From Sketch to Painting: Mixed Media Italian Restaurant Facade

1. Introduction + Welcome: You enjoy mixed media art or you love drawing and painting, charming building facades, or perhaps you're just looking for a fun project to help you practice both foundational drawing and watercolor skills. This course is for you. Hey, everyone. My name is Erika, and I'm a traditional media artist who enjoys working with a range of mediums and subjects from still life to animals to scenes, urban sketching, and more. I have over 15 years of experience working in creative and artistic fields. First as a graphic designer, then I worked as head art teacher in a school environment, and today I run my own business where I sell my art, and I also help artists all over the world level up their art skills. It's been incredibly rewarding for me to take what I was already doing on a local level to the online space to be able to reach even more people. I'm very passionate about sharing my skills with others and also encouraging other artists along the way so that they too, can stay consistent with their art practice long term and enjoy the immense happiness and fulfillment that come with this. This course, I am taking you through my entire process for this mixed media Italian restaurant building facade piece. We're bringing together the magic of colored pencils and watercolor to create unique, balanced and harmonious results. I'm taking you through a beginner friendly process where we're first creating our pencil sketch freehand in our sketch and then after transferring our sketch onto our watercolor paper, we move on to our colored pencil process, then the watercolor, and then finally back to the colored pencil for final textures and details. This is honestly the process that I would recommend for beginners to ensure better results and to allow you to practice foundational drawing techniques and get comfortable with drawing this kind of subject matter in a less overwhelming way. This way, you don't have to worry about damaging or scratching your watercolor paper. We want to avoid doing too much erasing on our watercolor sheet, which can damage its sizing. We also want to make sure that our linework isn't too dark, that it shows through our transparent paint at the end. But even for myself, this is exactly what I in order to better prepare for the final piece and ensure higher quality results. Throughout these class videos, I'll be sharing tons of tips, techniques and tools that you'll be able to take with you to sketch buildings and scenes with greater confidence, especially frontal facades. I take you through a straightforward process teaching you to break down what you're seeing into simple shapes, how to work large to small, general towards specific to ensure better proportions and a better utilization of your drawing space. We practice our watercolor washes, our layering, our color mix and developing a nice range of values throughout our painting to create believable depth and dimension. I also explain how I choose my colored pencils for something like this and the techniques that I use to combine these two mediums for great expressive results. In this one, we also get to practice using a reference photo for visual information so that we can bring in a certain level of realism into our piece, but at the same time, not allowing that reference photo to constrict us. We practice making artistic choices and bringing in lots of ourselves into our art. Alright, with all this said, if you're ready, let's jump right in. 2. Course Project: By the end of this course, you'll have completed a vibrant mixed media piece that brings together colored pencils and watercolor and features a beautiful Italian restaurant facade. And more importantly, you'll have practiced important drawing, watercolor, and mixed media techniques that you're going to take with you and use long after the class is over. As we work on this project together, you'll build confidence drawing buildings and architectural scenes, creating watercolor washes and developing depth through layering. As well as bringing colored pencil and watercolor together for unique expressive results. If you're new to drawing in general or you don't have much practice sketching buildings, I would highly recommend going through this process as described in the course, working on your drawing first in your sketchbook, and then transferring onto your watercolor paper. If you're farther along and you have more experience drawing buildings and scenes, then it is totally up to you. You can go ahead and create your freehand sketch right on your watercolor paper, but I want to encourage you to do as little erasing as possible so that you don't damage it. Also make sure that you're drawing lightly so that you're not able to see your linework through the watercolor at the end. I want to encourage you to slow down and enjoy every phase of this process. Take as long as you need to before moving on to the next class video. And if you're a beginner, it might be worth watching the class video through or at least skipping through it. That you can understand the objective in that phase and the key techniques that we're using, and then you can watch that again and give it a go on your own. Was you're done, don't forget to upload your work to the project gallery. Sharing your work is a great way to celebrate your progress, inspire others, and also get feedback from me if you need it. I've prepared a set of downloadable files, which you're going to be able to find in the Projects and Resources tab right below any of the class videos. Simply click on this tab, scroll down a little bit, and you'll find a section that is titled Download Resources. Click on any file that you wish to download and it will be saved onto your computer or device. To post a photo of your work here on Skillshare, all you have to do is click on the Projects and Resources tab. Once you're in, you'll see this purple button on the right that says submit project. When you click on this button, you'll be taken to a new page where you'll easily be able to both upload a photo of your piece, as well as share any thoughts, experiences, struggles or questions that you might have for me. Here you can create a title for your project and click on that larger content section underneath. And if you want to add in that photo at the beginning, you can go ahead and click on that image icon on the bottom. Simply find the photo that you're wanting to share on your computer or device. Select that file, click Open, and it will be immediately added into this content section. Then under your image, share anything you'd like, whether it's struggles, questions, wins, aha moments that you might have experience throughout this course. Anything you'd like to share. I always love hearing from you. At the bottom of this content section, you'll see different icons. One is for formatting your text. You can use the other one to add emojis, the Adimage icon, which we just talked about, and you can even embed links. You're free to add even more pictures if you'd like. They can be process or supply pictures. And over here to the right, we see this preview area where we can see a thumbnail or cover image for your project. You can go ahead and change it to a title image that you have created in a more horizontal format. You can just go ahead and leave it as is. Once you're ready, go ahead and scroll back up. Click on the Green Publish button, and you'll be all done. If you'd like to share your work over on Instagram, please do make sure to tag me at Erika Underscore Lancaster Underscore Art. I love seeing student work over there and giving you shoutouts in my stories. And, of course, go ahead and tag the Skillshare account, as well. It goes a very long way and inspires other students to share their work too. Skillshare is a safe learning space for all of us to continue growing together. So make sure that you're using this gallery, and let's all connect and help each other out. I can't wait to see your work and to help out with whatever you might need. Let's move on to our next class. 3. Supplies: In the first part of this process, we're going to be working on our free hand drawing and creating a solid looking sketch that we can then transfer onto our watercolor sheet using tracing paper or whatever transferring method we prefer. Working in a sketchbook or a separate sheet of drawing paper and then doing our transferring is going to allow us to practice our drawing more comfortably and not have to worry about damaging our watercolor paper by doing too much erasing or simply drawing too dark, which would both affect our Cm. I would recommend working in a sketchbook that is at least nine by 12 " in size so that you can then easily transfer that drawing onto a watercolor sheet that is also approximately that size. I personally enjoy using tracing paper for my transferring, but you're free to use whichever transferring method you enjoy. I will be linking to a couple of step by step tutorials where I take you through my entire process of how I use tracing paper for my transferring, as well as how I use a lightboard or a light box. Do my transferring onto watercolor paper. Those are going to be available for you in the Projects and Resources tab right below any of the class videos. Once I'm ready to start my final piece, I'm going to be working on a sheet of watercolor paper from arches, and this is going to be hot pressed paper. Hot Pressed paper is the smoothest type of watercolor paper, but you can certainly use cold press or whatever kind of watercolor paper you just be aware that because we're bringing in colored pencils which are a drawing medium, because we go in with sharp pointy tips, the tip of that pencil is going to skip over the tooth of your paper. So you're likely going to end up with more broken lines and marks, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. It just depends on your personal taste. The more texture your paper is, the more broken lines and marks you're likely going to have. Also, you're likely going to have to sharpen your colored pencils more often because the tips will become blunt a lot faster. Before getting started with your drawing, it is important that you decide on what size you want your final piece to be. Whatever size you decide this final piece to be, it has to fit in both your drawing sketchbook and your watercolor. From the beginning, I decide that my final piece is going to be 10 " in times 8 " in height. And so that is the size that my sketch is going to be in my sketchbook and the size that I'm going to be transferring onto my watercolor sheet. This hot press watercolor paper pad that I have is nine by 12 ". So I do end up cutting a couple of sections so that I can get it in the size that I want. As I was creating my freehand sketch in my sketchbook, I primarily used an HB pencil, which is what I would recommend so that you can keep your drawing lighter and cleaner and so that you can easily correct mistakes as you go. I'm also sharing a two B pencil here because I use a softer pencil grade for my tracing and transferring process. I also always have a couple of different erasers on hand, both a soft graphite eraser and a kneadable eraser so that I can correct mistakes and refine my preliminary sketch as I go, as well as to clean up my last sketch on my watercolor sheet before starting with my other medium. Have a simple pencil sharpener on hand so that I can sharpen my colored pencils as I go when I get to that part of the process. And I also have a roll of regular 1 " masking tape, which is what I use to tape down my watercolor sheet onto my black cutting mat. I just run my pieces of masking tape over my clothes one or two times to weaken that adhesive. Make it a lot less likely that I'll damage my watercolor paper at the end when I remove it. I'm going to be using this set of prisma color premiere soft core colored pencils, which are regular wax-based colored pencils. This is a set of 72 colors, but we're really only going to be using ten, and you by no means have to use my same exact colors to arrive at great results. But just as an FYI, the ten colors that I'm going to be bringing in are yellow ochre, lime peel, olive green, crimson red, French gray 50%, French gray 70%. Indigo, burnt ochre, sienna brown, and dark brown. I'm going to be swatching all of these colors out for you on a scrap piece of paper so that you can see what they look like and you can replace whichever you don't have with something similar. For the watercolor washes, I'm going to be using a combo of paint from Windsor Newton's professional line and a couple of colors from my white Knights watercolor set from St. Petersburg. I'm using only seven different colors, and these colors are Russian green and raw sienna from St. Petersburg white Knights and Windsor lemon, a zarin crimson, burnt sienna, ultramarine blue and cobalt blue from Windsor Newton. And really, the only reason why I'm bringing in those two colors from my white knight set is because I really like that green from St. Petersburg. I also ran out of my raw sienna for my Windsor Newton set. I'm also going to be swatching out all of these colors for you on a scrap piece of watercolor paper, along with the main color mixes so that you can see what they look like and replace whatever you don't have with something similar. For my painting process, I'm going to be using three different round brushes in sizes 310 and 14. As long as you have something similar, you'll do great. I have my container with clean water, which I make sure to change along the way and a couple of my Blu Scot absorbent towels, which is what I like using to stay on top of water control. I would also recommend having a few scrap pieces of watercolor paper on hand to test out mixtures and consistencies along the way. And finally, I do want to remind you that I created a set of downloadables to go along with this course, which you're going to be able to find in the projects and resources tab. You're going to find the reference photo that I was loosely inspired by my outline sketch in case you'd like to skip over the freehand sketching part of this process and simply transfer it onto your watercolor sheet to move on to the colored pencil and then the watercolor. But if you'd like to look at my outline sketch as you're working on your own freehand so that you can see those shapes clearly, that is available for you as well. I'm also going to make a photo of my finished painting available for you as a reference in case you like to use it as you're working, and your supply checklist will be there for you as well. Alright, go ahead and collect your supplies, and I'll wait for you in the next class. 4. Preliminary Pencil Sketch (Pt. 1): All right, everyone. So first things first, we need to create our preliminary outline sketch in order to be able to transfer that onto our sheet of watercolor paper and then move on to creating the final piece. What I like doing in order to ensure that my sketch is exactly the size that I needed to be for my final piece is I take the watercolor sheet that I'm going to be working on. I place it over one of my sheets in my sketchbook, try to center it as much as possible, and then I simply trace around it using my HB pencil. To create a rectangle, which is going to be my drawing space. I end up with a rectangle that is ten by 8 ", which is exactly the size that I need my sketch to be so that I can do my transferring successfully onto the final sheet. Let's get started with this drawing process. I'm going to be using my HB pencil so that I can draw lightly and refine my drawing as I go, erase mistakes as needed, and that kind of thing. This is the reference photo that I'm going to be loosely inspired by. When I use reference photos, my objective is not to copy the reference photo as always change the composition, sometimes a little bit, sometimes a lot, depending on what I think will improve it and what I think will lead to better drawings or paintings. For me, it's also very important to bring myself into my pieces if I want to change colors or anything like that. I go ahead and do that. There is a lot about this photo that I but I'm going to be bringing in more color into my piece, maybe add flowers to add a pop of color in those plants around the doorway. I also want to add in light effects and a variety of values and hues in the windows so that the restaurant looks like it's open and ready for business and not closed for the day. Another thing that I want to do is I want to place the doorway for this restaurant a little bit off center and to the right so that the focal point is not completely right smack in the middle of the piece. The first thing that I do when I'm getting started with a drawing like this is I do my best to replicate the longest vertical and horizontal lines that I see in the image. In all my drawings, I go from general towards specific, large to small, and that is always going to be helpful. In this case, this is an elevation view of the front of this restaurant, the front facade. So we do see a straight vertical and a straight horizontal in this view. It's not a two point perspective view or three point perspective where you have diagonals. Support yourself with those longest straight lines that you are able to see, and that is always going to be a good place to start. This is the ground line where the wall meets the sidewalk. Of course, we have a variety of objects down here that are covering up this edge. But try to ignore all of those elements, try to tune that out. You know that it's going to be a straight horizontal line. Using the sections of those lines that you are able to see, for example, that section in front of the door, use that and then go ahead and complete that line to the best of your abilities. It would be very cool to add in this diagonal right here in the composition. Because it adds extra depth and interest to the piece. This is an elevation view of this restaurant entrance, it's flat. By adding diagonals over here and a bit of a different perspective for these elements over here on the left, that is going to add more interest and depth. The shapes that we create in an elevation view, house or building are going to be flatter because it's a flat forward facing view of that building. Whereas over here, we see something like this going on. There's a little gate section. And I'm going to bring these. I'm going to move these a little bit more to the left. This would be a horizontal line. Horizontal, horizontal. This is the forward facing face of this structure. This is going to have a horizontal line and a horizontal line, and this is a diagonal. I need to fix this. Horizontal, then bring it down. This would be the forward facing face right here for the structure and then the gate with the black metal work goes like that. And then a little section here and here for the upper planes of this structure. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take out this red sign right here, but I'm going to keep the lamp behind that. I'm trying to ignore or tune out the red sign right here and I'm just drawing that lamp. G bring this down. Move this line This is in perspective. I'm just going to complete this form. That's the street lamp right there. There's a bit of a cylindrical form right there in the middle. That's a very loose lamp there and we do see a little bit of a metal design element here. Going to erase this line that I no longer need. Add some extra details into this fence here. What I'm going to do is instead of adding those buildings in the faraway distance here, I'm going to be adding some trees. This way, I can not only add some more natural organic elements, organic forms that can counterbalance all of the more geometric structures and forms that are taking place with all these architectural elements. But I can also repeat the greens that I'm going to be using around the door so that everything can be a little bit more integrated and more harmonious. Looking for ways to repeat colors or repeat rhythms throughout the piece is going to lead to more harmonious integrated end results. With that sorted, let's go ahead and work on the detail right here. I like guiding myself with tick marks before starting to draw the actual shapes so that I can make sure that the shape itself is going to be the size that I want it to be and in the location that I want it to be. In this case, I'm just trying to decide on the width for that arch shape where the door is going to be. This is the initial width that I'm going to give it in terms of the height, perhaps the highest point of that arch will reach this line right here so that I can have a little bit of space for the plant that is going to go all around the storeway. I'm going to go with this width and this height and start drawing this shape. If I find that it's too small or too large or I want to move it more to the left or to the right, I'll go ahead and do that later. Instead of going in and trying to create a perfect curve for that arch, what I'm doing is I'm creating straight lines. I'm just bringing those straight lines together. Then I will turn them into more of a curve. I'm doing my best to create a symmetrical shape here, refining as I go. I'm going to bring this down with a vertical and bring this down with a vertical. I'm just trying to get those angles for my lines as symmetrical as possible. I think this is a good size for that focal point area. I'm just going to continue. We do see a little bit of that thickness of the wall. We do see a little bit of that inner plane for the wall created by the thickness of the wall, which is very important to add in because it's going to help add depth. This is the inside of the wall, that little inner section that provides the wall thickness. Then from here, I'm going to start breaking this up into medium sized shapes. I see a horizontal here And sometimes when you're creating those straight horizontals or straight verticals, you see errors in alignment. Here what I noticed is that I was starting to angle my line too low. It was not aligning with this changing angle over here, so that means that my shape is not perfectly symmetrical. Helping yourself with plumb lines, whether they are vertical or horizontal lines can be very helpful when you're trying to create symmetry or when you're trying to align things. From here, I'm going to break up this space into this smaller shape over here and this other shape over here that is slightly larger where the window is. Maybe if this is the halfway point, maybe the door is going to reach this point here so that I can leave a larger area for the window. With these medium sized shapes in, I can go ahead and start with my smaller shapes. We're going to be having some fun with lettering in this one and we're going to be adding the name of this restaurant. When it comes to adding handwritten lettering, I do like creating horizontal lines for myself before starting to draw the letters so that I can make sure that my letters will be aligned. Tratoria will be right here and I can also add another horizontal for the top edge of those letters so that I can make sure that the letters making up that word will be the same height. Then for the smaller letters or words above this, I can go ahead and add in a couple of other horizontals and I can make that space or that distance between these two lines a little bit shorter than this over here because those are going to be smaller letters. With this in, I'm going to go ahead and start adding the window in the door and the window in this other section over here. Because the window in the door and the window over here are aligned and I want them to be the same height, I can always support myself with another horizontal line. If I drag a horizontal line across and over here as well, I can use these horizontals to make sure that these windows are going to be the same height and that they're going to be aligned. Now I can erase the extra sections for these lines here and I can add in the design and the wood beneath these also helping myself with a couple of horizontals so that I can make sure that that detail in the wood is aligned as well. I know that when it comes to this section over here, we can barely see what is going on behind those baskets. We have to get good at visualizing what is being covered by other elements when it comes to drawing scenes. With this, I'm going to start adding in the plants, which is an important element in this piece. The plants around the doorway are a very important element in this piece. If I simplify all of the plant section into a basic shape, simplified shape, if you will, it would be pretty large, so I'm going to go ahead and add it in right now. I want some asymmetry and irregularity to be present throughout this plant shape. I don't want this entire shape to be exactly the same width. I also don't want to create a very patterny shape when it comes to those leaves. I definitely want some asymmetry throughout it because otherwise it's going to look too patterny, too structured and these are organic elements that we're going to be adding, which again really help counterbalance all of the man made architectural elements that require more symmetry, more precision, straighter lines and that kind of thing. Just make sure that everything is very irregular and when we sketch the plants in with the colored pencil work and the watercolor washes, we want to make sure that we're very loose when we're sketching the organic elements in this piece, both the trees and the plants and flowers around the door. So for now for my sketch, I'm just adding this in very loosely. But my intention right now is definitely not to create a perfect shape that I'm going to be perfectly tracing around with my colored pencils or perfectly filling in with my watercolor paint, especially when it comes to organic elements like trees and plants. You want to sketch them in and paint them in loosely and really freely move your hand around and move your wrist and rotate the angle that you're using your paintbrush at so that you can really get everything in in a very fresh loose way. It's creating a little bit more asymmetry here. I'm just going to continue giving this the size and the location that I want. I'm going to have sections of these plants over here at the top cropped off the picture plane because if I try to smush this so that everything fits in perfectly, I think it's going to look a little bit too controlled, too cramped even, so I'm going to have a section cropped off. But I do like the size of this. In the reference photo, there's a section right here with very sparse leaves, very few leaves, and I don't want to do this in my piece. I want my piece to be fuller in that area. I just expanded that shape. 5. Preliminary Pencil Sketch (Pt. 2): Instead of having the focal point B right smack in the middle of the piece, it's going to be slightly off center, which leads to asymmetrical balance and greater interest. All of my major elements have been added in all of those large and medium sized shapes from here, I'm going to be adding those smaller details. I'm going to use my needed eraser to lighten up the graphite in this bottom section so that these lines and shapes don't distract me or confuse me as I am drawing these elements on the ground. I definitely like this box right here. I'm going to keep it. I start with the front plane of the box. We have a rectangular prism planter over here and over here where the plant is growing out of. I really like the addition of these boxes because again, they add extra depth to an otherwise very flat looking facade because this is an elevation view. Let's draw some rectangular prisms down here. This is the front plane. This is the side plane or the inner plane, and this is the top plane of this box. Before I add anything else over here, I'm going to try to replicate this rectangular prism over here. First, I start with the front plane. I used another long horizontal right there to make sure that these boxes are aligned. Can even add another horizontal over here. This is the front plane of this box on the right, and then I have another diagonal. I'm going to close this with a vertical, add another straight horizontal up here for that top plane and a diagonal. We have the front plane, the side plane, and the top plane. This one looks a little bit larger to me, so I'm just going to make slight corrections so that they can look a little bit more similar. All right. This looks pretty close to me and whatever else I want to change, I can do it right on my watercolor sheet as I'm doing my transferring. By the way, in that photo, you do see more of the inner plane or side plane of this box on the right than you do for this box on the left. This is happening because of our vantage point in relation to these two objects. We are closer to this box than to this box. We see a little bit more of this plane than of this plane. So the little I don't know if this would be considered a tree, but you can actually see little twigs or trunks coming out of this box. I'm just going to use my artistic license here, same thing over here, adding a few little tree trunks, very thin tree trunks. If you want to add in extra details to those boxes, you can. But I do want to remind you, you don't have to add in all of the details and textures and everything into your preliminary sketch. You can actually add that straight on your watercolor sheet. Going to erase these extra lines that I created. I don't need this one anymore either. I'm going to add in those little curtains. I think that's a nice detail to include in the piece. Then I'm going to start adding in these baskets. We have five. Starting with the ones at the bottom, sometimes it's helpful to get the middle one in and then add in the one on the left and on the right to make sure that everything is centered and in the size that you want it to be. Make sure to create curves down here at the bottom because these are tapered cylinders and cylinders are curved. You can see how I created these three lines. I just want to in a very general sense, create a shape or line for myself to make sure that these baskets are going to be in the location that I want them, they're all aligned and sitting on the floor and they're also the size that I want them to be. Maybe they're not perfect, but they're pretty close. From here, I can start adding in the upper section of these baskets. I start with a curve because these are cylinders. Then these upper sections or the lids of these baskets are more like cones. I see something like that, and this curve wraps around there. Here we have another one. Because these are at ground level below our eye level, we see a little bit of that curve wrapping around, going around and behind the lids. If this is looking good, I can then go ahead and add in the little handle if I want to add the handles in, which I don't have to if I don't want to. And then I can do the same thing with the baskets above these. I start with the curve at the bottom and we know that these are two and they fit right in between these two and these two. I start with the curve and this curve would be less visible than the curve in these down here because these are way below our eye level. Essentially, the lower the cylinder is, the more we're going to see that folder circle at the bottom of the cylinder. If the cylinder is higher, closer to our eye level, the closer to our eye level that the cylinder is, the more that curve is going to turn into a flat horizontal rectangle. These two are not quite at our eye level, but the curve should be at least slightly less pronounced. In these baskets over here, they are sitting above these. But I try to go with the same process, starting with this initial shape and making sure that that shape is in the right location in relation to these and also in the right size. From here, I just go ahead and close this shape again with a curve that is at least slightly less pronounced than these down here. Then once that's looking right, I can just go ahead and add the lid. And if you're adding these in and they're not exactly in the same location as the baskets in the photo, that is totally okay. What's most important is that proportions wise, the size of those boxes looks believable in relation to everything else that you've already added into your drawing. And what's also more important than having those baskets sit exactly where you see them in the photo is that their structure and three D form looks believable as well. To do that, you need to acknowledge these as being tapered cylinders and everything that I was just mentioning about having curves along the bottom and all that. I'm going to fix this, make it a little bit more centered. I really, really love going through this preliminary sketching process and doing it separately on my sketchbook because it's I'm preparing things and planning things and it's like a thumbnail, if you will, before jumping into the final piece. I can really get a sense of everything that I'm going to be changing and how I'm going to be improving things, what I'm going to be simplifying. I can even start thinking about the colors and the techniques that I'm going to be bringing in first with my colored pencils and then with my watercolor. These are kind of bigger branches that I'm going to be adding into this section. I'm going to add in this detail on the wall. It's going to be cropped off the picture plane, and the letters in this small little sign, whatever it is, can be just added with little scribbles because they're so small and secondary to the larger letters over here. I'm also going to add this other sign down here, which is partially covered by the plants. Okay, so there are some smaller elements like a little pot right here that I'm going to be taking out. I'm also going to be taking out that table that is sitting right here in front of the door because if the restaurant were open, it wouldn't make sense for that table to be in front of the door. As I said before, I want this restaurant to look like it's open. I'm going to be adding some lights in the windows and stuff. That would be counterproductive to the message that I'm trying to send. When it comes to these elements in the window, I'm going to change them. So I'm just going to draw some bottles of wine and maybe some bread. Just quickly sketch in a little bottle of wine. I'm going to do a basket with some bread here. This is closer to our eye level, so it's a little bit more horizontal down here and up here and I'm just going to do loaves of bread. Just bringing in my artistic license to change things up. Great. The very last thing that I'm going to be adding are some lines because I do want to add a brick pattern or texture on the wall. Having those straight horizontal lines is going to help me do that easily. Just trying to distance my horizontal lines apart relatively evenly and making sure that this line would connect with this line over here, this line, this one would connect with this line, and so on and so forth. Otherwise, they won't be aligned. When it comes to the verticals, the verticals are shorter and I just make sure to add them in like that. I'm going to add in a little handle on the door. That's something I haven't added in. And with that, I'm going to be all done with my sketch. I'm happy with how I've simplified things, how I have removed some things and added other things in. Now I am ready to do my transferring. I'm going to be using tracing paper to do my transferring, use whichever transferring method you prefer, everything else, all of the missing little things like the letters, I'm going to be adding straight on my watercolor sheet. I'll do my transferring, and once my sketch is on my watercolor sheet, I'll be back to talk about some final refinement and extra details I'll be adding to my sketch before jumping into my linework that I'm going to be doing with my colored pencils. 6. Refining Drawing on Watercolor Paper: So I finished doing my transferring with my sheet of tracing paper. And as you can see, I ended up with a very light drawing on my watercolor sheet, which is one of the reasons why I enjoy using tracing paper instead of carbon paper or something like that. I can control how light my drawing is going to get transferred. And this is because I personally don't want my graphite to show through my colored pencil and my watercolor paint at the end. And it doesn't really matter what transferring method you use. As long as you end up with results that you like, then continue doing. I said, no matter what transferring method you use, most likely than not, your drawing is still going to need some work before moving on to the next part of the process. For me, this means completing some lines or shapes that weren't fully transferred or maybe changing shapes slightly and just making sure that I have a nice clean light looking sketch before moving forward is going to be very important. Another thing that I'm going to be doing in this part of the process is adding my letters in pencil first. I switch on back to my HB pencil to keep my drawing nice and light, and I'm just going to go ahead and complete these lines you can see how because of my masking tape that I've placed around my watercolor sheet, some of my drawing did get cropped off. That is perfectly fine. I always anticipate some of it being cropped off and it's totally up to you how you want to position your drawing when you're doing your transferring and how much you want to crop off from either side. I need to draw the shorter vertical lines in those bricks to bring this line down a little. Using my needed eraser, I gently tap over my drawing to partially erase out some of these lines that might need some fixing. You can see how as I was doing my transferring, I curved my shape over here more. It's more of a smoother curve than what it was before when I was creating my preliminary sketch on my sketchbook. I'm not pressing down hard at all as I'm creating my sketch, bringing out my kneaded eraser again and doing some gentle tapping over this line. It's a little bit wonky, so I'm just going to make it straighter. I use my needed eraser quite a bit for this part of the process to do gentle tapping over shapes and lines that I want to correct or make lighter. I'm just going over my drawing here to darken my linework just a bit. Make sure that I have my shapes and lines just right. I am not pressing down hard at all though, because if I do, I'm going to start creating grooves or scratches on my watercolor paper and there's no taking that back. Be light handed as you're doing all of this. For your shapes and edges of your plants, as long as everything is very irregular and loosely drawn, you're going to do good. Also make sure that you understand where your branches and little twigs are going to be because we're going to be using these shapes and lines in just a bit when we bring out our color pencils. I just want to make sure there is a lot of asymmetry in this shape. This is a branch right here. Some sections are more narrow, other sections are wider and there is no thought out pattern anywhere throughout this. Everything is very asymmetrical. More little branches coming out of this pot. It's good to have some brown sections of branches or twigs showing all throughout that plant section just because it provides a structure to the plants. Just finishing up by adding these brick patterns here. I didn't actually transfer these, so I'm just drawing them right on here. All done here. Let's get started with the handwritten lettering and pencil first, cleaning things up a bit here before I get started with the handwritten lettering. Already traced over these lines that tell me how large or tall these letters uppear going to be and how large these letters are going to be. What I like doing in order to ensure that my word is going to be centered in the space where I needed to be is I counting the letters in the words that I'm going to be adding in and starting by placing the letters that are right here, right in the center. Then once those letters are drawn, I can add in the letters to the left and to the right of that. I bring out a notebook and write the word here or words if there are multiple words. What I do is I count the letters first, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, total of nine letters. The letter right in the middle is going to be this T right here. I'm going to start with this T right around here and first I just create normal letters. Whether they are capital letters or lower case letters, it doesn't matter. I just draw the normal letter and I will be creating bubble letters around this in just a bit. First, I just do one on the left, one on the right, then I need another A over here and an R over here, and then another R over here, and then an I over here, then a and then an A. See how I ended up with something that is relatively centered. Let's do the same thing with these letters up here. Up here, we have Dow incursive which means since or from, and we have 18 65. We do have to account for this empty space in between these two. I just count it as an extra letter. In this case, we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, a total of eight letters or numbers. In this case, the empty space and the one need to be close to the center line. What I do is I just create a little line here down the center, and then I start with this one over here because this is cursive and in cursive, the letters are joined together, I should just write those at once. I'm going to go ahead and add in these numbers and then I'll tackle that 865. Then here, I'm just going to make a little teeny tiny tick mark, barely visible there just to visualize where that word or abbreviated word should finish. I'm going to do dull. If I wanted to turn these into bubble letters or give them more thickness, all I need to do is add some extra lines right above or below the lines that I've already drawn in to give them some thickness. And the font here for Tratoria is a serif font. Serif fonts have those little extra lines or sections, which makes the fonts look a little bit more classic or formal, if you will, and SanserifFonts don't have those little sections. If you want to make that font look more like the font in that reference photo, then all you have to do is create extra little sections where you see them there. Those are my little hacks or tips for adding in lettering into this piece. Now I'm going to go ahead and erase these horizontal lines that I had created for myself before I don't really want those to show. I'm going to use my needed eraser one last time to clean up excess graphite that I might have on my watercolor sheet because once we start painting over this linework, we're not going to be able to erase it. Do any cleaning up that you might want to do. I just noticed that this line here is a little bit wonky, so I'm just going to fix that real quick. Everything is light and clean and everything that didn't get transferred properly is now in. 7. Choosing Colored Pencils: Time to get started with the colored pencil part of this process. I'm going to explain what I'm going to be doing to choose my colors as well as the objectives for this part of the process. I have my prisma color premiere soft core colored pencils right here. These are regular wax-based colored pencils. What I like doing is first pre selecting my colors, keeping my colors limited to a certain amount, and just making sure that those colors go hand in hand with the paint colors that I'm going to be bringing in for the watercolor washes in the next part of the process. Keeping your number of colors limited to only a certain amount is going to ensure that everything looks more harmonious and cohesive at the end. Remember that repeating colors throughout the piece is going to lead to more integrated results. With those things in mind, what I do is I observe that reference photo and I take out the colors that are similar to that from my prisma color set. As I mentioned before, I will be bringing in an extra pop of color for little flowers in the plant section around the doorway. I need to decide what color I'm going to be bringing in for that. I am thinking maybe a red or a magenta, first, I just want to bring out the colors I will be using more of. I take out some lighter browns and some darker browns from my set I also see a grayish color for the brick wall, and I think these French grays are going to do beautifully, and then we definitely need some greens. I'm going to take out a darker green and a lighter green from my set. As you can see, as I'm choosing my colors, I'm making sure to bring out lighter versions and darker versions of these colors. This is so that I can make sure that even in my linework and my marks that I create with my colored pencils, there is already going to be a little bit of a range of values. But most of the value work is going to be developed with the watercolor washes. Check to see how bright this poppy red is. This is a warm bright red. I think this poppy red will do beautifully for that pop of color in those flowers and this terra cotta is a nice warm brown, could be useful for the baskets and the wood. Right now, I am just bringing out possible colors and in just a bit, I'm going to be taking some out. This could be a nice yellow ochre looking color for the pots or planters. Nice beige golden neutral color. Here's another dark brown that I might decide to use. Here's another red that I might decide on instead of the poppy red. Golden rod might be helpful. Instead of bringing in black for, say, the lamp and dark areas that I want to push more, I'm going to be bringing in this dark blue, which is indigo blue. With these colors, I have more than I need. I like swatching these out, and if any of these colors are quite similar, I remove one of them because it's not necessary to have two colors or more colors that are very similar. Starting with my browns, I have the se three. This one is definitely the lightest, so I'm going to keep that one, but I think that I can do without one of these. This one is the darkest. This one is somewhere in between, so I can probably do without, especially because since we're not really going to be doing super realistic shading with colored pencil, there is no need to bring all of those in. Then I have these two darker browns that I also think are going to be quite similar. This one is dark umber and this one is dark brown. They are both pretty dark. This one is definitely darker. I think I'm going to keep this one. I like that it looks a little bit warmer and these 2 grays are going to be for my bricks. They are both French gray. This one is 50% French gray and this one is 70% French gray, lighter and darker, I am not going to be taking out these two because I need a lighter and a darker version. As you can see, this one is lighter than this one. When it comes to my greens, I have a lighter green, a medium green, and a darker green. I don't need a lighter, darker and medium green because a lot of that value development in the plants is going to be done with the water color. I'm just going to swath these out. I like this green because it's a medium green and it's warmer. This is a lighter green. I really like these two. I'm going to take this one out. When it comes to these two, they are relatively similar in the sense that they are both golden neutral colors. In terms of value, this one is definitely darker than this one. But because I have a lighter brown and lighter brown is a great way to darken this golden neutral color, beige looking color, if you will, I really don't need both of these. I'm going to keep the lightest one and I'm going to get rid of this one. Indigo is an absolute must because I want it for darkest areas and black objects. Then I have these two options for the red flowers in the plants. This is poppy red, and this is crimson red. So as you can see, the poppy red is a lot warmer than this one. I like both, but I think because there's already going to be a lot of warmth in the piece with the warmer browns and the golden beiges, and even my grays are warmer grays. I think if I bring in the crimson red, which is the cooler red, that is going to help balance things out a little bit more between warm and cool colors. That is exactly what I do to choose my colors for a mixed media piece like this. I ended up with a total of one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten colors. The next thing that I do after having chosen my colored pencils is I sharpen them, and I'm going to make sure to continue sharpening them if I notice that they start becoming blunt. Just as an FYI, let me tell you what these colors are, but you by no means have to use these exact same colors in order to arrive at great results. More so focus on what I was mentioning before, which is make sure to bring in lighter and darker versions, especially of your most important colors. In this piece, we're going to be using a lot of grays and browns, which is why I'm bringing in a light, medium and darker brown. But when it comes to my other colors, I just have a lighter and darker version or just one when it comes to the indigo. 8. Colored Pencil Process (Pt. 1): The objective with this part of the process is to trace over the linework that I already created in pencil and also to add more detail, some alternative shading and extra expressive lines and marks for texture. Because this is going to be a mixed media piece, we don't want to go overboard with the work that we do with the color pencil or with the watercolor. We need to create a balance with both. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go in with my lighter gray. This is 50% French gray. I'm going to trace over my pencil work in the gray areas, which are the bricks, I'm going in loosely and lightly. I'm not pressing down hard at all. It is not my objective to burnish my paper or to create very clean looking lines at this point. I'm observing that photo, noticing if I'm missing any gray areas that need to be traced around. I'm going to trace over this arch. Maybe leave little sections where that plant is going to be overlapping some sections of that arch. In which case, you wouldn't really be able to see the edge of that shape, so you don't have to trace around this shape super perfectly. And But this is still wall. That is why I traced around it with gray. Then the street is also gray, I'm going to trace around that. This is also gray. I'm going to start tracing over this little gate over here, starting with the wall. I'm using my light brown. This is my burnt ochre. I'm tracing over my pencil work with this first before going any darker. I'm going to switch to my indigo because the gate metalwork here is black. I'm going to trace that with indigo. I haven't added in some verticals that I need to add in into this gate. I'll do that right now with my colored pencil. The lamp is also going to be indigo, and I also trace over the black sections of the lamp with my indigo. Observing that reference to remember what is black and what isn't. Hopefully, you can see how I'm going in quite loosely. I am not spending too long in any single area or trying to make my lines super perfect. Sometimes I'm using multiple lines to go over that pencil work. Going back to my light brown, I'm going to start tracing over my line work around the door in those wood sections the wood sections, especially. I'm going to add in an extra shape inside of that larger shape for the design and that wood. Same thing over here. At least the sections we would be able to see through the baskets. I'm going to trace around the windows as well. Then I'm going to use my yellow ochre to trace over the handle in the door, which I want to be more of a golden color and I'm going to use the yellow ochre for these planters as well. Any extra details or lines that you would like to add in, you can go ahead and add in. I'm definitely going to be adding extra lines and marks to the baskets to describe a little bit of that weaving. Going back to my light gray, I'm going to be using grays in the white curtains when I paint them, using a light gray colored pencil is going to play well with that. Or the spread basket, I'm going to be using my lighter brown. This is burnt ochre. I'm going to go back to my yellow ochre to trace around the bread. For the bottle of wine, I'm going to be using the darker gray. This is 70% French gray. Trace around that. The little label. When it comes to this section right here with the letters and the name of the restaurant, what I'm going to do is I'm going to invert those colors in that area. I'm going to flip them. Instead of having the letters be a gold color and having the back of that be brown, I'm going to make the letters a dark brown color and the entire half circle, it's not even a half circle, but this arch shape right here behind the letters is going to be a gold color. I can create that same contrast and still get in that feel. I'm going to trace over this section with my yellow ochre. Then I'm going to switch to my dark brown. I'm going to make sure that this colored pencil is nice and pointy and sharp and I'm going to trace over my letters and numbers. And very carefully filling in those shapes. Just using back and forth motions with my colored pencil. As long as your pencil is nice and sharp, then you should be able to fill in that very narrow shape relatively easily. You can see how I'm adding in those serifs. The little extra sections that I was talking about before. The O does require a little bit more finesse because it's curved. I'm doing my best to get the same thickness in all these letters. Okay and there we go. I'm going to get started with the baskets for the baskets, I'm going to be using my Sienna brown. Going right in and tracing over my pencil work first and then I'll worry about details that I might want to add in. This hot press paper is nice and smooth, so I'm not having any issues with the tips of my pencils skipping over that tooth or anything like that. I'm going to add in a little bit of a weaving texture here. What I'm going to do is I would first do the would be horizontals in this weaving pattern following that soft curve that I already created along the edges of this shape. And these lines don't even have to be complete or they don't have to reach from one edge of the shape to the other. I think it's cool to incorporate line weight variation into this part of the process. This just means making sure that certain parts of your lines or marks are thinner and lighter than other parts of your lines and marks. To do this, it's very helpful to work swiftly to keep moving and to not try to create perfect looking lines because if you do that, that's going to lead to a lot of stiffness and a flatter look flicking your hand as you're creating that line is helpful as well. Right. I'm doing those horizontals in all these in the lids and in the base bulk of these baskets. Sometimes making my way from left to right, and other times making my way from right to left. It adds variety into the drawing. Now I'm going to create the would be verticals. For this, it's helpful to start with the line right in the middle. Then as you make your way toward the left and the right, just angle it out. Toward either side, guiding yourself with the shapes that you've already created. Start in the middle with a vertical and then make your way out until your lines are a similar angle to this edge of your initial shape. Vertical, vertical, angle, angle, angle, angle. Vertical, vertical, angle, angle, angle angle, down here as well, then, vertical, angle, angle, angle angle, and down here as well. 9. Colored Pencil Process (Pt. 2): So now we've achieved that weaving pattern. I'm going to use my lighter gray to trace around the glass sections and also the artificial candle right here in the center of the lamp. I can trace with gray because that would be a white color, so I'm just going to do that with gray. Another thing that I'd like to add is a little bit of detail into these curtains and I can do that with a light gray as well. By doing this thing, you can convey those fabric folds in the curtains. Doing something like this, just a few organic shapes and same thing with this one here. Loose organic shapes. Let's get started with the plants now. I'm going to use my sienna brown to trace over the branches and twigs first. It gives me a chance to start visualizing the plants and also to understand where all of these leaves are growing out of good place to start. Bit of a thicker tree trunk down here and then thinner branches as you make your way up and around. Sometimes I'm guiding myself with my pencil work and other times I'm just adding in extra branches. Remember what I said in the beginning about how when it comes to organic objects, I really like going with the flow a little bit more Not being too controlling or planning things out super carefully. We can continue adding more leaves or more twigs and branches depending on how things are looking. I'm going to start with my lighter green and I'm going to create an irregular organic shape for this tree over here first. Get myself warmed up. You can see how when it comes to plants and trees, I like creating marks inside of the shape as well, which helps convey those overlapping sections of leaves, clusters of leaves. Same thing over here. I am letting my hand and my wrist go. I'm not trying to carefully trace over that work that I did with pencil. I'm using it as a guide to help me understand the size and the location of this important part of the composition, but I'm not going by my pencil work super strictly. If I do, my lines are going to end up looking very stiff and very flat. So again, when it comes to organic natural objects, loosen up your hand, your arm, your wrist, just focus on creating something that is very irregular and asymmetrical. This is a scribbling motion. No planning anything. Just trying to let go, creating expressive lines and marks. If you want to loosen up by practicing these marks and lines on a scrap piece of paper first, I would highly recommend that and then go ahead and do this on your final piece here. Adding in some extra marks and lines inside of the shape to convey a little bit of a sense of leaf clusters. Now I'm going to be adding some of this in with my darker green, which is olive green. This lighter green is lime peel. This one is olive green. I'm just going to add in some extra marks and lines along what I've just created just here and there, so that there can be a variety in value along these edges. Make some sections pop. See how I'm just going over some sections. I think that's enough. Now I'm going to be adding some little flower effects with my crimson red. The point here is not to go in and try to draw the petals. We're seeing these flowers from a bit of a distance, so I'm just trying to create a little sense of a flower being there. I'm not going in and drawing the actual flower. Same thing with these leaves. I used lines and marks to convey leaves, but I didn't draw the actual leaf. I'm doing this kind of thing. That kind of mark. Little scribbles. Make sure that you're not placing your flowers in a very patterny organized way, luster them together in different ways, distance them out in different ways. Variety is so important. I think those are enough flowers and when we're doing our watercolor washes, we're going to be adding in that red wet on wet. We're going to have a lot of free flowing, organic effects throughout the plants. By the way, I forgot to add in that little table line here. My bread basket and my wine look like they are floating. There you go. I'm also going to be adding a little bit of a weaving effect or pattern here in this basket. Same thing. First adding the would be horizontals. And then adding in the would be vertical, starting with the line in the center. Next thing that I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be adding a little bit of hatching in these sections right here, what we're able to see through the glass. Now, as I said in the beginning, I'm actually going to be adding some light effects in these sections. In my painting, these sections are not going to be as dark as they appear in the photo. There's going to be a variety of values and hues in these areas. But these are still areas that I think would look good with some shading because they are darker than everything else because it's the interior of the building that we're seeing. I'm going to be adding some alternative shade to the darkest areas. So I'm going in with some cross hatching. First, I go in with groups of straight vertical parallel lines, and then I simply choose an angle for my second group that I draw over that to create cross hatching. When you're doing hatching and cross hatching, your lines don't have to be going at any specific angle. You can choose an angle and just go with that, but stay consistent once you choose something. You don't want to start in one angle and then change that angle a lot as you're moving forward because things can end up looking a little bit messy. I'm going to be adding in some hatching over here as well because this is in shadow. So I pick an angle and I try to keep that angle consistent. It's kind of challenging to keep that same angle when you're filling up a shape that has an arch or curve to it. So do be careful and try to keep that angle consistent as much as possible. You are going to see me do a little bit of fixing and cleaning up with my soft graphite eraser. Linework was getting a little bit messy and I wanted to clean it up before moving on to the watercolor washes, because once you add the watercolor, you cannot erase anything. There is a certain amount of erasing and lifting that you can do when it comes to colored pencil pigment, but I wouldn't say that you can erase it 100%, so just be as careful as possible since the beginning. Y I'm going to add in a little bit of scribbling here with my dark gray to convey some letters there. As I was doing my transferring, I decided to leave out the little plaque down here because since a section of my drawing got cropped off, it just wouldn't make sense for me to create it. But if you have more space here and you would like to add it in, by all means, go ahead and do that. Just completing a little bit of those bricks here. Little lines or those bricks. I'm going in now with my darker gray and I'm just doing some quick shadow effects under or in between some of these bricks. Just like what I did with the plants, I am using my darker gray to just go over certain sections of my lines that I created with my lighter gray. This creates a little bit of a shadow effect. I'm going to leave the trees over here in the farther away distance just with the lighter green so that it doesn't compete as much or distract the way from the plants over here in the focal point. I do, however, want to go in with my darker brown to create a little bit of a darker effect. In some of these sections, these columns in the wall. Create at least somewhat of a variety of brown values there. I'm going to use my lighter brown to just do a little bit of detail right here. Connect the candle with the base of the lamp. Using my light brown, this is burnt ochre to just create a little bit of texture here. There's soil and dirt in the planters. I'm also going to use this light brown to create some hatching in the inner or side planes of these boxes for a little bit of a shadow effect. And finally, I'm going to be adding some shadow shapes. If you look at that reference photo closely, you're going to see some cast shadows below the baskets and to the left. By the way, I did go back to my light gray because these shapes are on the sidewalk, which is gray. I'm just creating a similar shape there. I'm just doing some hatching inside those shapes. To keep the shadows consistent, I'm going to do shadow shape over here to the left of this planter and over here. And that is pretty much it. That's all the work I'm going to be doing with my colored pencil. 10. Watercolor Swatching: Before jumping into the watercolor washes, I'm going to go ahead and swatch out the seven colors that I'm going to be bringing in. This way, you can see what these colors look like on paper and whichever color you don't have, you can just replace with something that is similar that you do have. The first color that I'm going to be bringing in is this beautiful rich green from St. Petersburg. This green is a bit on the warmer side, but it is quite dark and I'm going to be mixing this green with this Windsor lemon from Windsor and Newton to create my lighter green values throughout the plant section and also over here in this tree in the background. Windsor lemon is a bright, cool yellow, which looks like this. And by adding this Windsor lemon into my green, I can create a variety of green values. If I add more yellow into my green, I get a lighter green and if I add less yellow into my green, I get a darker green. I can get a whole range of green values to add depth and realism to the plants by just mixing different amounts of those two colors together. Aside from these two colors, I'm going to be using a zarin crimson for the flowers and a zarine crimson is a cool red, which looks like this. I'm going to make sure to drop in this lizarin crimson for my little flowers while the greens are still wet so that I can get nice wet on wet, soft expressive effects. Another color that I'm going to be bringing in is cobalt blue. I'm going to be using that to paint the sky. Cobalt blue is a blue that is neither warm nor cool. Some artists even refer to cobalt blue as a true primary blue precisely because it's neither warm nor cool. Another blue that I'm going to be bringing in is ultramarine blue, which is a warmer blue. It's leaning a little bit more toward the purple side in the color wheel. I really enjoy using a combo of ultramarine blue and a brown to create my grays. Instead of using a ready made black, such as ivory black, lamp black, et cetera, I actually like creating my own grays by mixing together different colors. For this one, I'm going to be creating my grays, using a combo of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, which is a warm brown. Burnt sienna looks like this. As you can see, it's a reddish brown. When I mix together equal parts of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna, I get a gray. If I add more blue than brown into my color mixer, it's going to look like a dark blue and if I add more brown than blue in my color mixer, it's going to look like a dark brown. If I combine a 50, 50 amount of each, I'm going to get a dark gray. This is a very versatile way to create your grays. You can make it a little bit warmer by adding more brown into the mixture or a little bit cooler by adding more blue. The last color that I'm going to be bringing in is raw sienna and raw sienna is a light beige golden brown. It looks like this. Let's go ahead and get started with our watercolor washes. 11. Large Washes: So I did take a moment to change my water just to make sure that I'm starting with a fresh container, and I'm going to also make sure to change it along the way because dirty murky water is going to affect the vibrancy of my colors. I have these three brushes on hand, and I'm just going to make sure to change between them depending on the size and complexity. Shape that I am painting in. Something that I do want to recommend is try not to spend too long in any single area of your piece, fussing too much about little imperfections that happen when you're painting with watercolor. Try to embrace those organic, imperfect effects, those uneven washes because that is the beauty of watercolor, when we start trying even things out too much or even blend colors too much together, or we just try to perfect things too much. This is going to get rid of that freshness and looseness that we're going for. Try to paint quickly and swiftly, yes, you can go in and manually move that paint after it's been placed on paper a bit. If you want to soften transitions or even do some lifting in areas that you've darkened too much, that kind of thing is fine. But stop yourself from doing unnecessary things from doing too much. I'm going to start with my size 14 round brush and I'm going to create a good amount of this gray that I was talking about before by mixing together burnt sienna and ultramarine blue. I'm just going to arrive at a gray that I like. You can even test your gray out on a scrap piece of watercolor paper if you want to see what it looks like, and if you want to make it warmer or cooler, it's completely and totally up to you. Just add in more blue or more brown accordingly. Here I have a nice puddle of gray on my palette. I would say this is a coffee consistency right here. I'm adding a tiny bit more water into it, get more of a T consistency. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start painting the brick wall. This brush that I am using comes to a nice fine tip. So as I get close to the plants, I'm lifting my brush a little bit and just doing a little bit of a scribbling motion and pushing that paint into those very irregular shapes that I've created for the edges of my plants. Making sure that the edge is very irregular. Now, if you live in a very dry warm environment like I do, and your paint is drying way too quickly, just make sure to go over that section where you started and make your way back down a little bit, and then go back to where you started and make your way down a little bit more, and so on and so forth. Cleaning up my edges a little bit here while the paint is still wet. Beautiful. I'm going to remove this gray from my paintbrush bristles. I'm going to take a little bit of my raiena I'm going to drop in a little bit of this golden beige brown in some sections to add a little bit of a tonal variation and also a variation in hue. To make that wall look a little bit more realistic, a little bit more worn out, if you will. Now I'm going to do the opposite side. If you need to make more of your gray, go ahead and create more. Just make sure that the gray is similar to the gray that you are using on the opposite side so that it looks like it's part of the same wall. Trying to get a t consistency as well on my palette. If you need to add a little bit more water into your mixture, go ahead and do that before taking a good amount of this gray, loading up your paint brush bristles well, and then just go ahead and do the same thing that you are doing. On the other side. Making sure to lift your paint brush and just use the tip of your brush as you are coming into contact with the edge of your plant so that you have that nice irregular edge. You don't want to create a smooth edge. Continue coming back to where you started. If you fear things drying a little bit too fast, just continue coming back to where you started to re wet. Going back. Things are still nice and wet and workable, so I can do a number of things, whatever I need to do. If you need to lighten, you can go ahead and do some lifting by pressing down the bristles of your brush in any area where you want to remove some of that color. If you want to go ahead and darken, you can just add a little bit more of your gray into different areas. I'm going to add a little bit of my raw sienna into certain sections as well, just like I did on the opposite side to create a variation in hue and value. Make things look a little bit more interesting. There we go. I need to paint in the wall right here and those sections are definitely way smaller. I do want to be a little bit more in control when I'm painting that. I switch on over to my size three round brush. I need more of my gray. I just add more ultramarine blue, more Burt sienna, do my best to get a similar gray to what I was using before. Always test out your colors on a scrap piece of watercolor paper as needed, and I'm just going to go ahead and get started. I'm also going to paint in this interior plane of the wall. A little bit later, I will be adding a second layer into that plane to darken it further. For now, I'm just connecting those two shapes and then with a second layer, I can separate the shapes by darkening the interior plane of the wall that has the hatching on it. Just doing little scribbling motions as I get closer to the plants for that irregular edge and making my way to the right, which by the way, if you are left handed and you work better right to left, then make your way right to left. I'm not going to be adding raw sienna into these sections because these sections are more in shadow away from the light. They are being covered by plants. Plant is creating a shadow on this part of the wall or it's the interior plane of the wall facing away from the light. I'm not going to be adding raw sienna here. I'm going to switch on back to my size 14 round brush. I'm going to add some cobalt blue onto my palette and I really only need a bit. The sky is a small section over here. I'm making sure to use a t like consistency when it comes to this cobalt blue so that the sky isn't too dark. I just load up a good amount of this cobalt blue, and then I just do the same over here. I make my way around the tree. And that is transparent glass. So you can make your way all the way to the candle, the edges of the candle, because you would be able to see the sky through the glass, paint right up to the edges of the candle, right? There we go. A That's the sky painted in. If you want to create any soft, subtle cloud effects, you can just do a little bit of lifting while that blue is still wet using the slightly damp bristles of your paint brush, just do a little bit of lifting, twirl your brush in different ways and just press it down and your brush is going to act as a little absorbent sponge. You're going to be able to remove some of that pigment off the page. I'm going to start painting in the tree right here. I'm going to make two different greens, a lighter green and a darker green right here. Both of them have lemon yellow and green in them. It's just that this one has more yellow than this one. I'm not really planning on going too dark for this tree in the distance because I do want the greens over here to look lighter generally speaking than the greens that I'm going to be using over here or at least not have as much contrast to them. I'm going to take a good amount of this lighter green and I'm just going to start painting this in very loosely. Making sure that I am lifting my brush and using just the tip of my brush in those edges, bringing the green down all the way through here because you can see green through the gate. Putting a little bit more of my green into it to darken it more. I'm going to place some of this darker green here and there, just to add a little bit of a tonal variation in these trees in the distance, not have things just be super flat with one same green. Bringing this down manually. I'm adding a little bit more green into my green color mixture to darken it more. I feel I need a little bit more contrast, especially down here in shadow areas. I remove that green from my paintbrush bristles and I'm just fixing edges a little. Sometimes because I'm making sure to work quick, I end up with edges that are a little bit messy or irregular, so I do that cleanup work at the end. Okay, so in the spirit of filling in the large areas first, I'm going to paint in the sidewalk. The sidewalk is also going to be gray, so I'm going to add more ultramarine blue and more burnt sienna into this puddle. I can make this gray a little bit warmer or a little bit cooler just so that it looks a little bit different from this one here, if I want to. I think I'd rather make it a little bit warmer by adding more brown into it so that it looks like a grayish brown. I make a good amount of this grayish brown load up my paintbrush bristles well. I'm just going to go ahead and get started with the sidewalk. Painting right in up to those baskets. And all of this area over here. Depending on how thick or how watery your color mixture is, you may or may not completely cover up the little hatching lines that you did for the shadows under your baskets. Try not to go too thick too soon when you're painting with watercolor. First, we're using a T, maybe coffee consistency, and then you can darken as you go. I remove that gray from my paintbrush bristles, remove that excess water. Right here, I'm just doing a little bit of cleanup work, softening some edges, creating some irregularity down here. I think things are looking just a little bit too dark. I'm doing a little bit of lifting to create some softer values in this area because right now everything looks very dark and very flat. There we go. By doing that, I lightened some areas and added dimension back into the sidewalk because it was looking a little bit too dark, a little bit too flat. This is actually the following day. All of the work that I previously did with my watercolor is completely dry at this point. I'm going to continue painting in those larger shapes and medium sized shapes first before moving on to the smaller shapes and details. This is my size 14 round brush, by the way. I'm going to start painting in the wooden sections over here in the door and the window and also the beige golden sections over here. For this, I'm going to be using my burnt sienna. Is my reddish brown. I will be adding a teeny, tiny bit of ultramarine blue into it just to provide a little bit more of a darker look. Burnt sienna is what I would consider a medium brown, at least with most brands. It's not super light like yellow ochre or raw sienna is, but it's not super dark either. So a dark brown would be like a sepia or even burnt umber is darker than burnt sienna. Remove that burnt sienna from my paint brush bristles and I add a little bit of my ultramarine blue into it just to darken it a bit. I want to make sure that I have enough of this brown on my palette before getting started with those large washes that I'm going to be painting because I want to be able to paint those large sections quickly. I don't want to be left with lines and defined edges. As I'm moving forward, I want to be able to pick up that bead where I left off and then continue filling that section. Make sure that you're well prepared when you're painting large areas. You want to have a good amount of paint ready for you on your palette. I added a little bit more water into that mixture to get it a little bit more watery, more transparent or paler or lighter. I am soaking up and loading up a good amount of this brown in my paintbrush bristles and I'm just going to go ahead and get started. Same thing over here, same principles I have in my mind. I'm starting on the left because I'm right handed I want to leave that intersection there with a lighter brown, so I'm making my way around that. Trying to make my way around the handle as well. I'm just trying to paint things in as swiftly as I can. Right now, my working environment is pretty warm and dry and our working environment really has an impact on how quickly or how slowly things start drying on us and it can change day by day. It's something that we need to be aware of and work around and sometimes even change our techniques. I I'm going to work around the baskets because I want the baskets in a lighter color. I'm just going to carefully make my way around them, making sure that just the tip of my paintbrush is coming into contact with the paper in those very small areas. Of course, you can always have a smaller brush in your non dominant hand and switch between them once you make your way down into these more complex areas, smaller areas. You can always have two paint brushes on hand. But of course, switching between two different brushes can be a little bit more difficult because as you're switching between your brushes, things can start drying and then once again, you're left with those texture lines and marks and visible edges that are drawing on you. So I'm going to add a tiny bit more ultramarine blue just because over here, things are a little bit wet and workable still, I have a little bit of time to drop in some paint and develop a bit of a darker value here and there. Can also develop a little bit of a shadow effect over here in between the baskets, just to convey a little bit of a shadow in these areas. Because the baskets would be blocking that light from hitting that section of the wall. Remove that paint from my paintbrush bristles, remove that excess water. Softening some edges before allowing everything to dry. I'm going to leave that alone, allow that to dry. In the meantime, I'm going to be painting the planters. 12. Planters + Plants: So for that, I'm going to be using my raw sienna. I'm going to add a little bit more of my raw sienna on my palette and to darken the raw sienna for the darker inner planes of those boxes, I'm going to be adding a little bit of burnt sienna into the raw sienna. First, I go in with the plain raw sienna. Just paint in that front plane then paint in this front plane over here. Then I add a little bit of my Burke Sienna into this color to darken it a bit and I use the slightly darker version of my color to paint in this shadow plane of these boxes. If your lighter color is still workable in this front plane and you want to darken certain areas, just drop in a little bit of that second color here and there to provide a little bit of a range of values. I still have some of the darker brown here, which is a mixture of burnt sienna and a bit of ultramarine blue. I'm going to go ahead and use this to quickly paint in a little soil dirt section here that the plant is growing out of. And if any bleeding happens here because all of this lighter color that I used to paint the boxes with is still wet, I'm perfectly fine with that. Bleeding can look quite beautiful and interesting. I'm still continuing to just embrace those little imperfections and irregularities that are happening. Those little imperfections can actually make things look more realistic and more interesting, especially when it comes to painting exteriors of houses and buildings because usually, unless the building or the house is new and recently There's going to be some amount of imperfection here and there because of the wear and tear and abrasion that happens on a day to day basis. Colors fade and things get dirty. I'm going to start painting in the plants for this. I want to make sure that I have at least a couple of different greens ready to go on my palette, and I also want to make sure that I have the Alizarin crimson puddle on my palette ready to go. I'm going to continue using my size 14 round brush for this. I'm going to be creating two green color mixers, just like what I did. Or the trees over here in the distance, I want to have two versions of my green ready to go, one lighter than the other one, so I'm just going to be adding more of my Windsor lemon into one of them and less into the other so that I can have a lighter green. And then what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be pushing those darkest areas in the plants and creating a little bit more detail with a second layer. So with this first layer, we're just creating the lighter values and mid tones throughout the plants, and we're going to be dropping in the Alizarin crimson as well. To create those little flowers with a nice wet on wet effect. Then after everything is dry, we're going to go back in and add more detail into the plant section. Here I have a lighter green, which is a mixture of my green and Windsor lemon, heavy on the Windsor lemon. Over here, this is a mixture of both colors green and Windsor lemon, only it's heavier on the green from St. Petersburg. I'm going to remove this green from my paintbrush bristles. Make sure I remove it entirely. I'm going to be placing my zarin crimson right here. Red and green are complimentary colors in the color wheel. They're opposite and complimentary colors mute each other down. If your green and your red start intermixing, you're going to get a more muted green or a more muted red. So it might be worth separating them on your palette so that these puddles don't start intermixing if you're looking for vibrant bright colors. Because of this as well, you also want to make sure that you're completely rinsing out your paintbrush bristles as you're moving along painting the plants and the flowers and changing between your green and your red. With a clean brush I'm going to get started with my lighter green first. I load up a good amount of this bright lighter green and I'm going to make my way from left to right, really moving my paintbrush in an irregular way. I'm not trying to fill in this shape. I'm using little scribbling motions up and down motions, pushing my paintbrush down in a variety of ways, shifting the angle that I'm using my paintbrush at. You can also see how I'm leaving little sections of highlights unpainted, just with the white paper shining through, and how I'm going back to where I started to re wet that area. Here I'm going to take a second. I'm going to stop. I'm going to remove that green from my paintbrush bristles, take some of my darker green, add some of the darker green over the lighter green and some sections here and there to start creating a variety of green values throughout the plants. Then once I have developed a little bit of a range of green values, I remove that green from my paintbrush bristles, I take some of my zarine crimson and I pop it into those little sections where I sketched in those flowers. I remove that red from my paintbrush bristles, I go back to my lighter green and I'm going to continue filling in this shape. Same thing. I'm going to make my way maybe until here, and then I'm going to do the same thing. Remove that light green from my paintbrush bristles, take some of my darker green that is heavier on the green, and then I'm just going to darken some areas to provide a little bit of a range of green values before rinsing out my paintbrush bristles and adding some of my lazarin crimson for the flowers. Remove that green, remove that excess water, and add a little bit more of that lazarin crimson onto my palette right here on this puddle that I had already started. I'm just going to pop in those little flowers as blooms, remove that red from my paintbrush bristles and I'm going to make my way down over here in this lower third. I'm going to add more of my Windsor lemon into the green to lighten it nice and quick before this section here dries. And I'm going to make my way down, leaving little sections of paper unpainted, little scribbling motions, making sure there's a lot of irregularity throughout this shape. Remove that light green from my paintbrush bristles, remove that excess water, load up a good amount of this darker green, can add more green into the puddle if you need to, and then just going to pop it in there, just here and there. You can go by the shapes and the marks that you already created with your colored pencil and place the darker green in those areas. But you don't have to go buy your colored pencil super strictly either. In fact, if you want to add more flowers, then the flowers that you added with your colored pencil, that's fine, too. I'm going to add more zarin crimson into the puddle to thicken up this little puddle a little. And then I'm just going to pop in the lazarin to get those nice wet on wet blooms here before my paint dries. So seeing everything as a whole, making sure that I have the amount of red flowers that I want in this area. I do feel that I have a little bit too much water and paint over here, still, a little bit of excess water in these areas. I once again clean my paintbrush, remove that excess water, and I just use the tip of my paintbrush as a little absorbent sponge to lift up that excess paint and water that I have pulling in some sections here and there. But all in all, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out here. My flowers look soft and diffused, so I had those nice wet on wet blooms because I painted quickly and I applied the darker green and the red while that initial lighter green layer was still wet. 13. Small Areas + Objects: So I'm going to move on to paint the little baskets, and I want the baskets to be a lighter brown than this one, but a darker brown than this one. I'm going to be mixing together burt sienna and raw sienna right here on my palette once I have a nice color, I'm just going to take some of this and I'm going to paint them all at once. This back wall is already dry, so I'm not getting any bleeding. These are relatively small shapes. So if you want to use a smaller brush, you can feel free. But I'm also constantly helping myself with my absorbent towel, tapping the tip of my brush onto it to remove that excess drippage just to make sure that I have enough control of what is happening here. That initial lighter color has been painted in. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to add more burnt sienna into this puddle to darken it, get a slightly darker brown, and I'm going to drop in a little bit of this burnt sienna into shadow sections in my baskets to create a slight range of brown values before allowing this to dry. Now I'm just going to go in with a clean and only slightly damp brush to fix things just a tiny bit before allowing things to dry, fixing edges, cleaning things up a bit. Awesome. Going to leave that alone. I mentioned before how I'm going to be switching the colors right here. I'm going to be flipping them. What I want in here is a very light golden beige brown. I'm going to be using raw sienna in that area where we have the name of the restaurant. I'm going to load up a good amount of this raw sienna and I'm just going to paint that in. I want it nice and light so that there is contrast between the background and the letters. I want the letters to be legible. If I go in with a color mixture that is super thick, that can actually lower the contrast and not make the letters as legible as I want them to be. I had gone slightly into this shape with my darker brown as I was painting in this area, right here, I'm just doing a tiny bit of scrubbing after having painted in that lighter color and I was able to fix that easily. From here, I'm just going to drop in a tiny bit more raw sienna in a slightly thicker state, in some sections here to create a slight range of values. And provide just a little bit more interest and dimension to the sign there. I'm going to finish painting these two elements right here and then I'm going to move on to these. For this, I'm definitely going to need a smaller brush. These are definitely smaller shapes. First, I'm going to tackle the wall here. For this, I'm going to be using a combo of burnt sienna and a little bit of ultramarine blue just to darken the brown a little. I want a similar brown to what I used over here. I'm just going to mix those two colors together until I arrive at something that I like, a bit of a darker brown with my size three round brush, I'm going to go ahead and paint that in. I'm going to paint in the entirety of the structure, the wall at once, and then with a second layer, I can separate out the planes by darkening a section of it. I remove that brown from my paintbrush bristles and what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint in the top of the lamp, which is black. For black areas or black shapes, I'm simply going to create my gray that I was using for the sidewalk and the wall over here. If you remember, this gray that we are using is a mixture of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. I just mix those two colors together right here on my palette until I get something that looks like gray. If I go in with a super thick dark black looking color right away, it's going to look very flat and very heavy and I'm going to get rid of my opportunity to create lighter values in that metal. What I want to do is I actually want to go in with a coffee consistency, I would say. If your gray is just too thick, add a little bit more water into it. If you want, you can even leave little highlight sections left unpainted right there because this is supposed to be metal and metal is reflective. Leaving a little teeny tiny highlight here and there can really help convey that metallic material. But as you can see, it looks gray and not black. By going in with my gray in a pretty water down consistency, allowing that to dry and then going in with a second layer and darkening the shadow sections. In a second layer, I can actually develop a little bit of a range of gray values in that lamp and at the end, it's going to look a lot more realistic and it's going to have a lot more dimension. Going to use the same brownish gray color that I just used to paint the black sections over there. The candle, whether artificial or natural, they're usually white objects. When it comes to painting whites with watercolor, we need to incorporate the whiteness and the brightness of the paper to really help convey that white color. But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't go in and develop a range of values. So to create a little bit of dimension in the candle, which is a white object, I'm just going to be using a little bit of this same gray, but I'm just going to make sure to incorporate a lot of the whiteness of the paper. In that candle. Because if I cover it up, it's not going to look white, it's going to look gray. There it is. It's a very light gray. You can even leave the center of the candle free of paint. I'm going to use just a tiny bit of this same gray to paint the glass edges. Just creating a little bit of a shape, a gray shape right along my linework that I already created with my colored pencils. I'm going to allow that to dry and then later on I can add more detail. For now, I'm going to go ahead and start painting these elements in. I'm going to switch on over to the medium brush that I am bringing into this painting process, which is my size ten round brush. I'm going to be painting in the inside of the restaurant that we're able to see through the glass. To paint that in, I'm going to be using exactly the same combination of mixtures that I was using for the wall. I need my gray color mixture, which is a combo of ultramarine blue and bird sienna and I also want to have raw sienna on hand or that light effect that I'm going to be adding. All we're going to do is we're going to paint in the gray and then we're going to be dropping in a little bit of raw sienna as blooms, especially up here to create a little bit of a light effect. Add a little bit more ultramarine blue into this gray, a little bit more birtsiena. It was looking a little too much like a grayish brown, so I'm turning this into a little bit more of a neutral gray, not too warm, not too cool, taking a good amount of this gray. I'm just going to start painting in this area. My brown is already dry around it, so I don't need to be super careful to avoid creating blooms or anything like that. I'm going to remove this gray from my paintbrush bristles quick. I'm going to add some raw sienna right here on my palette, golden Biji brown, and I'm going to drop some of this in. Going to take a little bit of my Windsor lemon, which is my cool yellow, I'm going to drop some of that in as well. Beautiful blooms. Going to do the same thing over here. I'm actually going to have the smaller size three round brush for those smaller complex areas in between the curtain and the bread. I'll change between my two brushes. Once you drop in your colors, don't move them around unless it's absolutely necessary because you might get rid of that bloom effect completely if you do. You're just going to start merging those colors together to the point that you don't have that organic effect, changing to my smaller brush, taking a little bit more of my gray, helping myself with my absorbent towel. This is a small shape that I'm filling in. Quickly changing on over to my larger brush again, taking some of my raw sienna and I'm going to drop it in here before things dry. Removing that raw sienna from my paintbrush bristles, taking some of my Windsor lemon. I'm just popping in some Windsor lemon. Great. I'm going to leave that alone. I'm not going to touch it or move it. I did fill in a little bit more of this shape by accident when I was painting the darker brown. I'm just going in with a tiny bit of scrubbing with my smaller size three round brush. It's nice and clean and I'm just removing a little bit of this dark brown from this shape. I'm going to be painting that shape in just a bit with my plain raw sienna, give it a little bit of a golden look, but I'm going to allow it to dry before I do that. I don't want to paint in the curtains and these little elements over here until this dries completely because I already have quite a bit of effects going on there and if I have bleeding between my curtains and those areas, I think it's going to be a little bit too much. The meantime, I'm going to get started with my second layer in some of these areas and jump around. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to darken this interior plane right here in the arch so that I can really convey a little bit more of a shadow effect and add depth to the piece. For that, I'm going to go back to my brown color mixture, which is a mix of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. Try to get a similar gray to what I was using before in this area. I'm going to continue to use my size ten round brush, which is the medium brush that I chose for this process. This is a coffee to milk consistency, so it's not super water down, especially because this is the second layer already and I'm looking to push the dark. I'm looking to create shadow effects. The lights are already in, the light values are already created. I'm looking to expand the range of values and deepen and darken sections within those larger lighter areas to create more contrast, add more depth, and more realism to the piece. Once again, just making my way from left to right, because it's what comes more easily and naturally to me as a right handed person. You can see how by just doing some overlapping with that same paint color or that same color mixer that we were using before in this area, I've created a darker look. I'm going to add a little bit of an ultramarine blue effect. I I add more ultramarine blue into one of these little corners of my palette, I'm just going to do a little bit of a blue effect here and there. Just dropping in some ultramarine blue. I got a little bit of ultramarine blue on the wall, so I remove that paint from my paintbrush pitels, remove that excess water, I'm just going in to remove that color. I'm going to add a little bit of a darker value as well right here in this plane of this pillar of this wall over here. This is the same color mixer that I was using to paint this. It's just a little bit heavier on the ultramarine. If I want to make it look more like this, I simply add more burtsienna into this and then going to use my size three round brush. To add a little bit of darkness to this plane that is facing away from the light. Maybe a little bit here as well. Now, if you want to add a little extra effect after you painted that in drop in a little bit of your raiena while this is still wet lifting a little bit of that color. From there, I'm just going to be adding a little bit more detail into the lamp. I'm just going to use the same color mixture that I have right here, my mix of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna because it's what I was using to paint the lamp before. All I'm going to do is create some little shadow shapes, maybe darken some planes that are facing away from the light to expand that range of values in that metallic section in the lamp. Also in the glass here and there. Look at those abstract shapes that I am painting. I'm not trying to trace over my linework with perfect lines. I'm more so creating abstract, irregular shadow shapes. I'm going to do a little bit of scrubbing to fix this edge of my candle just a bit. I left a little sliver of white paper unpainted there. I'm just softening the look of it a little. Awesome. I'm just going to soften this dark gray shape that I just painted into my candle. It's a little bit too dark and jarring to me. Tiny bit more gray right here. I'm going to leave the candle alone. If I continue adding gray to it, it's going to start looking gray and not white. I think that's enough detail in that lamp. I can start painting in the curtains and the little elements over here. By this point, these sections are pretty much dry, so I'm going to start painting in the bread and the little elements. I'm going to use my size three round brush and use my plain raw sienna to paint the little loaves of bread. Maybe add in a tiny bit of burnt sienna just for a little range of values here to separate out the loaves, remove that burnt sienna and just sculpting the breads a little here. I don't want to overly describe these elements. I'm going to add more burnt sienna here on my palette and I'm going to use my burnt sienna to paint the basket and the table right here. Remember, we can separate out the elements with a second layer just by adding some shadow effects in between them. We can visually separate them out. All right. So for the wine, I'm going to water down my gray, take just a small amount of paint. Going to paint in that bottle. I had some of this gray go right into the brown but I just had painted in for my table. I'm just doing a little bit of fixing here. I'm just going to go back to my burnt sienna and I'm going to paint in the label with the burnt sienna. Repeating colors so that everything is harmonious and cohesive. Add more of my raw sienna into this little section of my palette to make it look a little bit lighter and more like a golden color. I'm going to use this to paint the handle of the door in. And now the only sections that I'm missing when it comes to this first layer are the curtains. I switch on over to my medium sized brush again, my size ten. I want the curtains to look like white curtains. The same ideas that I was explaining when we painted the candle still apply. I don't want to paint the entire shape of the curtain with gray. I just want to paint a bit of gray to develop a slight range of light values. Remove that gray from my paintbrush bristles. Soften things, make sure that there is plenty of white paper shining through to convey that white curtain color. If after having placed a little bit of this gray, I want to darken areas even further, then I can go ahead and take more of my gray and add it into certain sections here and there to increase that range of values. But I want to be careful that I don't overly cover up that white paper or create effects that are too stark and contrasting. Softening edges here. 14. Adding Details + Shadow Shapes: And now we're going to be moving on to adding more detail and more shadow shapes, especially here in this focal point area. I took a quick sec to change my water because it was looking pretty murky and I'm going to start with the plants. As I mentioned before, with that first layer, we were developing the lighter green values, and now with the second layer, we're going to be creating darker green. So think of these as little shadow shapes under and in between clusters of leaves. I add more of my green into the section of my palette where I was creating my greens. If you think that there is way too big of a jump or discrepancy between the green values that you've already created and your new green puddle, then I would recommend adding a little bit of yellow to create a bridge transition tone. As you move along, you can add more green into your mixture to push areas even more. For this part of my process, I have both my size 14 round and my size three on hand because my size three round brush is going to be great for little teeny, tiny leaf shapes that I'm going to be doing with a bouncing motion. First, I'm using just the tip of my larger brush. I need a little bit more of a darker green. I'm just creating little shadow shapes with the same scribbling motion. Keep things very loose and very irregular here. If you don't see enough of a difference between the green values that you've already created and these darker green values, add more green into your mixture, darken it and thicken it up a little bit more, then use it that way. Remember, the point here is not to completely cover up all of the lighter green values that you've already created. It's more so to expand that range of values and create little shadow effects to really convey those overlapping groupings of leaves. Notice how I'm shifting the angle that I'm using my paintbrush at, doing little scribbling motions and moving my paintbrush in different ways. Sometimes just the tip of my brush is coming into contact with a paper and sometimes I'm pressing down the belly of my brush a little bit more. I'm going to go a little bit darker. Add more green into my color mixture here. Just add a bit of a darker green here and there. If you want to intensify the red flowers, add more zarin crimson into the section of your palette, and you can just drop in a little bit more of your zarin crimson. I wouldn't recommend intensifying every single one of them because you want those soft diffused effects. That variety of effects is important and what I mean by this is you want some of these flowers and leaves to have that soft look to them and you want other shapes throughout this area to be a little bit sharper and more defined. It's that combo that really creates that depth and that believable look. So I'm going to switch on over to my size three round brush and I'm going to take some of this darker green and by doing a little bit of a bouncing motion, you create little leaf shapes. Because since this is a round brush, if you press down that brush, you create a little leaf shape. You can add these for extra detail here and there. Make sure that you're clustering these little leaf shapes together in different ways. H with a bouncing motion. Make sure your leaves don't look super patterny and organized as well. Cluster them together in different ways, make sure their orientation in space is different. Bring in that variety that I was talking about before. I think that's enough for now. If I want to add more little leaves later, I'll do it then. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to create a little bit more of my gray color mixture that I was using for my wall and I'm going to create some shadow shapes in between my bricks. I'm not looking to paint perfect lines. Once again, I'm looking to create shadow shapes with this same gray that I was using for my wall and my size three round brush. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to start creating little shadow shapes in between my bricks. Using my linework, I'm still able to see my pencil work through my paint, and if you can't see yours, I would recommend maybe sketching that in again lightly before starting to do this. Because if you just guess where those shadow shapes would be and you start painting in these shadow shapes, you might end up making some mistakes and these lines have to look aligned throughout the wall. But also notice how I'm not creating perfect lines. My intention is not to create perfect horizontal lines here. It's to create abstract, irregular shadow shapes in between my bricks, how do I do this? I do this by pressing down my brush and lifting and pressing and lifting in a very irregular unplanned way. Sometimes my lines are not even connecting and touching, and that is going to make things look a lot more realistic than going in and painting perfect lines because these are not lines. These are shapes, they're shadow shapes. All right. Awesome. Now I'm missing the vertical shapes. It's a little bit wonky. I'll fix it in a bit. A little bit wonky here. Alternating pattern for those vertical lines. I'm going to fix this wonkiness a bit, softening that. This one too. While that paint is still wet, I'm going to move on. This helps enhance the brick texture a little bit more. I'm going to create a little bit of a shadow effect right here under this detail in the wall. Just thinking of its three diness Now I'm going to move on to adding a little bit of a shadow effect and more detail in the door. Back to this color that I was using in the door, which was a mixture of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue, heavier on the burnt sienna so that it looks like a dark brown, still using my size three round brush and I'm just going to be adding a little bit of a shadow effect. In the wood detail. Here, I'm using just the tip of my brush and I'm trying to stay away from the look of outlines. Again, I'm thinking of these as shadow shapes created by plane changes throughout the wood, not outlines. I don't want to go super dark and contrasting with my detail here. Again, pressing down and lifting that helps me create irregularity throughout this elongated shadow shape. A bit of a line weight variation throughout all of these is what I'm looking for. If you want to see them as lines, think of creating a line weight variation throughout that line have certain sections look whiter, darker even, and other sections look thinner and lighter. Now, here, here. M. As we continue expanding that range of values and adding more detail, this piece is really starting to come to life. I'm going to darken certain sections in the plant pots as well, starting with the dirt. I just create more of the same color that I was using here and create a little shadow effect where the volume of those plants would be creating a shadow in the dirt. Adds irregularity and depth to these areas. I'm going to use more of my raw sienna plus a bit of burnt sienna to create a little bit of a shadow shape right here, shadow shape right here and I can darken the interior plane of these boxes with my burnt sienna mixer that I was using before. Just developing a second layer right here is going to darken that. I'm going to do a tiny bit of lifting because I think things are looking a little bit too flat throughout that plane. So just removing a little bit of that color. I have just a few more things that I want to do before switching on back to the colored pencils and one of them is darkening the shadow shapes under the baskets. For that, I'm going to be using my same gray color mixture that I was using for the sidewalk. Make a little bit more of that or at least similar to that that same combo of ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. Paint in those shadow shapes again. I am using my size ten round brush, but I should be using my size three round brush, I think is more appropriate for that. So I switched to my smaller brush. A bit of a shadow shape here under the door and here to the left of this planter. Give it a little bit of a squared look. Adding just a bit of darkness here. I don't want it to look like an outline, so I soften that using more of my gray combo burnt sienna and ultramarine blue and going in with my size 14 round brush, the largest brush that I'm using for this process, just to quickly create some final shadow shapes on the wall. Because the plants are blocking that light from hitting these sections of the wall, I should create a little bit of a shadow shape here. I'm making sure that this shadow shape that I am painting in is very irregular because the shadows are being created by a very irregular shaped object. Make it a little bit darker. Add more of my two colors into my mixer, thicken it up a bit. Doing a little bit more layering here and there. Just to finish up, I'm going to create some of the same brown that I was using for the door, mixture of burnt sienna and ultramarine blue, heavier on the burnt sienna so that it looks like a dark brown. I'm making sure to go in nice and water down because what I want to create right now are just some lighter mid tones here and there. Make this look like this is receding a little bit. Create a little bit more of a shadow shape here behind the baskets. A little bit of a shadow shape under the handle. I'm going to be all done. I'm all done with the watercolor. I am going to allow this to dry and then I'm going to switch on back to the colored pencil to add a little bit more contrast and definition into the letters and maybe just add a little bit more detail into the plants with some lines and marks and also to the baskets right here. 15. Final Colored Pencil Details: We're moving on to the very last part of this process where we're just going to be adding a little bit more detail, maybe more expressive lines and marks, adding a little bit more contrast into certain little elements. I'm only going to be using these five colors from the ones that I was previously using. This is my darker green, which is my olive green. This is light brown, which is, for me, my burnt ochre. This is dark brown, indigo, and my red that I chose for my flowers, which is crimson red. Let's go ahead and finish this piece. I want to go over certain little branches, just sections of these if you want to add more, you can definitely add more. Just don't go overboard. Just to make those branches pop a little bit more. This is my dark brown that I'm using. Down here, taking my crimson red, I'm just going to do a few more expressive lines and marks in my flowers here. You can even add more in other little sections if you want to. Same types of lines and marks that I was using in the beginning. Some of these are still quite visible, so I don't need to go over them. As I said, you can choose to add more I'm going to make sure to sharpen my dark brown before going into those letters. I want to go in with a nice, fine, pointy tip, and I'm just going to trace over my letters again. This helps darken and clean them up a little. Going in with my burnt ochre now, my lighter brown. And just darkening this section here a little with the same brown, I can add a little bit more depth and dimension to these brown letters by just adding a little bit of a lighter brown to the left of my shapes and lines for my letters. Creates a little bit of a shadow effect that helps raise those letters, makes them pop a little bit more. If you want to go in with your dark green and create a few more lines and marks in those leaves, you can do that too. Same thing as with the flowers. Switching to my burnt ochre now, my lighter brown and just going over some of my previous lines and marks here for the baskets to make them pop a little bit more. Since these elements are closer to us, we would be able to see them more than, for example, the elements that we're seeing through the window. It's nice to create a little bit of that distinction, what is closer and what is farther away via just adding more detail and contrast into closer elements. I'm just loosely going over the lines and marks that I already created in a very loose way. The last thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to go in with my indigo just to darken this section of the lamp a little bit more. And I also want to darken the metalwork in this gate over here, clean it up a little. Just went over those lines again. And with that, I'm all done with those last colored pencil details. You can take it further if you'd like, and continue adding more textures and details, but I would recommend coming back to see the piece as a whole so that you don't end up overdoing it and so that both mediums, both the watercolor and the colored pencils shine and are able to balance each other out. 16. Thank you: Congratulations for making it to the end of this course. I really hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned many new tips, tools, and techniques that you can take to future artwork. Make sure to share your work in the projects gallery, which you're going to find in the Projects and Resources tab right below any of the class videos. I always love seeing your work so so much and would be happy to help out with anything that you might need. If you enjoy this course and you found it helpful, I would really appreciate it if you could leave a review. It helps me know that I'm on the right track and also helps get my courses out there for more people to enjoy. Don't forget to follow me here on Skillshare so that you can know when I share a new course. Make sure to check out my YouTube channel for new free tutorials every single week and my Instagram for special tips and inspirational posts. Thank you so very much for joining me on this one. I wish you a wonderful rest of your day. Enjoy your art practice and see you very, very soon.