Loose Watercolor Trees Landscape

1. About the Class: Hi, my name is Madeline. I'm a self-taught watercolor artist and I've been painting for two years some of my favorite things to paint, our simple loose watercolor landscapes. During part of the pandemic, I homeschooled my two kids. And one of my favorite parts of homeschooling was teaching art to my kids and their friends. I loved teaching them how to paint, how to fall in love with art and find and foster their own creativity. In this Skillshare class, I will be showing you how to paint this simple loose watercolor forest with a lake reflection. This is my very first class on Skillshare and I'm so excited for you to come and learn alongside me. 2. Supplies: Let's go over the supplies that we will be using. I will be painting in this sketch book. It's called The perfect sketch book by the brand at shirt, it has a 100% cotton paper, which I really like for a lot of my quick loose landscapes sketches. I have two jars of clean water and this small ceramic palette that I'm gonna be putting my paints in. I have a round size eight silver black velvet brush, and I also use a liner brush to paint birds and a flat brush. What parts of my paper later, but I don't have a picture in this video. They will be in a photo in the Resources tab. I'm going to be using for Daniel Smith colors. Right here. These three colors are going to be used to paint the trees. And I'm going to use a little bit of amethyst genuine here to paint the horizon. I am going to squeeze out some of these paints and do a quick swatch for you so you guys can see what color these trees are going to be. If you don't have these specific colors, you can use whichever paints you prefer, this piece looks good with any combination of colors. I think it's really pretty ones the paints bleed together. So you can use paint similar to these colors or you can use something different, whatever you prefer. So this first color then I'm going to use to paint the trees is called erode and night genuine. It's a nice light, pink. The second color is called Verona gold ocher. It's like a yellow ocher but a little lighter in my opinion. The last color for the trees is burnt sienna light. I like this a little bit more diluted. So these three colors are what I will be using to paint my trees. Make sure to check out the resources tab and you can find the list of supplies that I use. 3. Quick Trees Tutorial: I am going to do a really quick tutorial on how I paint my trees. Just so when you guys paint it and you guys have a general idea of how I paint them. It's very loose, very quick. It's oftentimes a little uneven and messy. I'm going to use brooding night genuine first. So I draw a straight line down as the trunk of the tree and then I take the tip of my round brush and I zigzag down. Going wider as I get to the base. It's not in a totally uniform fashion. I guess it's kinda like a triangle. Don't think too much about the trees. I find it easier to paint when I don't overthink it. There's really no right or wrong way how they should look. 4. Painting the Loose Landscape: I want to go over the basic layout of this piece. The top half will be the trees, and then we will have a lake reflection on the bottom half. Before we begin, I already have the colors in my palette. And I'm going to take some clean water and wet the bottom half of the page so that when we paint our trees, we will get a bleed effect on the bottom half. The trees on the top are going to be painting wet on dry. You don't have to put too much water, just make the bottom part a little bit damp. I'm going to start with row tonight, genuine. I'm going to paint a straight line. Start zigzagging to paint my tree. There's really no order. What colors you need to paint them in, whatever you feel like doing. I also like to vary the height of my trees. To make some tall, make some short. You can also vary the values of each color to make some lighter and some darker by adding more or less water. I love seeing the paint bleed on the bottom. If the bottom gets a little dry, you can try rewetting it. But if you try to re-wet the entire bottom portion, try not to pull the paint that's already there. Okay. I am going to paint one last tree right here. If you want, you can drop a little bit more color on the bottom half of the paper. The paper is still wet. If it's dry, then I probably wouldn't recommend it because you might get some hard edges, but my paper is still damp, so I'm just going to drop a little bit more color. When it's wet, the paint moves pretty easily. So you can either wait for it to dry or if you have a heat tool like me, I'm going to use this to speed up the drying process. Okay, now that it's dry, I'm gonna take a little bit of amethyst genuine. I'm going to use it for my regular paint palette because I already have some here. I'm going to use this. It's like a nice dark purple. And I'm going to draw the horizon line so there are trees don't look like they're just floating in midair. I'm not the best at drawing straight lines. So there we go. See I added water there at the end and then dried into this weird hard spot. Whoops, don't want that. Let me try to add some water, see if I can even it out. Make it a little less obvious. I'm just going to pull the water all the way to the right so that I don't get another weird hard edge. But watercolor is all about these kind of weird, funny mistakes. Sometimes they're like happy accidents and then other times you get your blogs like I just did. Oh well, you just never know what can happen. So that's that There's a little bit of a bleed right here. Let me just wipe it off. Here we go. For finishing touches. I'm going to take my black velvet size one liner and I'm going to grab more emesis genuine, a thicker, creamy or amount. And I'm going to paint some birds. Because I like birds. I just make little v's like a regular, be an upside down V. And then there'll be there, we have it. Simple, loose watercolor forest. 5. Class Project : Thank you for taking this loose landscape watercolor class with me. I hope you will join me and painting this loose landscape. Like I mentioned earlier, you can use the paints that I used if you have them. Or you can feel free to use whatever favorite colors you like. What I love about this piece is seeing the different watercolor paints flee together. I think it creates a really cool effect that is unique to watercolor. In the resources section, I have included a photo list of all the supplies that I use, the pink colors as well as the brushes. And I will also include a photo of my final piece. If you do paint this, I would love it if you upload your art to the Class Projects tab. I love seeing everyone's art. If you enjoyed this class, I would love if you left me a review. If you're on Instagram or TikTok, my handle is Madeline carry. You can also find my page through my Skillshare profile. I would love to meet and connect with you. So don't hesitate to reach out to me. I love to meet other artists. Thank you for being a part of my first Skillshare class.