land, and then we'll have something like a lighthouse just at the corner here. And that's it. As simple as that. These are the features which you're going to appear from our watercolor. 6. Layer one: And we are into the painting. The first layer is wet on wet. I'll show you what that means, but it is important to understand that it is fine, if not even totally desirable to fill our page with color at the beginning. When we fill our page with color, it needs to be light. So pay attention to when I'm talking about the amount of water that we're using, and just see how lightly the colors that we apply get applied onto my page. It's time now to paint. And this is where we'll want to just pop a little clip on our page or make sure page is secure somehow. It doesn't buckle and move around too much. I'm just going to pop two clips on this side. We've got three layers of paint, and we have three brushes. We're using the biggest brush first. Now, the specific colors here are really unimportant. What I will encourage you to do is start by just taking a bigger brush like my 1 " flat or a big round brush, pre wet the entire of that square. And that's right we are painting the entire under painting here. Then pick whatever colors you want for the sky. We could be sensible. We could have a sort of blue sky. Now look at how watery I'm making this paint. Pick up a little bit. And then plenty of water. Got really thin watery paint. And we can just pop that in. And cause it's wet already, all sort of move around a bit, it'll be nice and loose. Ignore any lines that you have at this stage. Now let's pick something else, perhaps less sensible. I'm going to use my Indian red, which is a sort of warm brown almost. It's a lovely color, and we're just going to add that in a few places. And this will let things move around. And last, let's add one other color. Let's just go the full spectrum of primary colors. We've had a blue. We've had a red. Let's add a little bit of yellow, just coming through in a few spots. Make sure that that all blends nicely. You've got some movement with the colors. We can even come in and just touch in little specific blobs of color, or even do some brave splashes, as well, if we want. We'll do a few of those in the yellow, as well. Just little touches. And keeping it really light. You can see how gentle and light everything is here. We can perhaps even just touch in with a damp brush. Just drying off the brush. It's damp, not wet. We can kind of touch in, move things around if we want, but keep that lovely, soft underpainting. And then pop the brush away and let it dry. 7. Layer two: Next, we move up a layer. Need to let that first layer dry completely, but with it dry, we'll suddenly find that we can apply still light and watery colors with a slightly smaller brush, and we end up with something much bolder, and the seam is starting to take shape. We want this page completely dry before we move on to the second layer. And so just make sure it's nice and dry. And then what you might notice, especially if you've got sort of cheaper paper or sketchbook paper like me, you might notice as a bit of buckling, so you can see here that the page is sort of slightly warped and buckled. Oh, not a problem, take your clips and just re sort of stretch it out, let it move and come to a more natural position. This is normal for it to happen. It's normal for watercolor paper to bend and move a bit as you start to paint, wet it, and then dry it. What we're going to do now, is start to create something of a second layer. And the key to water colors is, indeed layering. And what happens when you layer them is you start to increase the value. You don't need thick paint. In fact, the beauty of watercolors is how light and loose the paint is and how transparent it is. I use the same colors. Don't need to be complex. We use the same three colors. So I've got my blue, I've got my red, and let's just mix them together to make it kind of shadowy purple. Now, this shadowy purple, we can come in, and the page is dry now. Unlike before. It's not wet, It's dry. We can bring it along that little horizon line we've marked, and see how it feels almost neutral, but it's so much darker than the previous colors, and it's simply darker because we have lay it up. We still got very watery paint, but we have two layers reflecting that light back at us. I'm just going to bring this little shadow around. And what I'm doing is the slightly varying. I've got a little bit more blue in places, and then a little bit more of our then a little bit more blue. And just avoiding it becoming claggy or thick, leaving some gaps as well. And then even more blue in a few places. And then we can capture these yellows as reflection, so we get that yellow paint back. Bring that in. And just come in. Again, a wet brush, becomes a damp brush with a little touch of the tissue. Then we can gently scrub into these edges and just soften out so that our watercolor edges don't seem so harsh. Again, if we want a few little touches specific touches of the blue or specific touches of this purple mix. Even to make it nice and bright and happy. Maybe some specific touches of yellow. And look there, that was too thick, and that's because I didn't take care mixing in the palette first to naughty me. But there we go. We've softened it out. I'll just neaten up this Hrizon line just a touch. And we're almost there. What are we missing? We're missing, of course, our lighthouse. And just like before, our lighthouse is going to join up to everything else. What I will do is leave little gaps. Again, just like we've got little gaps, here, little gaps in my lighthouse. And I'm using the straight edge. It's a big brush. B I'm using the straight edge to create, to create a straight edge, effectively or no. And by doing that, we can actually make a really specific painting, even using a large brush, and that stops us overworking things. Overworking is often how things go a little wrong in watercolors. Like that, our second there is done. We can put our brush away, and we can let this dry off. 8. Layer three: Last but not least. In fact, maybe it's even the most important. We're using the tiniest brush to create the boldest marks. These bold marks are almost like drawing, but don't be tempted to overdo it. Less is more. You can always add more touches when you're finished, but you can't take them away. And can you believe it we're already on to our third step? And you guessed it, third step, another layer of color. This time using a really nice and small brush. Now, the issue with small brushes is when you pick up pigment, and if I just paint on my masking tape, it's really thick. It's bold. I can't do big areas without overworking it without it becoming messy. But as a third layer, when perhaps what we want to do is pick up bold paint, so let's pick up a bold purple again, that same mix as before. And then essentially draw details. Well, that's perfect. That's all we're going to do now is a few light and airy details. So we suddenly take our lighthouse and give it some little suggestions of detail. Again, we can vary that. I started with a mix of purple. Then we got this kind of bottom half of our lighthouse. This is going to have more of a red undertone. Just like before, I can take my brush, wet it, make it damp instead of wet. I can come in and just sort of soften some of these things I'm doing so that it doesn't become just lines. There's also this idea of a little bit of tone in there. Get rid of that blue just to make this feel a bit more varied. And like that, we can move gradually down. And it get a bit more blue into our mix that it feels different from the lighthouse. And I'm going to create these sort of cliffs. And bring out this feeling of a foreground, as well, we can even bring in another set of cliffs here. Into the foreground, we get thicker and thicker with these little suggestions of details, and then come in and just paint a slightly broader wash, again. Still remembering to keep little areas of white, little areas of light, little areas coming through from the previous work we've been doing. Into the foreground here, we'll get nice and bold. And it's sort of coming together, isn't it? Just with a few tiny touches. We can bravely just do little flicks as well. Here some little grass, maybe a little bush in the distance. Same here. Maybe as we come forward, we've got little rocks in the sea as well. And just allow yourself to use this really minimal palette. Remember, we've only used three colors for the entire of this sketch. Just allow yourself the freedom of using such a minimal palette. Over on the other side. We'll just add in some little suggestions of waves. As they come towards us, they get a little bowl, a little bigger. And in the distance, they're much more fine and difficult to see. Nothing wrong with a few yellow splashes in the sky. And even a touch of yellow maybe in these rocks. And just like that, I going to say this one is finished. So the last phase is to remove that tape. Now, I've got little edges hanging up, so I'm going to be able to gently lift it and peel it off. I'm going to do the same on this edge. It's nice and gently peel. Sometimes it gets a bit stuck. Don't yank it. What you can do if it's getting a bit stuck. You can at use a hair dryer. If you sort of hair dry it, it will lift a little more easily. Sometimes applying a little bit of water can help lift it as well. As long as you've got a little edge and you've not really pushed it down, Oh, and came my little finger nail struggling here, but the yours as your little edge, and you gently pull it away. You'll find yourself able to unveil your gorgeous landscape. Here's the last one, the moment of magic. And there it is. Look at that, as soon as you unpeel your masking tape, it becomes really quite something, doesn't it? Really beautiful. I've got a little pen here, so I like to initial under my art. And that is my scene. So simple taken only a few minutes of your day with simple steps. It allows you to use minimal palette and really create these beautiful, slightly abstract, loose color landscapes. 9. Windswept Forest: The first one done, it's time to jump straight into our second scene. I want to give you something a bit different. So in this scene, we're going to work all the way through it all in one video. Remember you cancel it and you can pause it, especially and when we dry it. Of course, we're going to need to pause the video. But also, I'm using different colors. I'm using a different feel, a different mood. So experiment with yours as well. Try something different and see what happens. Having worked gently through our first landscape, it seems a shame not to do another. So let that first one dry, and then come and we can prepare our page in the same way. And we can create maybe a slightly different scene. So I'm going to use my pencil again, and I'm going to create a sort of set of trees coming across and then we'll have a maybe a little building here. Then some more trees coming up and down like so, and maybe in the distance, we'll have a hill as well. See that really, quite remarkably simple shapes. Just sketch it in nice and lightly. I just making the shakes a little more obvious hopefully for the camera. Get these little trees bobbling up and down. And there we go. We can then move on to what we know is the first stage of our painting using our big brush. And we'll use different colors this time. I'm going to make this more moody. So here's some moon glow. This is like a sort of darker shadowy kind of pigment. So we're going to pop that in. Again, pre wetting that area, and then just dropping in that moon glow. And we can be a little more intense as well, if we want to be very gentle with the first one, because gentle is really important. But there's nothing wrong also with a little bit of intensity as long as it's understood that it's just got to be gentle, then we'll pop in some red. Something again a bit sort of abstract, isn't it? There's a little bit of red in there. Making some bold down at the bottom. And let's use our final color that we didn't use last time, a little bit of brown. In a few places, can go in the sky, can go in the in the building. It doesn't matter. This is an underpainting. Now here, you can see there's some big pools of water. If I just come in with a damp brush, so a damp brush is one which has been made wet and then dried off. Just a little bit. You can pull out that water, and it stops the watercolors moving too much, it allows it to dry much quicker. You might find that here, when I've pulled it out, I've lost some of that magic. So we can drop in a little bit more magic, a little bit more of that pigment, where it's still a bit wet. There we go. Now, don't overdo it. I think if I keep going too much longer, we'll end up with a very busy sky, which isn't what we're after. We're after a nice, interesting fluid feeling sky. So here's my last touch, a little bit of brown up in the top edges here, and we'll let that dry. And you can see we've dried nicely, and here is two useful learning points. Firstly, look, I didn't put the clips on and the pages survived. Now, with a lot of water, that could have been an issue, and I am going to put the clips on now to keep it flat. But clips and things are not absolutely necessary. You might want to experiment with not taping down your whole page, if that's what you like to do, or just trying fewer eclips, for example. The other thing is, you can see these little ruffles in the paint. Now that's where I had that pool of water, the I tried to get as much heart as I could. Because some of that pool is still there, when it dries, it creates these busy edges. For me, I quite like them. It's not a problem if there's only a few. They add a little bit of drama. But if you don't like them, it's important to be aware that learning to remove that water really is important. Anyway, let's jump on. So, as you know, we're using the half inch flat brush now, and we're painting everything sort of underneath. And I'm going to start at this edge here. We've got our little mountain, and we've got this nice layering effect coming down. We'll get this same brown over on this edge. And then I'm going to use a little bit of red coming down the building. And then our moon glow, a little bit of that. Again, being careful to get a nice and liquidy in our palette. And that can fill out the rest of our spaces. The page, this time is dry like before. But look how the paint is plenty wet enough. Things are moving together. I've got a few gaps where I'm leaving gaps. But mostly, we have a nice soft, gentle wash of color. And that's what we're after to build up the silhouette. And hopefully, this time, you can understand where we're heading. And we're going to let this dry, of course. And then we come back using our smallest brush, still those same lovely colors and a little bit more of a bold feel to them. So here. We've got these kind of ideas of trees, so we can just almost do little leaves in the sides of them, can we? As long as we're nice and quick, we can get the leaves done in a few of them, make our brush wet this time and pull that down. So we get these edges which then lead down and where it leads down to the bottom, we can suggest some little flicks coming up, which perhaps these little flicks of grass in the foreground. Perhaps some of them are the trees themselves, the trunks of the trees. Then I'm going to keep going along. We'll find some more trees in this light and airy fashion. Just all using my brown at the moment, and then come back, wet brush, soften it down, leaving these gaps, there's still plenty of gaps, leaving some gaps, beginning a more continuous feel coming down. And here, little trunks in the foreground, little trunks flicks across, whatever you feel like they are. That's what they are in a gentle abstract art like this. Here we could just do little touches in the background, little tiny touches, little flex to suggest there's some kind of texture without really having to do much. It's just a mountain in the end. So doesn't need a huge amount. And last but not least. We're going to have some fun with our building. So nice, bold red. And look at how because we are layering and we're being gentle underneath. We can make it really bold on top without the paint being really thick. I'm going to let that blend a little bit with the tree just on the side. Make that fairly neat on the bottom edge. We can even give a tiny shadow. So like just using the moon glow at the bottom of that red. Look, if we bring that along, get this shadow. And then underneath, I'll use a bit more of that moon glow. To suggest, maybe we've got a door, we've got some windows, we've got the edges, and maybe mixing that with the red. We have the colors of the walls. The key is just not to overdo it, not to be anything other than light and loose, little bit free, little bit sort of suggestive of details, not having to explain absolutely everything in our image, just leaving something, little touches to the imagination. And little touches of fun here, as well, Tiny bright touches. And now we come to that final touch of few splashes here and there. You don't have to enjoy this. I really enjoy this, but. You don't have to so you don't have to do this, but for me, it adds a lot of fun. Might even do a tiny bit more of this brown. And there we go. And you know what happens next? The magic moment. We find the edges, gently peel them back. Trying to keep up my mucky hands away from the clean paper, gently pulling each little layer back without ripping. And there you go. Another un sort of dreamy landscape. You can see a couple of edges here where the masking tape wasn't put down totally properly. And that's what happens sometimes, isn't it? But for me, this is a really fun beautiful sketch with a very different color scheme giving a really different feel. 10. Urban sunset: Last but not least another scene. Another mood, another feel. This video is going to be the same as the last one, but also diff different scene. So let's see what happens. Again, as we're going through this, just pause when you need to. You don't need to rush. You don't need to work at my speed if it's uncomfortable. So take your time. And with this one nice and dry, we can do, of course. Another one. So let's do something a little bit different. This time, we're following the same ideas. So, you know, the drill, this time, I'll pop my clips on. We'll prepare our page, and we'll pop in the sort of edges of our scene. So here, let's do something more like a city. There's lots of little rectangles bobbling up and down. Maybe going into a harbor. So a little bit of a bit of water in the very bottom corner. But in front of that, we've got layers of rectangles. Cause that's basically what city scapes. Aren't they rectangles, triangles, simple geometric shapes. So we've imagined our scene in front of us. We come in. We our page. Taking care at this time to learn from previous mistake, so I had a bit too much water last time, so a little bit less this time. And we'll do something else. Another different set of colors. This time, we'll just go bold primary colors to start with. So we'll get this low through the city. Can you imagine that yellow, that's going across the whole city. Above and below it, we can pop some red, just a little swipes. And then above and below that, we'll get some blue, and I'm going to mix that in with a red to create a murky purple. And that hopefully is going to give us something like a dreamy evening skate, but often it's a little random. We'll see what the water color the sides to do. We can splash water in there, and you'll find that gives you some interesting textures. You can splash some of our pigment in there as we've been doing already. Let's do a little bit of that blue in there as well. And like before, we let our underpainting simply dry. Then we come back in on our dry page with our next brush size. And I'm going to imagine that Our buildings in the distance are blue. Blue tends to add the feeling of distance. So I'm paying attention to those edges that are in the back. Those distant edges are the ones which matter. Again, look at the advantage of this flat brush. It allows us just to be quite specific in picking out, not quite details, but neat lines, neat lines. Here, we can just do this same, bring our brush down, down here, and we'll make a inner one, inner edge here. Underneath, we can change it up a bit. We'll add some red in, get that more sort of purple feeling in the foreground. We don't want it feel too separate. So if it feels too separate, we've got this line here, for example, we can come in with our dump brush, soften it out, and then we'll get a little bit more of our blue. Get that purple feeling going again. And we'll find that edge where we set the harbor is. And where the harbor is, that tiny bit of water. Is going to use a little bit more blue. So it sort of separates back out. And look, we've got these little lines here, which I think probably make a nice crane. Maybe we can do some other cranes in the distance as well. And that's as simple as all that. Isn't it absolutely as simple as all that? And we're ready to let that dry and move on as you know to our next layer. And we're on to our final layer. Here, I'm going to use again a little bit of kind of blue tones to just bring out that distance in the distance. And we can suggest little details. You know, you often get this feel of horizontal and vertical lines. We have all those windows in distant buildings. As we come forward, maybe just change it a little, so we've got this. Smaller building is more in shadow with a more muted tone instead of that deep blue. And down here we'll just do a similar feel. Remembering to soften things in a tiny bit. As we get closer and closer, we can make it more red and more. Again, sort of standing out a little bit. And just remembering to find lots of different shapes. If you've done pencil lines like me, you'll have those shapes, perhaps staring you in the face as you move around. If not, you'll be able to invent them a little bit, which is a really freeing experience. So you get here and you just go, I'm going to overlap this. I'm going to overlap. That and find different areas. Just keeping it varied, not like extreme, like everything is completely different from one another, but allowing different buildings who are next to each other to have different levels of certainty, different levels of intensity. Some perhaps only need a tiny couple of marks like this. And then others next to it get a bit of boldness to suggest there's a shadow being cast through our scene. Just about experimenting, seeing what's happening, having a bit of fun with it. We can make this distant building a bit red, just to pull it apart from everything else. And then we're into our funny little foreground. I keep calling it a harbor. I think that's a good term for it. And we can bring in some more kind of these. I like these lines. These kind of cranes. They work quite well, so we can put some closer to us. They'll feel closer if they're just a bit bolder. And then a little harbor, a little sea, get some little textures of darker color. Now, unlike the others, we've got an urban scene. So you may want to just go with a few more details. Kind of like a fourth layer. Just moving around where you see things have dried, you can add in little lines, like we're drawing. Little lines just to suggest like this, this feels closer cause the lines are bolder, but we can do the same with our sort of air buildings as well. We can add in bolder colors, which just will bring things to the foreground and therefore send other buildings in the distance. To be definitely in the distance. Wet use any bold yellow yet. So let's just tease some middle touches of yellow in a couple of places. Some splashes of yellow maybe, as well. You can tell our splashes hopefully by now, and we are done with our third very different scene, all using the same techniques. Taking care. I love this moment. You always find bits where you wish you'd stuck down the masking tape a bit differently. But it's also just so wonderful seeing this crisp edge emerge. And when you're looking at it before you've done this, you're like, Oh, has it really worked or not? You take away the masking tape. Are you like, Yeah? It's worked. It's just such a crisp way of creating a lovely frame. There you go. Three different scenes, three, very different scenes, three different selections of colors, all of three layers. An easy, very achievable thing you can do in your sketch books today. 11. Final thoughts: Thank you so much for joining in. This is such a beautiful and effortless way to paint. We just need to relax, let the paints flow and have a little bit of imagination. Bravery is needed as well, of course, because when we're doing less, it can feel like we're not doing enough, but often less is more. And that is my biggest learning point that I hope people take from this class. As well as the positivity that, yes, you can create beautiful watercolor landscapes. If you enjoy this, please do leave a review and don't forget to pop your project up in the class projects and resources gallery. You can find way more of my classes, both watercolors, beginning watercolors, and ink and water colors, and all things sketching on Skillshare. I'll see you in the next one.