Mastering Watercolors: Guided Sunset Cityscape

1. What this class is about ?: A scene for watercolor practice can catch your eye at any moment, whether during an evening stroll through the city or in a new video tutorial. Hi, I'm Maria, a watercolor artist, and instructor. In this class, I've chosen a project that will offer plenty of practice for those already familiar with watercolor techniques. But don't worry, this complex process is broken down into manageable steps with clear explanations for each part. We'll cover a range of aspects like a detailed preparatory drawing. Painting a sunset sky with wet on wet technique, and exploring brushwork variations for different shapes and textures. I'll also share my favorite technique that keeps the paper wet longer, giving us more time to refine details and create those soft color transitions that awk a warm evening atmosphere. By the end of this tutorial, you will be able to create a stunning sunset city scape, confidently combining various watercolor techniques. Join the class and enjoy watercolors. 2. Materials overview: Let's start with a brief overview of the materials I'll be using for this project. First, of course, we need paper. I'll be using cold pressed arches paper, and I will be painting on its more textured side. For the technique, I'll be demonstrating in this class, it's important to have a waterproof board. I'm using a piece of plexi glass that is slightly larger than the paper. For painting, I'll use water colors in tubes squeezed onto a plastic palette. The list of specific colors I chose is on the screen. You can use similar colors from your palette, of course. There's no need to use exactly the same brands and colors. The key is to make sure that they blend well together. And please pay particular attention to the shades of yellow, orange and blue that you will choose for your painting. To avoid a green tint in their mixture, I chose a yellow and orange with a reddish tone and a blue that leans towards purple rather than a primary blue. This will give a more neutral mix instead of greens. I selected Mars Black for this work because of its granulation effect, which will be useful for painting the bridge. However, you can skip it if you prefer or if you don't have this color. Colors that I don't usually use, they go in the corner of the palette. As for brushes, we need a brush for wetting the paper and round brushes in different sizes for wash and details. I'll be using this set. It also includes a Chinese categraphy brush, which I'll use for painting trees. If you don't have this brush, a soft squirrel brush will work as a good alternative for this task. Don't forget to prepare a pencil and eraser for preliminary sketching, a glass of water, and paper towels. Finally, we'll also need paper clips to attach the paper while it dries. You'll also find a complete list of materials in the project section below the video. Once everything's ready, let's get started. 3. Background sketch: To start, as with most of my watercolor paintings, I'll begin by sketching with a pencil. I've printed out the reference photo and my paper size is proportional to it. The format is relatively large. It's a quarter of a full watercolor sheet. But you can use a smaller one if you prefer. Just keep in mind that smaller painting will have fewer details. This time, I felt like doing a more ambitious project compared to my previous classes here, which is why I chose this format. This composition will have three main parts. We have the sky, the distant background with trees and buildings, and the foreground with a bridge, a river, and a tree. I don't plan to draw too many details. The outlines of the buildings, the placement of the tree, and the shape of the bridge are the most important elements to me. And I will add other details later directly with the brush. I'll set the reference image aside of camera, but you'll see the photo on your screen. I'm not attaching the paper because I plan to use this wet on both sides technique. For the drawing, I will need a medium soft pencil. I'm using a B pencil here. I also have a regular eraser and a soft needed eraser for removing excess graphite. I begin by finding this line and determining where it will be in the composition. I check how high it will sit. The center of the sheet is roughly here, and the line is a bit below the middle. If the center is about here, then my breach will be located somewhere around here. I'm starting the sketch with light soft lines. The bridge will take up roughly this area. If you're working on a smaller paper similar to the size of the printed image, you could use a light table or simply trace the outlines from the photo, or you could make a preliminary drawing on regular drawing paper first and then transfer it to your watercolor paper. But I usually don't miss an opportunity to practice drawing skills, so this time is no exception. I'm not trying to capture the proportions and shapes perfectly. Here will be roughly the center of the bridge and down here, the outline of the water. Right now, I'm focusing on the placement of the main lines. Here's the bridge. And this small part is what we see from below. I'll draw it a bit wider than I initially planned. I'm estimating the width of the river in this section and also checking where this part will be in relation to the bridge. Have plenty of chances to adjust things later. And as you can see, I'm starting with very, very light lines. And this line is slightly angled. Here, I chose a rather cropped composition because I wanted to keep a vertical format for my painting. But in the class materials, I'll include another photograph if you prefer a horizontal landscape format, that one will have more details. Somewhere around here behind the bridge, you can see the lines of the stairs. M. Mm Here is the shore. And I won't add too many details just yet. You see the bridge structure is pretty complex. I'll place a tree here. So I roughly positioned the bridge and some details will go here. I need to make the angle of this line a bit more noticeable, I think. I continue refining the lines slightly, making them a bit darker, as I go. And now, let's move on to the next element of the drawing. 4. Bridge outline: Now let's continue with the buildings in the background. Notice how this line is tilted because of course, the rules of linear perspective are at play here. You can lightly sketch this line here. Here I'm focusing on the outlines and the shapes. For example, I'm interested in this corner and this one here, along with some small details. The roof will be somewhere around here. Followed by two chimneys. And then the roof slopes down again. For now, I'm keeping it simple without details. Next, I'm drawing the line slightly like this almost horizontally. And here we have two towers. The focus is on positioning these buildings correctly first. I'm checking the level seeing where it is relation to these roofs. There will be trees here. These are trees and here the facade of a building. Now here I can add a bit of perspective. I've slightly adjusted the angle on this side. Here we have some tower. And here it's just a simple straight roof. The drawing is little by little coming together. This area will have trees. You can even use a ruler if you want. Next, we have the background. This part could be slightly lower. We can start adding some architectural elements to the outline. Little details like this one. Overall, you see that I'm not too concerned with all these details on the buildings. I'm not going to draw them. Next, what we can do is flip the paper over and look at it from a different angle and compare to the reference with fresh eyes. I'm fairly satisfied with how these angles turned out. Though I might tilt this line a bit more. You see this method always helps me see things more clearly. On the left, we also have a low outline of something. I can add that here as well. Take your time here, draw everything calmly and then let's move on to the final element. 5. Tree contours: Now, we finally can add some more details here. This will be the line of the bridge and it's going to be a fairly dark area. I want to darken this line slightly right away. This part is a bit unclear to me. And when I draw these elements, I pay attention not only to how the line is placed, but also to the outer counter it creates. Maybe I should even raise the bridge slightly like this. This will be our dark area. The shadow on the bridge will appear here. And now we just need to draw the tree here. I roughly sketch its conto showing where it will be, but no details, no particular elements. This helps me to visualize where it will be. Then I also can figure out the trunk. There might even be another tree next to it. In reality, there were two trees here, and I cropped the photo in this part. For those of you who check the additional photo in the class materials, you will see that there were actually two trees standing close together. In this area, the embedment wall widens as it comes closer to us. Don't hesitate to use an eraser to make erections like this. There's some decoration on the bridge here and some steps start to appear. Of course, I won't draw them in much detail. I've just sit down because I was while standing before. And now I want to refine and darken the outlines. Because here we'll have the sky with a wet brush, and it might blur the pencil little bit, and I want these lines to remain visible even after the first layer of the sky. I'm not going to draw windows or balconies. It will be dark anyway, and I'll just add a few spots with paint later. Notice that there are two lines on the bridge here. This line is at ngo. We could of course, talk about the rules of perspective here. If you look closely, you'll see the lines converging towards the horizon, and the horizon is somewhere here, even though we can see it. And as you may know, it's the eye level of the observer. It's no coincidence, then the people heads on the bridge will be roughly at this level, since they were about the same height as me when I took the photo, and there were, of course, many people. This is the center of Ferris, close to Notredam. So there are always many people and tourists here. This is approximately where the horizon line runs. So we could talk about perspective, but as you can see from this drawing, you can achieve it by just carefully transferring the angles and distances between lines onto the paper without any specific construction. You can also plan out where the shadows and reflections will be if you want. But I think I will paint them later with just with a brush. Well, I hope everything is clear to you so far. You can either skip this part and simply transfer the outlines from the printed photo using a window or light table or with graffit paper, if you want, or of co, like me, you can draw the sketch by hand. After this step, we can start preparing the paper and water color for painting. E. 6. Paper preparation: When the drawing is ready, I prepare the paper. Today, we're using the method of wetting the paper from the back side. Therefore, I turn the paper over and use a large brush to wet its back side. I apply water in the usual amount as if I were going to normally work wet on wet. So there shouldn't be any paddles or excess water. But the paper shouldn't be dry either. It's especially important to do this around the edges, since the paper dries faster there than in other areas. Now you can wait a bit for the water to be absorbed. It is possible that at this stage, the paper will start to get slightly. This is normal. You can keep retting it to ensure the surface stays even moist. Here is how the paper surface looks in my case. I continue maintaining the surface of the paper in this wet state until it straightens out again. The surface should always be a little bit glistening. Sometimes. Of, it takes quite a bit of time for the paper to absorb enough water. Once it's flat again, I carefully flip the sheet over and remove the excess water from the edges. If you've done everything correctly, the paper will stick to the board. At this point, you can already start painting, especially if you are planning to paint objects with defined edges. But I'll start with the sky, which of course will be done wet and wet. Now I'll moisten the top part of the paper where the sky will be. And here, by the way, I think I can also wet the bottom part as well. Why not? Let's moisten the entire paper, or you can just wet the top of it. It doesn't really matter at this stage. And I will keep this bottom part shiny by occasionally going over it with a dump brush if needed. Just like the back side of the paper, I've wet the front side to the same state. Now, while the water is still absorbing, I can spend my time preparing the pains for work. 7. Pre-sky setup: In the sky at the bottom, we have some slightly creamy shades. Then here, there are a bright vibrant orange, a bit of purple, dense and darker in tom. And a bit of blue. These colors are reflected in the water as well, so it makes sense to paint the sky and a bit of the light on the water. You can see that in the water there are dark shadows and light reflections. The shadows on the waves appear as sharp strokes, so I'll paint those on dry paper. That means that there will be two different layers of paint on the water. I begin by preparing the paints with this mixed hair brush, and for the creamy sky colors, I will take Napples yellow with a slightly reddish tint. Next. There's also going to be a large section of the sky down in orange. Of course, I always have a paper towel in hand. I'll be working while standing as it's more convenient since the format is quite large. So I think we can start, and I'm not going to focus on the bottom for right now. What's important is everything up to the horizon, including the area where the background will be. There's no point in outlining the buildings, was the sky. That's also why we wet this entire part of the sheet. And now we finally can begin. 8. Sunset sky: Of course, you could make the sky a brighter yellow color here, but I'll begin with this more gentle creamy color. My paint has a reddish tint to it and you also can change its shade to your liking, for example, by adding this orange or even a bit of yellow from your palette. I've made sure that the paper surface is evenly shiny and I'm starting to paint. Notice that I'll be using quite a saturated paint with a lot of pigment because anything painted using this technique, we lose a of it intensity and tone while drying. I'm starting with this light layer, and I'm painting right over the buildings that will appear here later. Not going around their conters, see. Next, for the clouds, you can add a bit more of this thicker paint. You can make the color even brighter if you're inspired by the bright orange that we can see in the photo. I'll also had a bit of cadmium perhaps for a more carrot like color. If the paint spreads too much, don't forget you can control it with a tissue. Actually, if you don't have much experience working with such sky painting. Maybe this class is not suitable for you yet. To learn the basics, you can start by watching my basic lesson on painting skies, where I explain in detail about paint consistency and control and many other things that will help you to understand the process better. So don't hesitate to check it out before starting this class if you're just the beginner. Next, I'll take a larger brush and create this bright orange section. I'll probably mix the orange with cadmium orange once again as well. Here, the area is large and the cloud shapes are soft without any details, so I'm using a bigger brush to speed up the process. It may look bright now, but it will fade a lot once it dries. There isn't enough pigment here, I think. I want to have it more intense. In this technique, once again, you usually have to add quite a lot of pigment because the paper is wet, and the format is quite large. So don't hesitate to add more paint if you want a rich ski color in the end. Now I'll clean my brush from the orange paint. And I will take now royal blue with a touch of indent trim blue for this part of the sky. And here I think I can even dilute the paint a bit more, so it flows and spreads better. And with the same brush, I'm blending the boundary between these two colors. And you see I'm getting these cloud like effects. Since my orange has a noticeable reddish stint and the blues are quite far from being primary blue. I don't get any green at the boundary between the orange and the blue areas. Hopefully, you can see it. Now I'm taking more dark blue, and I'm adding more shadow here. See the paper still wet because we moistened it on both sides. I have plenty of time to mix the colors and then calmly add different elements. I'm adding royal blue here to make the mixture dense and thick, but at the same time, not too dark because I want this area to have a dense cloud, so the orange will appear even more glowing comparing to it. Such shapes of the clouds I usually create with the side of the bruh. Here, you actually can change it a bit to take a smaller brush and see what you like better. And it's important that I'm not trying to replicate the composition from the photo exactly. I'm just focusing on the main elements that catch my attention, things I like from it. Here you see, it's funny. The brush picks up a bit of orange from the lower part each time, and then I just kind of transfer it to the blue, which allows me to paint these kind of clouds in this part. Here, I also want the sky to be a bit darker in this corner. You can slightly mute the color if you want a less saturated blue by adding some reddish tones. This time, I've added cadmium orange. And we get an nice contrast. Well, that's it. And now we can slowly move down to the lower part. Here, I'd like to start by just applying some color in this part. My goal is to avoid leaving any white paper after this first layer. I'm using this leftover paint. I'm doing it with a not too wet brush because if the paint is too liquid, it will flow upward. In this part, you can also start adding some paint. It seems more like bluish color to me. The upper part of the breach as well. This isn't the final color yet. It's just the lightest part of this construction. Well, in the end, the paint is spreading slightly in the sky, and I will take this fluffy brush and gently correct this spreads, swiping it a little bit like that. I could also slightly tilt the board, so the paint flows downward. But at the same time, I don't want to do this because I'm afraid the paint will flow from this side as well. So I use the brush. Anyway, actually, there will be a tree here, so it's not a very big deal. You can add a few clouds while the paper is still shiny. And I'm doing it with this thick paint. Finally, now we can continue with the lower part in the water. A. 9. Light on water: Now let's continue with the light on the water. The paper surface has already dried here. I can tell because the edges of the strokes are sharp and the paint isn't spreading. But I want the transition to be a bit smoother and that the paint stay wet a little longer. I lightly go over the surface with a slightly damp brush. However, avoid using too much water during this process. I'm mixing two shades of orange for the lights on the water. I want to create this glowing effect in this area. I'm focusing on the light right now, ignoring the shadows. There is a light blue and orange here, and I started with orange because there is simply less of it here. The color on the foreground appears more yellow to me here. So I added Naples yellow for this. And now I'm switching to blue. As you can see, you could actually complete this step first and then take a break and afterward, work on the lower part. Just remember to lightly with the surface of the paper here before starting. This is clearly the reflection of the sky in the water, so I'm using the same colors. I made the orange highlights more like vertical with a few horizontal strokes. And now I'm working more with the tip of the brush and making horizontal strokes, already trying to create the effect of ripples on the water. Oh. The idea now is to make sure that there's no white paper left, as I said before, because this is a sunset landscape, and we can't see the source of light, the sun, which could be white. But everything else in such lighting will have some sort of a t. For now, I'll cover this area with blue. I will add some later. You can try to work on texture somewhere. Why not? Immediately add some warm color details like this. Let's take a smaller brush now. I'll use a bit of blue paint, not too watery, and add some details to the water carefully with the tip of the brush, and the brush is almost. With this motion, I slightly move the paint from blue to orange, from orange to blue. And I get this light ripples on the water. This transition zone between blue and orange is what interests me the most here. We could also darken the foreground a bit. You see, I'm not touching the sky anymore. I just let it dry. Although the paper here still has a bit of a shine. This is my first layer. I've covered all the elements with the light toone, and now I could try adding some warm details here and there. I'm not sure if they'll be visible under the future layers, but why not give it a try. We'll see what comes next. Generally, since the paper hasn't dried yet, you could try adding various elements such as shadows and reflections just right away. But since I've decided that I want to have sharp contras on the water, like in the photograph, I need to wait until this first layer dries. There will also be a shadow here later. Oh. That's it. I'll stop here. Next, I'll move on to the background. But before that, I need the top layer to dry, so it stops shining and feels d to the Dutch. At the same time, the paper should still be stuck to the board, meaning it's. We'll talk about that in the next video. 10. City silhouette: The next step is to add buildings in the background. I waited until the surface of the paper dried, as you can see, it's no longer shiny, but the sheet is still glued to the board and feels cool to the touch. This means that there is still moisture inside the paper. I will now use these two brushes to create this background. I'll use the same colors, but in slightly different proportions, I'll begin with the buildings in the background. In the protos the darkness and hue of the paint. And I think it can be a little bit darker here. Well, maybe not so dark, after all, I turned out to be a very intense blue because I didn't mix the paint well on the palette. By the way, you can use a small brush here to slightly work on the outlines if you want. To create the city scape feeling in the distance. In general, it looks nice if we slightly change the shades of color. Here I'll make the color a bit warmer. Since the paper inside is still wet, even though I'm painting on dry surface, the paint remains wet for a long time. I can freely adjust these shades without worrying that it will dry and need. Here I'm going to slightly blur the edge. I'd probably like to add a bit more of the cool tone here. O I think I can also start adding some gray paint at this stage. It will be darker and more neutral shade. Why not? There will be trees on top, of course, I'm not too concerned about it right now. You can also slightly blur the lower edge here. Now let's move on to this part. Y. 11. Buildings: Now, let's add the buildings on the right side. I'm using the same colors as before, but I will also take a smaller brush now. I'm mixing such a neutral color with a slightly warm tone in it. Now I'm painting while sitting, so I can rest my hand on the table and better control the brush movements. The color can be slightly adjusted here. The main thing is for it to be a bit darker than the sky in this part. Oh. I'm carefully observing the contents of the towers, trying to replicate their shapes. But for the lower part, you can just imagine it as some shadow, and that's it. Here I don't know actually how the building continues on this side. On the photo, it just covered by trees here. Here's another tower. I make these small spires a little bit more orange. And I'll continue in the same manner. The paper is dry enough now, so I can comfortably rest my wrist here. You can even add a bit of orange to the tops. And closer to the bottom, I use blue and to make it easier I'm switching brushes. I'll do the same here. The paper at the bottom is still wet, so the color in this area remains moist, as well. You can still make various adjusts it. Now I'll take a bit of gray. And the making the roof element here lighter and warmer. I'm doing this to create the impression of warm light on the roof. Vertical lines help to create the impression of falls. It's also important to pay attention to the direction of the brush when you do this. I'll also add more orange here. I'm adding vertical lines here and some horizontal lines. They need to be drawn carefully considering perspective. They won't be horizontal, but add an angle, as we noted during the drawing stage, if you remember. Yeah, there is a big temptation to add details like balconies here in the place when we can see the building through the trees. Here, this will be just the background for the future tree. I don't really care about details in this part. D That's it. I don't want to add anything more here. Otherwise, I'd have to add many details everywhere to make it cohesive, which I don't really want. I just want to create a slight impression of architecture here. 12. Bridge: Now it's time to paint the bridge. What I want to do now is refine the edge a bit here. The exact color doesn't really matter. I just want the lines of the bridge to be neat. After that, I'll start on the bridge itself. I'm going to use a bit of mars black as it adds a little bit of granulation texture. I also pick up a little bit of orange. And let's add a touch of our blue color here as well. This will create a muddy color. And I'll begin with this line here. I want to leave a bit of a gap in this place. It's easier to do it with a small brush as I do. M It's not necessary to do everything the same way. So here, I just put the color just like that. Where the tree will be, you can paint over it as well since the tree will be darker anyway. Now I'm mixing the paint really well again, so the pigment is evenly distributed. I want the granulation effect to appear on the paper, so the paint should be que liquid, allowing the pigment to move. I'll gently soften the lower edge with a clean brush here. Tell that this area is already by the sharp edges. Right now, I'm mixing a blend of orange, black, and ind blue on the palette. This mix will settle and create a beautiful texture. I might darken this corner a bit more, adding black and mixing it to deepen the tone. To bring out the granulation effect, you need to use plenty of water. But keep in mind, this often makes the paints appear lighter on the paper as the pigment pulls. To darken the area, you can add more transparent dark paints into the bland. In my case, it's dark blue. Here we can see some of the bridges structural elements. They add some texture. The mix of black and blue creates shadow here. In fact, we can start to merge these areas here, I think. With clean water, I will soften this edge to the shadow blends smoothly into the water like that. Right now, my goal is to create a bit of visual sort of noise. So I'm switching to a smaller brush and we'll add some details. Again, blue plus black. I'll deepen the shadows where needed. And probably you can see how the earlier sections have lightened the bit after some time. I like how it looks. There are actually different ways to show texture here. I'm using the granulation. It may seem quite dark at this stage, but later, we might need to darken it even more. I might actually do that now in somes using this thick gray paint on wet paper. I'll keep it like this for now, and maybe later, I will really emphasize the shadow. 13. Waterfronts and details: Here you can see that I made this distant part of the embankments a bit more blue than the bridge itself, it helps to distinguish them by color. Let's go ahead and add a darker shadow here at the bottom. As you watch you see this dark spot grad lighten more and more. This is a characteristic of granulation paints as I mentioned before. We can always add more shadows as needed. I really like how this turned out. I'll keep going with the same approach. Soon, I'll be starting on the water. But first, I need to darken the embankment a bit more. There will be people here, so we can even start painting them right away. Some paint has flowed upward here, but that's okay. It ended up creating a nice effect like trees. This paint gave the bridge an interesting texture. Once it, we can add some details. I'm even thinking of adding a bit more blue here to further split this area from the bridge. Next, we'll work on the water and then the upper parts. 14. Ripples and reflections: Now it's time for shadows and reflections on the water without waiting for the top part to dry, I'll just start working on the water since the paper in the river area is already dry. I'll first clean up the excess paint on the palette and mix the color for the water. I'm going to use a base of gray with a little intrin blue and a touch of emerald green. The color should be more neutral, not overly green or turquis, but slightly greener than the gray background around it. This is important. Now, I'll use this color to start adding shadows. The walls of the embankment are still wet since I just recently applied paint here. This will allow to get a smooth transition between the water and the shore. I'm working with the tip of the brush using horizontal strokes. I actually could even use a smaller brush for the distant areas. Why not? I'm just drawing such simple horizontal lines. And changing the color depending on the background, as you may see. Remember, we were planning to add a shadow here. For this, I will switch to a bigger brush again. To create thinner lines, I work with the tip of the brush and hold it almost vertically. Like that, I make a smooth side to side motion, like that. I'm not painting here yet. Because I want to change the shadow color a little bit. I pay attention to the background color. So where it's orange, I plan to use warmer tone for the shadows. And making the waves on the foreground a bit larger, and of course, not copying the photograph exactly, just the general shape. Here, of course, you can darken a bit more while the paint is still wet. T Now I will add a bit orange to it to change the color a little bit here. Same goes here where the background on the water is orange. And now I'm switching back to a smaller brush. And here, I will add small with a lighter, more like transparent paint. Aging I'm drawing everything with horizontal strokes. Even along the edge, I try to maintain the shape and the direction of the waves to keep the consistency the same shape all the time. I can also add a few more lines here. Well, let's add a few more semi transparent waves here. And then I think we can call it down. Maybe just a touch of a darker color here. The advantage of this method with moistening the paper from the back is that my paper is still wet inside. If you're not working with the pre moistened paper or if your paper has dried, it will be difficult to achieve the same effects where the individual waves and ripples blend into a single uniform area with a complex as I have here. I'll soften this sera bit to reduce the contrast maybe like that. All right. I'll leave it as it is. Let's wait a bit for it to dry, and then I'll start working on the trees in this area, followed by the large tree, of course. But before we can paint here, we need to wait for the paper to dry. Next, I'll darken this area and then move to the trees in the background. By the way, I think we can already start working on them since the background here is almost. 15. Distant trees: You It's finally time for the background trees. To work on the trees, I'll be using a Chinese calligraphy brush. However, you can also use regular soft round squel brush or even a synthetic one if you prefer. For the trees, I will take the same gray, add a touch of emerald green to it, and perhaps a bit more blue and gray. The goal is to mix a dark grayish tone, something almost neutral. I'll use this color to paint the trees in the distance, making them slightly more light and transparent. Oh. Once this dries, it will appear even much lighter. You can even add a bit of orange to the mix here. These trees will hide the towers behind them. I'm doing the same here, putting the brush on its side to create these rough torn edges for the tree. I'm leaving some gaps here and there. To add depth. I'm applying some darker paint. And I'm doing the same here, always starting with a slightly drier brush. I feel like adding a cooler color in this area. And then I let a slightly darker shade to these trees as well. And keep in mind that once these areas, they will lighten up. Here, I also want to fill some of the empty spaces on the side. If there is too much paint, you can even remove it with a tissue very very gently. I'm just really barely touching it. And that's all for the distant trees. 16. Foreground tree: In this step, we'll draw the last major element of the sin. Now that we've warmed up by painting the trees in the background, we can move on to the large tree on the left. The technique and the brush movements will be the same, but this tree will be bigger and more detailed. I will also change the color and tone of the paint as I go. Using warmer shades along the edges, especially where the tree overlaps the orange part of the sky. Unfortunately, after painting the sky, I can barely see the pencil outlines anymore. So I'm painting mainly with the side of the brush here again. In the middle part of the tree, I am pressing harder on the brush to create broader strokes. There's a deep shadow under this branch. So we have light coming and then a bit of shadow inside. Here, let's take a smaller brush to add a few branches. I'm using paints gray here to make the process easier and quicker. I think you can understand why I'm painting on the texture side of the paper now. It helps to create the interesting brush strokes for our trees, and also it helps for the granulation to appear. Now, we smoothly transition to the tree trunk. Yeah, I feel like adding a few more branches extending from here. You can see how the trees in the background are gradually becoming lighter. But now I feel like adding some shadows to the path and then moving on to the final details. A. 17. Final touches: Here we are moving on to the final stage, adding small dark details. After introducing darker elements to the painting, it's clear to me that this part looks too light. I'll create a shadow with a slightly bluish tint. I think that the tone should match the surrounding area. And it will help also to emphasize this sort of railing or wall. I also want to darken this area to match the shadows in the trees. I am adding a few more details here and there, working still with the paints gray. Noice how the sky starts to glow as soon as we add these dark details. I just increases the contrast and helps a lot. I'm using thick paint, and this creates some brush effects in places, giving additional textures. O 00. And you can draw the brash just by touching the napkin like that. Let's even slightly blur this section. And I want to darken and blur this area as well. You see how the small, seemingly minor details have really enhanced the contrast in the painting. The foreground now looks more detailed. It takes more attention and really for me, feels closer. I might add just a few more small strokes here and there, a little bit. Well, we're always done. The only thing left is to add people's figures to the sin. 18. Figures: Now it's time to add some final details and bring the city to life by adding people there. I think Rad blue will work well for this. These are small figures of people on the bridge, and I could paint them using an open color. They will be lighter than the background, but not white as these figures are also in the shade. There are many people, of co. Here, we also have some people. I'll draw them using darker mix, simple sites like that. And these figures closer, I don't really want to draw them. O Naturally, these figures are slightly larger than those on the bridge. I'm drawing them very simply, just a brush stroke like this, and then a small dot for the head. Plus, you can add a few more dots just for extra details. This might represent someone's shirt or something similar. You can also add a few details with orange paint, maybe a traffic light or a sign, or just something to add color variety to this place. And I think it creates an interesting effect. Oh. We could try adding something else in a lighter color. Let's take our naples yellow, and I'm applying it thickly. It's quite light on its own. Let's work with it a bit more. You can also take white and mix it with some other color for more or less the same effect. This will add some variety to displace or figures. And just a few final touchs here and there. And that sits done. 19. Conclusion: Here it is the final result. I hope you're as pleased with your painting as I am with guiding you through this process. Once your artwork is complete, it's a good idea to secure the steel wet paper on a board using some clips. This little trick will help your painting dry evenly and stay flat, avoiding unwanted warping. I truly hope you found this step by step tutorial both enjoyable and informative. Please don't hesitate to leave a comment below to share what was new in this class for you, or if you have any questions about the techniques, materials, or anything else we covered in this class. In the project section, you will find a full list of the materials used in the reference photo. Please use them for your independent practice. I can wait to see your sunset City s Caves. Don't forget to share them here. And if you're posting on Instagram, please use this hashtag so I can check out your amazing work. Thank you so much for watching. I'm looking forward to creating more inspiring projects with you in the next lesson. Until then, Happy painting. Bye bye.