Elements of Nature: Capturing Wildlife in Watercolors

1. Introduction : The world around us is full of wild and wonderful things. However, there's nothing as wild or as wonderful as watercolors themselves. Hello everyone. My name is Sheryl and I am a self-taught watercolor artist based in India. My aim in this class is to equip you with skills that you can apply to any watercolor artwork that you choose to create. However, for this class, we will capture wildlife using watercolors. To this end, we'll create a majestic painting of a beautiful stag in a forest. I will walk you through the supplies that you'll require. We'll paint the soft background wash first, add details to the foliate and then paint the main details in the stag itself. You will practice various watercolor techniques like wet on wet, wet on dry and dry on wet. By the end of this class, you will have created your very own watercolor wildlife painting. I believe that regardless of whether you are a seasoned artist or a beginner, this class has something to offer to you. So if you're ready, let's get started. 2. Class Project : For your class project. You will create your own watercolor painting of a stag in a forest. A painting like this might seem intimidating, but do not worry. I will guide you lesson by lesson in how to complete your project. First, we will paint the background foliage and then paint the main subject. I will demonstrate this for the stag. However, bear in mind that you can apply this to any animal or bird that you choose to paint. If you prefer to paint a different animal or bird, do not hesitate to use another reference picture. Some alternative references are available under the resources tab. The reference picture that I'll be using for this class has been AI generated and I've used Mid Journey for this. As you progress through your painting, I encourage you to upload your progress shots. And once you're done with your work, please upload a photo or a scan to the section below titled, My Projects. This will help me as well as your fellow students. Take a look at your work and provide feedback if you ask for it. Now let us proceed to the lesson. And I can't wait to see what you create. 3. Supplies: These are the supplies that we'll require for class today. First of all, we require watercolor paper, which is a paper that is dedicated for making watercolor paintings. The regular paper we have buckles a lot, we do not use that. The size of the paper that I'm using is 24 centimeters times 32 centimeters. My paper also has the following properties. First of all, it is cold pressed, which means that it has a bit of a texture on the surface that is good for watercolor papers because you'd like to create texture. It's also recommended that the paper should be at least 300 grams/meter square. Mine is 320 grams/meter square is the equivalent of, 300 GSM is the equivalent of 140 pounds. It's strongly recommended that you use 100% cotton paper and not cellulose paper. Next we'll need some tracing paper and a print out of our reference image. This is printed in gray scale because first of all, it just helps me preserve some ink. Second, all we need is a value study in order to create our painting. This is a good enough reference for us. We also use this print out to trace onto our watercolor paper using the tracing paper, the drawing of the stag. Next, I have with me a kneadable eraser, or artist eraser, and a mechanical pencil. A kneadable eraser helps you to lift off graphite marks from watercolor paper without having to rub the surface. And this prevents the fibers of the paper from getting damaged by the eraser. Next, we have masking tape to prevent the paper from buckling when we apply water. Next we have masking fluid and a bit of soap, which we'll need when applying it to the paper. I also have a paint brush with me, and this is not a very important one. The reason this matters is because the bristles of the paint brush could get ruined while applying the masking fluid. However, the soap solution should prevent this to a good extent. I have a cement pickup which I use for removing my masking fluid. Once it's dry. I have a set of brushes with me, and you certainly don't need all these many brushes, but I've used all of them in my painting, so I'm going to mention them here. For your purposes, it will suffice if you have just one good brush with a pointed tip. In my case, I have two synthetic brushes. One size 6 and size two, both with good tips. I have a natural hair brush for doing the soft background washes. These two are completely optional. But I have a large flat brush which helps me quickly with the entire page the background washes. I also have a large circular brush that I use brush-off masking fluid that I erase. I also have paper towels which is useful for removing excess water off the paper or off my paint brush by dabbing onto it. Next, I have two containers of clean water with me. The first is for brushing clean water onto the paper whenever I need to. And the second is to wash brush between colors. Now most importantly, I have watercolor paints with me. And these are Mijello Mission Gold paints, which I have squeezed into pans. The palette here has built wells that I'll be using. But if you don't have these, you can use a separate palette. You can also use paints directly out of the tube. And there's no compulsion to use the same brand as long as you have something that's good quality. The paints we'll be using are red brown, burnt umber, burnt sienna, raw sienna, yellow ochre Hookers' green, sap green, and ultramarine blue. We'll also use yellow orange every now and then. I've provided a full list of colors in the description below. You don't have to worry about remembering all of this. You don't need the exact same shades. It's fine as long as you have something that looks similar to you. Once again, I reiterate you don't need the same brand of watercolors as I have, it's fine to have any decent quality brand. Lastly, I have a tube of white gouache by M Graham. You can use any white gouache of any brand, it's fine. This, by the way, is completely optional. It's not necessary to have gouache. The full list of supplies is also available in the description. I'll see you with your supplies in the next lesson. 4. Tracing Your Drawing: Let us get started with the drawing of our stag onto our watercolor paper. For this, you need the printout of your reference image as well as your tracing paper. I start by placing my tracing paper on top of the printout and draw the outline of the onto my tracing paper. I do this with my mechanical pencil. The procedure is quite obvious. So, I sped the video up quite a bit. Now that I'm done tracing the outline of my staging onto the tracing paper. I flip the paper over to the backside like so. I can see the outline of the stag on the back side of the tracing paper. And now I'm going to, using my mechanical pencil over this outline so that I have graphite deposited on both sides of the tracing paper. Now I have it on both sides. And I once again I go to the front side of the tracing paper and I placed this on my watercolor sheet. Again, you have to trace this out. And what this does is that it deposits the graphite from the backside onto the watercolor paper. So we'd have transferred our drawing. I lift the tracing paper every now and then to check which parts of the drawing still need to be deposited on the watercolor paper. And I go over those parts, now I'm done, and as you can see, the outline of the stag that I got on my watercolor sheet is actually quite light. I don't know if it's visible through the camera, but it's visible to my naked eyes. I go over the outlines with my mechanical pencil to darken them a bit. I draw the impression of the foliage around the stag with curved lines, like you can see these represent trees. And I also make some random shapes to represent the leaves around the stag. In the next part, we'll mask these areas of specifically the foliage and the leaves, as well as we'll mask of the antlers of the stag. See you in the next part. Bye bye. 5. Masking: I start by securing the paper to the table with masking tape. This prevents the paper from buckling with water and leaves a clean outline on all sides. I leave a six millimeter margin. Next, I use my masking fluid to cover the areas of the painting that I would like to leave white. When I do the background wash, I have the following supplies with me. First, I have a paint brush with a pointed tip. I also have some water. In this palette, I have soap, and in the other well, I have masking fluid. To get started with masking, I dip my brush in water, then thoroughly coat the bristles of the brush with soap. This prevents the brush from getting ruined when I dip it in the masking fluid. Because otherwise the masking fluid dries very fast, It's very difficult to remove it from the bristles of the brush, but dipping it in soap prevents it from sticking to the bristles. What I'm doing now is that I'm drawing the foliage, and this is just an impression of the foliage, right? I'm drawing curved lines and this works interest to the painting. I continue to do this for all the lines that I had drawn on my paper. Next, I proceed to the impression of the leaves. The shape of the brush is quite advantageous when doing this because it right away gives me a pointed shape, like a leaf. When I press it against the paper, I also make some spontaneous parts and spontaneous impressions of the leaves. Next, I mask of the antlers of the stark with masking fluid. I would also like to keep this area light because in the reference picture I can see that it's quite light. Finally, I take some masking fluid and splatter it on the page. These give some nice and white spots when I remove them after finishing the background wash. Finally, we are done with placing the masking fluid. I clean my brush thoroughly and we will continue once the masking fluid is completely dry. This will take at least half an hour. See you in the next lesson, bye. 6. First Background Layer: Welcome back. We will now do the first background wash I have with me. These three paint brushes. A large flat brush for wetting the entire page, a natural hair brush, as well as a synthetic hair brush with a pointed tip. I also have some tissue paper with me, and this is useful if I want to dab off excess water from my bush. While doing the wet washes, I have two clean containers of water. I have my mission Gold colors with me. To get started, I take my large flat brush and I'm going to wet the entire page thoroughly in water. I dip it in clean water and coat the entire page with the clean water that is there on my brush. I take some time to do this, sped up the video, but this is a process in which you should spend some time to make sure that the fibers of the paper have thoroughly absorbed all the water that you use. But make sure that you have no puddles of water on your paper because this could ruin your painting. All you need to have is a uniform glaze of water on the paper. I prepare a very dilute mix of raw sienna and yellow ochre. I go in with my painting with this, you can see instantly that the paint spreads and gives a soft effect as opposed to hard lines. And this happens because our background is completely wet. I continue to place the raw sienna in a way that is random and adds interest to the painting, but mostly towards the top side because the bottom side has a much larger value, if you look at the reference image. Next, I start to prepare a very dilute mix of Hookers' green. I go into my painting with this. When you do this, important to ensure that the amount of water in your brush is less than the amount of water on your paper. Having too much water on your brush could produce blooms on your page. Blooms can sometimes be used to your advantage if you're trying to create certain effects, but they are almost always unwanted and accidental. You want to avoid this. If you have excess water on your paint brush, then be sure to dab it in the tissue papers that you've got with you. Next, I go in with the stronger shade. This is burnt Sienna. I make random spots with it more towards the bottom of the painting, but I also have some towards the top. To add interest, I mix some more burn sienna as I go along. I make sure to add burnt sienna at places where I originally had white so that I don't have too much mixing with the greens. If my paint is not moving sufficiently, I just encourage it a bit with my brush while constantly making sure that I don't have more water on the brush than on the paper. If at any stage you notice that your paper has started to dry, then do not continue to work. You should stop, allow the paper to dry completely and start painting again. once the paper is completely dry. my paper is still wet, so I add some red brown to have variety in the painting. We have mostly selected earth tones for this painting. As you would have noticed, that's because that's how we see the reference image. And we would like to reproduce that in our artwork. I continue to build layers as long as my paper stays wet with red-brown, burnt sienna, raw sienna, and yellow ochre to produce a very dark effect. at certain places. I create a mixture of ultramarine and red brown. The mixture of blue and brown of this kind gives a blackish or grayish color. This is what we'd like in the foreground because the values are quite dark in the foreground. The techniques we are currently employing are called wet on wet and dry wet depending on the relative concentration of paints in the brush. If the paint on the brush is very dilute and very watery, that's wet on wet, it's called so because both the paper as well as the brush are wet. It's a very concentrated pigment on the tip of your brush. Then that's called dry wet because the paint brush is relatively dry, whereas the paper is wet. Next, I start to go in with my synthetic brush. I remove any excess water. I prepare some red brown on the tip of the paint brush. I start to create these lines that look like trees. I create as many of them as correct to maintain balance and harmony in the painting. I do not want too few of them or too many of them, but just enough for the painting to look complete. I occasionally add some ultramarine to my red brown or to my burnt sienna to give a darker and a blackish shade. It's important not to use the black that comes with the paint set directly, because this can make the painting look flat. The black that comes with the set usually does not have any hue to it. Whereas when we prepare our own black with a mixture of brown and blue, that usually either has a reddish or brownish hue or else a bluish hue. And this looks better. I add some grass to the foreground with Hookers Green and Sark Green also continue to draw some trees in this green color. Finally, I splatter some clean water onto the wet paper because this produces the effect of a mossy background, which would look good in our forest themed painting. Now we'll allow for this to dry completely before we return to create a second layer of background wash. See you in the next lesson. 7. Second Background Layer: Now our painting is completely dry, and as you can see, it's much lighter than when we had made it. This is because when we allow the paper to dry, the paints get absorbed into the fibers of the paper as well as settle into the crevices on the paper surface. This leaves a much lighter color when it's dry. For the second background wash, I thoroughly wet the background fully, once again with my large flat brush. Since it was already wetted earlier once it's now much easier to wet it again. I don't have to spend nearly as much time this process as the first time round. Now I go on to build the colors that I laid down. In my first layer of the background wash, I take some green and I lay right where I had laid green in the last wash. It's important to overlay it right on top of where there was green the last time. Because if you lay it on top of the browns, then it will have a muddy texture and a muddy loaf, which wouldn't be nice. I build the colors and I use sap green this time as opposed to Hooker's green. because I realized that I did not want my green to be nearly as cool. I wanted more of a warmer and brighter green. I use sap green, and this is fine. Next I make a mixture of red brown and sap green, and I lay it at my spots. Do this spontaneously and randomly, but while taking care that I laid at the same place where I laid it last time, but it's still a bit spontaneous. It's time to, it's important once again to make sure that you have no puddles on the page because if you do, then that will produce blooms once the paper dries. The best way to get rid of any puddles is to have a damp brush lift off the excess water. The way you have a damp brush is by dabbing a wet brush onto the tissue paper. Most of the water is out of the brush. Then you take this brush and you lift off the water like it's a sponge from the paper. I mix of ultramarine and brown, and I lay it at certain places in a way that adds interest to the painting, but mostly towards the bottom half because that's where the values are the strongest and the darkest. In our reference picture, I feel that I don't have enough raw sienna and lighter shades on my painting. Now I mix those. I sometimes also mix a bit of yellow orange with the raw sienna to give it a brighter look. Here I have some yellow orange on my pain brush and I'm laying it onto the paper. I'm dubbing off the excess water from my paintbrush onto the tissue. Here we are continue to build layers for as long as my paper stays wet. Once my paper begins to dry, I will stop working on this now. I'll allow for this to dry completely before we proceed to the next class. 8. Adding Details to Forest: So in this lesson, we are now going to remove the masking fluid that we applied to our paper. Before you do this, you need to ensure that your background wash from the last lesson is indeed completely dry. And only then do this part, I use a cement pickup to remove my masking fluid. You can also just use the tip of your finger, but I prefer not to do that. And it's easier for me to use the cement pickup. I do not remove the masking fluid from the antlers, but I remove it from everywhere else. on the background. Dust off any residual masking fluid that might be on the paper with a bone-dry brush, and now it's completely off. If you can feel it somewhere still on your paper, then go in again with your cement pickup and be sure to remove every bit of masking fluid. It's important to feel your paper to know whether all of it is gone. Now, I'm going to start with the wet-on-dry wash. I will wet my brush. I'll mix some sap green, a very dilute mix, and I'll just begin to tap on my paper with it, you can see the leaves shapes with hard edges and this is the effect that I'm going for. For the background, I change the hues as well as the values of the color that I use to give interest to the painting. Once again, I lay the yellow ochre and raw sienna mix right where I had it earlier and I'll add browns also where I had them earlier. I add water to change the intensity of the green shade. This variation makes the painting look better. As you do this for your own painting, I would recommend that you first observe how I'm doing it before you start with yours. I covered some of the whites of the leaves with the color because we don't want white leaves glaring at us from the paper. This wouldn't look good. In fact, we just want areas of different colors, which is why we masked off the leaves earlier. They'll be lighter but not completely white. I start to make the black brown mix with ultramarine blue and red-brown and some burnt Sienna as well. I lay this at the foreground since as we observed earlier, this is where most of the darkest hues are. The foreground is the darkest. As we proceed to the back of the painting, we see lighter and lighter shades. And when I say back, I mean more towards the top of the painting. I take some time to create variation with diluting the paint with a clean, damp brush. Then once again, I built it layer by layer, the wet-on-dry part of the painting. near the foot of the stag, I laid down some darker shades, but I'd also like some greens in there. So I prepare a green mix and place it near the foot of the deer, and wherever else I would like to have more greens. I add some water with a very dilute green color. I make some splatters on the wet parts of the paper. This is to give the mossy texture. Now, we'll wait for the paper to dry completely before adding some final details to the background. See you in the next lesson. Bye bye. 9. More Details: Now that my last layer is completely dry, I'm going to take some sap green. I will splatter it on my background to give the impression of foliage. It's important to make sure that the stag is not covered in green spots. I put my palm over to make sure that nothing falls on the stag. Alternatively, you can place a tissue paper on the stag and then splatter on the background. Next, I take some sap green and mix it with the brown that I have on my palette. I create some more impressions of leaves and grass. I mix some red-brown with the brown on my palette, and load my synthetic brush with its pointed tip with the color, and paint more lines in the forest. These lines, which are representative of trees, are easy to create with the sharp point of my brush. Once again, I try to include enough branches that there is harmony in the painting and that I have balance in the entire composition. We do not take all of them all the way to the top. It's important to eyeball your painting to see if you have sufficient details and sufficient variations in the value, but do not overdo it. You can always soften the edges with a clean damp brush like I'm doing with this, I feel that I'm done with the background. The last thing we'll do, we'll remove the masking fluid of the antlers of the stag. Because we'd like to ready our paper for the next part where we'll paint the stag. So painting is ready for the next lesson. I'll see you there. Bye bye. 10. Stag Antlers: Now that the background is completely dry, I will go on to painting the stag. And we'll start with the antlers. I have my round brush, number two. This is a smaller brush than I had for the background wash. My brush loaded with paint is almost the same as a colored pencil, and that's pretty much how I'll use it here, almost like a pencil. I draw straight lines along the length of the branches of the antler. Captures the shape of the antlers' contours. I go in with a lighter shade initially, but I vary the shades every now and then because this variation adds beauty to the painting. Otherwise, the antlers would look rather flat if you painted the entire thing in one color. That's not something we want specially for the antlers, because it's almost like the best part of the stag. Here I've loaded a different color with a darker value to paint over the first layer that I created. To get the values correct while placing your paints, make sure that you keep referencing the image provided in the resources tag, which is our reference image. I continue to create these straight lines for all the branches of the antler. These crisp lines are produced when I paint wet on dry or dry on dry, which is what we are doing now. Our paper is bone dry at this step, and our watercolor brush is either loaded with very little water and a lot of pigment, in which case we're doing dry on dry. Alternatively, like here, it is loaded with a dilute mix of a paint, in which case it is wet-on-dry. Right now I'm painting a very dilute mix of brown onto certain parts of the stag's antler. Once again, keeping the reference image in mind, that's how I know which values to lay where. While the antler is still wet, I go on to drop some burnt sienna into it to add some soft lines. If I do not want soft lines, then I allow for the underlying watery layer to dry completely before I add the hard lines. wet-on-dry or dry-on-dry, like here, that's what I'm doing. I add the shadow underneath each of the branches so that it looks more dimensional. I keep varying my colors throughout the process. I even introduce some green into one of the branches to have it unite with the background wash. This is just a reflection of green that is coming off the background and not the green of the stags antler itself. Because of course, that won't have any green of its own except for the reflected colors. At this stage, I'm more or less satisfied with the painting of the antlers, except for any finishing touches, which I observe the painting for a while to see where to add. Once I'm done with this process, I allow for these antlers to dry completely. And I'll see you in the next lesson, where we'll begin painting the face of the stag. 11. Stag's Head and Neck : To get started, I'm going to paint the ears of the stag. I have a very thick, concentrated red-brown color on the tip of my brush. And I'm making these quick and small hair like strokes on the ears to give the impression of fur. I do this on both the ears. I'm constantly referring to my reference image to make sure that I've got the darks where they should be and to get the value placements correct. My approach here is contrary to what most artists do, which is to paint the lightest shade first. I'm painting the darkest first. The way that I'm using my paint brush is quite similar to a colored pencil here. Next I go in with some raw sienna and yellow ochre to paint the parts of the ear that are comparatively lighter than the last layer of hair. Paint the inside of the ears with the, make sure, all the while creating this hair-like texture, before I proceed with burnt sienna to the face of the stag, I try to accurately capture the contours with these lines that I draw here with burnt sienna. I go in with some water to soften some of the hard lines that I've drawn, at some places, but not everywhere. I add the darker shade to a paint side of the head and try to reproduce the patterns that I can see on the face of the stag. I vary the colors that I use. Sometimes I go for burnt sienna, sometimes for red brown, and at other times for Umber or for raw sienna and yellow ochre. I paint the patterns that I see around the eyes of the stag, darkening them at certain places, blurring them out at others to create variation and interest in the painting, they go in with a different color, which is now the yellow ochre. We start painting the nose and the mouth of the stag. I observe the patterns in the reference image and try to reproduce them while also getting the values correct. I make the part of the nose at the top lighter and the part at the bottom darker. I start to paint these hair like strokes to show the fur beneath the mouth of the stag. I don't know if they are called a beard of the stag, but that's what it looks like. There's a part of the fur that is white and beneath it, on the neck, there's a part which is brown. I paint the white part for now. I also add a light shading to the nose of the stag. Next, I start painting the eyes of the stag. I realized somewhere along the painting that my depiction of the eyes were not accurate enough. Even though I had praised the drawing for this painting, you can observe me fiddling quite a lot with the eyes in the final stage of the painting, where I add finishing touches to make them look more natural. Now I start to paint more of the fur that is beneath the mouth of the stag. This part of the fur is white. I wet the entire area first with clean dump brush, then I load the brush with a little bit of pigment and very little water. And I make these strokes to give the appearance of fur. Even though this is white, we never leave any white objects completely white. And the reason for that is that's not how we see them in nature. We always see various shades reflecting off. Next, we will paint the body and the neck of the stag. 12. Stag's Torso and Legs : I've already drawn some of the markings on the neck of the stag and I'm going to lay yellow ochre on top of it. The markings beneath this layer are easy enough to create if you paint wet-on-dry and just make straightforward strokes as if you're using a colored pencil. I've added some shading to the right hand side because I'm imagining light source on the left hand top corner. I'm shading accordingly. Yellow ochre is a light-valued color whereas the burn sienna and the red-brown mixture that I'm laying now is a darker value. I laid down too much red brown here. I'm lifting some paint off my brush before continuing with the red brown. To build darker values, I'm building values on top of the underlying wet layer of yellow ochre to give soft transitions as opposed to hard lines. And this gives the impression of fur. Before you do this part of the painting where I'm painting the neck and the body of the stag, I would recommend that you watch the entire video first before starting your own work. That is because this involves a lot of steps and it's good to have an overview of the entire process before you start. I'm going into the body now because I'm done with the neck. I lay down the darker shades first, like I did even earlier block in the darkest parts of the body of the stag. I do this with a mixture of red brown and burn sienna. I begin to soften some of the lines wherever I would like a smooth transition as I see in the reference picture. I start to fill the lighter layers using yellow ochre and raw sienna. I overlay it on top of my red-brown to give an appearance of unity. I go in with a mix of ultramarine blue and red brown underneath the body of the stag. And I continue to lay shadows and highlights as I see them. While painting the legs of the stag, I make sure that the rest of the body is dry because otherwise the paint underneath the body will bleed into the legs of the stag. And this is not something that I want happening. Now, I paint the top of the back leg and I make sure that the underneath of the body is dry, like I mentioned. Also, make sure that the front leg that overlaps with the drawing of the back leg is completely dry so that colors don't bleed from one place to another. Once again, to know where to lay the shadows versus the lighter colors, it's important to closely observe your reference picture. And that is what I do every now and then while I paint. I'm nearly done with the body and the legs of the star now. And I'll meet you in the next part where we'll add the final touches to the painting. 13. Finishing Touches : Alright. Now, we are nearly done with this painting. In this lesson, I'll be adding the finishing touches to this painting. First of all, I'm fixing any value transitions that do not look correct. By which I mean that any areas that should be darker, I'm just making them darker. Any areas that should be lighter, I'm accentuating the dark areas around it to make it pop. You need to be careful at this stage not to overwork your painting, because that is really easy to do at this point. Take a break from your painting, look at it as a whole every now and then to see if it might be complete. Because it's really easy to go on forever with this last lesson and this last stage of the painting. I add some more grass to the area near the feet of the stag, and some parts of the foliage seemed to light to me. So I just go and darken them with some sap green and Hookers green. The right side of the beard wasn't sufficiently visible and detailed I felt, so I added some more detail to that area. Finally, I feel like I'm done with adding the details to my painting, and my page is completely dry. I start to peel off the masking tape. Now it helps to peel it diagonally to make sure that it doesn't rip the paper. Finally, I splatter some white gouache to add interest to the painting. And, here we are done with our work. 14. Congratulations!: Thank you for sticking till the end of this class and congratulations on reaching the finish line. As a final step, do not forget to upload your work to the project gallery below. If you struggle with any part of the course or have questions, feel free to start a discussion below or to ask my help by mentioning it within your project upload. I will look at every project uploaded and provide feedback. Also, don't forget to follow me here on skill share and also on my Instagram and Youtube pages to keep up with all the water color ideas that I come up with. I hope you enjoyed yourself in my class and see you next time. Take care.