Paint an Atmospheric Sunflower Field in Watercolor

1. Introduction: In this class, we'll be painting a beautiful sunflower field in watercolors. Watercolors, the perfect medium that allows you to produce spontaneous and expressive paintings. On the go, we'll be using some special wet-on-wet techniques to slowly build details and softness. I'll go through my entire process in real time so that you can understand my mental process as well as the exact colors and mixes that I'm using. It's easier than you think. So join me in this class. You'll see just how easy it is to paint this landscape in no time at all. 2. Materials Required: So for this class, I want to go through a bunch of materials that you're going to need. And hopefully this will give you any indication of what ones you may have or which ones you may want to pretty purchased or get a hold of. So I will go through firstly, just the lighter and warmer colors. So as you can see in the foreground, you've got so many of these warmer yellows and the mainly yellow that I'm using is this one here, which is hansa yellow light. You can also use Hansa Yellow Medium. You can use cadmium yellow. Any of those brighter saturated yellows works very, very well and gets you that impression, that same level of saturation as you do with that sunflowers. So that's a good one to use. Another one I use as well as a bit of yellow ocher sometimes if I wanted to just dial off an area, if it looks too bright and out there, we do that. Yellow ocher works quite well too. Now, on the buildings that's where I've used most of that yellow ocher here and also little bit of this color here, which is burnt sienna. It's kinda like a reddish brown. And I've used that on most of the buildings to get in that. I guess that Let's shade that I want out of the back. They're not too, not too saturated but still warm enough. Now, if we look at the shadows and the buildings I've used at really just a dark color. And for that I've used some purple and a little bit neutral tint mixed together. So I find purple tends to be a really nice shadow color to use, especially when we've got all these yellows in here. The complimentary nature of both of those colors really makes for a vibrant looking scene. I'll also use a lot of green in here, as you can notice over here, this is just a bit of dark green and mix up your green with a bit of blue and a little bit of yellow. So different blues and yellows make different types of hues of green. But experiment around, do make sure that I'm using more lighter greens in the foreground and in the background, a little bit more dark greens, especially in the trees and stuff near the houses, really makes the rooftops and buildings pop out a little bit and come forward. So if you look in the background as well, Same thing goes, I'm using the same darker green and also little bit of purple there. The sky is a little bit of this color here, which is cerulean blue, a very light blue and easy to work with. And probably for the last paint I'd recommend is this one here. This is a bit of watercolor gouache. It's an opaque gouache. And I also, I use this from time to time to get in highlights. I haven't really used it much here except mixed it in with a bit of the yellow to get in some little opaque dots and bits and pieces to indicate some sunflowers near the end of the painting. It's not 100% necessary, but I tend to find this can really help to bring back some highlights. So enough about pain. Let's talk a little about the brushes. These brushes here, as you can see, the very simple and it's only five of them. So I've got a whole bunch of these watercolor mop brushes, just all three of them. And they're fantastic for getting a lot of color in. And you're painting in large areas. So if you're painting in the sky, some of the mountains in the back, areas in the foreground, we've got these kind of rows or fields. You can see here these large belly on these on these paint brushes can pick up a lot of paint and get you that Erin very efficiently without too many brushstrokes. That's the key to having a nice loose painting with the brushes look intentional, not too forced. Use those and make sure that they also have a sharp tip. And that tip allows you to cut around objects. So things like the buildings, some of the trees, bits and pieces like that is quite important to other brushes that I also use. The more detailing brushes or just brushes, they're getting smaller shadows. This one here just a number eight round brush and it's a synthetic, allows you to get in little dots for the sunflowers. Or if you're spattering some paint around, you can use that. Tap that on another brush. You can get into details of some of the buildings, anything like that, even the trees, these work very, very well. So that's all to talk about in terms of paints and brushes. A little final word about the paper. I'm using. Medium, medium or cold press watercolor paper in 100% cotton. So it makes sure that you have some kind of paper like this. And if you don't, just make sure that you've got some watercolor paper with some texture on it. The texture helps the paper to take a bit longer to dry. And you can also create just a lot more interest in there because you've got, if you've got a hot press watercolor paper, what I find happens is that you get bits of inconsistent drying and everything looks very flat, especially for landscape paintings. I do recommend using a paper that has some texture in it. 3. Drawing: Okay, we are going to be doing this amazing seeing here of a sunflower field. We've got some farm houses off in the background. I think they sort of country style farm houses, quite like this scene. There's a lot going on here in the foreground with all of these flowers, but I want to really simplify them down. I might put in some detail for a few sunflowers just in the foreground. But for the majority of it, I'm just going to leave it mostly yellow. So first things first we want to separate out the bottom of the buildings and just draw a line where all the buildings essentially hit the field. And conveniently enough, this line just lies right in the center of the page. Draw a little line here and the little guiding line here, line here and the left end I just want to connect, just draw a little connect the line like this, just to join up both the sides. As you can see, from here, we have a really good starting point because now we can measure where we put the houses and we don't need to worry about whether the houses too high or too low because you've got that center of the page marked out. And actually we'll just draw it a little bit darker. Me a little bit tricky here on camera, but we will get this done. So there we go. Pretty easy there as you can see, now, I want to divide this page into half roundabout here. Why is that? Because we've got the building, this building here in this center sort of starts in the center of this larger sort of, I'm not sure what it is, is largest house here and it lies right in the center of the page. I think that's the easiest place to start like that. And I can already start putting in some little details of it when we draw in the house as well, look at it in terms of some basic shapes. The bottom of it is this rectangular shape. We want to make it also wide enough so that we've got just enough, just enough width on the house. But then at the same time, we want to leave a bit here on the other side to get in the other houses and features there as well. So we've got a bit of a rectangular shape there. Here. It's kinda like a squarish shape. Okay. That's the side of the building. Okay. I mean down, it does not have to be perfect, just getting some really basic details. And you can see here there's a triangle shape with the tip of that triangle pointing right at the rooftop like that. Okay, Oops, might have to redo this one. Actually. Get that in a little bit more. Better. Get that top in first like that. And then something like this. Okay? Something like that. Then we have it. We've got the rooftop here as well. Just extend that along like this. Alright? And you can now form the rest of it, they're there. I'm also being wary not to be too precious with all the detail in here. Look, it's important, but at the same time, you don't want to spend all day doing this because you can start to get bogged down in all the details. Okay. But we do want to make sure that this looks like a house, kind of looks like a brick house. There's also some of these shrubs, as you can see, just growing up the side of the building. So I will pencil in a little bit of that, like as you can see. But apart from that, we have pretty much done with the side of that house. Let's go in and get in one here, we can see that it is two houses and there's no like a fence or something here in the background goes like this. There's a whole bunch of details hard to see exactly what it is. We'll just sharpen up this edge of the building here. First. Sharpen that up a little. And then I can just work on this house here in the background. It's this comes down a bit like this and pops down the side there. Again, like I said, we don't have to make it exactly as the reference picture, just use it as a general reference. Okay, so we've got the rooftop and this triangular bit underneath the roof and then we've got that bottom part of the roof there. There's some chimneys as a chimney here. Something here on top. Okay. It's not a big deal, It's mainly just getting in the general shape of it. And then of course we've got one more coming out through the back there like this. There's a shrub here in the front. This is a front-end facing front on facing house. Okay, Here's a little section there. Here, just getting inabilities. These little features here, okay? And then not drawing them into defined as well. So I've got some leeway. Want to improvise. There's a shade here and there's a door or something underneath here. More shrubs and things here. Obviously not a huge amount of detail. There's even a house looks like behind there. But I think that should be enough for this scene. And remember the light source as well is coming from the left and casting a shadow here on the right side of these houses. So we have to make sure we keep that in mind. So we've got everything from the middle part to the right-hand side, roughly penciled in. Let's have a look now here, on the left side, now we've got our shrub here. Sharp. It's quite a large tree, XD just over here. So I'll just pencil that in a little bit and you can see behind as well, the house seems to be the edge of another house. Often the distance just depends on may or may not leave that in there, but I'll leave it in there for the time being. Some of these buildings here, actually a little bit tricky to do. So I want to start off just again, getting these little bushes into this section. And let's have a look at this kind of tower like structure. Now, we know that this bush is a good bit taller than the House. So we see Just getting that tree to see, make sure that it's just like significantly taller than the roof of that house. And then if we notice that roof of the house, sorry, this this shrub or tree, if we move directly to the left, you'll notice that's roughly where the roof or whatever of this tower starts. And it starts like this. And then of course, it goes up like a triangular shape to the tip like this. Okay, So in that sense, I use other features of a scene to figure out the relative position of other bits and pieces in here. And that way everything is in proportion, doesn't look too big or too small. And it all starts, it all starts from this line here underneath that we first started to draw in line there. There's a little bit of 3D three-dimensionality there. Let's have a look. This is kind of like a rooftop actually comes down like this. Then you've got a bit of it just jumping out the side. They're not a huge amount of detail now, bring this down. It's less important exactly what's further down there. I'm going to have to just make that pretty dark. And then of course here we have the rooftop of another building. So we're just putting in that side of the building. Let's get in that part of the roof and we know it cuts across quite, quite significantly here. C is going to be too hard there, but like this side of that, doing that here, we've got over on that right side here, there's gonna be a bit of darkness. Okay? But then on the left side there's gonna be a bit more light shade under there, but a bit of light here on that left side of the that tower. And we've already started putting this house that some cutting in front of it like this. And the host start with the roof and it's put down the side of the roof as well, that left-hand side of the roof. And of course connected up like this a bit more. There is a chimney here, simplified chimney like that, and a bit of a shadow on the rooftop, of course here we've got a lot of darkness underneath the house as well. Okay, we can start also penciling in some details for this little part of the house here. Goes further down to the ground. It's kind of like on this angle like that, on into the ground like that. This one then connects onto another side of a building like this. And just look at that's kind of like a hexagon. A hexagon like that. Okay, Then another bit here. Another triangle on the top of this house, as you can see, this triangle and where does the triangle end roughly about here. We pencil that putting the dots of where you want the three, this triangular shape to be. And as you can see, I've put it in roughly about here. And then we'll just connect the dots. As simple as that. We have a roof like shape. And I can start working a bit more on this building, just getting in the roof like that. You've got a bit of shadow forming on this side of the house. Something on top of the roof there. Of course we've got some larger sort of shrubs overreaching like that. And not only that, there is some kind of again, another house or something behind there, then I'll just who didn't like that. We're nearly there. Let's start putting in some of these houses here. So we know that this last house kind of comes down a bit like this. Straight rooftop starts about here, goes up to a central point here. Okay, quite similar to this one that connects up a triangular shape again. And then I'm going to bring that to the edge of the page there. And there. Of course there's no chimney here as well. So we can just detail on bidder that chimney. Oops. Something like that. Bit of a shadow to the right-hand side. And below that we have another house of some sort that is kind of really close to the ground or hidden behind these bushes. Okay. So that is it. We have the details of all the houses. And of course, I think one last thing I wanna do is just make sure I've got an indication of these mountains here in the background. Over in the distance. Just a really light line for the field. And other thing you wanna do is look at checkout the perspective. So you can see it's got a straight lines running in these rows. And then as you move out, it becomes sort of goes on this sort of angle. Okay. So that's just a reminder. I'm not gonna put any really drawn any of the flowers. I want to do that later in the watercolors. 4. Light and Shadow: Alright, so let's go ahead and get started with the painting. And one of the first things that I want to do here is actually start with the buildings. Because if I get the buildings in first, I think this will be able to just portray the lights. And the more I can just go ahead and do the background a little bit later because the background is actually darker and the sky, I can just blend it in. So I'm going to mix up a little bit of yellow ocher as well as some burnt sienna. Just going to get me a nice warm color for the rooftops. Patch of orange may work as well. Okay, and I want to do is just getting a nice sense of warmth on these buildings. And the great thing about this part is that you don't need to worry too much about the lines, the details or anything like that. All we're doing is putting in some color, trying to match it slightly with the reference photo. I know it's a very warm color as you can see. Nice, sort of nice, warm color. I'll go through and just getting a bit of the detail. By cutting around. I'm using a mop brush. The water concentration as well as mostly It's mostly just water. And ten per cent paint. And I'm doing that to just keep this wash with very light. And this is a way to preserve all the beautiful, beautiful lights on these buildings. The only way to do that is by making sure you just keep it as light as you can. And it can be tricky to do this because at times it looks too much to light compared to the rest of the painting, but that's because we don't have any of the any of the darkness in there yet. So I'm going around and again, I'm not being too precious about the borders because we're going to go and cut around them anyway. Later on, when we have some more, we get in the dark colors. A bit more of this yellowy color, just a bit of warmth in there. Notice here on the right-hand side as well, they might. I'm just going to blend all of this together. Look at that. It's just kind of blending together nicely. Here on this building. I'm keeping that pretty light and pretty warm as you can see in there. Dropping that in like that. This might be a little bit too dark, doesn't matter. Here. This very bright, this side of the house. It's just, you know, I'm just I'm grouping, being very aware of just using as little paint as possible and making sure that I've got enough water in there to keep things nice and fresh, that the bottoms of the house becomes slightly cooler. Use a touch of neutral tint here as well, just dropping a little bit of that grayish color. I'm going to water that down a lot though here as well. Just drop that in bit more warmth here on this building there. Okay. There. Okay. Like that. Forgotten to get in some of the bottom parts of this building, I'm going to put in some grayish color here, just a bit of the gray of picked off the palette. You can mix your grades by just picking up bit of just a tiny bit of neutral tint or, or basically any of your primaries and mix all your primaries together to get that gray. You can also mix brown and a bit of blue, cerulean, not truly an ultramarine blue to get that color. Here, I am going to do a bit of work with the trees and stuff. So I'm picking up a bit of this green. It's a granulating sort of green. I'm gonna drop in here. But before I do actually I will add in a little bit of, little touch of yellow on some of these trees here on the left-hand side. Because I'm fine. I find that just a little bit of that helps to indicate the light source. I don't want to lose that tiny bit of that in there. Even some here like that as well. Okay, let's grab that green and this darker green. And I'm keeping this pretty pretty loose at the moment because I will have to go over this one more time to kind of cut around the background. But we can still getting a little bit of detail at the moment. There we go. Put it in a bit of yellow and then just blend that down. Okay, good. Now what I'm gonna do is let this dry off a touch. While that is drawing. I will just work a bit on to the foreground, just on some of these. Flowers and what have you and I'm using a really, really bright yellow. This is, this is a, a touch of touch of Hansa yellow. Okay, Look at that, just dropping that in like this and you can see kinda blends a bit into the houses there at the back. What I'm not fast at all. Okay? What I wanna do is get some of these row like effects, as you can see of the, of the flowers. And I really want to pick up quite a pure yellow. And this is a Hansa Yellow Medium, mostly just water mind juice. So that again, we get in those really light tones. This feeling of lights and look at, looking at how I'm painting so that it emanates from a central point like that as well. Okay, so bringing that closer, that like that, notice that how the back at all just blends in to the trees but the houses. But we're going to get in some of those colors for the houses late. I just want to put in a little bit of this yellow in here to start off with. You notice it's just really, really yellowy off here in the in the back. I like to also get a chance to pick up a little spray bottle. And the spray bottle helps to just wet some of the area to make it better, easier to get in color. So just give this a little spray down on top. This will help to encourage some blending of color. A bit of wet and wet. Same mop brush, same yellow. Okay. Just running through here. It's not really so consistent. I mean, you do find there some areas that are more, they have a lot more sort of the sunflowers in them than other ones that see more kind of sticking out here in the front. Keeping it fairly loose. And I'm putting in lots of yellow because I know that I'm going to have to put in some green afterwards as well. And the green is going to fill in essentially all these spots of white that we have in here. Okay, so I think having enough yellow in here, just having more yellow event is probably a better, a better thing. Okay, because it just saves you a little bit in case you go overboard with the green. Um, it's very, very easy to mix green into this once you, once you start to see green, maybe put in a little cerulean, blue or teal. Here we go. Let's drop that in a bit. So you can already see that spread. I'm just going to continue on and do something like this just to get in this indication of the rows that we can see these kind of these rule-like effects. They're not perfect, but they do need to be done wet into wet. Okay. This is the only way that you can do them so that it just looks natural. And if you leave a bit of white on the paper, that's okay as well. Don't fret. That's kind of what I like doing that because it just gives a sense of contrast in there. Some more. And notice the paint that I'm dropping in as well. It's very, very instant. There's not much water in there. It's mostly just paint. I'm just picking it straight off the pallet with a tiny bit of water in there. Okay. And that stops it from spreading too much when you use a more stronger concentration of paint, then water, whereas before is using a lot of water in here. Okay. So let's get into a bit of this stuff. In as we move towards the back, you notice there's not really much going on in there. It's little it's mostly just flowers, kind of yellow, yellowy color colors in there. I'll probably want to touch that bit much. But here we can have a bit of a play around, can pick up some other colors. Purple in here, even get some of those darker bits. Here, as you can see, just a little bit of an extra contrast or something here and there. Okay. Notice because I'm using it quite dark, quite thick. I mean, it's coming up darker and it's staying as well. It's not moving around too much. This will spread out and touch as we go as well. I'm just looking at the scene and looking at where's the where's the little dark sections in this scene? Where I see the extra darkness here hiding away in the rows of these sunflowers. I'm taking the opportunity to darken the touch, okay. So wet and wet and it becomes easy. To just add in little details when you've got, you've got this happening. More green in there, maybe be the green here is just why not adding a touch there. Okay. Good. Sometimes also it helps I just pick up a bit of a mix of paint here on the palette and give it a little tap here like that. And you can get little speckles of paint running through and little bits of inconsistencies in here as well. Which are like. Another thing I think is to do is because we've got all these sunflowers and things in here. I think by making sure that we've got a little bit of gouache to bring out some highlights. And this is an interesting technique because what we can do, I can go over here, e.g. got a small round brush. Number eight, round brush. I've got a little bit of white gouache, opaque, white gouache. And I'm going to mix that in with a little bit of yellow. And I'm just dropping some things like this. And you will notice it kind of makes it stick out of the paper a bit like a to highlight. This is to indicate for me anyway, perhaps some of these sunflowers that are a bit closer, but I do think they need to be more yellowy. I'm putting in some more bit more yellow contrasts. And you can see how they just carry on into the background, the background ones I think we can do with this tapping technique, but for the ones in the foreground, I just want to get in a few. I mean, they're just round shapes, essentially like this. That's how you imply perhaps there's something here, these little sunflowers here. Okay. I'm dropping in here. Even just a bit of water. Probably do the trick as well. Little bit of water like that. Little bit of water. We can try that dots of water and these will spread out a bit and cause some micro blooms. That will indicate that we indicate some sunflowers, hopefully, especially these little ones here in the back and forth, to create blooms. You really got to wait a little bit of time for these sections to dry first, which done that, just picking up paint, making sure it's pretty a wet sort of concentration of paint. And then I'm just going straight in like this. Read more here, more here. And then later on, I can probably put in a bit more detail for some of the sunflowers. You can even do it now if you'd like. I'll show you how to do it now. For some of them. Because I want some to be maybe a bit sharper. In some to be a bit more softer. So we'll just pick up a bit of black and it's released a darker color and I'll put it in here for some of them are black and yellow. And that can just be like the center part of some of the flowers like that. They're just want to get rid of some of that contrast there. I think it's too sharp. Shift this a little bit more. Okay. I'm gonna leave this and come back to it a bit later. But what we'll do now is work on these houses and do a bit of cutting around. And what we're gonna do is also find a general large shadow shape across all these houses connected up. The big one I see is just that large shadow coming cross the right side of the buildings. So let's go ahead and get that in. And another thing I want to make sure as well is that I also get in the background kind of mixed in there as well. Let's draw it off. Or I totally get the shadows in for the houses. And mainly they occur on the rooftops. And I'm gonna be actually using a purply mix of color, maybe with a bit of dark bit of black in there and a bit of brown. And the reason why I'm using some of these purple is because we've got all this yellow in here. And I always find that trying to work with complementaries, it just looks so much better if you want to create a stark contrast. But he's a personal preference, you can use a more neutral color. So there we go. I'm just going cross the rooftop and I'm using a bit of purple and also a tiny bit of brown and black just in different quantities. The main thing is that you want this shadow to be pretty dark to indicate that there is a shadow on the building and the light source coming from the left. So underneath there you can see there's actually a bit of shadow under the building like that. That move that across the on the right-hand side, you've mainly got just a lot of darkness. So probably be touched more purple in here. Not too dark, but I'm just dark enough to really represent that shadow. You can see, okay. This building has some darkness on the rooftop like this. I'm gonna get that in like that. Comes down. Here. We have it just trying to get it all in one go if possible. And of course later on I can add in another bit of color if it's not enough. Okay, bit of darkness at the base here. Alright, maybe touch something there. And look at how I'm just trying to find a way to connect up all the shadows into one big shadow shape. There. Look, there's a shadow running cross this house like that. Okay. This point I'm really just using, using purple. Purple and a touch of brown and black can hear that. Just put that color in straight away like this. And of course you can leave out little highlights and things for whatever is down there. But I'm cutting around. Of course, this building here. Just bring this then like that. Okay? Black using some granulating colors in here as well. There is actually some light on top of that rooftop and I want to make sure I leave a bit of that indication of lights in there as well. So I will just touch on a little color in there, but other than that, I'm not going to do too much with it. I'll cut around it in just a moment. Great. Let's go ahead and get this house here. There's a bit of a shadow underneath there. The rooftop is fine, but there is some kind of a chimney. And over here we've got that same deal, this chimney creating a sharp shadow. So I can just again pick up that darker color. Imply that shadow going over to the right-hand side. Like this. Well, this particular chimney or whatever feature where we are, maybe notice how it's just all blending together. They are these shadows. Okay. More bit more of this color and I'm leaving gain just leaving this rooftop. This house in front, a bit lighter. There is a chimney here forgotten to get that in, but it doesn't matter. Just implied like that. Okay. There underneath the roof top. I'm making this one fairly dark as well. Give it a bit of contrast, bit of extra contrast here. This one sort of behind, like that little house behind k here. Oops. There. Hey, let's have a look. We'll bring this further down. There is a shadow underneath there as well. Okay. Let's go ahead and getting some shadows on this one here. And that sort of comes down just the right hand side of this tower has some shadows on it. Okay. Right-hand side, just like this. And that's all you have to do, just imply that same light source that we have seen on the left coming across the buildings? Well, notice I sometimes go back into areas when you have when that paper is still wet, you've got that opportunity to do so. Certainly make use of that. I think it's a great time to do it. It is a little chimney here as well. Look at that. And I can just imply something like that. Alright. Top of these roof, there's something here on top of the roof, like a little sky room window, something like that. Really just working on making sure I've got a lot of these shadows in and creating a connection between all the shadows as well. Connections. There we go. There. Of course we've got that building, but we've got this one here, this larger building. And I'm just going to make that shadow underneath, sharp shadow under there. And then again start working on the shadow to the right. Like that. It's the shadow underneath the rooftop like this. It just get that in and it's kind of like that. You just used to using that purple. I've got a bit of that brown in there as well. Connect up the roof top, that triangular shape. Okay. Bring that further down. Oops, I'm going a bit too far, but doesn't matter. You can just lift off at touch or something. Okay. There's the wall or something. He is the little wall. Again behind this house. There's another house there that has some shadows and bits and pieces. Another bit of detail that we can add in. This one here, There's some darkness underneath it, but also some of this kind of cut out stuff that we can go over the top, just cut around it this little shade that I'd left out before. And work my way down, leaving bits and pieces in that previous color in there as well. It doesn't all have to be colored in. And we look at the rooftop. One thing I find with these houses that it's actually a little bit darker than the other two. Um, whether I want to get that in or not, probably I'll probably skip that and just keep it consistent. It will just make it easier. But I will help getting a bit of this shadow. These little bits top of the house. Okay, Just a little. It's a detail like that. Simple little shadows running towards the right-hand side like that. Excellent. Now, I want to put in some of these trees and Munich's mixing some green with a bit of black to getting just extra contrast. Of course, over here we've got more contrast on the right-hand side. And I use the edge of this flat brush. You can use a round brush or whatever, but I'm using a flat brush here because it will just find that it just creates a sharper edge. Just a little sharp edge on this side of the building. That end. Um, of course, I can just create some little effects like that. Little kind of cut around the rooftop. Their bits here serves as well to create these little, funny little brush, brush strokes like this that look like shrubs. I will just put a bit more water in here though, to soften some of this stuff down. Soften a bit of these edges that connected a bit onto this era of the ground as well. It's tricky. Windows even here on the side of the house, some of the yellow has managed to creep up into the houses. There we go. Another, another bit of this tree here in the background and an opportunity yet again to cut around the house and form a nice sharp edge there. Okay. Like this. Hey, there, I'm going to just cut around and cut in front of this one. Now that this color here, It's trying to join a lot of this onto each other. So it looks more fluid, more natural. In there. We've got most of the shadows in here for the buildings. We've got the shadows in a little bit here in the foreground for some of these sunflowers. What we don't have the background in here yet. So I want to get in the background getting the sky. And we can do this using the same flat brush. Or again, we can probably use the round brush that's going to be just as good. And I'm using a combination of green and a bit of blue, tiny bit of green and blue. We can even use a light purple again, but mainly a, of a greenish blue, mainly quite diluted mix, but still darker than the buildings, of course. Okay, so I'm just gonna go in straight away like this. And also I do have some other colors leftover on the palette mixing here, I'm not so concerned as to what exact color we've got more so that the color back there is it is darker in the background. Okay. The houses will come forwards more. So I can just cut around, look at that, just cut around that one there, around that rooftop there. You only get one chance to do this. He got to really be quiet, deliberate with it. And it's just signed in and look here. Like that. Okay. Good. I think I'll just cut a bit over the top of this one more like that. Better. Greenish blue color. Then you can join it onto the trees. I think I might have to even reduce some of the trees again. Cut out that tiny little house that was behind this one. Just for the sake of continuity, making it look a bit more neat. There we go. Look at that, just getting in this background and you will notice also some of the shadows will be slightly damp. But for the most part, they're gonna be completely fine to work on. They'll be mostly dried. I'm just working like this. Cut around, creating contrast so that the background is darker. Kinda ran these trees and these houses like that. Like that. Here. You extra darkness and spots around the place like this. I do have a touch of purple in there as well. Funny enough. There we go. Just a bit more up here around this house as well. Like that. The k. So that is pretty much the mountains done. We're almost done. I'm just going to quickly finish this off. It's not much sky and they release a little bit of sky. More color, more green actually in there. Perhaps a little bit more blue. Blue and a bit of green. Bit of wet in wet effects would be nice as well. Just indicates some of the these darker looking trees and clumps of them like that. So I'm just using green mixed with a bit of purple to darken that green a bit. Add a bit more coolness in there as well. You've gotta do this all in one, go. Just all wet and wet. Some points where you feel like you need a bit more contrast, just go ahead and drop in some color. So you don't have to do this in all paths there you see some, you just want to leave. I think that's enough. I'm going to go into the sky. And for that it's just gonna be a mix of surreal in blue and nice, bright and mixing cerulean blue. Look at that. Perfect. Someone that meant it's mostly just civilians are very light color anyway, so it's hard to get it dark even if you want it dark. Impossible really, you just have to use that mix that you've got. Um, I might use my bigger brush, just this larger brush like this there. And I also want to potentially mix some of it into these mountains. Soft edge on some parts. Maybe leave it to connect on to leave rid of white and some areas, but mostly just still have a line, I suppose a little disconnect between them in areas. Okay, So you can still see the boundary between the mountains and the sky. But it's just a soft sort of boundary. Little bits of areas where you think, hey, that's a bit too much, they're putting too much paint going lift-off. Not only that, you can also use a bit of tissue and do things like this tree, e.g. you might want to just lift off a bit of painting indicates some highlights. I will go back into it again and continue working a little bit on, on it. Whoops, just down a touch here. Okay, good. So let's let this dry and finish it off. 5. Finishing Touches: Okay, so for the final step, what I wanna do is put in the really dark areas of the painting. Perhaps draw out some details for some of the flowers in the foreground. I don't want to make it too obvious. Maybe just put a few in here and there. But yeah, just bring out some more details on the buildings I think would be a good idea. And I'm kinda tossing up whether to use a round brush or a flat brush. Can use both. Okay. As long as as long as you've got a sharp tip on the front of it. And what I'm gonna be doing is just picking up a darker color system, black. I have a bit of neutral tint as well. Get it quite dark so that you've almost got maybe 60 to 80 per cent paint on there. And what you wanna do is just look around and find areas that you want to indicate extra darkness, e.g. maybe here and a dry off that brush a little bit at times so that it's not too much. Maybe there look, there's a bit of darkness in here. You could indicate their abilities like a chimney there. And not only that, there's underneath the rooftops, you'll see just little bit of extra darkness. And this helps to actually bring out the details on the buildings, this little bits and pieces, there's a window here. Then I can indicate with the brush and purposely using a larger and larger but a flat brush that's still fairly large so that I don't get bogged down doing too much detailing. And I'm using this kind of touch and go technique as you see, touch and go. I'm not in there for too long, just adding in a few bits of details and things. And then moving on to the next moving on to the next area. Okay, here's a bit for that building. There's something like tree or something you just darkened in that section. And not only that, there are some darker bits here too, you can see mixing a bit of green in there to get in. Something like that. Um, soften this off like that. They're soft and off. Okay. I might have to just soften this bit to bit of a sharp edge for that purple that I didn't really want there, but we can remove that and as you can see, better than scrubbing and I'm all done here. That what I'm trying to do is merge, merge this area onto the buildings of touch so that we've got a bit of a softer edge in some areas of the buildings. And the interesting thing is that you can see actually how it works because there are these little shrubs, lighter shrubs that sort of connect on with the darkness. I'm using my brush here to scrub off a bit of that paint underneath and connect it. Connect this field. I'm using just a bit of water on the brush and this water lifts off the paint and it creates a bit of this soft and edge. In the areas that you touch it. They look like little shrubs. Capturing the light. A bit too much of that yellow paint onto the side of that house, but that's okay. It does happen when you're using wet and wet, things like that. I'm bound to occur at the same time while I'm adding those dark, it's in pieces. I'm also finding ways to soften off some edges as well. Look at that. It's looking good. Just thinking whether I want to darken the side of that house here a bit more, could do. Another quick quick wash over the top like that. Let's have a quick look around here. Now there is this tree and as extra darkness here that don't want to imply, just hopefully feather that in so that that side of the tree looks sharper. Here as well. Look at that. It's a bit of dry brush like that. Yeah. Yeah. Let's work a bit on this side of the building. That running down moves like these. Extra darkness underneath the roof top there. Notice again, I'm just using this cutting around technique, just finding ways to bring out detail. Usually underneath the roof top is where I'm focusing on. And you can create little windows and stuff like that. Just some vertical lines running through this. You could just put a window there, even though there's not a window there. The main thing is keeping keeping these brushstrokes real quick. They're dark, but they're not creating too much of an interruption. Just this little highlight here and there indicates some details. Let's look here. Same thing goes. We can put in sort of part of the roof like that. It's their window. Window here. Underneath there. These sections. Okay. Suddenly you start seeing some bits and pieces emerging from all this. Some extra contrast as well. And you can see especially here with the yellow, that the these little brush strokes that I'm using just above here, just a light wash of I don't know what it is. Just a bit of gray color helping it to merge a little bit with the yellow of the flowers. Like this. Doesn't just suddenly n, But the flowers sort of cut over the top a little. You can do it from time to time, just doing this sort of effect. This, you can just drag the brush over the top like that and it creates a bit of texture. But remember to just keep it very light and very, very light. Just gives a bit of character to the building. A bit more brown in there and dry that brush off again. Okay, so here just this can be break or something like that. There's something here that rustic look. The buildings. I mean, this one also has a bit of it, but it's actually darker than the other two, but I don't want to get too carried away there. It's just some texture. All it is just a bit of texture. This one, go to something that extra darkness. Let me just getting a few little bits in pieces. Could be the edge of a window. There, could be an edge of a window there. Top of the roof. This little house here in front. Notice how I'm not defining every single edge, just, just an edge here and there I'm picking out. And I'm letting, letting the imagination fill in the blanks. I think that's something I had to learn to do rather than paint everything in. And be too descriptive and lose the magic of the watercolors. You gotta let it have to leave some to the imagination, a little bit to the imagination. Even on these trees here in the background, I am tempted to go into them again one more time, but just maybe in the rooftop, but I don't want to go in and disrupt the beautiful wash that's running through most of that area. So just a few little brush strokes like that should do the trick. I, just to get some of that green in there. Like this. I'm actually drawing off that brush a little bit and then cook going back into it like that, be to draw it just a bit of dry brush with this green that we might have a bit Hughes, well, they're finding ways that I can connect things on. And there's even some bushes and things here. Little green can help that. You've been a bit behind these houses. There's a little something they're hard to see, but there is something there that just quickly getting a bit of that color. Don't want to overdo it. Soft trees on the background. Up the top there like a little tower. Just outline that bitter little window up there or something then I can just imply from though it's not really there. There is another window. I can put it into some window here, just finding bits I want to add in. I think that's looking pretty good. The last step, like I mentioned before, was just some bonus bits and pieces really here for the flowers. I mean, you can add in some little sharpness in areas have got a bit of gouache and a bit of yellow. And I'm using the gouache. You can do this sort of thing and just create the impression of some flowers here in the foreground. And the way I'm doing it, it's just using the round brush, creating these almost like flower-like shapes. Just sharper sort of shapes that indicate some sunflowers. And I think it's more sort of near the front width that you need to worry about. As you get towards the back, they just appear as dots. Dots have sharper yellow. This sharpness gives them actually, actually enhances the softness of all these beautiful wash that we have in the background. And I've used a little Guassian here is to help the yellow stand out a bit more. Because if I don't use it, I think it's gonna be It's just going to disappear. Okay, so little bits like this, little little dots, as you can see running through in the background. I don't want to overdo it, but I do want to make sure they have the kind of structure to them. And when I say structures in that they growing in these, as you can see, these patterns, these rows. Okay? So take your time and just another thing, you can just sort of do what I was doing before you start tapping technique out in the back. If you're feeling up for it, I think I'll skip that and just just do this for now. Okay. Few more here, bit more here on the left-hand side, tends to look more unique, as you can see as PSR bit more contrast in here on the right-hand side because we've got some darks in there. Whereas on the left-hand side there's not too many darks at all, but we do need fuel. These little specks of color, specs of yellow. This is again like a yellow sunflower seeds. So we need to, I think just adding a little bit of this is going to be helpful. Okay. Like I said before, when you get down to the front, you can start putting in a bit more detail in the flowers. I mean, I I'm not fast about this at all. Mind you, I just want to get in a few major ones perhaps, but not interested in putting in too much details. Okay? If I put in too much detail, it's going to draw attention away from the rest of the scene and See if I can just getting a few petals that come off. Some of them like this, you notice they just, a lot of them are facing in the same direction so as to write a few little bits and pieces like that. In the center of them you can put in the game enough, just a little bit of darkness. Oops, I'm on the right hand side of the flowers. Actually just done some of them. Don't wanna get too bogged down. Okay, so just picking this going and going and going along with this same technique and putting in these flowers. More here on the left. Again, it's difficult to get the ones in on the left to look like much because we've got just mainly yellow in there, Whereas on the right-hand side we've got more contrasts. But it's still doable. Simplified sunflowers. I'm not interested at all when trying to get every little it was a little smudge, smidgen of detail in here. Let's use that last trick again. We'll pick up a bit of yellow and then use this tapping technique because you can see, before I do that actually I'm going to cover the top of the scene so that I don't get any paint up there. Just cover that up and touch like this. It up some of that yellow and let's just go for it. More yellow. Especially actually at the back, would be a good idea to wash in there, but a yellow. That more look at that. It's like a big shortcut. I don't have to sit here all day doing it. The shortcut method. Smaller out the back. And as you move towards the front, larger blobs of paint for the front. Really get them all in exactly though. Something like this. Maybe. Just being more haphazard I suppose helps to create. Since these natural looking variations. What's going on instead of it being too stuck on. This is just a bit of lots of gouache mixed in with the yellow. And as you can see, it's doing something just creating a bit of extra contrast with the white and the yellow. Too much there. Let me just over over the top like that. Okay. Let me take that off. Have a quick look. Then is looking alright. So I think I'll leave it as that. 6. Class Project: Your class project is to draw and paint your own sunflower field in watercolor. This can be the reference photo featured in this class are based on one of your own photographs. You can also refer to the scan drawing and painting templates attached below, which will allow you to trace the drawing if you choose to do so. I recommend drawing each scene. Freehand. Drawing is an important step in improving your painting skills. It provides you with an opportunity to compose and plan your painting. Once you've finished the drawing, use the watercolor steps and processes included in the class demonstrations to complete your painting.