Landscape for Beginners: Relaxing Watercolor Painting of the Night Sky in the City

1. About the Class: Welcome to my new class crafted specifically for the beginners. In this class, we will paint a simple yet stunning landscape with a sky and a city. I will guide you through every step. We will start with materials and color mixes. Then we will move to draw in a sketch and finally, we'll create our watercolor masterpiece. This class is perfect if you want to paint something relaxing. I will use only four colors so you can paint even with a small water color set. As a class project, you will paint a landscape with the night sky and silhouettes of the city. Hope to see you in the class. 2. Materials and Color Mixes: Hello again, and let's start with art materials you will need for this painting. I will use four colors permanent yellow deep, in credon coral, ultramarine finest, and paints gray. I will use two brushes, synthetic brush number six by Winsor and Newton and number 12 by squama. I'm using mechanical pencil by pencil, 0.3 millimeters and needle eraser. If you don't have it, the ordinary eraser will do just fine. I always use 100% cotton paper for landscapes, and this time, I decided to try paper by bah. I already painted some landscapes in this pad, and I think it will work fine. I will take some scrap paper to show you the color mixes I will use for this painting. I will start by swatching my colors. If you don't have these colors, you can try to find some similar colors from your pallet to replace them. For this type of sky, I normally use a lizard in crimson for the red, but this time, I decided to use kinocrdon coral because it creates more bright orange color in mixes with yellow. Our first mix is kinocrdon coral and permanent yellow deep. Which creates a very nice orange color. Even if you have orange color in your palette, I suggest you to use pink and yellow color instead because we will need to create a smooth gradient on the paper from the purple color to the bright orange, and it will be possible to create only with these colors because if you will add orange color to this palette, it might look muddy. Our next mix is inacrdon Coral and Ultra Marine finest. And pure paints gray, I will use for painting the silhouettes of the buildings, and you can use any black that you have in your palette. That's it for the mixes. Let's move to the next sketch. 3. Sketch: In this lesson, we will draw a sketch. I don't use the ruler to create these straight lines, but I'm using site and method and to measure the proportions of the objects, I'm using my pencil, and also you can measure the angle of the lines because they are not straight with your pencil. You can split the image in two halves horizontally and vertically to understand where the objects are towards this middle line. My sketch is done. I will remove the pencil lines with a needle eraser. I'm usually using needle eraser to not damage the paper, and I will see you in the next lesson where we will start painting with watercolor. 4. Painting the Sky: In this lesson, we will paint this landscape with water color, and we will start by preparing our colors on the palette if you haven't done it yet. I'm always using a ceramic palette because I like how the colors are mixing on it. But if you don't have the ceramic one, you can use plastic co metallic one or even a simple plate. We will need a pretty dense purple color, so don't create two watery mixes and try to create a very color on the palette. We will start by covering the surface of the paper with clean water. I'm using another mop brush, but it's not necessary if you don't have it. You can just use your mop brush. I just have it loaded with the color, and I didn't want to rinse it off from the brush, so I decided to use another one. I will start by applying very dark purple color on the top of the paper. You can cover the whole paper with the color, not avoiding the buildings because the buildings will be black and we will paint them on top of the color of the sky. As we move to the bottom of the paper, I will add some more pink color to create this nice gradient. Basically, we are moving from a very dark purple color to the orange one, and we need to create a smooth transition. Mm. We are covering the paper with color, but I think we can create even darker shade for the top of the paper. While the paper is still wet, we can work with wet on wet technique. Because the cotton paper will absorb a lot of color and the colors will be not so bright in the end. Now I will clean my brush and dab it on the paper to remove some color from the surface of the windows because the windows will be pretty light pink. And we are done with our first layer. Now let the paper dry and I will see you in the next lesson. 5. Painting the Buildings : Welcome to the final lesson where we will paint the silhouettes of the buildings and some final details. I will use Pure paints gray color and the brush number six. This part of the painting is pretty relaxing because you need to use only one pure color and to cover the whole surface consistently with one color. This synthetic brush that I'm using has very pointy and which allow me to paint even a small details and thin lines in the end of the painting. If you don't have such brush, you might need a smaller brush later. When we're painting this building on the left, don't forget to avoid painting the windows because we need to leave these areas light. If you will look closer to the reference photo, you will see that this side wall of the building has slightly different shade, not so dark and not so black. That's why I want to add a little bit of kinocrdoncorl, two pins green. It will be still pretty dark color and maybe you even can tell the difference when you're watching the video. But I suggest you used this slightly different shade. Because this different shades, they will create more realistic appearance of our buildings and not just flat color. It looks like between these two buildings on the left and on the right. There is a tree or some forest, I don't know, and the building further away. So I will have to paint some more interesting elutes than just straight lines. But you can create your own elutes that you want to paint over there, maybe even just a tree instead of the building. When we are painting this building on the right, we also remember to avoid painting over windows. And now I'm moving to the final part of this black buildings painting, and I will just paint the balconies on the right. To be honest, I just repeated the shape that I saw on the photo. I didn't analyze wh part of the balcony so be logically there or somewhere else. I just repeated this shape. And it's not very important because the Focus of this painting is on the light windows and contrasts between the black building and light windows. So these dark buildings on the edges, they just create some nice framing for our sky. I'm done with the balconies, and now I want to create some small details. I'm holding my brush vertically and barely touching the paper. I'm creating this very simple lines that are representing wires and some elements of the city. I will also add some thin lines on the windows. And again, as I told you, my brush has very pointy and sharp end. And if you don't have such brush, you probably can use a smaller brush like number zero or number one. And we are almost done with our landscape. I will just add some final details with a zinc white color that I will put on my palette first. I want to paint some moon and stars on this dark purple sky. Okay, I decided to switch to my smaller brush for painting the moon. I will use brush number zero, also synthetic one. The watercolor is not pretty dense medium, so you probably will have to go over a few times to make the color look very white. And I will add some small dots representing the stars. But also, I want to add some white splatters because its very artistic. First, I need to cover the areas that I don't want to be splattered with the paper towels or some scrap paper. Anything will work. So just keep the area that you want to cover with white splatters. Once your brush is loaded with the color, you need to hit the brush against the finger of your opposite hand. It will create these nice splatters. Now we can remove the paper towel and our painting is done. Thank you for joining in this class. Please don't forget to leave review and submit a class project. I would love to see your painting, and I hope to see you in my other classes.