Loose Watercolor Landscapes for Beginners: A Walk in The Forest

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome. In this class we'll be painting a forest landscape using a variety of wet-on-wet techniques and wet and dry techniques. Creating a soft and hazy look with a sense of depth can be tricky when you're learning watercolors. Painting wet and wet is often associated with a loss of control. The right knowledge, you can create a mess. But don't worry, I'm going to show you the importance of timing when painting wet in wet. I'll show you how to gain control and layer effectively to create soft and atmospheric scenes. It's easier than you think. Wet and wet techniques bring out the natural strengths of watercolor and is essential for your journey. In any painting, planning is crucial. I'll show you how to simplify shapes and sketching the larger ones, such as sky, trees, grass, and lead. Getting those large components and accurately beforehand is essential for your painting to make sense. So join me in this class. I'm looking forward to showing you the secrets of natural landscape painting. 2. Materials Required: Here we have a few materials that I want to go through with you. Here's my finished painting and the paper I'm using is 100% cotton watercolor paper in medium texture. The medium texture or rough texture is really important because this is what allows you to get into the soft atmospheric sort of looks in the background. So some of these trees you can see that blended edge where you've got a, I guess a soften the edge here as well for the shadows. It's very hard to do this when you're working on smooth paper, dries quickly and often inconsistent. The good thing about textured papers that it also leaves these little natural highlights when you're painting. See little bits of white in here and there, and that's where the brush skips over the surface of the paper. So those can be turned into little highlights. But I find that it just makes that landscape painting look a little bit more realistic. You can turn some of those into rocks, bits and pieces, just adds a bit of sparkle into saying, okay, so let's go through some of the brushes that I'm using. And you can see here the main brushes on the left are these watercolor brushes. And these are really good for getting things in like the trees, smaller mop brush here. And I use that in the beginning to get in a lighter wash of yellow. And in the background here you can see that sky. I've actually used a slightly larger mop brush, this one here. And actually picked up a lot of cerulean blue pop that in. But smaller brushes like these smaller mop brushes, let you pick up a fair bit of paint, but still be able to get in details. Even that tree there you can see while that background was still wet, I'll just drop that in quickly with this smaller mop brush. And really depends on the size of the paper that you're using. This larger ones too big, probably. We might be able to use this to paint the sky or something like that. But I've used mainly these two on the left. I've got this brush here. This is a little round brush. And the round brush is good for getting in details in the trees like the branches. This brush here, which is a little flat brush, is also fantastic for getting in branches. I use this one quite a lot actually. And a few more brushes that you might want to look into as well, rigger brush, and it has a long tip like this one. And that helps you get in large shapes and little details for the branches as you can see up there. But these long shapes out the back there for these trees, the distance works really well. With that brush, a little fan brush, I use this too. Just getting little details for the grass and things like that. It just textures really makes it very easy. So you don't have to use a brush, something like little round brush and just do thousands of little strokes. This gets in a few brushstrokes at the same time, which is why I use it. That's basically about it. In terms of the paints. I just want to talk a bit about which ones I've used for this scene. Now in the ground, I've used a little bit of Hansa yellow and also a bit of quinacridone yellow. So if you've got Hansa yellow quinacridone yellow, even if you got yellow ocher, that's completely fine. I've used a more vibrant yellow here because I wanted to draw out the contrast between the light and the darkness. It's also a little bit greenish and errors and that's because I've got some of this other green that's mixed into it as well. So when you're working wet on wet, often you're going to get a little bit of that happening here, especially I've done it on purpose to get in some of these grassy effect in that region. The green that I'm using is basically I've got a few different greens, but this is one called undersea green. And by Daniel Smith, there's a whole bunch of different greens that you can use, as long as you've got a dark green, even a hookers green, failure, green or something like that, it's gonna be completely fine. You can also mix up a green, got a bit of ultramarine blue, and a bit of yellow. We're getting quite a nice dark green color. But that's the green that I've used. Just make sure that it's dark so that you can get in these larger contrast here in the background or so for the trees as well. If you want it louder, just water it down and you can get some of these little brush strokes here in the foreground. For the flowers and things here I've just used a little bit of white gouache and comes in this little bottle like this. And that's opaque watercolor paint. You'll notice that I use some of this gouache and areas here. Here. The flowers, little bits in the background that figure here standing there in the distance as well. And that makes it quite easy again, these highlights right at the ends. You don't have to spend time cutting around things and getting, fussing about some more details. You can just wait till the end. Make sure I think that that wash is nice and consistent all the way through a rather give up and get mixed up a few of those highlights, then have a wash that does it doesn't look cohesive enough. Another thing that I want to mention as well, I use a small knife to just scratch out these tiny little lines. You can see them here. They're just like little grass or things like that. You can use a credit card and edge of a card, something sharp as well, and just use this motion, scrape off the paint and that you can use this basically only when the paper has almost dried. So you want to wait probably until it's about 85, 80% dry. That paint's still is slightly damp and then you can go in and scratch off. That way. The surrounding paint doesn't immediately pull into those areas. So quick little trick to get it in little highlights and not have to rely on the gouache all the time. I also use a bit of darker paint here, so a bit of black, I've got some brown here as well. Burnt umber in the sky. It's mainly just cerulean. Cerulean blue. You can mix up most of these dark colors here for that tree. So if you mix up your three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, you can get that nice darkness there. I just use my own black or neutral tint just makes it a lot easier. Probably the Browns will be something that you want to get separately. You can't mix that up anyway, so you need to get that. But apart from that, the rest of the colors, just your primaries. 3. Drawing: Today we're gonna be doing this scene of this trail going into the forest and could be a park. I think it's a forest. It's quite large at the pack there, lots of trees. But the main thing I really like about this photograph is that strong sense of light. Here. You can see it across the ground. That's sort of yellowy green grass and the shadows of the trees, beautiful sky as well at the back. So we're gonna go ahead and give this a try. So let's start off. I'm going to go in and look exactly where the trees are grounded. Now, we've got, I'd say about a quarter of the way through the page. I'm going to draw a little line here like that. And then remember that the path kinda dips a little bit in the center here. Okay, It's not a huge deal, but that's roughly where the trees are there or some sort of closest to the front, some further out in the back, but roughly on this line. So you can see some mountains coming round just above the halfway point from the backward like that. Coming all the way down like this and tapering off at the end there. And of course you've got trees all around. But that is the basic part here of the landscape that we're doing with sort of separating the ground from the mountains and then the mountains in the background from the sky. So I think what I'll do is start by penciling in this tree here. I know it's a little bit further up in the front like this. Simplify that down. It's just the trunk. It's the closest one. And I want to get it in fairly large. And you can see kind of branch off near the top like this. Okay, and I'm trying to keep things quite loose as well. Great thing about trees is that they come in all different shapes and sizes so you don't have to worry about getting in the perfect tree or anything that looks to representational in terms of that reference photo. But there you go. That's a little tree there and you can see also there's some leaves and they just shroud part of the tree around the side there. You've even got some branches that reach out behind the tree like that. Just coming off the side. Of course, there's some other shrubs and things in the background. I think that's another something here, just another here's another tree there. Then another smaller one here. Okay? And always try to keep these varied a little, but also don't try to draw everything in. I like to decide a bit later, especially when we're in with the watercolors. Just the precise location and leave, leave a bit of that decision-making into later. But you can see here e.g. there's this sort of Mount comes up like that. And then over here there's a large shrub just planted right there. And there's actually some branch has little branches going up from within. We've got this path that runs through the center. And I'm gonna see if I can just indicates some of this path by putting in generally some of this grass that comes around the side, the edges. Okay, kinda like this. And we have it. So we've got a bit of a clearing in the center. And then notice how it's so dark as well in there. This is really important for later so that we make sure that we get a bit of that contrast the darkness in that sense a bit. We've got another tree just running up through the center, not the one directly next to it like that. And this tree here, this really interesting looking one, probably my favorite one out of this whole scene just kinda coming up here. So I spent a bit more time with it. And we'll start with the trunk. Notice how I'm holding my pencil as well. Very quiet down the end so that I don't get too bogged down with all the little details, but it's got two main limbs that come off like this and then they separate out into additional limbs. Okay. It's just a thing with trees, they all just come in these interesting configurations. You can see how that, how they branch off in such odd tangents at times. But you notice that the branches will turn into two more branches like that. This is definitely patterns in here that you can identify. I'm not again, trying to get the exact reference that I see in here. I'm just using the structure of that tree, that general structure of that tree that I see. Taking some of the characteristics that are alike and I'd like the branches, how they sort of go off on all these different tangents and effect that the quiet bare as well. And again, this is something that we are going to emphasize a bit more with the watercolors afterwards. But I think it's important to get in a general sort of shape for this tree while we can. There's another larger branch, it just goes up, exits out the top of the scene. Another one that comes out here just exits out as well like that. Here. Look at that, Just another one there. They all come out in these odd little tangents. But we don't have to get them all in. We just have to get an a general indication for them for now and later. We'll do most of the work with watercolors. So some of these branches, I do think they should be coming over to the right-hand side. You can see it's just more balanced if we have some more branches coming over to the right and the smaller ones and things as well. Here in the background we go to a few shrubs. There's a hedge or something here. Don't know if I want to include that. We'll see how we go later. There's a large shrub or shrubs, a large tree here, and another tree here in front. Roughly where we want to put it, just eyeing it out. Use the shadow. Just again. Indications of those shadows. This large shadow here coming across the front, which is formed by all that, all that stuff yielded the larger tree. So we have in the sketch, once you're ready, we can get started with the actual painting. 4. First Wash: Alright, first things first I'm going to be picking up some yellow. I've got some very bright yellow that I've got here on the palette. It's lemon yellow, vibrant, and bright. And I'm using that in the areas where I want the most saturated color. And this grass isn't yellow, really this part, so this yellowish. But you'll see what I'm doing in just a moment. I'm going to add in some greens over the top. But the most important thing is to start out with all the lightest elements. First, if you can get there's lots of elements in, then you get into the habit of preserving them for later. It's just an important thing to do. And obviously with yellow, if you add more green to it just turns into a green or yellow or green, it's yellow was one of those colors that very easily turns to green, which is good for this particular scene. Some more water. I'm picking up a lot of water and just dropping it into areas where I want there to be a little bit more of that sunlit feel, I suppose running through. You can really drop it in all over the place. It's no big deal, I think to just avoid putting too much of it into the sky. That's the main air that we want to preserve for some cerulean blue. Okay, but pretty much everywhere else you notice. I don't mind just dropping in a bit here or there and letting it sink in and do its thing. They're just bring that across like that across the ground. I also like to carry around a spray bottle. And the spray bottle helps to just add a little bit more time so that it doesn't dry. Especially here in Melbourne, it's quite hot today, so I don't want that to dry too quickly. Now time for a bit of the sky and I'm going to actually mix in some cerulean blue. Got a whole bunch of cerulean blue here over on the side. And I'm going to just pick a bit of that up with the brush and keep it away from the yellow, want to contaminate it, but just start it off at the top there. Little bit of that cerulean. I want to make this pretty light wash, not much in there at all. I can actually pick up a bit of a little bit of Titanium white as well. And that just kinda adds a bit of this miss the feeling there. Not only that, I sometimes pick up a bit of gray and drop that in two. Because these clouds aren't exactly blue. They, they're, they're, they're more grayish color. And I want some of that to just blend downwards into this yellow and not create a Fosse. So some of that just carrying downwards. And remember to keep this really light as well. You don't want to add too much paint in there. I'd say keep it about keep it about ten per cent paint to 90% water. Just want a nice little indication. I've got some more blue as well. I thought I'd add a bit more up there in the sky. It's up to you how much you want to put in there. I tend to add a bit more at the top and then fade it downwards. Come down. He's a bit more of that gray that I've mixed up. This is just pre-mixed gray, which is essentially neutral tint. Just mix that downwards into the shrubs or whatever like that. There we go. Like grayish color, a bit more of that blue at the top there. See kinda just mixing them nicely, letting it all settle in and do it. Do its thing. Really. Get rid of some of these bubbles up the top there. I don't know why. Dries like that. Get rid of some of that. And the sky is pretty much done. And so what I wanna do now is work a little bit on the shrubs and things like that. And I tend to actually pick up a number, rushes to do this and I like to do all this while the paint is still relatively wet. So I've got some of this color here. This is color-code undersea green. It is a granulating green, but any type of darker green will do if you don't have a dark green, just mix them up with a bit of blue and a bit of yellow. I'm just going to pick up some of these and drop it in. And let's see how we go. Alright, so I'm just dropping it into the yellow. And like I said before, that yellow was wet already in it still is fairly wet. And this allows me to getting these nice soft effects, as you can see, they're not really there, but on top. As well of these trees, notice there's actually quite a dark layer of leaves and running across. So I want to get in some of that little bit of that. Just feather that brush around. And when this is nice and damp the paper, you noticed all the leaves blend in nicely to the sky and create a nice transition. Some more green here. And noticing how that yellow then starts to transition a little bit too green as well. Okay, moving downwards. Let's have a look a bit more around that right-hand side. I think here that probably be a bit of green here would be good shot. That's sharper sort of section here, but I will have to redo it afterwards. We just want to get in a little indication of what we think is happening over there in the background. And especially here you notice there's a sharper edge from where the trees and little treeline is at the backend of the scenes. So just paint a bit of that in, and I'm going to get into some of these, some of this tree here as well, soften off the edges. When the paper is wet, it does it automatically look at that? It's a timing is so crucial. When you, when you're using watercolors, make sure the paint that you add in as well is slightly thicker than the paint that's already on the page so that way it doesn't spread or too much. I'm just adding in some darker, darker bits. You can see it happening already, but i'm, I'm doing some layering. It's a little trick that you just do. Layer essentially with the with the colors wet into wet. And you can get in little details, amazing little details like that. There. Some here in the grass as well. Here. Here. Okay. I'm leaving that that area of the tree in a lighter as well. The reason for that is when a crisp edge, when I go in lighter, I'm going to actually paint it a little bit darker with some grayish color. Now, we've got some potential shadows here. Coming across to the right-hand side. I'm seeing how we can do this. I might wait for it to dry a little bit before we attempt that. I want that shadow to be sharper coming across the page. So what we can do now is just, again, just fiddle around a bit with these wet and wet work, getting some more of these bits of trees and things here on the right-hand side. And also don't be afraid to use a bit of other colors. Sometimes I'm mixing e.g. bit of purple with the green. And that creates sharper contrast because it darkens that green down. Okay, bit of blue and the green works as well, but I find purple just balances better so that it doesn't appear to bluish. You can do this sort of thing. Anything you can't really do just yet. We'll have to wait it a touch, but some of these little branches at the end, I think we'll have to go in with a smaller rigger brush. But you can see already I'm creating a nice contrast in the background. Take your time with this and look at the shadows. Look at the darkness in here and see what can you portray and what kind of contrast you can get in here. Let's have a look. There's also, if you look here, some little branches coming off the tree and this is where some of these other color in a bit of brown or something comes in handy. So I've just got the small little Rashi, I've got a couple of brushes pretty gonna use this one. This is the rigger brush. A little rigger brush and I'm picking up bit of brown. Also got a bit of brown on this on this other brush, the flat brush. And we can just have a little play around. Let's just see, test, test it first to see if the paper is too wet or not. That's good way. So drop that in like that. Use a very high concentration, I'm using almost 100% paint here. Then I can do something like this with this tree here in the background. I can just drop in a line like that. There we go. That's a bit of a tree or something. I might want to add in a bit of other colour, bit of neutral tint in there to darken off this brown a bit as well to get that full, full contrast in. I'm hoping this will subdue down and not stick out too much later. But the paper is wet and it allows you to do stuff like that. It just blends beautifully and without much interference. So look at that, just tiny bits of that, like they're little bit to that tree should be the sharpness in here and there is fine. Okay. Grabbing this other brush and just changing that brush around so that I've got another different sort of shape. So this tree here in the distance, I'm just trying to get in a bit of that texture. I don't know of it here in the distance. But you can see it's quite dark. It's like a brownish green color, like a muted green coming down here. Okay. Fantastic. Let's have a go at this tree. I'm going to put in a bit of burnt sienna and a bit of this. Let's have a look. She might leave it too late. I just wait wait for that area to dry. More kind of like on that side. But what I will do is work on some of these grassy areas, some green, a bit more green. And let's put in some little indications of grass or something here. Small green for easy for it to mix in with the other colors as well. You've got to be mindful of that. Like that. Just drop that in here. Good. Okay. Here. This darker green color here and browns like that. K, this large sort of shadow coming across. Gonna be a thing as well. Notice how I'm just being patient with the way it dries too. This is just a shadow coming across. I want to preserve some of this light in the there we go, Just some more of that green. So nice, soft, wet and wet work as you can see. Okay, good. The paper is also a flat, which makes it easier for me to do stuff like this. Let's try this. Let's try this little shadow here to the right. A wet-in-wet shadow coming all the way across. And look at how it just preserving some of that light as well. Bring that across and it just goes all the way out of the scene like that. Okay, nicely connected on to this tree, which conveniently enough, we will start to paint in a pit of darkness back there as well for some, for that little hedge or whatever it is. And I'm just contrasts here and they're really important to do that. Okay, good. Now, I think this tree could do with a little work. While I am here. I've got that big shadow. But I might just work quickly on these little indication of a shadow like that running running to the right-hand side. These little trees there. Okay? Okay. Just one little line and here you can see it just hit this row of grass or whatever. So I can go a bit darker and then connect the shadow up these trees to the left. Okay, It's many, kind of a greenish shadow. I'm going to bring this down a bit more like that and this one down a touch as well. So that the shadow just looks like it connects. Better. Look at that just a bit sharper because this area has started to dry and come down and then you can do it for this one as well. But mainly we've got this really big tree that will cost this enormous shadow across the bottom of the scene and across to the right. Okay, let's get in a bit of gray or something here for that tree, black. And I'll mix it in. Just a bit of black, fine if I just double it down with some water and a bit of white, titanium white and get myself in this grayish color. Maybe a bit of burnt sienna would help to look at that. Just warms it up a touch. I like to leave you see on the edge I leave a little, little, little wedge there so that the colors don't mix completely into the background. So see that even where the grass is here on the front, I'll just leave a bit of an edge like that. Continue upwards like that. More brown in here and some more black as well, I think would be good. Bit of darkness in there. It gets quite dark up the top too, so you can just increase the saturation. How much color is on the brush like that, and just get in the top parts of the branches. Let's have a look. This one here, just going to see if I can do all in one go like that. Connect that downwards. You've got this part of the branch as well that just goes up like that, disappears off. Okay. But connected onto the rest of the tree. There. We've got it. We've got a bit of a tree going on happening there. I'm happy with that part of the part of it, but I'm just putting a bit more more of this grayish color like that. Okay. 5. Second Wash: You can also do stuff like lift a bit of color if you think that might help. Good. It's trying to get some of these like striations that you can see on the tree with the tip of my brush. You can just imagine some of these helping to form the texture of the bark, I think is a good idea. If darkness up here as well. I liked to just try my best to paint all the scene wet into wet, where possible. Look at that tree, go up. Here. We can start playing around, playing around with these branches. So I'm just putting in a few of these branches coming off this side of the tree like this. This one here is pretty dark. I can pick up some brown and mix it in with some black and work straight into it. You'll notice there's even a little something growing on the side of that tree, which I'll try to leave an indication of that in and look at that. It will just form this darkness here. Mostly using a lot of paint to get this dark shape of this tree in that we go sing, doing my best to try to get it in with a few brushstrokes that all. We'll look at this side, you've got actually quite a large section of the tree that just goes up. They're there and you've got this bit that just goes directly up, like that. What's this side? You've gotten large branch grew up, disappear off there. It's important to get these bigger ones in. Here's another one there. This one just trails off and joins onto this side or this other tree here as well. Look at that Just more. These branches going off on different tangents. And that's why, as I mentioned before, to do all this in the watercolors. And because you can spend all that all the time just drawing. But at the end day you have to go over it a second time with watercolors. So I tried to do some of this, some of this painting slash drawing. Almost of it when I'm painting. And even the smaller ones, which we will actually get in with some finer details later on, just with another, another brush. For now, I just want to make sure I am getting in the bigger ones. Using a bigger brush as well stops me from fussing too much. It's a big issue, I think with new painters where you overwork and area. And it looks good, but then you just add too much in. Using a bigger brush is a great strategy to actually prevent that from happening. Once you get in the main ones is that as these bigger branches and things like that. That's when you want to think to yourself, Hey, let's pick up a smaller brush now. Before you even get in. Before we do that, just see how much you can get in with the largest brush. At this point, I'm making it up. I've stopped looking at the reference photo and started to think to myself, well, maybe I'll just figure some of his own. And where's that smaller rigger brush? It's still here. It's just picking up some more of this brown and black paint mixed together and it's really dry the brush when you do this as well. This is kind of like a tree or something here that has also some branches that go upwards. Little ones that just run off like that. Again, you can put that in with a few brush strokes without much effort at all. Okay? Um, another thing I wanna do is perhaps darken this area in the center. A touch, again to create more contrast. But because the paper is still quite wet, it allows me to blend it nicely like this so that it doesn't look too out of place. Like that. Good. Now, do note that there is some kind of mountainous area in the background and I am going to pick up touch of green and see if I can just indicate some of it in here. Wow. Yeah, Just while the paper is still wet and also being careful to leave in some of that light, as you can see running through the scene. But the slightest indication that there is some mountain or mountainous region off in the background. Ross, I don't need to worry about too much. Even the left side here you've got a fair bit of shrub, shrubs and things that just block, block the view of the mountains anyway, it's more this center part I wanted to get in. Okay. Good. Dark in this tree bit more, there's not enough contrast and some of these areas like up here, needs a bit more darkness. And especially I'm thinking to myself maybe a bit more darkness on the right-hand side of that tree. Too hard too. Get it all in fat, just blend it a touch. I can, I think that looks a bit better because it doesn't make sense with this tree to be so dark. And for this one in the front to be lighter, should be significantly dark or at least the same tone up the front here, unless the light has caught onto it, which it has not. And I'm just trying to put in also touch of darkness on the right-hand side of some of these branches. That's going to help. Not only that, but there are little, you can see here, just little branches coming off this tree, stuff that we've missed out before. And I'm trying to create a little more complexity. In this region. Of course, you can see all the leaves and things that we've, that are indicated in there. I might actually put in some more detail with those leaves afterwards, but for the time being, I'm actually happy with how it appears. Just playing around with some of these subtle, subtle bits of light and dark areas on the tree that, that spirit darkness there. Maybe you can just work a bit on this area. And I've always actually pick up a little fan brush and some green or whatever. Just feathering, some kind of grassy like structures here. To increase this sense of texture here in the foreground. Now look good thing to do as well is if you've got a little pocket knife or a little credit card, something like that. You can scratch out some small highlights. I'm just looking to see some areas maybe too dry, but here e.g. look at that. You can put in a little highlight for a branch or something like that. They can even do it for part of this, this tree here. Little, little bit of a highlight just scratched out on the side there. I don't want to overdo it, but a little bit of that just indicate that light source coming in from the left-hand side. You can only do this while the paint is starting to dry. You can see, let's try here. You gotta beat here as well, can just scratch off. And notice it just comes straight off the exposures that the white area of the paper. But this kind of thing here look at it just creates micro details. Micro details. And I think it's amazing this little, just a tiny bit of grass and things here suddenly starts to look like a whole lot of detail, especially from a distance. And this is a trick that I learned some years ago. And you want to make these these kind of like bigger at the front as well, thicker. As you get closer. Blades of grass, little bit more pronounced. And as you move towards the back, you can make them smaller. So just remember to keep them varied. I also run into the trap of forgetting to vary my marks. The grass as well. It helps to blend blend the grass in the shadows a bit more. But more so I just, I love the texture that it creates, the versatility of this technique. It's something that I think is really important anyway. So even here, look at that. There's a little area of shadow behind that tree there. And I can use this technique to scratch out a little bit of grass and stuff in their tiny bits and pieces in the shadows. Suddenly you've got a bit of detail that looks like it's a tree or highlight or something like that. There's another one. I want to indicate this a bit better. Almost so wary to just, again, not over overdo. It helps to create a sense of light coming from that left-hand side. If I don't have to use Gua Sha, I won't use gouache it ten times can complicate things. And the natural contrast of the paper, my opinion tend to look a lot better. I'm gonna go over to that left-hand side again. I'm gonna go put in a few marks in here over the top. This is this paper is already dry on this side, but this is just allowing me to get in an extra bit of contrast here. That left side of the scene. A little bit of detail. More grass. Again, just preserving some of that some of that yellow there as well. Good Times got an old brush like this and that helps as well to create some odd scumbling marks like that. And of course I'm actually going to use that for some of the leaves up above now, kind of in here. Now this area has dried off, which allows me to just stumble some of these leaf-like indications over the top here. I don't want to overdo it, but I do feel like it needs some leaves. This tree leads, needs a bit more life to it. So over the top of those branches, That's how it goes. I'm good. Having a look at what else we could potentially potentially work on here. This point, I'm just looking at some quick finishing touches on not looking for any any miracles. Lot of this has already dried off, but e.g. I. Could put in this indications of some branches or something in the distance like that. We have darker paint, just dry brush on the edges of the boundaries of the tree. I think I just want to reinforce that a touch through a few quick little brush strokes. I'm careful as well just to make sure I'm not overdoing it. I'm blending it onto the tree itself. And also some of these branches which I have gotten rid off before. E.g. might even put another branch in here, just a darker one. Looking at the composition and thinking to myself, well, it just needs a bit more. Something in here for this tree. So close to the front of the scene. We don't have enough detail in there. Sometimes it can look out of place. But it really just depends how far you want to go. Look at all these branches. We could sit here all day doing this. If you look at this tree here on the right, one of the things you'll notice is that the branches are so varied and they go all the way to the right in quite a, quite a dramatic fashion. If you see, it just goes all the way. He's going off to the side of the scene like that. And I'm going to try to get in some of these nicely and keep, keep it on a bit of a tangent. Some of the branches as well. Look at that, just continue that pattern. And if you skip over the paper as well, so don't draw the whole branch and draw part of it in stop and then continued on. It looks like that branch might be in some sunlight or something like that, so it works that way. I'm also looking at the left side of the tree thinking, I just got to make sure this is balanced. More darkness on the right-hand side of some of these branches as well. Just to indicate an extra, an extra layer of contrast and shadow. It's already pretty dark, but a touch of that is going to, again, just help look at that. Just touch that on like that. Watercolor is all about layering. Look at that Just more of these little branches. Maybe I've got one here again. Like that. Small brown, bit more brown of lost. Some of that in the process of getting quite excited. Maybe go just some more bits and pieces on the tree. Remembering to keep some of those contrasts as well. Super important. There. The shadow is in there quite nicely. I don't want to, don't want to touch that. This feeling of light as well is quite nice. I might want a dark and again around here. And all this stuff just goes and serves to create some extra bit of extra feeling of light and creating extra contrast, I suppose what I'm trying to say. So darkness in the background, just having a look maybe a bit closer to the tree like this, even to bring out the edge of the tree is quite dark behind here. But making sure I'm just feathering it out and blending it as well. Okay. Good. Some more lighter color. Doesn't matter what it is. I'm just using kind of a greenish brown that's leftover on the palette. Feathering it in underneath here. Just a few more brushstrokes. And this is layering over the top and it's creating texture. It's creating a sense of complexity in here, and especially here in the foreground. Look at that. I'm picking up a bit of darker paints and I'm feathering some of that near the little scratched out bits of paint at the base as well. Also creates more textures, nice little textures. Some little bits of green here in the background. Now just over here, I'm going to just feather a few little bits here in the yellow so that I don't know, it just joins on a bit, a bit more. That just like that. Careful not to get rid of that contrast though, but a few blades of grass and things in here, it's not completely yellow. So we need to imply that there are bits of grass and stuff running through their obliterating that light. It's tricky. It's for sure. Okay. We're almost done here. I'm just going to pick up this other Riga and look at some extra branches. I can quickly get in here easy little movements of branches like this. I want to turn this into a larger branch first, like that. Again, this is a little tip that you can pick up on is just don't completely follow that reference and change it up and add some more detail if you think that's appropriate. Experiment. Thing I love about painting these natural landscapes, you, you're not tied down to the reference photo. Some darker contrast here in the background. Even up here for this to be just a tree that's hitting the light or something like that. Some more brown and a tiny little indications of some of these trees here in the distance. I'm just layering and layering. Roddy. Final touches. I'm going to pick up some little bit of white gouache. Touch of white gouache. For some bits and pieces. Like the trick is really not to overdo it. It's easy to do that if you're not careful. So just some little bits there, their side of the trees that you might want to draw out. Some small details here and there. Bring back some touch of light like that. Okay. I find them more deliberate. I am in the marks as well to the better it looks. Okay. Disrupt that out for a second like that. A computer sparkle. And sometimes I'll pick up that gouache, dry the brush as well. And by doing that, you get sort of broken lines. As you can see, it's not too sharp edge where you're applying the gouache, tiny little bits. And you can even see here there's two like flowers or something. I can just add these tiny little dots of them. Color that might appear to be flowers like on the ends of these stems. Okay. It'll be to that here. The top. Try not to overdo it as well. Just using this technique sparingly works nicely to bring out some final touches. Especially where you've gotten quite dark, contrast and spots. Last minute. Addition, thinking of putting a figure. Thinking of putting a figure right here. Just pick a bit of darker color. It a purple. I've got here a little bit of neutral tint that could do the trick as well. Neutral tint. And a single output. The head here. Buddy. And maybe a couple of legs here. Okay. Figured just walking off into the distance. Little bit of a shadow as well, coming to the right side, enlarge and touch some highlights on the head and shoulder like that. Shoulder as well. And I'll call that finished.