Mastering Loose Watercolors: Paint Sweden's Golden Fields

1. Introduction: Hey, and welcome to mastering loose watercolors, paint Sweden's golden fields. If you've ever dreamed of capturing the serene beauty of Sweden's southern landscapes, but felt unsure where to start, you're in the right place. This course is designed, especially for beginners and those who might feel a little bit intimidated by the blank page. Poap, which is located just east of Helsingborg is a charming village known for its lush scenery, and in spring, it's breathtaking flower fields that blanket the countryside in vibrant yellow. These scenes provide the perfect inspiration for our watercolor journey. Over the next few sessions, we'll explore the fundamentals of watercolor painting in a relaxed and supportive environment from simple sketches to layering techniques, you'll learn how to bring all these landscapes to life on paper. No need for perfection here. It's about enjoying the process, embracing happy accidents, and discovering your unique artistic voice. So gather your paints, find a cozy spot, and let's embark on this creative adventure through the heart of Sweden. 2. Materials Required: We get started, I want to go through the materials that we'll be using in this class. And these are probably the most essential materials. Now, if you can't get the exact brushes, paper, paints, that's not a big deal. Just use what you have. But in order to really give yourself the best chance, I really suggest getting similar sort of materials to what I have here. So the paper that I'm using is 100% cotton paper, and you'll notice that there is a slight texture to the paper. If I bring it up a bit closer to the camera, you can see there are these little uneven spots all over the paper. And this is really important, in my opinion, for landscape painting. It just allows much more flowier and transitions in terms of washers. It's a lot more forgiving. Yeah, you'll find that some paper that you'll use has a very flat surface, and that can be very difficult for beginners to work with. So 100% cotton is also very important. It just leads to better vibrancy and better application of techniques like layering. If you're using paper that's cellulose, it can be difficult to layer, as you know, when you add in another color afterwards, it may lift off the previous layer a little easier. But it's not a deal breaker, just, you know, keep that in mind when you are getting paper. The next thing I'll talk about is brushes. So I've got three of these round brushes here. And as you can see, they have a really sharp pointy tip and not much in terms of reservoir. So it doesn't hold much water, but this is for painting things like little details, you know, a little door here, maybe this little area underneath the roof, sides of the houses, maybe, okay. But you're not going to be using it for really large areas unless you've got a really big, you know, really big round brush like that, you could potentially. But I would suggest getting one of these, a watercolor mop brush. It's got a soft generally very soft bristles and the tip is pointy, but it holds a lot of water, which allows you to paint large areas. So like this area in the front here with the flowers, the sky, all these trees there in the back, you know, it just allows you to paint without having to go back and reload, leading to a much smoother and yeah, just a better better quality wash. This here is a rigor brush, okay? It's a special rigor brush because it has a reservoir, but normally rigor brush is just a really pointy sort of brush, okay? So yeah, those are fine, as well as these sort of brushes, if you can get one of these. And basically, this is just little little kind of things like trees here, you know, branches, wiry kind of things where you just want to get some detail in without having to pick up a larger brush and accidentally putting in too much paint or making that line too thick. So that's quite important. Make sure you have one of those. This little bonus brush here is a filbet brush. And it's got these this edge here, that's kind of rounded, as you can see, and it's almost like it's been, it's been sort of, you know, shaped at the front, okay, to make it kind of blunted. And this allows you to go over afterwards and lift off paint. I'll show you how we use that later. But if you don't have one of those, it's not a big deal. You can also use a round brush, but just keep in mind that scrubbing that round brush on the page will probably lead to you destroying that brush in the long term. Now, in terms of paintings, I've got this little bottle of white guash. This is really for finishing touches. It's not essential, but it does help. So if you notice here in the house, I just brought back a little bit of the white here because I'd gone over it with the paint, and you can also mix it with yellow to make the yellow more opaque so it goes in front of all these darker colours here in the back. So the guash, I think if you can get some of this, it's going to be really a game changer. It really just brings your painting to the next level. Otherwise, all I have here is a bunch of watercolor paints, and I'll go through each of them. So here, I've got Indian yellow. I have got yellow ochre, Pyl orange, Pyl red. I've got quinacridone orange over here. I've got Hansa yellow, cerulean blue. These you won't really need, but they're basically a kind of teal and a lavender color. But yeah, I think for this class, the cerulean blue is fine, ultramarine blue, which is a dark blue. I've got a burnt sienna, a burnt umber. Undersea green, which is a dark green. I've got a bunch of different purples here, so three different purples, and these are kind of convenience colors. You can mix up your own purple, if you've got a red and a blue, and I've got a bit of neutral tint, which is basically a gray, a premix gray. So that's really all that you need for this class. I mean, if you had to choose really between a few of these colors, essentially, you only need about five to six colors. So if you can have yourself, you know, a yellow, a red, a light blue, a dark blue, and maybe a darker brown, that will get you through this class. Parts of this class as well, I do use a hair dryer to speed up the process. So just if you've got one of these, it can help. 3. Cottage - Drawing: Okay. Let's get started on the drawing. And I'm going to just draw a line roughly halfway down the center of the page because this is where the house in the background. Hits the grass. It doesn't have to be exact, but something like this, difficult to see here on camera, but it's just a very light line because I don't want that to show through afterwards. And I'm going to start drawing in the house there in the background, so just the bottom part of it that's kind of darker there, okay? And then we've got the rooftop, which is partially obscured by this tree, okay? But I draw that across. And you can kind of see part of the side of the house, but I'm going to make it a little more obvious than the reference. So just make the sides stick out a little bit more. I think that's just going to help to make the house look more three dimensional. And you can see on top of it, as well, there's a couple of chimneys. So here, and same thing here, I'm going to just try to add in a more three dimensional look to those chimneys. Okay, the left side, it doesn't really matter all too much because we've got, you know, that tree running across. I'm just going to get some branches running down there. And we've got this window here. This is going to be important, this kind of white window. And you see these are quite common in a lot of houses in the Nordic region, so white frame kind of thing. So I think I'll just imply that and move on. Don't want to spend too long. In that section. Okay, there is a house a little bit over here. You can just see something maybe like a rooftop, you know, just peeking out like that. I'm just going to imply that again, maybe some of these little windows as well down the side. Okay? I don't want to spend too long in that area. You can see there's, you know, shrubs and bushes and things like that here. Okay? We don't have to worry too much about this sort of stuff just yet. I think just put in an indication of it being there. The big thing is this tree here in the foreground, and I'm going to kind of just put it coming up like this. And if I can make it a little bit thicker, as well, this might, I think, just help with the scene. I want to make it more prominent. And, you know, let's get a branch going up there, disappears off. Okay, I'm using the reference photo to kind of indicate these branches, yeah. So it's not, of course, like, exact or anything like that, but I think having a reference for the tree does help, especially because Yeah, especially because we've got this house here. So I want to make sure that we've got some trees that are nicely framed. And I think this photo is a good kind of reference for that. So, look, there's some basic branches. Notice I'm just scumbling. I don't know if that's the right word, but basically just moving the pencil over the page and just really creating some funny little lines and things for the branches. We know there's a branch that comes over here, goes across the roof. There's some that then branch off this one. Okay? You'll notice the patterns in the branch, you just want to copy some of these and connect them on with other parts of the tree so that it looks organic. Everything's sort of joined together. And I really like how these trees do that. They kind of join together part of the scene and, you know, connects the scene together. This side to the left. Okay? And you can see here there's little branches that run down as well. Again, I'm not bussed about this stuff because I'm going to use basically draw this in with the brush later on, but we do need some kind of structure there so that I'm not flying in completely blind later on, on. And here we've got a tree just sort of running down this side of the house. It's sort of in the background here. Indicate something there. I don't know if I'll actually include that afterwards, but yeah, there are some trees that will need to be put in. Then we've also got this one here, okay? Again, just got the trunk here and I'm going to just copy this general shape of it and you run that one up like this, here, running like that, here, and that one comes out of the scene. Then we've got this other branch going upwards like that. And here, as well, running upwards. And also, we've got this other house in the background with some trees in the front. So again, it's obscured, but how obscured you want to make it, that's really up to us later. You've got all these kind of shrubs and little uh, you know, lighter bits of things here, which we can put in afterwards. Did notice there's a kind of fence here, so I will let's just kind of indicate this the fence getting a bit smaller there in the background. I think this will make it look more interesting, create this sense of perspective, like that. Doesn't have to be anything really like the reference, but let me just indicate this side of the house. And one thing we want to make sure, as well, we want to make sure we've got an indication of the light source and the lights coming in from the right. So that should be good for the drawing. Let's go ahead and I'm first going to get started with a 4. Cottage - Light: Light wash of paint, and I'm using a mop brush, watercolor mop brush that has a very that blunt tip, as you see here. And here, I've got a watercolor mop brush, and you can see it it's basically quite a large belly brush. It's got a sharp tip allowing me to cut around everything. So I'm going to put in the sky first. Let's get in a really light wash of cerulean blue. Barely anything in there, just really light wash of that blue. Okay, just so that it shows that shows through. Okay? And the green the trees and stuff like that. We don't bother with that just yet. We can drop that in afterwards. I do like to leave some of the branches unpainted, so that yeah, I can get in some warmer color on them. Okay, but not overly thinking about it, as you can see. I'm just coloring over some of it, as well. And let's bring that across. It's a very light wash. Probably about 10% paint or less, and the rest of it is just water. It's cut around. The kind of sky goes roughly around here, and then it disappears and then you've kind of got all the trees and stuff, and the house roughly finishes about there, as you can see. It's cut around the rooftop, okay. Like that. Good. There we have it, and, yeah, the rest of it is really just greens and things. But I like to keep the sky very light so that the light source just appears more vibrant. Alright. Good. And let's pick out some other bits and pieces that we might want to add on. So I always think the best most important thing to do next from the sky is to get in kind of the light in the scene. And I'm going to mix myself up a bit of what is this? Just a bit of yellow. Okay. We've got some Indian yellow mixed with yellow ochre, just to dull it down a little bit. And I'm going to start putting some of it maybe here into the right side of this tree. Okay. And some of it may go into the sky, like, that's perfectly fine, okay? Because we're just trying to turn into a greenish color anyway, where it touches the sky and it may imply some branches, may imply some leaves, that kind of thing. I'll do a bit more of that stuff later, but I like to just put in, make sure that I've got in some of these nice warmer colors in. And let's keep going, Okay, across here. Really light, still about 10% paint. This fence probably could do with some brown ish paint in there as well. Just put in a bit of that like this. Okay? And the sides. Underneath here, you just notice everything kind of getting quite quite green. But, you know, we've also got some yellows, little yellow dots and things like that here. I'm just going to drop in a few here. These are probably going to disappear. The most important thing I reckon is just to get in the greens. And if we're missing some of these yellow flowers, we can always pop them in with some guash afterwards, and it looks completely fine. You know, I just think missing out on a nice nice sort of wash up the top here can be really detrimental to your painting. So I'm going to pick up this is really just a bit of light green, and I've mixed up some, basically a dark green with a bit of yellow. You can also just mix up your own green if you've got some blue, you've got some Yellow, mix them together, and you can get that. Okay? This is really a light wash, and I'm using various mixes of green in here, but I do want to make it maybe a bit darker in some areas. Now, do keep in mind, we haven't got the shadows in really yet, so there's no big deal, you know, to really make sure everything is super dark, but just, um, you know, I think some darker shadow sometimes can help. I've forgotten to get in a bit of yellow for this tree here, the right side. I'll just, see if I can put in a bit here and there. Not a huge deal, but something like that. Um, there top of this house, as well, I thought maybe we're since we're in this section, pop in a bit of this color. It's kind of like a almost, like, rusty sort of color. If you go like a browny color, that should be just like a water down brownish color for the rooftops, yellowy brown color. It doesn't have to be anything specific, but I think a warm color will work nicely. Okay, it's just a bit like that. Yep, to get rid of the the whites on the roof. Further down, it's really, yeah, it just becomes darker. There's not much I can do here. Maybe just add in another layer of this brown, like a darker brown below. And I'm going to remember just cut around this window to create a bit of contrast. Okay. Just may blend a bit downwards. No big deal. Let's just go with it. Okay. A lot of this stuff I'm going to need to darken anyway afterwards, but this is a good start. Just get some color in there. And it's the same thing for this building here to the left. I'm going to use some burnt sienna for the rooftop, like a sort of reddish brown color for the roof here. Okay, like that. And then probably the bottom of it, I reckon I'll just leave it white. Okay, real basic like that. Alright, so back to all this stuff down at the bottom that I was playing around before with. We want to move this wash down, keep it nice and soft. So lots of water and mixing in different types of greens. You can even mix in some blues. Check this out. Got a bit of the blue before that I used in the sky, and we can drop some of this in, and it will actually mix in and become a greenish greenish value. So it's important to use a few different values and different tints of green so that you've got some variation down there. And over here as well, you know, I do notice that there are some lighter bits and pieces. So I'll drop in a bit of this other stuff too. Okay, more of that darker green down the base. Okay, I'd always like to make the base significantly darker, helps to draw the viewer into the scene. Okay, draw the eye through to the scene. All right. This is all wet and wet work, as you can see. It's very quick, very spontaneous. You don't want to be spending all day doing this. And another thing we can also do is perhaps pick up a bit of dry brush. I've got some just a bit bit of darker green, dry off my brush. Just go to scumble the brush over some of these areas here in the sky, where we've got branches and things like that. And I'm just going to get in some of this these indications indications of leaves and stuff here. So, let's just drop in some of these. Here, here, up here as well. Let's get in, you know, so it looks a bit furry, but it doesn't look too sharp against the sky. And that's the kind of effect that I'm aiming for. I don't want it to be too overbearing at the moment. Okay? Maybe a bit here near the roof as well. Just a bit something. There are some of these white flowers on this tree, which I'm not going to worry about yet. We'll figure that out later on. But I'm just trying to get in some of these, you know, softer leaves and things like that, okay? This stuff here at the bottom is starting to dry a little bit. As well, okay? But we want to give it a tiny bit a tiny bit more time for the color to sort of blend together before we put in a bit of wet on wet work, because I need to get in some shadows running across the scene there as well. Okay? There's also this area in the back, and might be a good time to swap over to a round brush, okay? A round brush. It's got a firmer tip holds less water, but we can use this to create better shapes and control back here because I do think we need a bit more a bit more control here. So I've mixed in a bit of blue with this green as well to try and basically try and create some darker green here. And I'm also being careful to not go over the entire all these branches and stuff, we need to leave some of those for later. Alright. And bring some of this down. This probably could do with some darker browns in here as well for this fence, okay? Again, just very, very loose stuff. I'm not really doing too much, but cutting around the tree, as well. So like that. I'll have to get in some of these shadows running across from this, yeah, from this fence as well. Okay. And let's have a look. This area is still not 100% dried yet. But that's the beauty of watercolor. I think creating some of these amazing wet and wet shapes makes everything kind of look a bit dreamy there in the background. And the risk is that it starts spreading a bit too far. But honestly, you're worthwhile. It's very much worthwhile because it creates this unique effect that you can only really find in watercolors. So you kind of have to let go at some stage and let everything blend together. Here is some more, and this area is starting to dry a little bit, as well. And the weather right now is perfect for watercolor because in Australia, it is a little bit colder here in Melbourne. So it's giving me a lot of time to work through this these sort of wet and wet parts and making sure that basically it's not drying, so we've got a bit of time to kind of work through this stuff, which is great. A bit of dry brush here, so you can get in some of these, like, you know, sharper bits of leaves and stuff like that, using the side of the brush like this. You can imply bits of that here and there. Don't overthink it, little things like that. Okay? Now, I think I might start moving down. And let's start putting in a bit of, like, shadow and stuff like that. I forgot again this tree here has a bit of light on it. There just put that in a bit of yellow on that tree like this. Fantastic. Ah, green there. Good. A smaller couple of smaller round brushes are gonna be perfect for this section because you don't want to overdo it. All we want to do is just have a nice nice little indication of the shadows. So running across the scene, there are some lighter ones in here as well, which I'm not going to bother with just yet, but here we've got the trunk of the tree. So I'm going to pick up it's like a purplish mix of green, purple and green mixed together, and I started off roughly about here where this trunk is and move that across like that. Okay? And then this fence. Always remembering to leave in a bit of light. Showing through. That's going to make everything look a lot more convincing. Okay. Even here in the foreground, we've got lots of these darker parts, but then also lighter, leaves and things showing through. Okay, so let's just continue on with that, leaving out a bit of bits and pieces there as well. And there is some kind of shadow running here. If you see, just behind that tree, I'm going to put that in. Running across. Don't try to control it too much. Just, you know, let it do its thing, running across here and then to this side of the field, and then we might have a little shadow here for this tree, as well, like that. So we can continue that on probably a bit much, but we can fix that up later. This area has started to dry a little bit, but that's fine. I normally will re wet areas, but, for this demonstration, I just want to show you how simple it is to work with whatever you have here on the page. And you have to learn at some point to accept that things are not quite going to turn out the way you want them to turn out in watercolors. You got to work with what happens at times. And sometimes you end up with quite amazing shapes and things that you couldn't have predicted otherwise. So putting a bit of purple in here to darken this area in this background section, you know, there are some darker spots back here that I want to just draw out. Again, a bit of experimentation, more to create contrast rather than form of any sort, okay? This side of the building, I'm going to mix some purple and some dark brown together. And let's go let's just go in there. So, probably a thinner brush would be better. Unfortunately, I've picked up a brush that's a bit bigger. It's always important to make sure you've got the right brush if you want detail. So just drop that in here down at the base of this rooftop, okay? And, you know, you're going to get a bit of a darkness under here, under here, but leaving out some of the light that's potentially showing through as well. It could indicate details, that kind of thing. Oh, let's just be so careful with this. This is tricky to get in this window. I might just kind of do that and, um, a couple of lines like that. Difficult to get in exactly, but, you know, I think that should be okay. Just a quick indication of that window, okay? As soon as it starts looking right, I try to stop so that I don't overdo things. Bring this down. Again, it's just, like, brown, really dark brown with a bit of purple mixed in there. And the one thing I'm gonna do differently is I'm going to let this kind of side of the house blend in with the grass below, okay? Like that. And I'm doing this just so that hopefully it blends nicer, looks more natural. And, you know, this side of the house, as well, look, there's some things that we could do here, like we could put in, like, the little windows, little squarish parts of the windows like this. If I can just quickly drop that in, just imagining the sun's hitting the side of it. Okay? Might have some, you know, details of the frames. I don't know. Just something like that, really. Uh would be good to imply, but not focus on too much. I think that's going to be good. See some of the greens creeping up. I'm going to shift that a little bit. The roof looks decent, so I don't really do anything there. I think, like with this, I don't know if I maybe just add in a little bit of something for the chimneys to just show that they are a present, but I don't want to obsess over it. Um, yeah, you know, the rooftop does have some, like, lines and stuff there. I reckon I can just use the side of the brush to try to imply some directionality with the rooftop like that, you know, very light and, you know, soft. Just texture on the roof. It could be like rust or whatever, like that. Um, Okay. Could be rust. Who knows? But, um, something simple, simple. And would leave that. Stuff down the bottom is beginning to dry. 5. Cottage - Shadows: And I can really, I think I might need to just sort of play around with this section a bit more, get in a larger shadow down the bottom. Yeah, I think that would be better if I just play around with that a bit more. Um, the shadows are very, very subtle. So you have to be careful not to overdo it. But, you know, this tree, for example, I really want to make sure that shadow comes through because it's quite a central central part of this scene, this tree. It's almost time for me to actually start working on the details of the tree. But I'm going to give it a little bit more time because I always tend to have the tendency to to go in too quickly and end up mucking things up. So I'll give it just maybe like a minute or so, few seconds. Because if you go in too quick, everything's just going to spread and it's going to be a bit of a mess. So let's put in a bit more of that blue and stuff here. Good. All right. There's also going to be a time where we can start scratching off paint. I use this little pocket knife here to do that. We can probably do it in some of these sections like here. Let's have a try. I think it's completely dried off. Some parts are starting to dry off, so you can just scratch off. Let me just tiny bits of paint and things. Probably here is better. Right? To indicate, like, grass and things running through this section. Okay, so let's start putting in a bit more. We need to just put in a little bit of darker color here for these like it's like a hedge or something in front of this house. I just want to imply that here and have that running across. And, of course, you've got this tree here in the background that's also kind of, you know, it's roughly here, and it might be casting a shadow to the left, okay? I'm going to make that shadow a bit sharper. Let's experiment and see what happens. That's, you know, no big deal. Uh, I think we might have time now. It might be time now to start working on these trees a bit. So again, the left side of the tree, you'll notice, has a lot of darkness on it, and you want to mix up a really, really thick blend of purple and brown or blue or brown, blue and brown, okay? And really almost no water, just enough to activate it. And this here I'm just using, touch on the vapor to increase the saturation and the darkness of some parts of the trees. So you can see here it gets really dry up the top because it's completely dry. The paper up the top is dry. Further down, it's not because we're working on that. But here we can just kind of, uh drop that brush in the left sides of the trees, some parts of the left side. And in other parts, you can just, you know, do the whole tree, essentially, the whole branch or what have you. But look at that. You're just kind of putting these nice little spontaneous, what you call them, spontaneous little branches in, okay, using the end of the brush. It's so important to use the end of the brush. Now, over here, I might just pick up some additional uh, you know, grab create some additional little marks here because I do want to make sure this tree shows through. It's quite tricky because you got to preserve the you really have to preserve the The light on the tree, as well. So bit of this really bringing out this fence a bit more I think is going to help, but I'm trying not to get rid of all this light, being so careful with this. You're being super, super careful. I mean, even this section here, looks beautiful. I just I want to make sure that some of these shadows are potentially showing through, but not go to stuff up the light. So, something like that. Let's continue on to this side of the branch. I've got this part here, there, and let's put in a bit of this here that there. And let's have a look going up. It's really just brown. Here in the background, we've got some trees as well, so I'm going to just imply that. Plus, we've got some tree here that, you know, there's another tree here, maybe, again, implying some of these branches. When they're so far in the distance, there's really not like much you need to do. Don't be afraid to go over the top of the house like this. It's meant to, you know, you're meant to get a bit of overlap and things like that here. So just don't overdo it. Okay, make it look natural. These branches coming off in different directions. Okay. Whenever I notice myself being too rigid, I'll just change the direction of the brush. I mean, with reason, of course, not too, you know, not too over the place, but with a bit of abandonment, I think you can really get yourself more natural looking shapes. One of the mistakes I see a lot of students make is they they try to make every single branch look perfect. And, you know, parts of the branches here that you see just kind of go over and leave part of the previous wash, that's really something you want to aim to do. You don't want to paint everything in exactly because it's going to look too picture perfect, and it's not going to blend and look look natural. So, that's got another tree here in the background. Let's just put something in there. It kind of goes over that house, whatever, something like that. And then we've got this tree here to the left, so let's continue on. Again, a bit of brown to the left hand side of it like that. And I'm going to just start moving up these branches like this. Okay. Brown and purple. That's all I want, kind of brown or blue or brown or purple mixed together. You know, it doesn't matter as long as you've got a dark value, preferably, like a cooler dark value. And look at that. We've got some, you know, we have ourselves another tree here, very basic, but does the job. And let's have a look maybe in the the foreground here, we've got a bit of extra something going to just increase the contrast of this shadow a bit more as well. Again, you know, you really want to make sure that you're preserving the light, though. So let's not get ahead of ourselves. O thing I want to just quickly do to even this out to spray that side of the scene a little bit down so that I can maybe get in some softer marks running here as well. Okay. So softer sort of marks. Good. I've got a rigger brush which can come in handy as well, just picking up a bit of this leftover paint. And the rigor brush allows you to get in these tiny little branches, spend more time doing them. And yeah, without, you know, over painting things, you just really get a thin little line and detail with the rigor, which is almost impossible to do with larger brushes. I'm gonna really use some dark paint here. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be purple, it could be black. But, uh, you know, just want to make it look like there's details here. There's even some trees here down below that I want to imply. So just a few lines running up like that, and we have ourselves some trees there. I mean, I could have done it instead of that, as well, but no problem. There's some extra darkness in here somewhere. I'm just gonna I don't know, I'm just gonna darken that for whatever reason. Okay. A bit of these splotchy bits might be good to I don't know, create some darker spots in here, darker bits of grass and things. Yep. I think we're missing a bit of that. Alright, let's have a look. What else do we have here? Uh. We're doing pretty well, actually. I think, um yeah, I mean, at this point, most of the most of the details are in. It's really just adding in tiny little finishing touches, and, you know, while everything is still, you know, still wet. This is why I like to continue to work on it. Okay. A bit of round and blue mixed together again. Just creating, like, little branches and things going off this tree. There could be a tree. There's acts like a tree back there, as well, that's going up. Here, and it might almost be times you just again, mess around with a bit of this green to just drop in some just scumble this bit of green and stuff around the sky to create a kind of indication of leaves and things like a dry brush leaves in some areas. Again, I don't really want to overdo this just enough to add something on there. Otherwise it look a bit messy. Redo this shadow a touch. But And I can do a bit of this work just like some tiny upward brush strokes here with darker paint, maybe darker green or something like that to get in, like, bits of blades of grass and things like that that are darker. The lighter stuff we're going to be able to get in very soon. This just helps to create a bit more additional contrast and interest. But I do like to scratch a lot of this off, actually, with the smaller kind of blade of some sort. Okay. But yeah, a little bit of darker ones as well. They help balance it out. Is it okay. Let's try. I don't know how to look at the parts that are almost dried, like here, so I can sort of scratch off a bit here. These areas have dried, so they can do this. That amazing and sort of some near the bottom of this tree, as well, I find they help to mark the base of some trees or I don't know, create contrast there, I guess. Uh, what do we got these, um areas of fences and stuff here. Look, I can just scratch downwards and try to create a bit of something. I don't want to overdo it, though, like that. Um, bits and pieces. This area down the front is almost getting dry enough for me to do it, so I can scratch off part of it anyway. But stuff in the back is going to be I gonna have to wait for that to dry off a bit. Yeah, that area is not completely dried, needs to be a little bit drier before I can scratch off and leave these marks, make them smaller out the back in some spots as well. That. Okay. The other thing I want to do is while some of that stuff is drying off, I'm going to pick up some white guash, mix it in with yellow, and I'm going to create some nice little kind of flour shapes. So hansa yellow and white guash. Let's drop this in. See if we can get some little flowers, soft wet and wet flowers in areas. Okay? 'Cause this paint has almost dried. Notice, it just spreads out nicely, looks a bit more natural. You've got to time it, though. Hopefully, we've done it at the right time, but shouldn't spread too much. If you just use a ton of concentration, a higher concentration of paint in there, you'll be fine. Just normally just stays put, spread a little bit, but that's all you need. Just a little bit, like a dot here, dot there um, that's all you need to imply these flowers. You know, come up from these stems that we drew in painted in before. Yeah, you can sort of make them join on join on with each of these scratched out stems and create some more, if you want, if you think that, missing a few here or there. You can drop in. You know, I think one here would be good. The flowers are bigger at the front, so we just make sure we imply that. But notice how it kind of blends nicely into the scene. You know, we've got this beautiful cohesive look to everything rather than it being all over the place and just flowers stuck on without without much effort to blend in. So this is because it's all kind of done wet into wet, you know, more or less. I mean, some parts are not wet and wet, but that's fine. We've got most of it in there. It looks kind of preserves that dreamy sort of look that we have, okay? But again, you know, as you can see, they spread a little bit when you press when you apply the paint. So there's not a whole lot you can do about that, other than just time it and wait maybe to a later time. But, you know, I'm not thinking about this too much, just enough to imply what's happening. Okay? Yeah, there we go. This is a good sort of section. I like that. Maybe I'll put one down here, just some spots where I just want to break up all this darkness like that. And we do have these lighter green shapes there, as well. I'm going to add in a bit of green to that in a moment. But just after I finish with some of these yellowy flowers and dots and things because I think we once we start playing around the greens, it becomes very difficult to uh, mix up that yellow again. So I'm just trying to do my best to imply some of this stuff, and I love these flowers, so that's why I'm kind of extending them across to the right, as well. I mean, there's some even in here, so just again, kind of mash some parts in like that. Keep them kind of randomized, as well. Alright. Look Now, some of this green stuff, I'm going to pick up a bit of green and drop that in with this yellow, and I've got this kind of pastel green color. You know, how am I going to achieve this? I really am not 100% sure, but we just want to basically maybe imply some of these little lighter green shapes in here, okay? Dry brush sits on, like that. I don't want to overdo it, yeah? Just just enough. It's a bit of white guash mixed in with green, and you get this kind of pasteli looking green color. And why not? Why not? I just wanted to try that out. You don't have to do this, but, you know, I think that kind of helps to balance out some of this darkness in here. Hey, everything is all starting to come together now. Alright, some finishing touches. I'm going to bring out this house a little more because we've lost I think we've just lost the form of it a bit. So gonna just really darken a touch and extend extend part of the house down like that. Okay. And, uh, mind spraying a bit of water back into that section to kind of encourage it to blend a little like that. Okay? Uh you put that roof in a bit better bit of that top part of the roof. And, um, really, it's just a matter now of adding in some win or darker spots. And there's also an opportunity to lift out some marks as well. So like to to think that it's mostly done at the moment. Okay. You do notice on the left side of the trees, you probably get a little bit more darkness in parts like that. There, this one's kind of left out. We've lost part of it, so I'm going to just bring some of it back like that. Okay. Got myself a fielbt brush. I'm gonna use this to just pick out pick off a bit of paint here and there, so just lift off some areas. But Because we've got all this softness in there, a little bit of sharpness does help to balance things out. That's why I'm just applying a bit of some of these sharper brushstrokes and areas. Can you see just a little bit here and there to balance it out more? Not in all spots, but just in some spots here and there. You know, it's not gonna hurt. Sharper and darker sort of marks. Shadow is just a bit too harsh. I just lift that off there like that. Alright, and I'll call that finished. 6. Country Road - Drawing: Alright, so I've just started off by putting a basic line in underneath the middle section of the scene, and probably round about here would be good. And this is basically just to mark the area where the house touches this field. And I'm going to bring these flowers kind of over to the right like that mark out roughly where they are. They come in here to the left. Lots of green around there, there's also a road that just runs through as well here, which I'll just quickly add in. It's kind of like a darker road comes in from the right there as well, and then you can see it runs off and goes in to the scene to the left. Okay. And there's a lot of grass here, which we don't really have to get in. The main thing is this barn here. I think it's a barn on a house. So I'll put it in roughly about here, the bottom part of that one to the left. And then you've got this kind of one to the right. It's like a triangular roof there. Runs down here. Oh, there's, like, a truck or something here to the left. Not sure what that is, but it's on the left side of the house, the barn. Okay, let's bring that down a bit like here. And the rooftop just extends out to the back. It's actually a difficult to see exactly behind. I'm going to just extend the roof. We zoom into the photo, you might be able to see a bit more detail. It's roof actually drops down a little bit maybe like here, and then you've got, of course, this tree that blocks the way. So that's going to be fine. And we're going to put in the bottom part of it here, bottom part of the roof, which sort of extends out the back. You see a bit of it sort of jut out the back there like that, and just hit the ground. And to the left, we've got this rooftop there, and we'll bring that across as well. Kind of hits the rooftop of that other one and another sort of area there to the left, where there's a building. Let's put in some of the windows. There's a door there. There's a window, another window here. Let's have a look. There's a bunch of little features. Another thing we're going to have to figure out is where the light source is coming from. And I think probably going to be better if we assume the light source is coming from the left hand side. Does look like it is anyway. I think it'll be easier if we assume that. That way we can just get that right side of the building in the darkness. Okay, there's a sort of tree here as well. Just put that in roughly. Apart from that, I don't need to do too much. I mean, the rest of these trees out in the back. I will figure this out as we go. Okay, just generally put in a bit of a tree line. 7. Country Road - Painting: Let's get started with some of the base washers. So bit of hansa yellow, really light and drop that straight in. We want this to be really the lightest part of the painting, and I'm using a ton of water, but still it doesn't really matter when you're using hansa yellow or very light sort of paints because they end up being very light anyway, even if you're using a ton of ton of paint, not much water. So let's just go drop that in there. Yeah. Alright, so we've got some of those flowers in, right. Like that. And let's start putting in some details like the grass. I'm going to grab some green. You can mix up your own green or you can, you know, also use a premixed green. I've got a bit of premixed green here, and I'm going to drop this in right underneath here the flowers and let it blend in wet onto wet. You know, there's also some bits in here, too that we can feather in a bit. There's even, like, a little pathway, as you can see going through, which I think I'll get that in a bit later. That's no big deal. But I want to make sure this is nice and blended. Blends in with the yellow like this. I mean, here, let's continue on adding more green. I'm also being careful just to leave, making sure that I leave this well, part of this road in as well. I need to get that in in a bit of darker color. Okay. Alright. Bit more lighter green here in the back as well. Good. Here. Okay. Great. Now, I think what I can start to do is put in a bit of this road. And for that, I'm going to mix up some darker value, bit of blue perhaps with brown. And this will create hopefully a kind of grayish value, some purple in there. And let's just drop this in. Here again, I'm going to mix this in with the I'm gonna mix this in with that wash above as well. Yeah, you can see it kind of go in behind that road, just go behind and disappear off a little. All right. Drop this in. It has to be maybe have a little bit of that bluish tinge to it, cooler sort of tinge to it. Okay. Good. Here. Good. O. Okay, so it looks like we've got that bottom bit more or less sorted. I'll actually start to add in a little bit of darkness into this road as well because as you can see, there's actually some darker spots that kind of go in and then come out like that. So if I can indicate some of this, it will make the edge of this road appear more realistic. Again, this is all just wet into wet work. It's very suggestive and not really detailed. Just needs to have some darker bits in here. Okay. Good. All right, I'll just leave that for the time being, may come back to it later, but that should be fine. Now, to the houses, I'm going to add in a bit of Burnt sienna. Perhaps a touch of red. It's reddish slightly red value in there as well. So the rooftop is actually maybe a little more reddish, actually. Look, let's make sure I dilute this paint down a fair bit, just like that. I don't have to get it exact, but I want to make sure I'm using a lot of water in here. I think also having a bit of that red is going to help to contrast with those trees in the background. That's probably why they've used this color in the first place it's a complimentary color to the trees. And let's continue on. There's that rooftop to the right. There, again, that's, like, a little bit lighter. Should make this rooftop here a touch lighter as well to the one to the right makes sense here. Okay. Yeah, the bottoms of the building a little bit darker. But again, I'm going to try to pretend that the shadow, it's not pretend, but I guess there's more of a shadow running to the right hand side. Okay. Good. Um. So I'll leave that for now and give it a bit of time to dry and we'll put in all the other colors in just a moment. Well, this a little bit of rooftop here in the back as well, needs to be done. Like this. Good. Okay. Let's have a quick little assessment of how things are going. Alright. Give it a quick try first. Okay, I'm going to paint the bottom of this building in. Some more burnt sienna, and maybe a bit more red there, too. It's just I just want this to be a touch darker than the roof area, like that. Smaller brush. That's just not enough for me to detail. Always make sure you swap to a adequate brush an appropriate brush based on what you're trying to paint. Otherwise, you're gonna run into issues. Okay, bottom part of this building as well, is also, you know, a bit darker. Just get that in here. This one here. Great. Now, the right side, I'm going to just darken a little bit with some got a bit of neutral tint here or even a bit of purple. You know, just as long as this is much darker on the right hand side, again, to just indicate that light source running to the right. Okay, there we go. The tree running through the center, which I'll get in a moment. But let's just do get this out the way first. Okay, that's that part of the building more or less done. I just want to reemphasize that darkness on the right side of the building there. Good. There's some bits and pieces we can fix up later, but that should be okay for now. Um, good. There we go. Now, all the trees and things like that, we're really going to have to go all at once. I've got some greens and I'm going to mix up. This is a pre mixed green. You can use other types of greens as well. And what I want to do actually, is maybe go around this building first. It's kind of difficult. Smaller smaller tip like a round brush like this is going to just make it easier. Cut around this building. Like that. The background has to be darker. Then the houses, the rooftops, especially. So just one brush stroke there that's going to do it. Well, good. You only get one chance with this, you just have to be very careful. And we'll cut around this roof here again, and again, you know, there is some sort of tree here that's actually lighter. I'll mix a bit of yellow into this part. I should have kept that a bit lighter, but it's no big deal. It's like a tree that's kind of in front. I might be able to lift off some paint later, bring some of that back, but it's no big deal. Okay, good. Let's continue on. I'm going to drop in more of this paint, with my round brush. Okay. Continue around, stop at the field, here, and keep it nice and sharp near the base of that field. And let's just continue on to the right hand side. So, you know, jagged edges or rough edges as well where some of the trees end, that's going to be good. Okay, here. Again, just more of this sort of work. Um Make sure you use enough paint really to cut around, create enough of a contrast. Cut around that tree so that there's kind of a lighter looking tree there as well. Right. And then around about here is where that part of the tree line in the back starts, so I'm going to just cut around. Continue. That. It's a lot of paint, probably about 50, 60, 70% paint. The rest of it is just water. And we're going to continue on. And I'm mixing up a bit of yellow in here as well to vary the color of some of these trees so that we've got some lighter ones. In fact, there's one really light tree here right in front that's kind of in the midground. But in the background, it's all pretty dark, so we really got to make sure that this line here is nice and sharp, crisp. Like this to separate out the background from the foreground. Here, let's go here. Great. More darker paints in there. Okay, fantastic. So that's looking right so far. And what I want to what I want to do now is just put in the sky wash. So I might actually fix up this line here. It should be straighter, like about here, maybe. Yep. Yeah, that's better. While the paint's still wet, you've got to do these little bits and pieces, these little adjustments where you can. Otherwise, it's going to look too stuck on afterwards. You know, here as well. Notice I'm just sort of adding some darker areas of trees and things around the rooftops. Again, just to try to make those. Okay, so here comes the sky, and I'm going to pick up some cerulean blue. Drop that straight into the top. A bit of ultramarine and cerulean. A nice even wash of cerulean for now. And I'm going to stop shy of that bit of green because I want to make sure that this whole area up the top there is quite uniform. Don't want to drag any of that green up. And we're gonna just now blend together. So yeah, blend these trees in a little bit. You have some furry edges, but because, you know, we had started painting these trees a while ago, hopefully, it won't spread too much, but it's gonna cause a little bit of blending, which is actually good. Okay. Top of the scene, I'll add in a bit more maybe ultramarine up here, darken it a bit up the top. And I will start putting in some maybe some purple clouds. Drop that in there. Just with that mop brush, it's a good time to do it because I is still wet, and you're not going to cause too much of a fuss, Kate. They're gonna like a purplish color I've decided to use up for them. And that will dissipate in do its thing. Okay, little finishing touches on the house. I've got some darker paint. Can be any sort of dark paint, but I've got purple and a bit of neutral tint, just basically black or darker color. And I'm going to outline this rooftop here. You can see there's some darkness there, and then also it carries on to the right hand side, and you get a bit of that here to the right side of the building, as well, underneath like that. Okay, pretty pretty basic, but it does add on a little more structure. You know, here underneath this building. Notice there's also a bit of something, and here as well, you know, there is also some darker part of that building there, which I will indicate. Okay, there are some doors, you know, little bits here, like, of the building. We can put in little sort of structures, bits of the building there as well, this barn. And I notice there's also some verticals running through because they're like, these wooden planks made out of these wooden planks. We need to just need to doll this color down a bit to maybe some brown, use some brown. Let's dry that off and just see if I can get in a few verticals here. Yeah, so it looks more like a barn, I guess. Then along the right hand side, as well. I'm gonna carry that along. There, this building kind of have some horizontals like that. Okay. Looking good so far. Okay. Well, also, maybe putting in some indications for this tree now. It's actually got a white trunk, but I'm gonna make it darker. Just for the simplicity of all this. L that some branch is going up. There are some lighter trees and things here in the background, so we can put in a few little bits of white gouache and, you know, indications back there. Okay? This one might have, like, I don't know if a bit of a shadow to the right that. Then I have to also do the same thing for this. This little building there or not. Okay. Some little indication. It doesn't have to be much. It's more to exaggerate this shadow. Drop color in more on the right side of the building. Um, right. Let's have a look. There are some little bits of detail running through the field, like this, um, maybe some machinery or, like, a tractor that's run through before, so you can see there's some little marks around near the flowers like that. Um, good. I think I might actually just more green here instead. Yeah, add a little bit more green to darken off some of this stuff or touch. I still want it to look a bit different from the background, stand out against the background, but I think it's still a little bit too light. Yep. Soften off those shadows. I think it just looks better maybe without those shadows in there. Okay. So dry brush for the road. Just some darker value bit of purple really that I'm dropping in. Okay? They're running into the left. Here. And I'm going to mix in some, like, little brush strokes here for the green. Maybe to get in this effect of the grass running in from the left. And, um, also, I want to put in little indications of flowers running to the just in the front here, so a bit of yellow, and I'm just tapping that brush on the page like that. Fortunately, I got some of it up the top. The best way to do this really is to best way to do this is to cover off that entire section up the top. But this is just a little bit faster. You can also just pick up the paint and use your finger to flick the paint directly on to the page like that. Of course, you can just go directly like this, add each little flower on. It takes a lot of time though, just want to try to be efficient with this as efficient as possible anyway. Just get rid of some of that down the base. Doesn't need that much there. It Just get in the tree a little bit here as well. Light a trunk. It's kind of a bit darker than that, actually. Darken this down a bit near the base. Yeah. Double. Use this sort of fill bit brush to pick off some paint up the top to just lift off this area of paint to look like this tree is kind of in front. Just like that. Not too detailed, too, um, not too much. There we go. Okay 8. Field and Trees - Drawing: Okay, let's get started with the drawing. And what I want to do is just draw the line where these flower fields kind of end. And I wouldn't say it's a third, but just above a third of the way through the page. I want to leave enough sky back in the background. So let's just draw it in roughly here. It's a pretty flat sort of line out the back. And we've also got some houses and things like that. But before I put those houses in, I just want to make sure that I've got a little indication of this tree here in the front, and I'm going to pencil this in just goes all the way up and then disappears off to the left side there with this branch. There's some leaves like that. And then you've got another part of the tree that just runs to the right hand side, maybe another branch that runs upwards as well like this. Okay? A lot of it's just kind of covered bit of light hitting the leaves coming down here. Okay. Let's just bring this trunk all the way to the ground and you can see the sort of little bits that stick out of the tree as well, so it's not all completely straight. Keep it looking interesting. So there's, there's one tree, and you can see there's also some like a fern or something here, like another something just sprouting up there and something to the left of the tree. There's, you know, some smaller branches that are coming out of the tree. Now, this is the stuff that you don't really need to put in. You just yeah, we can do that afterwards. This tree to the rights roughly about here, let's, kind of, it's a little bit smaller, and it runs kind of up like this, and then it just curves kind of to the right. Quite a Yeah, it's definitely quite an interesting looking tree. But I like it. I like it. It keeps the scene looking quite interesting, actually. So let's just follow these branches up as usual. Okay, there's that branch sort of hits the corner like that. There's another branch that comes out here and then kind of runs off to the edge of the page and another one that just runs kind of upwards like that. And we've got a thicker one that runs up and kind of as you can see, runs over the top of this other branch here. And let's bring this kind of down, and this kind of all just connects together like this. So you've got an interesting looking tree. There's also some smaller branches which we will get in imply afterwards, but that should be enough. Uh for the tree. Let's have a look at what's happening in the background as well. It's actually quite a lot of stuff going on. We've got some trees there, some smaller ones that's sort of pencil in roughly where they start off. They're behind this tree and you've got this house here. So let's put in a bit of the indication of the house. I might make it kind of more obvious as well. Okay? It's like that rooftop here. And then there's, like, the front part of the house, which is like a triangular part like this. Okay. There we go. That's the front, and then you got the bottom part there of the house. Runs directly down. There's some trees kind of in the way as well there. There's a window here, some chimneys kind of thing there on the roof. Not a big deal, yeah, something to indicate. There's also a tree in front. Okay? And kind of left side of the house, you can see there's a bit of shade. And really, it's like darkness there because you're imagining the light source coming from the right hand side, casting a shadow to the left. Let's have a look. We've also got some other kind of, there is another house of some sort just behind there. It's another decision that I have to make whether to put it in or not, I think I'll add it in, like that indication, 'cause I do like this little roof section here of the house, okay? Like, kind of like this yeah, okay. Something there. Alright, great. And the rest of it is just, as you can see, just trees and things covering up in the background. It's no biggie. And to the right hand side, again, there is another house, and I might actually shift this a little bit so we can see the front of it a bit more. So perhaps like showing a bit of the front side of the house, like that there. That's just like the bottom of it here. Alright. And maybe this can be some shadow to the left side of the house. Again, there's trees running to the left. Okay. And we do have a smaller one, really small sort of building here, which I will quickly indicate again, simplify down. There we go, sort of hiding in these flower fields out the back. And just the amount of trees around the house really helps to bring it out. Okay? But I think that should be it for the drawing. 9. Field and Trees - Light: Okay, so for the first part of the painting, the most important thing in my opinion is to get in the yellow, this really bright yellow for the flowers. And I'm going to pick up a mop brush, watercolor mop brush, pick up some hansa yellow. It's like a really, really vibrant yellow color. And I'm going to drop that in here. This is the light of the scene and pretty much everything in the background as well. Here where the flowers are, you can see that it's quite a vibrant high saturated yellow. It's just like a piercing sort of yellow that we have to get in here. There's no other way to do it but to put it in with this with this all this lighter color right here, okay? And of course, one of the things you can do is try to paint in every single little flower. But I think the better thing to do is just to kind of dabble on around this area, you know, leave some spaces here and there. But for the most part, if you just color it in, you should be okay because a lot of this stuff we're going to be able to sort of imply later on, make these little flowers come out later on by cutting around using some of this green. So yeah, I want some of this to be down the base, as well, like some, you know, larger flowers here as well. There we go. You bring some of this, like, there, okay. That's really important. Fantastic. Now, what I will do is let this kind of dry off a touch here at the base, okay? Because I want to go in afterwards with some, uh, bit more color, especially some greens, but we need to really let this dry touch first. Yeah, so I can pop in those greens. Now, what we can do is just work a bit on the sky and simple stuff here. I don't want to overdo the sky. I just want it to be really, really light, just a bit of cerulean blue. Okay? It's like 10% blue paint, and the rest of it is just water. So let's drop that in. Here's just cerulean blue. Really light wash. I'm using a large mop brush here for this. So you can see really large mop brush picking up a ton of water and bringing feathering this down the page. Here we get to, like, this area where we've got the trees and things, so I just want to calm it down a bit here. But yeah, for this part, really, it's no big deal. I just want to make sure that I've got in a bit of this sky wash and notice how I sort of drop in some darker bits of blue as well. That's going to help to just add a bit more variation of values in the sky because there are some darker bits of darker and lighter clouds in there as well. So yeah, here's where we got to be a bit more careful just cut around these buildings. The rooftops I need to leave in white so that I can just get in some kind of burnt sienna color, maybe. Okay. But the great thing with these mop brushes, as you can see, is that you just cut around. Simple. Very simple. Okay. Don't fuss over it as well if you end up yeah going over some parts. Alright, let's have a quick look at what's happening. So here, unfortunately, some of the blue some of the yellower started going into the sky, which is not a huge deal for me, but, yeah, we'll just have to deal with that. Now, here comes the interesting part. We're going to put in green as we move further down the page. So here where all the water is. Got a bit of cerulean blue and a little bit of hansa yellow. And I'm going to drop this in here. Okay? It's just like a tiny bit of cerulan in there to create a light, kind of, like, light green color here at the base. And also mix in some other greens. I've got some undersea green as well, just like a dull green value, but it's a little bit darker, okay? Like that. Because we know all these stems and all the bottom part here is like a darker green, but it's still not super dark. Like, as you can see, it's like Uh, yeah, it forms a contrast, but not a sharp contrast. We want this to be pretty pretty subtle. And notice here, the paint is already starting to dry with the yellow or has completely dried. So this allows me to cut around some of these flowers, right? Leaving me with a bit of leeway here to, yeah, imply some larger flowers in the front. Here in the back, I'm going to just kind of move some of this green up here like that. Here, maybe some more green below, just a tiny bit here and there. Okay? Not much. Some verticals, I think would be great here. Now, the important thing is this big shadow that runs through the center center of this field, I'm going to use a round brush for this, uh like a medium size round brush. Let's pick up some dark color. I've got some dark green here, some undersea green, and I've got also some purple. Let's mix a bit of purple in there to just darken that down even more. Let's have a look, okay? Like this, that's pretty dark. That's good. Here. And you can see all these smaller flowers in there as well. So a lot of that, don't worry about it. We can get that in afterwards with some, a little bit of guash. But for the time being, we just want to focus on this sort of darker area here, and, yeah, a bit of contrast, really. Right. And it is a bit of a shadow also for the tree. Okay. Bring some of this around. Um, I'll just color this in back here as well. Okay? Would have preferred a sharper edge, but that's okay. One thing I don't want to do is overwork an area. Just I'm going to let that sort of seep in that color seep in nicely do its thing. You know, if we need to bring back some yellow, we can quite easily do that with some guash afterwards. But I want to really make sure that this value here is the there's a bit of dark in this area as well, just as you can see, and then soon, once this has dried a little bit, we're gonna go into the trees. Allright? Good. We'll going into the tree soon. Now, the background is something I've kind of forgotten about, but these houses, they do have some kind of browns and things on them. I've got a bit of burnt siano. I'm gonna drop that into the rooftop of this building here. Hopefully, the sky has kind of dried off a bit, so it doesn't run good there, maybe on this little rooftop thing here as well. Good. It's a bit of running, but will be fine. Bottom part of the house is kind of like a grayish value. So I've got some gray paint. It's really just a bit of white guash mixed in with the remainder of what's left over on the palette. So I'm going to bring that down in there. Let's bring this down as well. This can be kind of like a bit of that house, okay? This house here is also kind of like a grayish color, but there's more like a bluish gray color. So I'm gonna drop in a little bit of blue in there. Good. And on the right hand side of the house, I will probably just use yeah, some warmer gray value. Yeah. Good that. Where's that burnt sienna touch that burnt sienna on the rooftop here. Good. So we've got those houses, indications anyway of these houses in right? Yeah, side of the house there. It's mostly just, mostly a lot of the trees and things there anyhow. Okay, so now this whole area has started to dry off, and, you know, I'm also trying to, again, imply the shadow that runs through here a little bit. Okay, as long as that back of the field is mostly yellow, I'm going to be happy with that. Now, the tree, let's get in some colors for the tree. We've got some kind of grayish values as well on the tree, so I'm going to put in, like, a warm, maybe a bit of let's pick up a bit of blue and drop that in there, like a bluish gray value for this side of the tree here. You can't see too much of it on this one, because it's all just pretty much, all just pretty much darker values, but there are some kind of warmer values up here, you can see just a little bit of a little bit of green there or a little bit of yellow where the sun has sort of hits the leaves. So just a little bit of something there, I think for fun, maybe some more yellow, yep. Good. Hopefully that maybe could balance out. The bottom of the scene, it's very yellow down the base. Okay. So what was I doing here? I was just adding in some warm color. So it's just a bit of white guash mixed with gray, or you can just water down a gray value and then it will be fine as well. Okay, just a bit of that down the trunk before I start getting in all the dark values. Let's bring this across. There maybe just some more of this gray running through there, as well, not too much of it. I want to let that dry a little bit first, but I think here in the background, while that's drying, I can actually start adding in some details. 10. Field and Trees - Shadows: So with the houses, you know, they're pretty much colored in. That's started to dry. I will pick up some green, a bit of just leftover green from the palette. Light green, maybe add in a bit of guash in there to give them a pasteli kind of color. And I'm just going to go through and again, imply these trees or something here in the background, okay? Like, distant trees like that behind this big tree here. I always try to do the stuff the lighter stuff first, and then work to the darks. Okay, here. And it kind of gets a bit funny here. It's like a bit gets a bit darker at the base of some of these trees and maybe the side of the house here, I could just darken a bit more as well. I don't want to overdo it, though. Good, good, good, something like that. There. Alright. So more there. Again, more of this green. It's just a really subdued green, you know, there's not much color in there at all. It's just so uh, yeah, really subtle. And you want to also leave a nice sharp edge there where it touches the yellows in front. Yep. So trees behind here. Let's get in some more behind here. There's some here. Trying not to make it too dark, but at the same time, yeah, we it does help to bring out the buildings a little I don't think they're going to be so visible still at the end of this. But an indication of them will be fine. Okay. There we go. There's more trees to the right. Fantastic. So I'm going to leave that all to dry. Let's now work a bit on the trees. And I think I'll work on the one to the left first. It's going to be a bit easier. I've got purple. I think purple is going to work great maybe with some brown, burnt umber, purple and burnt umber. Let's test this out. It's dark, but I probably would want it a bit darker, more purple. Let's have a look. Okay. Just mixing away to try to create a darker value, good would leave a bit of light on some areas of the tree, as well, perhaps. Comes down here. I mean, there's some other shrubs here as well. Let's get this in here. Okay. A lot of this is kind of wet and wet painting as well. If you look very closely, there's not really, as you can see, sometimes a sharp enough edge, but I'm trying to kind of accomplish that on some areas like here, making it really dark in some parts so that the tree kind of comes out more. As we move up, it becomes easier to do this because the sky is, like, just so bright. Here we go, like that. So, in a way, I'm trying to add a little bit more kind of interest in the tree. Okay, there, let's move this around. And, you know, here is where I was playing around with some of the lighting effects. Yeah, so cut around that tree. It's all really dark up the top there. So more green, perhaps. Okay. And I do have myself a nice little rigor brush, which I love to use to create details. So I'm gonna pick up this rigor brush, mix myself up some paint. I've got some brown and a bit of blue, maybe. Bit of blue, like a cooler color. Think more of this coolness needs to be in the trunk, as well. Okay. Sort of balance it out. It looked a bit too warm before. But you can see here, you know, you've got, like, a branch coming up. I, you know, just sort of bit coming here. You know, they're gonna run up into these imaginary leaves and things. Um, It's actually quite, you know, you can see just tiny bits of leaves and things that I want to imply with the edge of the brush and sort of turn the brush on its side and you can get some more leafy kind of shapes, okay? I find the more you tort yourself over the shapes, the less it actually start looking like leaves. So you got to really kind of be quite haphazard in a way, but not too much because otherwise, you're going to get just a gigantic mess. But yeah, as you can see, I'm just trying to be a bit more random with my brush strokes. Alright? And then we join these up with the little bits of paint that I have here. You know, with the rigor brush, you can see, it's doing a great job. Mm hmm. Edge of this tree is just making a little bit of a mess. I'm going to try to lift off some paint here to get a better sharper sort of edge on that tree. Okay. And you can never do this 100% when you're working wet into wet. You're just doing your best to kind of make everything join in and combine together, but accepting that it's not going to look perfect or anything, you know, Exact. So the great thing about these trees is that they all look quite different. And if you get a branch or something like that, different compared to the reference photo, no one's gonna notice anyway. So yeah, in fact, I find that it just makes it more interesting if you do your own thing after a while. Alright, that tree is looking okay. I reckon we can do some more work on it afterwards once stuff has started drying. But yeah, there is something here like this, as you can see this, like, plant here, which I will try to mimic there in the shadows to the left a bit more darkness, a bit more blue in here. Alright. This will kind of blend in nice wet and wet sort of work. There's also something here next to the tree to the left, so a bit of darkness there as well. Okay, bit more scumbling. Alright. Great. All right, let's start working a bit on this tree to the right, same kind of color. Gonna drop that in. Okay. That. The bottom of the tree is kind of dried off, so I was hoping to get some real soft shadows there, but it's going to be tricky. We can just try and soften off later, maybe. Okay, good. But yeah, moving up to the top of the tree, it becomes a lot easier here. You just have to get in those branches, and I've got a nice sort of grayish value that's emerged from just the mixes on the page. And that's what happens. When you mix everything together, it just basically turns into gray. Okay. Maybe I'll get rid of that shuttle full stop. Let's see. Let's see, whether it's even necessary to put it in afterwards. It might I might be might be able to, you know, lift off a bit of it. Um, good. And the brush here picking up some blue is value again, and I'm going to try to put in some little brush strokes here for the branches. Okay? These rigger brushes are so useful. They save a heap of time, and they make it look more elegant, these little branches. And, 'cause otherwise, if you try to do this saw with another brush or a larger brush, it can just turn into an enormous mess. So yeah, definitely try and use a rigor brush. Here, I've got a bit of leave here at the top that I can imply. There's some green already on the palate. Just go to water that down a bit and then, you know, scumble this green around the top. Here. It doesn't have to be much, just a little bit here because I don't want to obscure all these branches. I still want them to be fairly visible and sharp. Okay. Now, I do think this tree needs to be darker. Compared to the other one, it's way too light. So I'm gonna go ahead and drop in some more painted here with my round brush here. It's just brown and blue mixed together. Get myself a darker value. Okay. Good. That's, uh. Yep. There we go. That looks a lot better. Yeah, you just have to really make sure that you're matching some of these values appropriately to the reference photo. Good. Good. I think that's looking decent. I could do a bit more, but I think that's actually looking pretty okay. The buildings out the back now. I reckon we can put in a bit of detail for them. So a little bit of kind of scratching out work here. I'm just going to use, as you can see here, a little pocket knife, and this is so I can imply maybe little upward marks like this running through the scene that might indicate these as you can see the bottom parts of the these these stems, okay? Running up. Now, you kind of got to do it on the areas that are wet already. So the bottom parts completely dried, okay? So if you've got a little spray bottle like this, it can come in handy to re wet and scratch upwards to create this effect. But in actual fact, I think we're probably better not to overdo it down the base, especially with lighter strokes because there's actually some darker marks below. Okay. But yeah, as you can see, I've kind of re wet the area a bit, so you've got more time, a little bit more time to scratch off some paint. It's worked quite well over on this side. But, um, yet, like I said, you kind of got to do it so that it's looking natural, not overdoing it, okay? Let's have a look. Let's have a look. Ah, right. And here's my rigor brush is where the rigor brush again is going to come in handy. So a little bit of green paint again, maybe, really, really light green colored paint. And let's see if I can get myself in a few, yeah, like, these sort of upward marks like that, see? Just very, very light, but dark enough to imply these little You know, bits of stems and what have you for these flowers. Okay? Really light, really light sort of work. I'm always just trying to be careful with this, maybe some dark, slightly darker bits. Let's see if I've got enough paint like that. There we go. So some of them are actually a little bit darker, so we can, you know, we can put we put a few few darker ones in without, um, stressing. But try to make these see how I'm just sort of using a few different angles here, you know, with these flowers, they do grow on different angles at different depths, as well. So you want to try to mimic that and not try to make them all run in the same direction. Otherwise, it's going to just not look very convincing. It's the combination of all these things together that's going to make it look realistic. And you can see at the back here, the stems get like a lot smaller and less visible because we're moving further out into the back. Right. You can change it up a little bit, as well. That's fine. Scratch off a little bit here. I just wanted to try to, I don't know, meld it in to this tree a little bit, see. Just get that tree to blend a little bit more. There. Okay. And here's a little fun bit. I'm going to just pick up some yellow, really light yellow paint, yellow fans a yellow, maybe a touch of this white guash, as well. Let's squeeze out I'll squeeze out some, like, fresh white guash. But firstly, I'll try the yellow. Let's see if I can get a concentrated yellow here and just drop it into places. There we go. There's some Okay. Okay. Maybe some guash will be better, a bit of white guash, to bring some of these flowers back. Okay? See, I'm just trying to get in these little indications of the flowers running through the fields. Okay? The white guash is really definitely helping to bring it out. So yeah, mix in a bit of that. Okay. But change it as well. Change it up. So here I haven't really used much guash. I can just pop in these indications of the flowers. Really got to be quite quick with this, not overdoing it. You'll find that the flowers that you put in near the areas of slight darkness, like these green bits here, they're going to look more convincing. And more interesting, for example, here, let's put one on top of this see on top of these stems that we had painted in before. So look just a little bit of something there. If I can just add that in, um, you can see them kind of run across the top like that. You know, at some point I sort of stopped looking at the reference and end up kind of making it up. But yeah, the stems on the top here just need something again to indicate those flowers, you know, Okay. Ideally, one brush stroke per flower. Okay, one brush stroke per flow. And as you get further down the base, you see the flowers become larger, more numerous as well. So that's when you want to make them a little bit bigger and spread them apart a touch, as well. Notice how I'm just trying my best to keep it a bit more subtle, okay? So, you know, here's one, here, here. Okay. I don't want to overdo it. Some more here, little ones. It's really just guash. Okay? Here's, you know, some of them that just go near the tree, in fact, like there look just tiny little indications. All you need is almost like a dot on top of the on top of these stems and that will spread out a little bit. And this is the important bit here to the left where we've got all this darkness and we need to break it apart a little bit by adding in some of these little dots and flowers on top of the stems and keeping them at different heights as well. So there's some little bit further up, further down, changing them around a little. But Okay, let's move a few more down a bit more sort of marks further down here, these lotherflowers. Yep. It's really hard to retain this vibrancy of the flowers, and even get the same value exact color. So, you know, I'm mainly just changing them up, not getting too fuss over the exact value, but, you know, there are times where you might have to make that value a bit lighter, like here to make the flowers stand out more, make it look like they're actually present. You know, especially here down the front, I might add in a few larger ones, even though they're not there in the reference, um, I think it might be worth just putting in some here as well. Yeah some little ones here in the back. Thank you. Back here. Now, this whole area is like, I've gone a bit too far, so I can just try to bring back maybe a little bit of that yellow. It's almost impossible, but, yeah, we can sort of can sort of bring a little bit of yellow there, as you can see, m to the left of that tree. I don't know. Carrying on to the left there. Yep, Guash is like a magical little thing that you can add right at the end. And hopefully, balance balance out the scene. You can't overdo it. Okay. Again, just looking at the base, seeing if there's anything I want to add any larger shapes, any more flowers before I put this squash away, retire the guash, you know, a lot of little things we can do here. Find that when you're painting from a reference, as well, you sometimes go to change it up and add add bits and pieces to it because there's a lot of detail that actually goes missing from the photograph. So little every little dot can add um, you know, just that illusion of complexity back. Okay. Okay, so last thing I want to do is just bring out some of these houses with some darker bits. So I know here to the left side of this house, I'm going to pick up some grayish paint. And let's just drop this in. This is kind of like the rooftop to the left, and there's darkness to the left and this side of the house here. Okay? Just something there, and then underneath the roof, you might get a little bit of that darkness here and here, you know, bit of this chimney there, some little chimney bits on the roof. In the distance, there's that window there as well. Um, here, let's put in some more little bit of darkness there. Um, here as well on the left side of the house. Okay. Good. Just really want to make it quite subtle. This is a house here as well. Again, a bit of darkness there to the bottom like that, and maybe a bit of something here, like there. You know, some windows, that sort of thing. And this house may be a bit of darkness to the left like that. Alright. Underneath the roof there, that should kind of do it. Um, the only last thing I might want to change a touch is just adding in some more darkness for these trees, a little bit of darkness for these trees, surrounding the houses, here. Yep. Yeah, it's just going to make it look better, make the houses, hopefully stand out of touch more, not trying to overdo it again, being careful not to go too far down into the fields. Okay. A bit of gouache was still wet. Um, let's drop in some more green there. Get that out of the way. Okay. This tree here to the left. Um, over here. I've kind of accidentally gone over the top with the yellow, so I'm gonna just redo it. Brown and a cooler color like blue. Okay, that. I know it's sort of coming out in front. Come on, we need some darker values here. Difficult to kind of mix them up sometimes. Okay, bit here. Yep. It could sort of darken a bit around the base of this tree, as well, sort of, around the edges to really try to bring it out, bring the trunk of that tree out more. Like here, especially on the left hand side, you know, just a touch of that color, reinstating some of the branches and that kind of thing. Yep. These little finishing touches, they make a big difference. Yep, so continuing on. The base. He cute. Just rejigging again some of these branches coming off. This tree is really quite a central part of this scene. Um, and I'll do it for this one, as well. Bit more contrast bits What's the blue, a bit of blue perhaps in here as well. Yep. But yeah, it's okay if this tree is a little bit lighter, actually. It's still further back, we can get away with it. Okay, let's have a look. These trees, maybe in the back, I can just again rejig them and just bring it out to touch more. That's not everywhere, maybe the bottom part more, so around the rooftop area like that. Okay. I Let's redo this shadow a bit here. It needs to be darker for that house to kind of show through better. Okay, and I think we are finished. 11. Flowers - Drawing: Get started with the drawing for this one, and it's pretty simple. We've got a bunch of flowers here. I'm just putting in this area, which represents kind of like the bluish sort of maybe purplish area up the top, and at the bottom where it's yellow, kind of perhaps orange in some areas. And we've got this flower here, and I'm just going to put in some of the the flowers, general shapes of them. Okay, but the big thing is just this stalk that you can see here that's coming down stem and these bits that kind of come out of the stem a little bit here, where there are some flowers on parts of those like that. So that's one. We've got some others in the back here as well. There's just some shapes, and it becomes a little bit more interesting here at the back where they are a bit blur blurry, so we might be able to actually lift some of those. I don't know if they're petals, but bits of it. So I'm going to go down. Now here's one stem going that way. Then we're going to get the another one here, okay? So it's really just a few really abstract shapes. The drawing shouldn't take you long at all. Okay. I think that's almost that should be it. Yep, there are some additional shapes and things out the bag, but we'll get them in later. So 12. Flowers - Painting: Hs are yellow. Dropping that in here. All right. And hopefully trying to get the general shape of these you'd actually do see some green in there as well, little bit of green buds here. Let me just see if I can put some in. So just little buds here. They're actually a lot lighter than that. Kind of like this. There we go. Just notice how, uh, Abstract. I'm doing this. I'm not really bothering too much with the overall shape and everything. We can cut around these flowers and stuff later to make them look a bit more realistic. But for the time being, all we want to do is just pop in the color a little bit of that color. As you can see, you know, here there's another one out the back, more yellow. Here there are a few more. Well, here, here. There around here, there's a few more as well. Okay. Base. We've got some, again, lighter sort of flowers. Um, there's actually some that look very blurry almost in their But yeah, they're like a deep sort of yellow. And if you have a Cranacodone or Indian yellow, this is going to be great. Otherwise, you can mix a little bit of a little bit of orange in there, and that will also help. Okay? But let's continue down the base. I'm going to just continue adding in. I've got some Indian yellow, Okay, which I will use to sort of cut round. Yeah, just sort of cut around some of these flowers. Maybe with the hansa yellow mixed in, it's a bit too much otherwise. Key The mop brush is probably going to be more handy. To be honest. So the idea is to have preserve some of this really nice, brighter sort of yellow parts in there. And then at the same time, add in some of this golden, darker yellow around. We don't have to be perfect. Some of the stuff we can lift off later on and make parts of it lighter. When you're painting wet into wet like this, it's very difficult to create arm. There's actually some yellows behind there, as well. Yep. Good. Okay. I think the important part is to start blending in up the top here, some kind of purply colours and blue, purple and blue. So I've just picked up a bit of purple. That's not going to be blue enough. I'm going to pick up some ultramarine blue here and maybe mix that with some cerulean. Okay. Let's just bring just trying to merge some of this stuff together. You do see some lighter bits. There's some light coming through some lighter streaks here. Okay? Now, notice all of this stuff I'm doing is pretty much wet onto wet. I don't want it to Like just around here, I'll probably dry this bit off a little bit, near the flowers. But before I do that, I just want to make sure that some of this stuff here actually just blends into the background. Like for example, here, bringing this down this bluish value Okay. It's kind of blues and purples. Let's have a look how those flowers doing. A little bit of drying off around the flowers. Carry this darker wash through. A bit of cutting around here. That's just around the edges of that flower. Okay. Good. Let's do the same here. Yeah, the aim is just to leave on that yellow for a good proportion of it. Cutting around. Again, we don't have to be perfect. Okay, left in the yellow from the previous wash, and that's how we get this pattern of well, the contrast, supposedly, flowers and because otherwise it's going to be very difficult to imply what's in there. You want to darken a bit here on the right hand side. Add in some more shapes, maybe here. Darken that a bit more, darken a bit here as well. It's just blue and purple mixed together. Okay. Good. I still got that rigor brush that I was playing around with before. I'm gonna go in and grab a bit of purple and a bit of neutral tint and start implying these little stems. Now, there's this one here, of course, this stem, which is connected to a bunch of these flowers. Now, of course, this one's more in contrast. But actually, if you go further down, you'll notice that there's actually a lot of ones that are kind of blurry at the back. And that's where we want to actually put them in wet into wet. Now, parts of the paper are already wet, which is great. Means I don't really need to re wet the paper again. Okay. But I can just drop them in like this. Okay, there's another one here to the right. Some here in the background as well. Maybe something here. Okay. I'm going to pick up some more of this kind of darker yellow, darker yellow paint. It's really Indian yellow. And I'm going to drop some of this in here to try to bring out some of the lighter flowers, which basically just means leaving in parts of that previous wash and at the same time going over the background to darken parts of this background, the foreground, darken parts of especially maybe here that could help. Redo some of these stems. Let's give this a bit of a dry. 13. Flowers - Finishing Touches: Okay, just some little sharpening up with the stem again, I'm going to go back into this and re adjust and add in a bit of something here. Here. Okay. And there's some that look a bit kind of blurry at the back. That's fine. Just leave those in. This is kind of like the final bit step, I suppose, where you just you're trying to add in this layering effect so that it looks more three dimensional. Um, so there's a bit of depth in there, 'cause actually, you know, with the camera shot, you can tell some things are not in focus, some things are in focus. And this is kind of the way that you achieve it. Do some of it wet into wet and some of it wet and dry. And when you layer them over the top, fingers crossed, that should give you a more detailed looking painting, at least seemingly so 'cause it's a bit too abstract at the back here, so some extra sharpness is really going to help. Okay. Good. Another thing I like to do is perhaps put in some more of these flowers. I've got some yellow and white guash, which I'll mix together. And I can, like, drop in something here, for example. This can be a bit of a flour that I had not put in before, so check that out. We can just bring it back. Bring parts of this back. Here, I kind of lost out a bit of detail. You can drop in a bit of that. Here, as well, there are some flowers that I kind of lost out there as well. We can drop some of this color back in there. And the great thing about gouache is that it allows you to paint over the top, as well. So you just don't want to overdo it. It works well when you do it around these areas where there's darker spots here, like darker areas. Then you can just go in and add in something like that, which might look like a flower. It's all a big illusion to make it seem like there's details in there when there's not really. Okay. Now, film brush or just any kind of old brush that you can use. And I'm picking up a bit of water, and I'm going to scrub away maybe at some points here to just maybe bring out some light. So you just sort of scrub away at the edges of the flowers, and you can lift off, do this sort of thing. You can see here as well, This is the part that I was mentioning before. These little stems or whatever, they have a bit of light on them, so why not imply that by lifting off like this. Okay. So works a lot better on these darker spots. Down the bottom, it's a little trickier, but you can still do it by just, yeah. Basically rubbing into an area like that, lifting off. It's all again, just about creating a more interesting looking scene. These flowers here have a more softer edge. Start lifting off more paint here. It's a nice little effect as well of helping to blend the background with foreground and midground. This one could do a bit of softening. Some of them you just want to partially soften, but not really do too much with. I could do with a bit of yellow, maybe there. Yep. Just in some places you notice, okay, it's looking a little bit um, too dark. That's when you can start doing this stuff. Okay. So we're getting there, maybe lift off some of this here as well. There are some smaller spots kind of depends on the background layer. So scrubbing away and you mostly expose that first wash yellow if you scrub hard enough, or even the white of the paper close to that color anyhow. So I don't get any round shapes in here. I'm happy to indicate, like a bulb. I down the front, I'm going to make them bigger to indicate like maybe some larger ones. This flows kind of bugging me a little bit. I want to bring back the old color, like make it more yellowish, soften the edges. The only way I might do this is just to scrub out the entire thing, grab some of this more vibrant yellow, chuck that in like that, and, um, hoop that it remains like that should do. Upward brushstrokes maybe running into this blue, see? And kind of help to blend this a bit more. I'll try to do another one over this side for the same effect, maybe like that. You know, like I said, it's just kind of trying to blend things together. D 14. House in Field - Drawing: Okay, let's go ahead and get started with the drawing. And the first thing I want to do is put in this line right in the center, well, just below the center of the page where the flowers, the field kind of starts off and ends. So kind of goes a little bit above the halfway point as we move through the page like that. Okay. Something like that, okay? In fact, it doesn't quite matter, if you think about it. Yeah. I just depends on the sort of composition you like. I think just keeping it similar to the reference would be a good idea. Through the center of the page, you can see here there's a little bit of a kind of darker section of this field. It looks like it could be a pathway or something. I'm just going to draw a quick little indication there, and then you can see there's a tree just sort of runs through like this, okay? On the right hand side of the scene, I'm going to just place that tree roughly here, okay? Now, the other really big obvious thing in this scene is the house. So let's go ahead and put in the house. It's right in the center of the page. So let's I'm going to work firstly on the rooftop, so it's like as you can see, it's kind of this triangular style roof that goes, probably a bit more of an angle, maybe like that coming down here to the right. Okay, then you've got this bottom part there. And on the left side, you can see there's, like, this section of the roof, as well. And, of course, the chimney that just sort of pops up like this. It's not all too much detail in there, but that should be fine. Hey, great. A bit of that rooftop like that to the side, and you can see there's actually another part of the house that's just on the left, like a little section like that sticking out. There, I'm going to just imply that as well. This is going to be all under yeah, all under shade, most of it under shade, Ahow. In the right side, you've got this other section of the house, but even here, you've got, like, another part that just runs out, and then ducks of down. There's some windows in there, but the two main windows here, probably the most important to put in here. There we go. And there is some kind of window there as well there on the rooftop. Okay. And here to the right, we have like this section of the roof, just like this. And that sort of goes into the ground as well. There is some type of additional structure to the background as well, you can see it sort of runs out to the back section like that. Looks like another house or something there. I'm just going to pencil something in at the back, okay. Apart from that, we've got most of the house in. I'm just going to put in a bit of this tree indication of roughly where it is. It's another tree here, here. I don't tend to do too much for these trees because a lot of this can be done just in the watercolors. But that should be good for the drawing. 15. House in Field - Light: First part of this scene that we're going to focus on is all these flowers. I need to get in a ton of yellow. This is Hansa yellow, which is a really, really bright yellow value, very vibrant, just like this field. So I'm putting it straight in there, a little bit of water. I want to keep it quite concentrated. Okay, running to the right. I mean, this entire field, really, we just have to get that yellow in all the way through down to the bottom. Okay, best to just paint it all in that one color. And then drop in some more afterwards. But, yeah, as you can see, it's really, really concentrated. But with Hansa yellow, you know, it doesn't really go any darker, okay? I just gets a little bit more vibrant, I suppose, if you add more color, more paint into this mix. Okay. So there we go. We've got this bright yellow field. It's so important to make sure you've got that in. Alright. So now what I want to do is just work a little bit on the houses out the back, and I want to put in a bit of let's try some burnt sienna, a little bit of burnt sienna for the rooftop, like that. And I'm using mainly just water through here. It's really, really light value. I want it to be a little orangy, maybe. Let's drop in a touch of orange in here. Warm this up a little. But yeah, I think the important thing is just to keep it really light. The right hand side is just pretty much white at the rooftop, so I don't want to touch that at all. Little round brush helps with this. Great. And let's have a look, maybe a little bit on the rooftop here. This chimney. Like that. The house, I'm going to get in with some yellow ochre, little touch of yellow ochre, which is kind of like a sandy yellow color off a more warmer color like there. Oops. Here we go. Maybe I'll actually add in a touch of white gouache with this as well. It's just to make it look a bit more pastel. There we go. That looks better. Even this house behind there, it's kind of got a bit of this pastel like color that section of the house to the left. So let's put that in. Alright. Good. Good. Like that. Might hit the ground. That's no big deal. I'll put in a bit of this rooftop here as well to the left. It's just some leftover kind of darker warm color. It's not a big deal. Just need to fill in some of that. And let's put in maybe a little bit, as well here on the right side. That just to keep that house looking the same color. Okay. Fantastic. Maybe a bit of darkness under this portion of the house like that. Good. All right, the house at the back, maybe some grayish value, bit of kind of got some leftover blues and stuff, cooler colors that I can just add in for that rooftop here, and that will hopefully form a bit of a little contrast here, darken that a little more like that, between the house in front. Okay. And let's grab some, again, leftover paint and stuff here in the palette. I've just got a bunch of purples and bits and pieces mixed up here that's gonna be great, kind of like purple and green or purple and gray like that. Alright. Just around and near to the bit at the bottom. I might blend, but let's not worry about that. Okay. Now, let's see what else we can potentially work on. Now, of course, we've got to let the house and all that dry, but I think we can kind of drop in a bit of something here, this pathway. And again, it's just a little bit of purplish color that I've picked up, and purple goes really well with yellows. It just is a great kind of complimentary color that you can drop in there. I'm going to take advantage of that. And I've also got some uh, I've got another brush here which we can just pick up more purple. And I'm gonna I'm going to just drop in maybe a little bit of it here, like, at the front. Okay? Just to create maybe a bit more contrast. I still want to get some of them flowers going through, but just a little bit of something here 'cause I think it's gonna look better. Yeah, make it look a bit more interesting. Okay? I'm going to have to kind of sometimes exaggerate things in this scene because there's just so much detail in the reference photo that we're missing out on a bit of green here for this tree. And it's probably it's gonna have some purple in it, as well. That doesn't matter. Yeah, I just gonna bring that up. There we go. We've got like a bit of this tree here. Okay? More darkness, like that. There's going to be probably a little more darkness on the left side of the tree. Okay, bit of that. Good. Now into the background, I'm gonna pick up some more of this green and start working my way into this area. Okay, like that. Here. And, uh, Just start adding in these larger shapes in the background. Scumbling the brush around as well a bit so that it looks more randomized. Okay, around the house as well, we can start putting in a bit of detail. More yellow maybe into this green. Want to vary a touch. Okay. Me green back here. Look at that. Just really trying to keep this pretty loose around the back of the house, as well. Here, this is where you got to be a little more careful and cut around it like this. Kate, using the tip of the brush here's the chimney. And I do find this really helps to bring out the house if you've got some of this kind of, you know, bits bits and pieces like that. Okay. Try not to overdo it. Here we have it. Just going around the entire house. I probably best leaving that house to dry completely first. I've not left it to dry completely, but it's almost almost completely. So yeah, it just makes it easier. Otherwise, if you start going into that house too quickly, you are going to find that all the paint is gonna run everywhere and it's gonna become a mess. Okay. So Great. Maybe a bit more tiny bit more blue. Got some blue here to darken, perhaps some spots. You know, there are some darker areas that I just want to imply, perhaps in the trees, create a bit of, you know, variation because there is definitely some tonal variation in there makes things look more interesting, maybe here as well. Okay. Fantastic. Now, I'm going to put in a bit of the sky, and I'll probably use a larger mop brush for this some cerulean blue, which is like a really light blue. Drop that in up the top like that. It's almost It's almost all water. Some of this will probably cause the trees and stuff to blend into it, but I'm not fuss at all, let it do its thing. A. There we are. Good. That's a pretty simple sort of sky. I'm going to just continue dropping in a bit more green and some paints in here. There's some white spots that I want to eliminate here, some little splotches of areas that I think I could quickly fix up. Some of these are not a big deal, but I do find maybe in a scene like this where it could detract from the rest of it, especially from this, you know, yellowy flower field, I think that's a good yeah, a good call there to make. 16. House in Field - Shadows: Okay, so everything has more or less dried off now. And what we want to do here is, yeah, basically just start to put in some small details here and there. So firstly, I would like to maybe just rewet some parts like perhaps here, a little bit at the bottom, for the stems of some plants, maybe a little bit there, okay. But, I've got a bit of brown here and a bit of purple. Okay. A brown umber, and I'm mixing that with a bit of purple here to get myself maybe a bit of darker paint. This can be for this tree here, you can see, it's kind of like a vindication of some branches. And it's also good to have a rig of brush if you've got one. Probably use this and a rigger brush at the same time. You bring this across like that a bit more paint on the brush, maybe here. Yeah, just that little branch to the left and then maybe something here to the right. And going up, there's a few more trees and bits and pieces as well here, which I will indicate with another layer of paint, too. Okay. I just want to let that dry off a little bit before I start putting in some greens additional greens. But basically, like this, as you can see, it's just a little bit of using that rigor brush, the edges of it to indicate leaves. Okay? It's all just hopefully just one color. But yeah, we've got some softness in the background as well as this nice sharpness, which I think is really important. And we'll use that also here for the kind of cut around the rooftop like that to create extra contrast there. That I got to use contrast to your advantage. And that's popping a bit of lighter green here side of this brush like that. Okay. Again, trying to add in a bit more darkness for this, trunk, this tree trunk and the here, where it kind of hits the bottom of the scene like there. You know, there's also, in fact, a little hedge here. I barely noticed it, but there is a little kind of hedge, which I will indicate hopefully quickly like this. Oops, we've gone too far to the house. That's right. Lo, we can just I just want it to be really quick. Okay. This kind of helps to bring it out a bit more separate the house a little bit more. Alright, so we've got that tree here. Let's have a look. I'll put in some more kind of branches and what have you here to the left, and again, sprinkle a bit of this extra color in for this tree. I think it's important to have a variety of different shapes and values. In here, it keeps things looking interesting. Okay. Good. Bit of cooler value on the left side of this house there maybe underneath like that. Okay, it's kind of just a purple value. Not a big deal, like that. Put in a bit of that shadow or indication of that shadow anyway. Yeah, do you notice the left side of that rooftop is also a little bit darker on the top here. So let's just entertain that and put in a bit of a little bit more color. This is, again, just the same burnt sienna that I was using before, giving it an extra bit of strength like that. Good. Great. Now, I'm going to put in some of this, like, little rooftop section. There is some shadow here, and of course, there's actually some shadow running all the way across like this down the side of the building and going up like that. It's a very light value I'm using of a purple. Okay, with the edge of my brush, Okay. Maybe a bit here, too. That's great. Um. Nice roof here at the back, maybe some little bits of line work on it as well. Maybe if I just darken it, it would be better. Um, first, some of this brown. I feel like it's lost a bit of that warmth there in the roof. Yeah, I think that looks a bit more natural. Okay. Windows, let's put in a bit of darker value here for some of these windows. It's just a purplish value. Again, any kind of darker value will work fine like that. There we go. Uh, maybe a bit here. Well, here. A little bit of shadow there. I mean, we've lost out on this bottom part of the house in the background, so I'm gonna just darken a touch like that. Okay. And a little bit more detail maybe here. So I've got a tree there. This is a bit of purple and a bit of green that I will drop in here and also this tree here in the foreground, I think needs some extra presents. I need to bring this out of touch. But some darker bits here to the right, as well. Okay, so just continuing on with these windows a little. I think that a touch of darkness will help bring them out better. There's even this one here on the roof that kind of wasn't coming through before. Like that. Good. Little sections here to the left. Like that. Okay. So little vertical lines. I think the rigor will be better for this light vertical lines that you can see running through like that. You can barely tell that they're actually there. Great. A bit of a spray down in the foreground. Again, I was hoping to maybe get in some little indications of stalks and things. So you can see this kind of some verticals, I can see that these kind of stems going up like that, running through the bottom of the scene. You know, let's make a few go off in the other direction, that kind of thing. And this has some little, like, flowers attached on them as well here. So let's just indicate that really just putting on some darker yellow, like that. Layering over the top with this rigor. Oops. It's always just to make it look like there's more of a foreground create a bit of a interesting looking foreground section. Great. And I think we're done. In a quick finishing touch with a bit of white guash. Here. Okay. Maybe a bit on the rooftop like that. Left side. Well, you can barely sort of get that in here. The frames as well of the windows, maybe a bit, something like that in parts of it anyway. Great. And I'll call that one finished. 17. Simple House - Drawing: Okay, so I've drawn this line just below the middle section of the page, okay? Now, this is to basically indicate where I want to put the house. And it's right in the center of the scene. Let's get in some of the details. Now, you've got this kind of rooftop that runs up like this. It's kind of like a triangular rooftop there. And actually, there's some more details of it. It comes out to the side like this. Okay. And the other side also comes out there. It's kind of like a white little section, I suppose, you could call it. Okay. And then on this side, it comes out. That's sort of like the rooftop, on the other side. Then you've got the top of the roof here. Then it comes down like that. Alright. Just looking at the little shapes, that's all we're doing. Not too much fussing around. Now, this is the part on the bottom of the house here, and then you've also got, like, a little window or something there. Now, there is something in front of this house. I'm not sure what it is. So scaffolding. I'm going to just omit that. Don't have to put in everything that you see, okay? It's a side of the house here. Alright. And the part of the house behind is kind of like, again, it goes up that. And you can see actually it sort of comes out like this, as well, the side of it there and it comes down here. It's part another something behind it. Not a big deal. Okay. Bit of that white section, that. And it comes out sort of behind this one, like here. And the rooftop stretches all across. Now, there's actually a I almost forgot, but there's a little chimney here. I'll just put that in there, cut around that chimney There we go. There's that house in the background, and we're going to make that sort of left side of the house come down. The bottom part of it there. It's there's, like, darker window or something behind as well some shadows and stuff like that, which we don't have to really get in quick indication. Some more windows here on the sides of the house here. That's looking pretty okay for now. Okay, good, good. Good. Now, there is another house, actually, back there. You can just make out the rooftop of it, like that. And then it disappears behind those trees, which we can get in just quickly, a little trunk of a tree here, and then I'll get in another trunk here as well, to the right. Okay, that. And let's get in some of this stuff as well. This is the just the leaves on top of the tree like that doesn't have to be too detailed, but, um, yeah, the trunks, I find just you've got to really outline them a bit. Okay. Now, behind it, there's all this sort of tree line, as you can see, it just runs up. It's quite like quite abstract. But this is important because it's going to help to bring out all the light on the houses and also in the ground in front, as well. So that's good enough for the drawing. Let's go ahead and get started. 18. Simple House - Light: So I'm going to move in first with some yellow. This is just a bit of ars are yellow. Move all the way through the bottom of the house and into this field. Now, it's very important to make sure you don't go over the white of the house. You can see there, there's a lot of white in there. You don't want to go in there at all. So I'm just cutting around it. Okay. There, then we're going to go down. It's very light. This wash is mostly just water, maybe 50% water, 50% paint. I'm trying to go maybe a little darker here at the front, and I've got some purple as well, I'm going to drop in a little bit of purple here to just darken this yellow down because purple is a complimentary color to yellow, and it will just dull and add a bit of Um, yeah, just a bit of something down at the base, because there are some sort of shadows for some of the flowers, as you can see. This is just a quick little way to imply this, but still keep this field. You see, like, really light. I don't want to do too much to it, really. Alright. Then, if anything, you can just pick up some bits of purple mix with that yellow very lightly, and then also tap it into some parts like this. Okay? It's not so necessary, but it just helps to, you know, create a bit of some contrast in here because otherwise it's just going to be that same yellow running all the way through, which it is mostly, but there are also some little contrasts in there that it's going to make it look more convincing if you do this. Okay, maybe a few more here down the front. Doesn't have to be much. Okay? For the most part, I just want to keep it pretty much yellow all the way through. Okay. If it is just a bit too much, I can also just drop in some more yellow in there. Okay, good, good, good. Now, the top of these houses, they do need a bit of work, just to get in some color. So I'm gonna pick up a smaller round brush and some burnt sienna. Burnt sienna. Let's make sure it's pretty light. It's only about 10% paint, the rest of its water. Okay? So I'm going to go over the top of this roof here. Okay. Let's not overwork this as well. Let's just make sure we get it in. But yeah, no use kind of torturing yourself over this. It's just got to be really light. And this rooftop here is actually the same color here. So more of that There trying to keep it light. And, yeah, you do that just by adding more water. At the moment, everything looks pretty weak and, you know, you might think to yourself, I need a dark and some things here and there. Don't tempted to. That's only once you get in all the dark colors, it starts to make sense. Okay? There's another one here at the back, another rooftop. So just dropping in another bit of that burnt sienna back there. That is certainly going to help. Now, these tree trunks, as well, I think could do with a bit of gray or some color. I've got a bit of white guash. And a bit of leftover paint that I didn't use in the last wash, so I can just kind of put in this gray tree trunk there. It's just something light. It doesn't have to be much. Oops, it's kind of gone a bit into the bottom part of the scene, but that's no big deal. Okay, Kate. Good, good, good. Let's have a look. What else do we have back there? There's actually this field kind of extends a little bit further back. I didn't realize it before, but there is some back there. A little bit of something. There's also some darker parts, but we'll do that later. That's no big deal at all. Bring this one up a little bit to the side of the house there. Okay. Fantastic. So I'm going to leave this to dry, and we will come back to it in just a moment. Okay, so everything is now dried off. And what I want to do is work a little bit on the sky wash now, and it's pretty simple sort of skywh actually. But I will add in probably a bit more blue in the sky. So a bit of ultramarine blue. It was just almost like a purplish blue. I would say, like, a warmer blue. And hopefully that's gonna help me to also contrast a bit with the yellows. We've just got a bit of a, maybe you can put in a bit of purple in there as well. Tiny bit of purple. Yep. Parts. That's really light wash. Not much in there at all. Okay. Great. Here now the base, I'm just really feathering in that paint, okay? Can even drop in some darker sort of clouds, some sort of patterns up the top there if you want, as well. Just to give it more interest. Okay. That's about all I think I will do. Okay, so now we want to put in the trees behind. I'll give it a little dry first. Okay. And with the trees, I'm going to go in with this funny looking rigor brush, basically, if you've got an old brush with some, you know, splayed tips, this can help because it creates a more what should you call it, a more varied edge in some parts here where it goes into the sky. I don't want it to look too perfect. Okay? So here we go. Dropping that in. It's just a bit of darker green. You can mix some of this up yourself or you can use a pre mixed green. It doesn't matter as long as it's darker. Okay. Yeah, I just like the look of the effect of this brush. And notice I'm kind of just going around the top parts because I need these top parts to be a bit more bit more like dry brush, I guess, you could say, in some parts. Let me just figure this out. This left bit hasn't completely dried, so I'm getting a bit of this funny edge up the top here, like a softer edge, but that's right. It's just going to create a bit of a different look on that side. Okay? Keep carrying this down. With leaves, I find the less you kind of fiddle around at times, the better. So let's go in with the round brush and finish this off. So I'm going to carry this down past the rooftop seat and just cut around the roof there with this round brush tip of the round brush. Using that they cut nicely around the chimneys and the rooftop. I just want to do this all before it like completely dries off 'cause it's a bit tricky once once it dries. Don't be afraid to go a bit darker as we move down the page as well, maybe mix in a bit of ultramarine blue in parts to really get that extra contrast down. Yep. Is that left side of that building a bit more ultramarine in here to just darken this down a bit. Just to leave in that yellow there. For the, like, flowers. Good. Let's move this over to this other side now. Great. And I'm going to same sort of deal just kind of add more of this green. The bottom misses. This parts already started to dry, which is not ideal, but it doesn't matter. It's still going to look right. Let's just cut around. It's really just a mass of darker color, if you think about it. Don't overthink it. Just go in there, get in that shape. And, uh, yes, and just go with it, essentially. Might have to just make it a little bit darker down the base as well. Yeah. Los a little bit abstract, but it's fine. Okay. I think maybe some blue. A bit of extra blue in there. Create a bit of contrast for these leaves. And, you know, sometimes what you can do as well is you've got some other leftover paint, just a bit of darker paint. You can try to imply some branches and things. Like there's a tree here. If you look closely, it's like a you know, tree running up the type like that. So some of this stuff might be helpful, okay? Especially maybe here for these other potential trees that I had in there, something like that as well, just to split up this area to the left. 19. Simple House - Shadows: So time to go a little bit into the house now and put on some details for the house. Okay. So I reckon what I would do first, actually, is maybe just spray down the base of it. And I want to just get in a bit of wet and wet stuff down here. It looks like there could be some more detail I can add in here quickly. I got a bit of purple paint, and you can see there's actually some sort of parts that run through like that. Yes, with the fields, you might have little clearings, not little clearings, but little areas where people have walked through. I just think some of this might be okay to indicate to make it look like there's something else going on in there, more yellow, if you think that it's too much. There's another kind of dark a bit up here somewhere. It's just going to make this field look a bit more um, realistic, I think. And even at the base, I reckon I could just get away with making a little bit of extra darkness in some parts. Yep. G. Good. Alright, so going back into that house now, I'm going to pick up some color. I've got some purple, and I might doll that down with a bit of brown to create a grayish value. And, firstly, we're gonna I reckon we're going be good to get in some of these shadows. So there's some sort of shadow here beneath the rooftop. Yep. So let's get that in that. Right. Let's have a look on the other side here to the left. There's also some kind of shadow underneath these other buildings. So I'm going to imply that. The light source seems to be coming from the left hand side to the scene. Okay. Um, bit underneath the roof there is, like, also kind of darker, also here. Like, there's quite a bit of darkness in here. Uh Here, as well. And underneath the roof there, it's kind of really dark. You can start adding more color in there, a little bit more darkness, a bit more paint. Okay. And yeah, as you can see, it's kind of like a base value of a purplish, cooler sort of base value. Because we've got all these purples, well, not purples. We've got all these yellows in here, which really make for a great sort of contrast. I'm gonna paint this door in here in the front quickly, just a few brushstrokes. Darker. This has to be darker than the rest of the house, like that. I don't have to paint all of it, but just a little bit like that. Maybe there's also a door there, but I think I'll wait for it a little bit. Something here. Oops. It's probably a bit too harsh, but I'll be okay. It's like, kind of a shadow or something forming. There There I was thinking whether I want to put in some little light marks on the top of the house, like this bit just to indicate, let's try the rooftop, just some little little guiding lines. Something simple like that should be fine. I reckon I can just make this chimney a little darker, as well. You know, I always like to look at the reference photo and see how can I just change it up a little bit more? And yeah, make it look a bit more realistic. So, um, yeah, this side of the house does need to be darkened a lot more. That's got to be, like, fairly dark. Yep, here. Um, there's a bit of light that seems to be peeking through. I'll leave something like that. Okay. That's the side of the house. Yeah. It needs to be a bit darker. I was just going to help to indicate the light source from the left hand side. You put in that door here that I was thinking of doing before, but it was a bit early. That's better. Bits and pieces underneath here as well, little details that you might be able to just add in a little bit of extra detail under here. Like a bit of line work. Okay. I've got to kind of wait for that part to dry off a touch first. But I do want to add in some, like, darker windows in here, as well. That maybe just quickly. Okay, good something there maybe Okay, quick little dry off. Okay. So we're almost done here. The rest of this is really just adding in some final finishing touches. Just put a bit more gray on these trees, the trunks here. Um let's have a look. What else can we do? Maybe bring back a touch of the rooftop. Well, here just a little bit of white in there. Yep. Does help to have some fresh squash on hand. Bit of something to help bring back some contrast. Something for the chimney. Mm. Okay. Fantastic. Now for the flowers, the easiest thing I think to do is just mix up a bit of yellow hansa yellow with that same white guash. Probably more hansa yellow. And what you can do is sort of just add in tiny little indications of these flowers. Um, like, I don't want to go up too high. So sometimes you can just, like, cover off the top part, for example, of the house, and just flick some of this paint in see if we can do this flick some of this paint through. Yep, like that. A little bit much up here. Just remove that top. Let me try to increase the contract. This might be easier if I just do that. It's a bit messy. This work. But you can see how I'm creating a bit of this floury pattern here at the base. And on top of the previous wash, too, I'm making these kind of little round marks all on the paper. Which when they dry, they will look quite interesting. Give it a bit more depth, a bit more contrast, make it look like there's some other sort of flowers in here as well. It's just really messy, and I generally don't like doing this because it goes all over the place, but it is a lifesaver. You don't in terms of, you know, you're not having to paint each of these flowers in one by one. It saves a ton of time. Okay. So there we have it. We're almost done. We can just sort of start to do some little bits of manual work here, tiny little bits like that. You can see where the flowers sort of hit the edges of the house. And I can just, like, finish it off a bit more like that. Outlining for these trees again, trunks going up into the trees there. A few back there as well. You can see how it's trickier doing it by hand, but you do get more control. I'll do some more by just manual here as well, again, just to add more details some of these flowers because there are just some parts, I think. When you're painting all this yellow in here, it's really, really difficult to get in a sense of detail. So little things here and there that can go a long way in making the scene more interesting. I'm using different yellows, so kind of yellow mixed with that white guash here. Okay? For some parts. For other parts, I'm just leaving it. Okay. And I'll call that one finished. 20. Conclusion: Congratulations. You've completed mastering loose watercolors, paint Sweden's golden fields. Take a moment to reflect on how far you've come from the first tentative brushstrokes to the vibrant landscapes you've created. Throughout this journey, you've learned to capture the essence of Swedish landscapes with loose expressive techniques. Understand the interplay of light, color, and composition, as well as develop confidence in your artistic choices and style. Beyond techniques, you've embraced the joy of painting, the meditative flow, the surprises, and the satisfaction of bringing a scene to life on paper. Remember, every artist's journey is unique and growth comes with each painting. Keep exploring, keep experimenting, and most importantly, keep painting. Thank you for allowing me to be part of your creative journey. I hope this class has ignited a lasting passion for watercolor and the serene beauty of the Swedish countryside.