Learn to Paint a Dreamy Spring Landscape in Watercolor

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Irina Trzaskos, watercolor artist and illustrator. Also I love to teach watercolor classes online and live. In today's class, I will show you how to paint a spring landscape in watercolor. We'll explore wet into wet technique, wet into dry technique and different watercolor textures. If you are new to this channel, welcome and thank you for tuning. There's a follow button on top and let's get started. 2. Colors and Supplies : So in today's class we'll be using the following supplies. First of all, we'll need a board. Something like this or like this, where we'll be taping our paper on with the painter's tape. So we'll need a board. Before we start painting, we need to tape the paper like a quarter of a inch or five millimeters on every side. So it won't wrinkle when we'll be working with into wet paint. Next we'll need of course paper, paint, water, paint palette, paper towel, for some effects, we'll need a spray bottle, a big water color brush, this is number 12, a medium water color brush, this is number four and the small water color brush, this is number two. Optional we'll need a flat synthetic brush. So in this class, we'll be using following colors. It's a limited color palette, so, it's not a lot of colors we'll need. First of all, we'll need magenta, because we'll have blossom and that's what we'll use for blooming branches. Then we'll need paint gray. We'll use it for tree. Then we'll be mixing emerald green, and violet for water. So these are all the supplies and colors we'll need in today's class. 3. Painting the first layer of landscape: First thing we'll do for our landscape, we have to decide where we want our horizon to be. It's better not to put it right in the middle of the page. Put it a little lower or a little higher than the middle of the page. For this landscape, I would like it to be lower so we have more space in the sky for a blooming trenches. I will take painters tape. A little long. No. I will put it where I would like a horizon to be. Say here and tape it as straight as possible. Okay, so now what we'll do next we'll take a big brash and we'll start applying water. Not from the top to the bottom as we usually do, but from the horizon line to the top, just clean water. Next I'll take some magenta and add it also there, right close to the horizon. Feel free to add more paint because if there is a lot of water here and of course it will get brighter after it dries. It's one of the properties of watercolor. It gets brighter after it dries. You can see, I didn't add the paint all the way to where my water line is. Because I would like this part of the sky to be white. We can see the nice contrast between the branches I'll show you later. Here I would like to have a soft line like different blooming trees are softer into the sky. Next I will take the paper towel and I'll absorb the excess of water where I can see like little puddles formed. We can use more color here, but the first I'll absorb excess of water or no. You can add another line with water just in case you don't have a soft line there. You can see how these are already blooming up in just soft line. So what we'll do next, I'll take some Payne's gray, I'll add it to my little bit of magenta. Just a drop of magenta. I'll add with a small line with the small brush, some trees. Also while this is still wet, not everywhere just here and there a little bit. You can see we need more pink right here because it's all almost wide. Let's take some magenta and add some trees here. This is good. While all this is drying, we can be very gentle. I remove painter's tape. You can see this perfect horizon line. Because we we'll have water here, that's why we need a perfect horizon line. Next we can start painting the water while all this is drying. We'll take some emerald green with some purple and we'll mix it here in our paints palate so it will be created. It's created a beautiful blue. What we do first we'll apply water without touching this area, just leaving one teeny-tiny millimeter of white line. I will add some pink to it because of a reflection of a water which reflects the pink from the sky and pink on the trees. This water is not touching that area with the trees, it's important. After we did that part we can go braver. After we have some pink, we can start edging our blue. Lets take more pigment. Again, we have emerald green with purple. Looks like a lot of purple and so lets add more emerald green to it. It has to be blue, bluish green, a little bit of purple, Iike this. Again, it'll lighten up a little bit after it dries. You just take the paint and you press the brush onto the paper. It forms this beautiful, white ripples. Nice texture. Here I want to go softer, like this. Next I'll add a lot of water because here I want to have another side of the river. It's going to the earth here. We'll make it pink again because of the fallen petals from the tree like this. I think this part is too dark and too purple so I'm taking a motion with the brush and drying into paper towel and then just taking away some of this color, which I think is a little too much like this. Let's absorb some water from the bottom here. This is good for now. Now let's wait until this part of the sky is totally dry from this. Then we can do the next part. 4. Painting blooming branches: Our painting is almost dry. This part is not too dry yet, but this one is so dry enough. Just start working on the next part. We'll be using a spray bottle and just like in what they call textural clouds, we need a bottle which doesn't create mist, but actually creates drops of water. What I will do, I will put it like this. Because I want a branch to go from this direction in here, that's how I am placing the bottle and I'm just spraying water on the sky. Just on the sky, if you are not sure, you can cover this area with paper towel. After that, I will take a small brush and magenta paint. A lot of pigment, not a lot of water. Then we'll just play, will be entering for dots to the sky with dots of color. You can see how the drawing dots of the paint start flowing. Just like end of the clouds with water guard textures. When the also used spray bottle. Something like dots of the direction of the branches are at fall. Because I want my branch to go this direction. You can always add more water to your paint to help sound like barely touching the paper. That's why we need a small brush. Because we don't want to mess up with the shape of the drops from the spray bottle. We just want to infuse a little bit of color in a direction we would like to. I will some more here. We would never get this effect just with our own brush. This is a unique texture you can get only by splashing water. Then if you sync the drops with some color. That's why we didn't call it the sky. Because we wanted the contrast to be as obvious as possible. We didn't want to mess up with this beautiful texture of blooming branches. Before I tried to make a blue sky with this branch. Really it didn't look as so delicate and sophisticated, as it would be with white sky. I think am happy with a branch and I hope you are too. Just fill more right here and this is it for the blooming branch. 5. Finishing the landscape: Next what we'll do, we want another focal point. One of the focal points is the paint, it's still drying. This part is dry, I would like to add a building here. I wanted to add like Asian temple here, just as a silhouette. Let's try with a medium watercolor brush, and I have some of this blue from the water, and I dilute it with a lot of water because this looks like in a mist, in a fog. If you're scared it's okay, I'm scared too. You can draw it first with a pencil, take a smaller brush. I have a roof, and I want to have this taller line on top. This is probably not too accurate, but it's the feeling I am going for. Next I'll add more blue, and then I would love the effect to disappear in then blossoms. In this pink blossom we have, I'm just adding some water to the bottom, and now bringing it into this pink, just to disappear. This is enough, this is your focal point. You can add any building you want, it could be Eiffel tower, or a church, or a house. We'll let that dry, and meanwhile, we need to paint our tree from where the branches come in. You can see here, the pink was wet, and the water was wet and it bloomed into the water and it's okay. We'll draw the tree first, and then we'll fix the water if we need to, or maybe it will be hidden. We'll take Payne's gray, if you don't have Payne's gray, you can use CPR or you can make some ultramarine blue wave from some kind of orange, and you'll get a nice gray. Or you can just use black if you want to, that's really up to you. We've completed our strokes, let's paint our tree. I want it to be like, something interesting, I'm going with this kind of lines. Here at the bottom, it's like buried into its own petals. It's not a straight line. Before applying to dry paper, we diluted this Payne's gray with a lot of water. This is, as you remember, is wet into dry technique. The paper is dry and the paint is wet. Here again, you can play. Here the pink was still wet, and you can see it bled in. I feel like I want this tree to be like this. Let's take a smaller brush and add few more branches, and here. Also, if this blooming branches totally dry, then we'll dilute Payne's gray with water. Don't do it with the same dark, and we'll add few branches showing here and there, like this. But not too much, I don't want it to make it too busy, this is already beautiful as it is. Though maybe one branch going there, let's do something good with this bottom part. This is like a little hill, so it's okay, and next we need to add some more darker petals of our ground. Just like this and with different quantity of water, just create this effect of different petals. You don't have to be too precise on this, and the last step, let's add some darker colors into our water. A little bit darker, because I still want this painting to be, spring-like we need a light. Right here where I said we had pink bleed, let's fix it with some lines. You can always add dark here, or a swan or a boat, just whatever your imagination wants. Also, we have this line still showing here. Let's try to take a flat brush and just to dilute it into white surface. It's okay if you don't. Also for balance, we can add a little pink cloud here. Just one, and the very last details I'd like to add are some petals, just floating in the air. This always adds some magic too. You can show expressions if you want to. Just don't touch the areas which are still wet. [MUSIC]. That's it. This is our spring landscape in watercolor. 6. Thank you!: Thank you for watching my classes. I hope you've had a chance to paint with me. I can't wait to see your beautiful landscapes. If you are sharing your artwork on Instagram, please tag me so I can give you my feedback. Also if you like this class, please leave a review, upload a project on the project section of class. See you in my next class. Bye.