Paint Watercolor Fruit in a Vibrant, Appealing Style

1. Introduction: Hello everyone. Thank you for joining me for this watercolor class. My name is Debbie, and I'm an artist who loves to create art using different types of media and I love to keep learning. But one of my very favorite media is watercolor. Watercolor is so soothing and fresh and it's nature. I found that it's a great way to unwind and relax. I hope that you do too. One of my favorite things to paint in water color, as you can tell from the wall behind me, are fruits and vegetables. They have a natural color blend on them, but I think watercolor is the perfect medium to show off. So in this class, I'll walk you through how to paint three different types of fruits using various techniques to create different effects. Our style that we'll be painting is realistic but not overly detailed, and we'll be using vibrant colors so that our work looks appealing and fresh. The class project that you'll be doing today will be one of two things. You can either paint some artwork for your wall or you can paint something and create it into a fun greeting card using some lettering. I hope that you find this class to be helpful and that you gain some new tips and insights that maybe you didn't have before. I can't wait to see your work in the class project gallery. Without further delay, let's get started. 2. Class Project: Let's talk a little bit about our class project. In this class, I will show you how to paint three different types of fruit. We will paint a watermelon in two ways, a whole watermelon and also a slice. Then we're going to learn how to paint a banana and last but not least, a peach and for your class project, you can simply paint one or more of these fruits and use them as a wall art if you'd like. But another option is to create a greeting card like this one. So in this one, I created a smaller peach because I wanted it to be on a smaller card and before I put it on, I just made some symbol brushstrokes with paint. I put a very simple little face on here just to make it cute with my fine liner. Then, I used a brush tip calligraphy marker to write my fruity pun up here. Another card that I've made is a thank you card, and this one says thanks a melon. Again, the final inner up here, a calligraphy brush tip marker here. This one, I wanted it to be a little bit fun, so I added a little drip of watermelon juice here. Of course, it's actually paint. Because my watermelon is tilting and it just adds a fun touch. There are so many fruity puns out there. You can come up with your own or choose one that you like and create a card, or just simply paint a fruit. Whatever you do, I hope you enjoy the process and please remember to share your work in the project gallery. In our next video, I'm going to go over our class supplies, so I'll see you there. 3. Class Materials: Before we head into our first lesson, let's talk about supplies. Now, please keep in mind that these are the supplies that I use and would recommend, but you certainly don't need to use the same brands or the same specific items. First and foremost, we need watercolor paint. I prefer tubes and I've squeezed my tube paints into my palette. Now, in your palette you'll need plenty of area to mix colors, so, if you don't have much space, then go ahead and just grab a separate palette. In the next slide, I'm going to show you the paints that we'll be using for this class. You'll also need a set of brushes, all the brushes that we'll need today are round brushes, and I have various different sizes to cover different types of jobs, so, everything from an 8, a 6, 4, 2, and 0. Also, you'll need a paper towel or just a regular towel, a glass jar with clean water, a spray bottle with water, and what I do with this is, before I start painting, I go ahead and I spray down my paints, and that will dampen them and activate them so that they're ready to be used. You'll also need a pencil to do your drawing. I like using a pencil that has a harder lead, this is an F pencil, because the harder lead pencils will smear less and erase better, which is good for watercolor paper. Optionally, you'll also need some brush pens, if you're going to do the greeting card as your class project. Here I have a black calligraphy brush pen and also a Micron fineliner. This is not a brush pen, but just a fine tip pen. Also, you need an eraser. This is a kneaded eraser, and if you're not sure what this is, it's just like a regular eraser, it will erase your lines, but the beauty of this is that, it has a tacky surface and it can be shaped and molded. So when you're trying to lift your pencil lines, let's say you've drawn something and it's too dark, you will simply take this and press it down on your lines and it will lift off the top layer of graphite. Also, if you need to erase anything, you can use this, and it's very soft and gentle on your paper. I recommend picking up one of these if you don't have one yet. Last but not least, let's talk about the paper. I'll be using this Arches 100 percent cotton paper today. Whatever you use, make sure that it is cold pressed and at least 140 pounds in weight. This is the standard weight of watercolor paper. If it's less than that, then the paper is going to buckle a lot more, so, this weight really helps in handling the weight of the water. If you're newer to watercolor and you're wondering, what's the one thing that I should splurge on, then my recommendation would be on the paper. I have found that my paintings look best on 100 percent cotton paper, especially when I'm doing a wet on wet technique where the colors are just bleeding and flowing into each other, you really can't beat the cotton paper. Give it a try if you haven't yet, but again, for today's class, please use what you have. All right. So those are supplies. Let's dive into our first lesson. 4. Paint a Whole Watermelon: Part 1: Welcome to our first lesson of this class. We are going to be painting a whole watermelon, so let's begin by sketching it out. Now if you look at the reference photo and from your own experience, you know a watermelon is an oval shape with these sort of blunt sides. Let's sketch in that overall shape and then we can draw in our stripes. I apologize for this sort of blurry moment in the video, it does clear up. So just drawing in an oval shape, it doesn't have to be perfect, nature is rarely perfect. Also, just keep in mind that watermelons have been sitting in the patch. Well, they've been growing and, and ripening so the bottom of the shape is a little bit flat. I wanted to draw that in. Now what we're going to do just as a guide to help us before we draw our stripes is we're going to put little marks where the centers of the sides are and you're going to make the marks a little bit away from the oval. So I just put little xs, you can do whatever marks, these will eventually be erased. Then what you'll do is starting with the x, you are going to follow the contour of the fruit and lightly draw in where your stripes will go. Starting at 1X, going up and then coming back down toward the other X and just keep doing this. Again, following the shape of your fruit until you filled in all of your stripe guidelines. That just serves as a guide for us so that when we go to paint our stripes later, we know exactly where to put our painted stripes. Go ahead and just erase off all the excess lines that are hanging off the watermelon so that we only have our lines on fruit. Now we're ready to go in and paint this fruit. I'm going to start by getting my number six brush, loading it up with clean water and we're going to fill our shape with this water. Now when you're painting with water inside the shape, you do want to be careful to stay in your pencil lines because we're going to be dropping colored paint into our water and wherever the water is, the pain will also go. So paint the water carefully as though you were painting paint into the shape. Just be generous with the water here until you have your whole shape filled in. We don't want there to be so much water that it's pooling or looking like it's ready to drip off the sides. You just want enough to where the entire shape is wet and not drawing too fast. Now we're ready to drop in our paint. Just take some sap green paint with a bit of water. We want our sap green to be pretty concentrated, not too much, but we want there to be enough color so that when we drop it in the water, it shows up very nicely. As you put it in, you want to follow the lines along the edges because we want the color to be concentrated on the edges of our shape. We're creating a three-dimensional form right now and this color is acting as our shadow. So it's our background color, but it's also our shadow. I love how these bleeds are just showing up on the sides. Now in that upper right corner, we want to have our highlight. So leave that area open and don't paint in that highlight or if you choose to have your highlight elsewhere, that's fine. Just think ahead of time where you want the highlight to be and you can see that I'm just leaving a spot there or I don't want there to be much paint. Now I'm softening my edges with a clean damped brush, not too wet, just damp and then I'm just filling in where there are some gaps in my paint. Now what I love about putting paint on wet paper is that everything bleeds really nicely. What you can do to help things bleed a little bit more evenly is you can just pick up your painting and tip it gently here and there. What you're basically doing is you're telling gravity which way you want the water to flow and so your paints will sort of blend out in the way that you tip them. This can be really helpful if you have some uneven areas or just kind of want to blend the brushstrokes in a little better. Now I'm adding my hooker start Green in with the sap green paint and I'm going to use this on the edges where there's the most shadow. You can see I have a pretty strong mix of paint here and that area that's furthest away from the highlight is going to be pretty dark. That whole bottom edge there is the darkest area but I'll also be carrying this color a little bit around the other sides too. Look at those bleeds, I just love how watercolor just sort of flows across the paper in such a beautiful way, it is really sort of therapeutic to watch and this is why I find watercolor so relaxing. I'm just blending the color back a little with a clean damp brush. Again, just dropping color where you need. Remember that this will dry lighter than when it's wet and the color will also spread a bit when you're doing this wet on wet technique. Now I like a lot of contrast in my paintings just to really show where those dark shadows are and to make my form really pop. So don't be afraid to go nice and dark with your darkest shadows, it really does help the image come to life. Now I'm just smoothing out my lines. There were some areas where my brush when out of line and you just want to even it out and now we're going to let this dry completely. In the next video, we're going to paint our stripes once the watermelon is totally dry. 5. Paint a Whole Watermelon: Part 2: The watermelon has dried. It's time now to add the stripes. We're going to do a technique called glazing, which means applying another layer of wet paint over the layer that has already dried. We'll do that for our stripes, and the first thing we're going to do is, we're going to just use plain water, and using my number 6 brush here. I'm going to just tip my brush in water, pour off the excess, and I'm going to brush wiggly lines with my water over those pencil lines that we drew in the very beginning. The reason I'm doing this is is because I'm going to be dropping in some color for the stripes, and I want the stripes just to have a soft look. That's why I've chosen to do on wet stripe. Just wiggle that water on, and be careful again to stay within the confines of your lines. Now we're going to need a little bit of a darker mixture, switching back to my number 4 brush and just making more of this sap green and hookers green dark paint mix. While you're mixing this, make plenty because you will need a lot later. We're going to be using a lot of this color. Once your color's ready, just wiggle it in over those wet lines that you made, and you're going to see your colors start to bleed, and you'll end up with just these soft, irregular lines, which is what we want. I'm just going to put this in, however, just wiggling my brush around, and which is blobbing the color on. You can just have fun with this. There's no perfection here. I've never seen a watermelon with perfect stripes, so just have fun and blob it on. As we approach the bottom end of the watermelon, go ahead and mix a little bit of a darker color, because that is the darkest area of the watermelon, and we want to show that that's in shadow. Now we sort of lost our highlight up there on the top right, and since the paint is still wet, we can just take our paper towel or towel and lightly blot off that area of highlight, and then the highlight comes back. It's a very easy fix as long as your paint is still wet. Now taking a little bit darker mixture of this paint, I'm going to just emphasize the areas of shadow. Just dropping in some of that darker mix on the bottom, and also putting it into the sides, since that's also curving away from the light. That just helps to emphasize this round three dimensional form. Then I wash my brush off and I wiped off all the excess water so that it's just damp, and I'm softening my edges so that you don't end up with a harsh line where the shadow meets the rest of the watermelon. That's looking a lot better to me. Now I'm switching to a smaller brush using my number 4 here. I'm going to make a darker color than I did for the first application of stripes. I'm going to go over the stripes that I laid down with this dark mixture. It's going to be thinner. I'm doing this just to vary the line and show how the color values change, and just how irregular these stripes are. That dark color just helps the whole thing to come alive a little bit more too. If you notice, I carefully avoided that area of highlight so that I don't need to blood it off again. Again, just wiggling my brush around and just playing around with this. You can see how just adding that darker layer of paint really makes it look more and more like a watermelon. Go ahead and fix any edges that might have gotten a little bit wonky. If you brush when out of bounds a little bit, that's okay. You can just run your brush along and smooth out those edges, and that's looking pretty good. Now what we're going to do is, in these lighter areas between the darker stripes, we're going to add a little bit of texture. Usually these areas are not perfectly clean. They have some dots and marks, just the wiggly lines running around. We're going to add those in with a very fine brush. Just making some more of this dark mix or hopefully you have some left on your palette, and I'm just going to tap in some little marks and dots and things like that here and there. I'm going to concentrate these marks where the shadows are so that it helps that three-dimensional feel. Then where you have highlights or where the watermelon is, near the highlight, I will use less of the dots. In the very highlight itself, I'm just not putting any dots at all. It's good to step back every so often and just look at the overall piece and then decide where you need to fill in, where am I too empty, and then just go ahead and add what you need to add. That looks done to me. I like how this looks and I hope that you enjoyed painting along with me. In our next video, we're going to continue with the watermelon theme and paint a watermelon slice. 6. Paint a Watermelon Slice: Welcome to our next lesson. Let's paint a watermelon slice together. The first thing that we'll do is we will draw the slice. Now I've provided the reference photo here and we don't want to follow it exactly. But we can go ahead and just use the reference photo as a guide for us as far as the overall shape and colors and texture. I'm drawing mine a little narrower than the photo and I'm starting by first drawing those two lines on the side and connecting them with a curve and then I'm drawing the edges on the top and the bottom, connecting those with a straight line and I like mine to be a little wider on the bottom. Then finally making that bottom of the rind and then that's the end of the sketch. Go ahead and mark where the rind meets the red of the fruit just as a guide for yourself so that when you paint you know where the red ends and the white begins. Now we can go ahead and start to paint. Let's take our Alizarin crimson and mix that with permanent rose and we want a fairly strong mixture but not too dark. This is not going to be the darkest color. This is actually going to be the highlight color of the watermelon. Make it about a medium shade and make enough so that you can cover the entire red area of the fruit. Let's go ahead and just lay that in all over and as you paint, just be careful to go all the way up to the guide marks that you drew and stop at those guide marks. Remember that when you're painting the front face of the fruit that you want to follow the curve of the contour of the fruit. As you fill in the space with the red paint, try to move fairly quickly so that you're filling in while the paint is all wet and that way you won't have any weird edges if you put wet paint down next to an area that's drying. That looks nice. It's all filled in and I'm just cleaning up my edges now, just to make it a little neater. Now while this is wet we're going to create a darker mixture of the two colors that we mixed together and we're going to use the dark mixture to go over the front face of the fruit. If you look at the reference photo, the light is coming in from the side and so the front is going to be darker. Also, we want this fruit to look ripe and juicy so we do want a nice deep color here. One of the reasons that we put this dark color on over the other layer while it's still wet, is so that we get a nice soft transition from one side to another. This is because even though it has a pretty clean slice, the texture is fairly soft and there's a lot of fibers and texture going on so we want our transition from one side to the other to be soft. Here I'm just taking a lightly damped clean brush and just blending a little bit on that bottom edge so it's not too hard, just softening it a little bit. Now I was going to put in some of the color here on the side just to add a little variation, but I decided to wait because it's a little bit damp and not totally dry and if I put in some wet paint now it would create some weird blooms. I've decided to move on to the rind and I'm just dropping in a line of water at the edge of this rind. Then I'm going to take my sap green and the Hookers green dark and create a deep mixture and then we're going to paint it right above our pencil line in the wet line that we made. Then using a fine brush here number two, we want our lines to be thin and if you can see, I'm putting just little lines up with the edges of the rind and I know that's not actually there in real life but because their rind is going to be light. I just want to create those little lines so that it tricks the eye into filling in the shape. It will also help adding a little bit of color there when I add water, which I'm doing now so with a clean wet brush I'm just using water to draw that green paint gently down and create some subtle color in the rind and just blending with a clean brush. Now if you wanted to make your rind a little bit darker, maybe add some more of the green mixture. You're free to do that. But I like mine to be more subtle and I'm also dabbing off the paints that was on the side there because it was a little bit strong and I want that to be highlight. At this point we're going to let this dry and now I'm going to come back and add in a little bit more color along the side. The first thing I did is I dropped in some water just to create a subtle blend of color and then I put in some of that red mixture down the center where the water was and just dabbing it in a little bit on the edges and this is just to show the color variation that's in the texture there on the side. Be careful not to paint over the whole highlight because we want the highlight to show. We just want to add a little bit of depth. Again, as always, you can wash your brush out and dab off the excess water and use that damp brush to blend in any hard edges to soften them. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint in the rind and we're going to have some deep strong color for this because it's the darkest area of the painting and also is in shadow. Go ahead and be bold and strong with the screen mixing the Hookers green dark with the sap and use a fine brush, either number 2 or 0 to paint this in because it's such a small area and we want to be careful to have clean lines. We're going to let our watermelon dry completely and then we'll painter seeds. Now the watermelon is completely dry and I'm going to use my number two brush and just mix together some of the red and the green and what I'm creating is a neutralized red that's also a little bit darker. Doing more of the red than the green and when it's a nice deep shade, I'm going to come over to the watermelon and paint these little pockets that the seeds will sit in. I want to paint them a little bit longer than the seeds will be so that they show behind the seeds when I paint the seeds in. Also, you can arrange these however you'd like. Sometimes watermelons have the seeds arranged in nice neat line and sometimes they're random, just depends on the watermelon. I'm going to just put mine in randomly making it up as I go. I like how that looks and I think I'll stop there. Now at this point, we need those little seed packets to dry completely before we put the seeds in so I'll see you back here when those packets are all dry. Those little pockets that we painted have dried and now it's time to put in the seeds. I'm just taking some black paint here and we want it to be very dark so have a lot of paint on your brush and not that much water and if you don't have black paint, you can simply use a fine tip black marker and nobody would know the difference. Just go ahead and paint little tear drop shapes for the seeds at the bottom of those red pockets that you made being careful to leave some of that dark red showing behind the seeds. That just gives it a sense of depth. Just like that, all of our seeds are done. Now I'm looking at this slice and I feel like at least for mine, I need a little bit more contrast there. At the bottom. I want my rind to have a little bit more presence. I'm just mixing up some of my Hookers dark green into that set mixture that we made earlier and with a very fine brush, a number 0, I'm just going over that line in the bottom and now it's done. I hope you enjoyed painting the slice with me and I'll see you in the next video. 7. Paint a Banana: Part 1: Welcome to our next lesson. We're going to paint a banana together. I've gone ahead and I've sketched out my banana to save some time. But let me show you how I did it. Bananas have ridges on them, they're not perfectly cylindrical. What I did is first I drew that line that shows the ridge of the banana and that set the curve for the rest of my form. Then what I noticed is the area above the ridge is narrow, so I drew a line right above that ridge. Then the volume below the ridge is quite large. Then I drew a large curve below the ridge. Then I finished off by drawing the stem. I did modify the picture a little bit. I wanted my stem to be a little cleaner, and so that's what I did. Let's go ahead now and put some paint on our drawing. Before we start, remember to clean out your jar of water with freshwater especially if you painted the watermelon, it's probably pretty pink. Also remember to spritz your paints so that they are ready to use. We will start by laying on a layer of Windsor yellow and I'm just mixing a medium strength mix here. Not too light and not too heavy. You want it not to go over the entire banana. Once you have enough, go ahead and just lay the same all over being careful to stay within your lines. When I paint I like to turn my paper some times, it just makes things a little easier for me. I find that I paint better when I'm going from left to right, just one of those corks. Whatever you need to do to set yourself up for success, go head and do it. All right, now we filled in our banana with the first layer. This will be our highlight color. The next thing that we'll do is let's add some color to the stem. I took some sap green. To the sap green I'm going to add just a touch of burnt sienna. This is just to tone down the green and warm it up. I'm putting this right into the wet paint along the top edge of the stem. This is to both give it color and also to give it some form. I'm leaving a bit of highlight on the left side of the stem, because the light is coming from the left side if you can see from the reference photo. Just adding some more color here, for a deeper mix. We want this nice and dark, and this time we wanted a little heavier on the burnt sienna. Once you have this mixed nice and dark, put it along the top there of the banana. I like to see a dark tip there on the top of the banana and also on the other tip of the banana, and it just gives a little definition. Now since the paint has dried on this side of the banana, I'm going to just wash my brush out and take off the excess water so that it's just lightly damped and coax that paint down a little bit with the water. Also I'm bringing the paint down the bottom edge of the banana since there is a dark shadow there. Just smooth that out and blend it in. Let's let this dry. Then when it's dry we'll come back and paint in the top ridge, the shadow's there, and then we'll go ahead and paint the bottom area separately. See you soon. Okay, so our banana has dried, and we're going to go ahead and put in the shadows. Just remember the light is coming from the left side, and so there's going to be a highlight along the bottom left and the top right, because the light is reflecting off of those areas, while the other areas will have some shadows. Now I'm mixing in some cadmium yellow into my initial yellow mix, and I'm going to lay that along that top section. As I'm doing this, I am just dragging the paint out. Then I'm going to wash my brush so that there's just a little bit of clean water on my brush and blended into the highlight area so that it's a gradual shift from the shadow to the highlight. Now adding a little bit of broonzy on it here. I just want a little bit more depth to my shadow. Putting it in there and then I'm going to just blend it out, and be sure to smooth out above that area as well to prevent any harsh lines. Okay, now let's go ahead and put in some shadow along the bottom using a larger brush. I'm using my number six for this. I'm going to use the same colors, the cad yellow along with burnt sienna, but a little bit more burnt sienna this time, since the shadow on that bottom right area is darker. I'm starting about halfway along the banana and dragging the paint along the edge all the way up to that top tip. Just remember that watercolor's dry lighter than they are when they're wet, and so you can go a little bit deeper than you think you might need for this color. Just use a clean, damp brush to blend out as always. Now I'm adding back in a little bit more color just to deepen it and, blending once again. Now looking back at my reference, I'm realizing that this is still not quite where it should be as far as depth, so I am going to go and add in just a little bit of our brownie green mixture. I'm just dropping it in along the edge, and it's breeding a little funny at the top there. I'm just going to take my wet brush again and lightly blended out. Then we'll be done with the shadow. I'm just carrying it over a little bit to the left. Now we're going to put in just a soft, subtle shadow along that top left area. As we do this, just be mindful of the highlight that is there on the bottom. We just want a little bit of color just right there below the ridge and blend. All right, so we maintained our highlights which is good, and now we're going to go in and just add some detail to the stem. Back in now with some of our brownish green mix, and I'm going to lay this along the top edge there. Since that is the area in shadow and it's furthest away from the light, and just putting it in there and blending it out, now I'm taking some sap green and I'm putting in on the stem to add color and also to really define the shadow. I'm also carrying the green down over the shoulder of the banana, that part where the stem meets the body, and then just blending out in the green but leaving a bit of highlight there. Okay, and now we want to add some color into the other side of the banana. There's a little bit of green. I got a little paint on my paper. We'll add the sap green onto the tip, and then again, blending out with a cleaned off brush. Now there's a slight shadow underneath the ridge that we drew in, and so we want to put a very fine shadow. I'm using my number to brush here, so just a little bit of cadmium yellow. I'm not going to put the shadow up against the ridge, but I'm going to leave a very thin line of space and follow the shape of the line that we drew. You might need to hold your breath for this one and go slow. Once you put in that line, you can soften the edges if you need. I've decided that I want a little bit more shadow there. I'm going to put in a little bit of a thicker line. Just to emphasize that that shadow a little bit, especially since I know it's going to dry lighter. I just want to bring that out and I like that better. Let's let this banana dry and then we'll come back and add in some details. 8. Paint a Banana: Part 2: The painting is dry. Now that it's dry, I'm noticing that I like the warmth of the yellow at the top left, and I would like to bring that over into my shadowed area on the bottom right. I'm going to take my cadmium yellow and make a strong mix of this. With just a hint of burnt sienna, I'm going to brush this over that bottom area. Then again, we're blending up the edges. I like that a lot better. I'm going to add some of that same will mix near the tip of the banana just to give it a little bit more form. Now I'm going to go back and go over the stem and add in some more depth as well as just some fine marks and details and I'm using my zero for this. I'm just placing a nice dark line along that top edge of the banana and I'm just putting some thin lines and little marks there, just to give it a little bit of texture and shadow and also a little bit of definition to the other side. At this point, I'm going ahead and make more of this dark mix and I'm going to start adding in all the little marks that are over the banana and give it that ripe look. Starting here with that ridge, if you look in the reference photo, there is a line of just ripeness or bruising or something along that ridge, so I'm putting that down. Then I'm just creating little dots here and there and just do this randomly. Some of the dots are going to be closer together, some of them are floating farther apart, just trying to mimic nature here. One thing to keep in mind is that these little marks should be concentrated in areas of shadow. We don't want too many of these dots where the highlights are, because it could line up those highlights and take away some of their brightness, so try to keep most of these marks where the shadows are. Just putting a few marks in the stem. I'm just having fun with this. Just be careful not to go overboard or your banana will look a little too ripe. I decided as one last, final touch, I just wanted to add a little bit more contour to the area where the stem meets the main body of the banana. I'm just adding a little bit of that green brown mix and just putting a light curve right there and I'm going to call this banana done. Hope you had fun painting this. I'll see you in our next lesson. 9. Paint a Peach: Part 1: Welcome back, and this will be the third and final lesson of this class. Let's paint a peach together. Now I've found a reference immature and we're not going to follow it exactly, but we're going to piece together the elements that we see to create our own peach. I'm starting by just drawing a circle. Peaches are generally very round. I like the look of peaches that have a pointed tip at the bottom. I've gone ahead and drawn that in. You can see from the reference photo here that the peaches that have those tips at the bottom. Just make sure that as you draw your shape, that the transitions are smooth and that you don't have funny angles. Also at the top of the fruit, we just want to make it a little bit flat to show that there's a dip where the stem comes out. I've drawn a little bit of a dip along that backline and also I made a dip to show the front curve of the peach. I'm drawing in the crease that runs along the side of the peach and gives it that peachy character. Now drawing in the stem, and the stems are never perfect. They have bumps and enriches, so you don't need to make yours perfect either. I'm going to attach a leaf because having a leaf with the fruit really brings it to life. If you look at this picture, the leaves are long and they curl and there is a long central vein that runs down the center of the leaf and gives it a crease. I'm going to put that in and I'm not going to worry about all of the tiny veins that run alongside the center. We're just going to put in the center vein or this painting. Now my sketch is complete. If you need more time to finish your sketch then you can pause the video. Let's go ahead and start painting. I'm going to take cadmium orange and mix it with Windsor yellow. We want to make enough to cover the entire peach, but not paint the leaf. Again here we want to make sure that we lay down our color fairly quickly so that the paint remains wet as we lay new paint down, we don't want any edges to dry as we're laying down new paint. Okay, so that's filled in. Now as this will be the highlight color, I want to drop in deeper color. Both to give the pH peachy color, but also to give it some form. I'm going to take more of the cadmium orange and that's where I mix. I'm going to drop it in along the left side. I would like my shadow to be on the left because I'm going to say that the highlight is on the right. Also since I have a leaf covering the left side of the peach, I want more shadow under that leaf. I'm also adding permanent rows here to my mixture and a bit more of the orange. Just making a deep peach color. I'm going to lay this again on my left side and also along the bottom. Now peaches come in many varieties and looks. Some of them have the red coloring all over, some of them only have in a long half of a peach, and some of them have just blobs of color randomly placed. However you'd like to do it, you can create your own luck here. You don't have to follow my example. I'm going to be placing my color primarily where you see it now on the left side in the bottom. I'm just blending to soften some of these edges and also carrying the color along the side and weight and put it just along the back of the tackle the peach. Now I'm just blending. Now I've lost a little bit of my highlight there. I'm going to go in with my paper towel and just blot off some of that paint and the highlight comes right back. So as long as your paint is wet, you can blot off the paint. I'm blending in some color here. One thing I forgot to do was to wash my brush out after each pass. When you don't wash your brush out after each pass, you carry that color around. To avoid that, just make sure that you're frequently washing your brush. I've decided that I would like to deepen the areas of the peach that are on the left and on the bottom. I'm going to take some of my permanent rows and just place that directly onto the paint. Let's this dry completely and come back and finish the rest. 10. Paint a Peach: Part 2: Welcome back. The peach has dried. Now we'd like to go in and paint some shadow around there by the stem, where the top of the peach dips down into a concave area. Let's mix our shadow color. We're going to take some of the sap green and into that we're going to mix just a little bit of the permanent rose and we have a neutral color that we can put in here. I'm just working my way around the stem, blending up the color as I go. I do the other side and just work around that leaf, being careful not to go into the leaf area. Now looking at the shadow, I feel like it's a little bit flat. I'm going to go in and add a little bit of my peachy mix and just go over that shadow just to warm things up and give it more depth. Next, we're going to use this peachy mixture to bring a little bit of the color at the back of our peach. I'm just carrying it up and down the side there at the back and just blending so it softens the edges. I just want to lighten it a little bit because there is a highlight there. You can do that by just dabbing with a paper towel if you happen to make things too dark. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to darken the area of the peach that creases in. I'm going to use that peachy mix and add a little bit of the permanent rose. With my very fine brush, my zero, I'm going to just draw that very thin line with that dark mix of color. Then what I'm going to do is use just the lightly damped brush. This is my number 2 now. I'm just softening that line a little bit and carrying the color over. But just make sure that you don't lose the line of the crease there. Grabbing some more permanent rose into the peachy mix and adding more of the sap green now to create a darker, neutral color. With this brown, I'm going to paint in the stem. Using my little number 2 brush for this, you could even use the zero. I'm painting the left side of the stem the darkest because that's far away from the light. Then I'm going to wash out my brush and just blend a little bit to soften that up. Now let's paint our leaf. I'm mixing sap green with the Hookers Green Dark and creating a nice mix that's about medium in concentration, so not too light and not too heavy. I'm going to go over the entire leave with this mix. Just be careful here not to go over your line. Try your best to stay in the line of that leaf. Especially as you reach the point of leaf, just to be careful to create a nice sharp tip. Already that really brings the peach to life. Now I'm going to make this mix a little bit darker with more of the Hookers Green Dark. I'm going to put it into the wet paint right near the stem so that we really get a good shadow at the area of leaf that curves down into the peach. I'm just dabbing that dark mix along the edge of the leaf but the main concentration is by the stem. You can also emphasize the tip of your leave a little bit by putting in a little bit of that dark mix and blending it. Then you can wash your brush out. Again, with just a lightly damped clean brush, you can blend out your lines. Now I want to go in again with the darker paints. I feel like because it's going to dry lighter, I really want a little bit more shadow there. I'm also painting the stem of the leaf so that it connects to the stem of the peach. Go ahead and take this mix and put it wherever you think needs a little bit of shadow or definition and just blend it in. Now what we'll do is we can look at our stem and we can darken in and add some details. I feel like my stem has dried very light and I want to really emphasize that shadow along the left side. So just using my Zero Brush, I'm going to put a very dark edge on the left, as well as just little lines and things for texture throughout the stem. Now I'm going to wash out my brush and just blend where it needs a little softening and that's looking a lot better. My peach is feeling pretty dry under that leaf. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to mix some of these colors together. The sap green along with the peachy mix. This is going to be the color of my shadow that goes underneath the leaf on the peach. The first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to draw a thin line to show the shadow from the stem of the leaf. We don't want it touching the leaf at that part because we want to show that the leave is raised off of the peach there. But as the leaf comes down over the peach, it does touch the peach. At that point, the shadow will be right beneath the leaf. Now let's add some more depth and definition to our leaf. With more of the Hookers green dark into the green mix, I'm going to paint this dark mixture along the top half of the leaf. In doing this, I just want to show that there is that prominent center vein in the leaf. We won't worry about all the smaller veins right now, but we do want to show that there is a crease there. I'm just very lightly putting in that crease and also darkening the top half of the leaf. Now I'm going to pick up the same color, but with a little bit more water to lighten it. I'm going to paint the bottom half of that leaf, the thinner area of it. As I do this, I'm not going all the way up to the line that I painted in the middle. But I am painting, leaving just a little bit of empty space along that line so that it leaves a vein. I think that my peach is complete. I hope that you've enjoyed painting along with me. This is the end of our class. I'll see you in the next video for some closing thoughts. 11. Closing Thoughts: Well, we've reached the end of this class and I hope that you created something that you love and are proud of. I hope you've also picked up some new tips and techniques along the way that will help you in your watercolor journey. Remember to leave your project in the classroom project gallery so that we can all see what you've made and be inspired by it. I'll do my best to leave a comment on each one. Until next time. Happy painting.