Seascape Essentials: Watercolor Techniques

1. Intro: Hello friends, and thanks for tuning into this video class on painting seascapes with water color. My name is Anna. For those of you who do not know me, I'm an artist based in Santa Cruz, California, working under my studio name, Follow the Sun Art. A lot of my personal inspiration comes from being in and near the ocean. I really wanted to dive into painting seascapes in this class because it's not always so simple. There's a lot of elements and a lot of like dynamic stuff going on when you have a seascape, there's the sky. What's going on in the sky which reflects in the water? Is the water smooth? Is it wavy? Is there wind? Are there rocks? Is there sand? Just so many different elements that we need to consider when we are approaching our seascape paintings. In this class, I'm going to break it down into different sections. We're going to cover a few different ways to paint skies, some different ways to paint water, as well as go into the details like the things you might see like sea foam waves, rocks, cliffs, things like that. But yeah, I love painting seascapes, one of my favorite subjects that is endlessly inspiring. If you'd like to see more of my art, you can always check it out on my website. But in the meantime, grab your supplies. Feel free to take some notes and let's dive in. 2. Techniques: We are going to begin with a basic techniques refresher. If you're pretty new to watercolor painting, this will be really useful because these are the basic techniques that we're going to be using to create our paintings. If you've done some painting or maybe you've just gone over the techniques, feel free to skip this part or you can use that as a warm up or just refresher. It's always good to go over and practice these things. You have the tools to go about with your painting. I'm just using like a scrap piece of paper for this practice. You don't need to use your nicer heavyweight watercolor paper for the techniques practice. My go to these Canson mixed media paper pads. They're a lighter weight, 90 pounds. They do buckle a little bit with the, of the watercolor medium, but it doesn't matter too much because we're just practicing for this. It's nice to have like a scrap sheet of paper if you need to practice any techniques or anything like that before you put them onto your painting. Any specific little flourishes or anything like that. I've got a variety of brushes set up my water and a towel for drying my paint. Of course necessary component. We're going to begin with the wash techniques. Wash is you're basically filling in an area of your paper with one color. You can either use them straight from the paint palettes or straight from the tube, whatever paint you're using. Or you can mix your own unique colors in the mixing palettes. Here I've got like a variety of blends that I commonly use for different elements of my paintings. It's a little messy, so sometimes I'll give it a good wipe down to clean. But anyway, you can pick any color to start. Doesn't matter too much. One of the most basic things about water color is controlling the saturation of your color. If you use just a little bit of water, you're not agitating the paint too much. You'll have a pretty faint color. But then if you really just stir that pain around, wake up that pigment, then you'll have a much more concentrated color. That's a good thing to play around with is see how saturated you could get the color, see how light you could get the color to. That's basically a wash. What I just did right there with this round brush, I'm just holding my brush at an angle so I get a lot of surface area. I could do it vertically or horizontally, whichever way it feels comfortable for you. You're not using too much water but just enough to get the flow. Generally, you're not going back over your, you lay it down, let it dry. Otherwise, you might get like some uneven splotches or blooms If you drop too much water in unwanted effects usually keep it simple. Just lay down your color and let it be. Depending on the space that you are using your wash for, you can use different brushes. There are flat brushes specifically designed for the wash technique. I'll show you some of mine like this wide flat wash brush, and then there's a smaller one for example. Those are great because they stay wide and you can just brush back and forth to get your wash filled in with whatever color. But if you're going in smaller areas, you can also use a smaller round brush for more control in whatever space you're working in. Depending on where you're doing the wash, you can just find the right brush for that step. Then the next technique we're going to do is the wet on wet. Which means you're putting wet paint on wet paper, a lot of water. I'm going to begin just by wetting a section of my page just with water, even moist, not like puddling or anything. Then I'm going to pick up a color, plop it in, you'll see the paint starts to flow. It's doing its own thing. I'm rinsing my brush and grabbing another color, second color or third color, and then I'm going to throw that in, in the ******. This is one of my favorite techniques because you really see the personalities of these pigments. Like this blue for example, it really loves to push that pink away. Then some pigments will just sit in place where you put them. But it's good to play around with the different colors and see how they react to the technique. I'm just trying different colors now, popping them in sometimes if you feel like there's not too much movement, you can also just brush the paint around a little bit to get it to flow better. But ideally, they'll just go on their own. They don't need too much manipulation, but this is a way to get a lot more interesting color variation within a shape compared to the wash. You can see there's a lot more going on with the different colors. Sometimes I'll use similar colors, like different shades of pinks or different shades of orange, just to get that variation. It really adds a lot of interest to the painting, The next technique is going to be. Wet on dry, which is a great way to make define shapes on your painting. They'll have a hard edge versus a soft edge. I'll grab a color basically, you know, you're just painting lines or shapes. You'll find this property of water color, that the paint is not going to flow where the page is dry. Like where we did the wet on wet technique, that paint is flowing because that section is wet. This paint is only going to go where you brush it on sometimes. I'll also combine techniques, you can do like a little wet on wet within this shape. You'll see that color is not going anywhere, it's just staying within the painted shape. Another thing I like to use this technique for is if you're painting objects that are adjacent to each other. In a painting, you usually have to be really patient and wait for the first part to dry before you proceed to the next part. Or else there was some thing over here that I wanted to paint and I started going for it. The shapes just merge together and the paint flows into each other. Generally, you'd wait for this to dry first before you paint the next thing just to keep them isolated. But alternatively, you can use the white space as a barrier if you just leave like a little millimeter of space between the first thing you painted and the thing you're moving onto. You'll see this way, the shapes do not merge together and you can proceed. It's like a stylistic thing. What I love about this method of painting is you get this bold line and between your shapes, which makes things pop a little bit more, gives them a little bit of focus. That's something you can also use as utilize that white space between your different elements. But yeah, if not then you just want to make sure you're waiting for the sections to dry before you proceed to the next part of your painting that is wet paint on dry paper. It gives you hard edges and define shapes. Next, we'll have dry on dry, which is a great way to create texture. A lot of watercolor paper will have a little bit of a toothy texture. It's got some grain, it creates a cool effect. Let me show you how I load up my brush. I want to start with, ideally, a dry palette. I'm using a tiny amount of water, just enough to activate my paint. But not enough to really get like a pool of water like I did in that first pink I used. Sometimes I'll go to the edge of the palette where it's like more caked on. Also, if you're using the two paints, you can use the paint straight out of the tube with no water. That makes it a lot easier here. It's still more of a wash technique. It's a little tricky to get the right consistency, but I'm just going to keep working on it. The idea is to unload the water from your brush and just get the paint and it's thicker consistency, See here, now I'm getting that scratchy sound. That means I'm getting the dry and dry technique and you can see the texture, it's picking up the grainy texture from the paper. Try that out. It might take a couple tries. Sometimes if you start with like a wet brush and you're going along eventually, you'll unload enough paint that you can get the dry on dry texture, okay? Yeah, that's great for creating texture like if you're doing rocks or sand or something like that or a dirt trail, really useful for a lot of different things. Then the next one is dry on wet. For that one, I'm going to again wet a section of my page. Again, evenly moist, not puddling. Then I'm going to dry my brush off on my little towel, load it up again the same way we just did for the dry, for that texture, we'll brush it onto that shape. This is a good way to get defined shapes with soft edges. These two are similar because you can define shapes. The paint is not going to flow too much, but you can see the edges are very soft. Usually, I'll use this technique if I'm painting like a landscape or something. Maybe there's something in the distance like mountains or coastline or something, I wanted to fade into the atmosphere. You'll have those soft, blurry edges. That's a good way to add some depth to your painting. It's not a super common technique, but it is a good one to know for certain scenarios. Okay, and then we'll go over some blending. We can blend a color into the white of the page, and we can also blend two colors together. I'm going to begin with a saturated color here, just painting a little blob. And you can do the small scale. You can also do a larger scale then to blend it to the white of the page. I'm rinsing the pigment off my brush. Drying it off a little bit. Then just take note of the direction of my brush I'm pulling, my brush is pointing in the direction I want to blend in. My brush strokes are perpendicular to that direction. I'm blending to the right, but my strokes are up and down. Then I'll repeat that step. I'll rinse and dry until I can really get it to the white of the page. I use that technique a lot. You can also use it from a dry section, you can reactivate the paint. That is another awesome property of water color. I'll find one of these dry areas and get some water. Just brush that around to reactivate the paint. Then same thing, I'm pull it to the white of the page. And repeat with the rinse as needed. If you want to blend two colors together, start the same way. Leave a little bit of space, a little bit of white space between your colors. And then again, I'm rinsing to have a clean brush between all my colors. Same thing. I'll just go back and forth a couple of times to blend those two colors together. Another great thing to practice is your brush control. Your different brushes can have a variety of effects and it's good to get to know them and play around with them. One thing we can practice is thin to thick lines. For example, this round brush, I can make a really thin line just by using very light pressure at the very tip of my brush. I can also get a pretty thick line by pressing down and spreading those bristles out. Then you can alternate from thin to thick. Thin to thick. That's a good watercolor painting drill you could do to work on your brush control. Then a couple other techniques that are really useful to know are techniques to touch up your painting. Sometimes we'll get paint where we don't want it. Sometimes with watercolors you only get one shot because once the paints there it's there. You can't really layer and cover things up as you can with say, like acrylic paint or oil paint for example. But you can reactivate and lift the paint. There's a few ways to go about it. Depends on where your painting is and how bright you want to get it. If a section is still wet, you can just go right in and mop it up. If you got paint where you didn't want to see that section, I lifted up a bunch of pigment there and it's brighter if you just painted something and it's like, oops, I didn't want that there. You can just really quickly lift it up before it settles into the page. That's an example of lifting when the paint is wet. You can also lift the paint when it's dry. I'll just put some water down here on this purple section, then same thing, I'm just pressing into the page. Sometimes it's more effective. I got a little bit of pigment up, but really not a ton. Some pigments lift better. Maybe that's not the best example, but you get the idea. I'm going to try it out with the pink here as well. See if that's any more effective. That seems to work a little bit better then. The other technique is scrubbing. This time I'm going to agitate the paint and you can see a it's reactivating, I can lift a lot more pigment up with the scrubbing technique. You want to be careful with scrubbing though because if you brush to aggressively can tear up the paper and then it has an uneven texture. Just be careful with that one. But yeah, you can reactivate to lift paint up or to soften edges. There are some ways to touch up your piece if you've got any unwanted effects. Those are basic techniques. We can go ahead and move into some more specific exercises. Feel free to practice that as much as you want, if you want to refine any of your techniques, if you struggled with any of them, you can pause the video, you can work on those a little bit more and then jump back in when you're ready. 3. Color: Before we begin, I want to talk a little bit about your color palette that you're going to use for your painting. You definitely want to give some thought to your colors before you begin, Really take a moment to look at your reference where you are out in the field or looking at a photograph. Just pay attention to the colors you see around you. Depending on the time of day, um, and what's going on in the atmosphere and in the water that's going to affect your painting and your color palette. Let's cover the different times of day. At dawn and dusk, you tend to have pastel hues. There's very soft color contrast, not too harsh between the lights and the darks on the colors are mostly similar. On the value scale, you tend to have a lot of pinks, purples, yellows and blues. You can see all of that in this piece. There's pinks, just light very similar shades of blue, purple variations of each color? Pretty much. Okay. Then at midday, when the sun is high and bright, you're going to have more vibrant colors. And that's just the science of light and color. The more light that is bouncing off of the object, the more vibrant the color is going to be. You do have higher contrasts. The high lights are really going to be illuminated very brightly. Then the shadow areas are just going to appear more dark. A wider range on your value scale from light to dark. Also, the colors are just more saturated. Just rich, blue, rich yellow. Whatever else you have in your scene, okay? On an overcast day, when it's cloudy or foggy, your colors are going to be more toned down, which means that they are more on the gray side. A couple of ways you can do that, you can grab whatever base color you're using. If it's like blue or yellow or purple, you can add a complimentary color to it. So you can refer to a color wheel for that. If I'm going with blue, you could add like a splash of orange to it, just to gray it down. Then another way to approach it is to start with a pigment like pains gray for example. Then add your colors to that. Add some yellow for your yellow, blue for your blue. You're more muddying up your colors. Which you usually would avoid when you're painting. But it's good to get like a little messy just for those grade down tones. Then the contrast is also going to be medium. The colors are more similar. Of course, you still want to have some dark areas and light areas for the contrast and structure in your piece. But similar to the dawn and dusk a day, it's going to be more on the subtle side. Sunset and sunrise. Super fun to paint because you have all those fun colors when usually you might have a more monochrome painting, shades of blue or gray. Here you get to use all of those fun, warm colors like yellow, red, orange, pink. There is very high contrast because you've still got the sun up and it's shining very strongly. The highlights are going to be bright, the shadows are going to be dark. Your colors are also very saturated. As we know, if you ever seen a sunset, some of the brightest colors that you ever see in nature, really avoid muddying your colors up. Use them a little bit more saturated. So using less water, you can really go heavier on the pigment for sunsets and sunrises. Then also, you want to keep in mind using complimentary hues. In some of the other examples, the colors are similar on the value scale, so maybe like different shades of blue and purple. For the most part here you're going to have complements like orange and blue. For example, yellow and purple. This combination will also help with the contrast in your piece. Aside from just using light and dark to create contrast, you can also use the colors that will enhance that Complimentary colors help a lot with contrast. Then another thing that I want to brush on is setting the tone of your painting. Oftentimes, if I'm going for a certain mood in my painting, or there is like an overall color tone to a certain scene, I will use an initial wash over the entire page. Before I start painting, I will do my sketch first, and then I do try to save the white if there are any really bright highlights. This will also help enhance those highlights even more like on the sea foam, for example, or in the clouds. I might do this, I'll go around those parts, but otherwise just cover the entire painting. The way you do this is you grab a large wash brush that's going to hold a lot of paint. And you want a mixing palette with like a good room to mix up a lot of water. You're going to select your pigment that you're using and then water it down so you have a really light version. You can test it on your paper, and then if it's too vibrant, you can just use water to spread it out for your wash. If you feel like it's light, then you can add more pigment. That's easy as well. Then for your color selection, warm colors give warmth. That's usually what I'll go for my paintings because I just love that warmth personally. I'll use a yellow or yellow ochre to wash over the piece. Then if you have a dawn or dusk time of day, you can use a pink wash because that's color in the scene. The other times you might use cool colors for a cooler tone, like blues purples. I personally don't do that too much. Maybe for a night scene that would be pretty effective. Yeah, you can play around with that. Even do like some thumbnail paintings to see how that affects your finished painting. The overall tone in this painting, I used a wash of yellow just to create that warmth in the piece. Yeah, play around with that and give some consideration to your color palette before you begin your painting. 4. Skies: All right. Seascape Skies. Let's grab another sheet of paper. You can use heavier weight watercolor paper if you would like to. You can also use the same mixed media paper, because these are all still just going to be exercises. I've got a ruler here. I'm just going to section out my page a little bit so we can do smaller thumbnails with all of these techniques. Just give yourself enough room. I'm not like being specific and measuring this out or anything, but just give yourself enough room on your page in these little sections to work on the different techniques. We'll do some skies in this one, maybe some of the ocean sections too. We'll just do the mini thumbnails to get a feel for the different ways we can go about our paintings. Then once we've got all the basics down all the different elements, then you can use these as a reference for your larger paintings. Skies, We can have a variety of skies. You want to look at the colors that are in your sky. Just one over the color palettes. For a dawn or dusk, there's a lot of pinks and blues. You might want to do a wash with a gradient for that on a bright day might just be clear blue or you might have some clouds. You just want to plan out what technique you're going to use for your sky. We'll start with the most simple. Maybe like a bright day at dusk, I'm going to use a flat wash brush. You generally would use for your sky. Depending on the size of your painting. Again, you might want to use a larger brush to fill in the sky just so you can be efficient and get it all filled in before the paint starts to dry out. Let's say we've got a bright day. I'm going to be like selective. I have this color over here, It's called bright blue and it's been one of my favorites to use for skies. But maybe you have like a light blue or just like a different shade. Just use whatever is on your palette. We will all have different pigments and there's no wrong or right one. Sometimes certain pigments are useful in certain situations, but for the most part, just follow your intuition. You can also do swatches. Yeah, I do want to control the saturation of my colors. This, for example, is really a little bit too bright. But remember also the paint dries a little bit lighter, better to go, more vibrant, I think. Then I'm just grabbing some water and I can dilute it. I'm using these long brush strokes horizontally to fill it in. We can create a gradient. Remember that blending technique? We can use that here. Then maybe I'll go in just with some water to get it to fade to the white. A lot of times on the horizon there is like a hint of another color from the atmosphere. I usually like to throw in a little splash of yellow just because gives it a little bit more energy to have that splash of warmth. Or if you've got a dawn or dusk environment, you could use a little bit of pink on the horizon line. Yeah, just going with the pink and then rinsing my brush so I don't get the pigment too saturated or accidentally mixed green. If they collide, you want to have that little bit of white space between them. That's a nice clear day, blue sky day. Then let's try a cloudy dame. Next, I might start at the same way using a little bit of more water. Because we're going to use a lifting technique to create the clouds again, beginning with a wash. Then maybe this time I'll throw in a little bit of pink on that horizon. Okay? And then I'm going to grab my towel and lift up some clouds here, some cloud shapes. What's really the easiest way to make clouds is just lift them up. You can bunch it into like a little corner here so you can get more of that poofy shape of the clouds here. I'm going to let it dry and then we'll add a little bit of shading to the clouds because if we just leave them white and simple, there's not a lot of depth to it. Let's let it dry for a sick. When that initial wash is dry, I'm going to grab like a gray color. One of my favorite combinations is purple and brown, or ultramarine and brown. You get a purple, bluish gray. But it's really a beautiful color. That's ultramarine blue and a dark brown like umber. Or you can do a little bit of purple in there too. Here, I'm going to just line that at the bottom of the clouds here. I lost them in this example. Basically like that. Then I'm rinsing my brush and I'm just going to blend that color out but not all the way to the edge. I still want to maintain some white. A blending technique, but a little bit more texture so we're not going for smooth. Sometimes you can go like a little heavier with the water, just something you have to experiment with there. We've got some little clouds, then you can always go back in to say sky ended up really light like this. You can also just go back in with the wet on dry technique and go around the clouds. Just fill that background area in again, if you feel like you need a little bit more vibrant color here. I'm using that white space trick to paint adjacent to the clouds. You can also let them dry and start painting. Once that's ready here, I'm going to rinse and just blend towards the horizon. Gradual blend and any little touch ups you need to do. Okay, let's do an overcast day. Overcast is really fun because you can just go in with like the wet on, wet, dry, wet. I love to start by just wetting the whole section of sky. I think overcast days are some of my favorite skies to capture. Just because you really get to use the water color advantages of the flow. That same gray that I used, I'll throw that in. Basically, I'm just playing around with different colors. Sometimes you want to, again, just observe your scene and see what you see. There might be a little bit of yellow at the horizon, maybe even some pink. See what other colors are popping up in the clouds there? Pinks and purples, maybe some blues. This is really just the wet on wet technique. Start there then. If there's any areas of sharper contrast, like you see the different layers of the clouds or something like that, then you can let it dry a little bit when just still wet but not totally dry. You can go in with that dry wet technique. Again, loading up the paint when it's more in like a pasty consistency versus watered down. You, wherever you lay down your lines, you'll have soft edges but defined lines. But here you can see the paints just drying and I've got a nice, really super easy overcast sky that looks amazing, in my opinion. Yeah. Really fun to do those cloudy days, sunset and sunrise clouds. Those are probably some of our favorite paintings. Whenever I have a sunset or sunrise painting, like the vibrant colors just always pull the viewers in. There are some different ways you could go about it with like a wet on wet technique and just plop in those more vibrant colors. Again, observation. You want to see what colors you're seeing in there. Maybe pinks and purples and oranges and yellows and super saturated you're using really stirring up that pigment to really get that concentrated color. But I'll show you guys a little technique here. Let's see, we'll start with a little bit of blue, then I'll leave white sections here for the clouds, like pastel, but I'm leaving some white were. I'm going to lay down my yellows for example, but going with that blue sky at the top here, more of a wash, going in very loosely. That was my wash brush I was just using. Then I'm going to switch to my round brush. Going to let this dry a little bit. Don't want to rush it. When this is sufficiently dry, then I can just make sure my brush is real clean. I'm going to start with yellow. For sunsets, the lights coming from the bottom. Basically, the way the clouds are going to go are yellow on the bottom or lighter colors on the bottom. Usually that horizon line will be really bright as well. So we'll throw some color down there. Again, just going in like pretty loosely, creating a lot of layers there with some space in between. Then I'm going to grab some orange next. Get a little more saturation in there that's going just on top of all the yellow sections. Then we'll go into some pink. I do find it better to do this wall the paint as wet so you can have some blending. It gives it a more natural feel. Tend to work quickly, just overlapping. I'm still leaving a little bit of space because we're going to have like a darker color at the end. With the pink, I can start layering over the blue. With the yellow, you can't really get that effect so much, but the pink layers over the blue pretty nicely. Okay, then I'll make that same color I used for the clouds. Like that grayish hue, a little bit of brown, a little bit of purple. That way that shadow is really toned down. And that's going to be at the top of each cloud. We can still leave like a little bit of space between the clouds just so they have some separation. This gray color doesn't like blend into the yellow too much. You still want to make sure you have some vibrancy. That's your basic sunset or sunrise. A variety of different sky conditions here that you can choose from for your painting, different techniques. You could just do a very simple wash. You can add in some clouds with some extra steps. You can do a wet on wet for cool dynamic cloudy sky. You can do a combination of the wet, wet and dry wet to create vibrant clouds as well. Hopefully, that helps with your skies. You can pick and choose from the different techniques depending on what specific scene you're painting. 5. Seas: Now we're going to get into the sea part of our seascapes. I'll show you a couple of different ways that you can paint the water. Main things to note is the reflection of the sky. You're going to usually be using similar colors. If you have a clear blue sky, your water will probably be a clear blue clouds might have some reflection of those purply grayish hues. Of course, the sunset ocean is going to be very similar colors just reflected. But yeah, mainly we just want to get the texture of the water accurately. You could do something simple like a gradient like if it's a really calm, not windy day and you just see the blue gradient. This is also a simpler approach. If you want something that's not too complicated, something you can begin with, we can just do a simple gradient for the water. Usually it's a little darker at the horizon. But again, observation is the most important thing. I'll start with my horizon line here, then doing the wash technique. As I move forward, sometimes the color might change. Maybe I'll throw in a little bit of turquoise in the foreground. You can work with it a little bit shifting colors until it depends on what you're cutting off to. Do you have a sandy beach here or is it just water? You can take it all the way to the bottom edge. If not, then just end there. If you do have your water connecting to a beach down here, you can blend to the white because we've got like that sea foam as a transition. Then I'll get my sand color, which usually I'll mix yellow and pink. But you can also use a yellow ochre. That's the color I usually mix up. Maybe like a little bit of pink in there. Makes a nice sandy color. But yeah, natural hue, you might have a yellow ochre or a light brown. That's really good for sand. I'm going to leave a little bit of white space there that will be like my connection there. Sometimes I might go over the water again. If it dries and it still feels a little bit light, you can do a second layer to brighten the intensity. Also where the water meets the land, You want to help that transition a little bit. It's not just white to the sand color. There's shadows. It's a lot more dynamic than that. I might grab like a purple or gray color. Then on the sand down here, I'll add a little shadow there to see how that changes. Maybe this line could be like wavy to how the water comes in. It's organic, very organic line. Let's see. Once this dries, then you can definitely layer again if you need to, with more color intensity. Then if you just brush along this, eventually the paint gets off your brush and you get a natural blending. But then you can also do the rinse, dry, and brush to really transition to that white. Really important, if you've got waves in your seascape, you always want to save the white for the clouds, for the sea foam. Just take note of that before you start painting. The white of your page is the white in your painting. There's no white watercolor paint. You want to save it? I showed you guys the lifting and scrubbing techniques. It doesn't always get all of the pigment out because sometimes it'll settle deeper into the paper, it'll soak in some colors, even stain the paper. Just really important to plan out where your white ****** are going to be and paint around those areas. You can blend into them, You can leave a hard edge between them and then soften it or whatever you need to do just to save the white. Okay. Then once that sand is dry, then I can jump back into that area. Maybe add like a little more texture or a little more shadow to that sea foam there. Just a little line of darkness right at that edge, which will give it some depth. You can blend it into the white up here. You can blend it into the sand as well. That's like a very simple sea that you can do to create an awesome seascape. And you can shift the colors for whatever your sky calls for. It's always going to be reflecting. This would be a good reflection for a clear day or maybe a cloudy day. For an overcast day, I would use lighter colors, more grays and purples and things like that. For the sunset, I would use same shades of pink and purple and yellow. Okay, then let me show you guys another way to create some texture on your water. Just starting with my blues. This time I might jump around between different colors. Let's see, you're getting intuitive here, not thinking about it too much. We could do the bottom of the sea foam the same way, just blend into the white. I'll also show you guys how to create waves. Okay, and we'll let that dry a couple of minutes after this initial wash has dried. Then I'm going to go in with a second layer to create a little more texture. This is a good technique for maybe when there's like a little bit more texture on the water, say on a windy day perhaps, or if there's some swell in the water. I'm going to grab a variation of colors. Right now, I'm just layering with a similar color that I did my wash with. Then we did our techniques practice in the beginning. Here I'm using that really thin stroke and then going randomly, shorter lines, some longer lines, but all horizontal and very thin brush strokes, Sometimes there's a little overlapping, not going too dark with these colors. Sometimes depending on the sky above and the reflection. Sometimes I'll mix up the colors with the sunset colors. For example, throw in some yellows, greens, oranges, yellows, pinks, whatever is going on in the sky. You can mimic those colors in the foreground. Then as I get to the front, I'm going to gradually fade out. This technique, just using a little bit of water to brush it around. Still doing thinner those horizontal movements with my brush stroke. But spreading it out with water, it fades to the sea foam in the foreground there. Yeah, that's another technique to create a little texture. And then you could spend more time with that too and just overlap, maybe different colors also then where the water meets the sand or whatever other features are there, whether it's rocks or something else. You can just do the same technique. I could do the same thing that I did with this beach, just on the bottom here. Okay. 6. Waves: Okay. Next up I'm going to show you guys a little bit more detail with the water. We're going to go over how to paint sea foam and how to paint waves, because those are pretty big elements in our seascapes. Sometimes if you want to add a focal point of a wave or something like that, it's good to know how to paint that too. I'll begin with sea foam. These two ocean overview demos I presented, I kept the sea foam really simple. We just did that soft gradient. But let me show you another way that I like to paint it. I'll work in the square here. I'll just start going along with my basic seascape, starting with the sand down here. Just to set up my scene. That's where the wave is going to be washing onshore. Start with that and then I'll grab some blue for the ocean and start again with the horizon line back here then. Yeah, you can use either technique, either just that side to side wash or you could do the layering. But let me show you. I'll do just like half of this for now. Then the rest of it, I'm going to do a different transition to the foam. I'm going to use these squiggly strokes, just starting from the top edge here, pulling some of that blue down. And the strokes are going to be more concentrated at the top and then gradually decrease. If you look at a picture of foam, there's a lot of these little holes where you can see the color of the water through. And then the bubbles will be a little bit more concentrated at the very front here where it's washing. But then the bubbles pop as the wave washes. Next time you're at a place with waves, just take a moment to observe them and see how they work. Also, I recommend looking at photos. If you can't get to a beach right this very second, you can also look at some photos and see how just the patterns. That's what helped me figure out this painting technique. Especially when I transition to water color. Because with acrylics I would just use the white paint to paint in the C foam in a very similar motion with that squiggly movement. But with water color you have to work opposite because the white is already there. The white is the page. It's like negative painting almost. Instead of painting the white and the C foam, I'm painting around it. Then sometimes I'll do another layer just to intensify the color. That's like my general operations with water color. I usually won't do just one single layer, maybe on some instances. But for the most part, I like to do multiple layers to really get that richness of color. Okay. It's pretty simple. We just paint in that negative space pretty much. Then the rest of it, I'll do the same as I already showed you here. Adding that shadow under the sea foam and onto the wet sand as well. That'll give it some depth. Can use a purple color or a blue color and then rinse and dry my brush and just blend that line in so it's not so intense. Then I'm also a pretty big fan of the splatter technique as well as adding color. Those are additional details I'll usually add into the foam. One thing I'll do is little splatters on this small scale, it's a little tricky, but I'll grab a pink or purple, just really watered down, So it's a very subtle touch. You can just do a tapping. It's okay if it gets on the sand too, because I think that's one way I like to paint sand that texture. Then either mask and cover the places you don't want to get this splatter on, or you can always lift them up. Lift up the spots that you don't quite like a little bit of splatter. Actually, before you do the splatter, you might want to add some colors. Sometimes the white can be really flat and boring when really, there's like a lot more color and texture. Just to add more to the foam. I'm going to go in here with a stippling motion like a dab, dab, dab with that blue. Then maybe with a little pink, sometimes I'll throw in yellow, just those primary colors. Then I'll rinse, and then I'll just spread those colors out just to get like a nice splotchy effect. You can also do wet on wet. Sometimes I'll just wet the whole C foam area. If there's a bigger area of it, I'll wet most of the sections, maybe leaving some white highlights. And then just plop my colors. And using the wet on wet technique, that's another way to just add a little more energy to what could be very flat white. Then let me show you guys some waves. We'll start with a really simple one. Say we have a seascape like this, ready to go. You could do something as simple as just adding like a thicker dark line color is not quite dark enough, something like that. Just like a dark line across maybe like narrow on one side. And then it peaks up where the wave is going to crest and then tapers back down. Then rinse and dry and blend the bottom edge. Then you can stack your waves. Also, maybe I'll add another little peak back here. It doesn't have to go all the way across. I might just make this one go halfway. And then same thing, the top edge is going to be a hard line. And the bottom edge, you want to blend in to the piece. That's a very simple way to make waves. If you want to do a more detailed wave, like a little bit more focused, usually I will start by sketching it out. It's great if you have a photo or a live wave to work from. Of course, the live wave breaks so quickly. It's a little hard. Photos are good if you can take some yourself or you can look up some reference images as well. We'll sketch off the top of the wave and then will curl down somewhere. But you'll see the top of the wave to the simplest wave that I've seen drawing waves described is you have this top line that curves and then it's a series of C. You'll have a backward C here, the top of a curve for the lip of the wave curling over. Then from here you'll C shapes to get the curl of the wave. When you're painting waves, your brush stroke direction is really important. When we did the flat ocean, we keep our brush strokes horizontal to indicate the flatness of the water with the wave. You're using your brush strokes in that direction to indicate the curl of the water. That makes sense. Okay. We'll have the lip here. Every wave looks different. So just really be observant about those shapes. And then I'll do these squiggly lines for the sea foam breaking over. Make sure you have an eraser handy so you can take out any lines that you don't need. While you're sketching, you don't really need to do all those pencil lines. I wouldn't. I'm just demonstrating so you guys understand what I'm talking about. But you can just sketch in essentially like the top part of your wave and where it curls over maybe like outline some of the foam. So you have it mapped out and you know where your paint is going to go. Then we'll start painting right in the curl here on the top of the wave lip. That's where the colors are going to be lightest. Then it's darker, there's a band of darkness right in the middle. And then it starts to reflect the sky again at the bottom. It goes from light to dark to light again where the light is shining through the water. Then of course the C foam will do similar to how we did it here. I'll begin with the light colors. Sometimes you might have like a little bit of yellow green in there, or maybe it'll be a little bit turquoise. I'll just start with my light color and lay that down here on the lip of the wave. Sometimes there's like some white sea foam washing up into the wave as well. But I'm going to take my water on the brush and just blend that in. I don't have any hard edges just yet then you can go right into your dark color. I'm just making a little mix here. This is where it's going to be dark. Just laying that out and blending it in. This is our base color here. Then we'll go back in with our texture, but I can start adding a little bit of shadow on the sea foam to got some of this color on your brush. Also, you could paint the top of the wave while you're waiting for that to dry. Hint of that turquoise the same color as the curl of the wave. Then we could also do whatever is in the foreground. If it's just water or more sea foam, you can just paint whatever in there. Yeah, usually I'll wait for the paint to completely dry, but you can also play around with like pushing the paint around a little bit while it's wet. Sometimes you could get some cool effects this way. But generally, I'll wait for that to dry or I'll work on other areas of the painting until that is ready. Yeah, I might just like work on the sea foam right now, throwing in a little bit of pink in there for color. Touch of yellow for warmth also makes a nice contrast with all the blues. Then I'd like to get a darker concentrated color. Toss that in on the bottom of the sea foam, so let that just flow. I also want to note if there's any spray behind the wave because you'll get that mist floating back, that'll change the intensity of the color in the background. Just demonstrate if I have a bit of that dark ocean peaking through. I want to paint the mist in. I'll leave like a little white edge there. You can lay your color down and then lift it up while it's wet. Using this brush to lift up that dark color, I just put down and see how it lightens it and creates that really cool effect. That's one way to do it. Or you can also do the negative painting, start with a very light wash and then do a second layer. Just painting around where that mist would be. That makes sense. When that first layer is dry, we can start adding more color here. This part gets a little bit tricky if you find yourself frustrated on the first try. Don't fret. Just keep practicing. And it'll click into place the more you do it. Even for me, Like sometimes it doesn't always quite work out the way I envision it the first time. But it really is more of a marathon, not a sprint, doesn't go. Q Going to grab well, I did grab some more intense turquoise. I'm using like a flicking motion, following that curve that I was describing. Then I'll rinse the pigment off my brush and go into a little bit more blending. It's not super intense, but always using that brush direction that we laid out in the beginning. Those curved shapes here. I'm just going back and forth with those lines. Then if you go in too soon with your darker color, it might spread out and flow into that turquoise color we just did. But you can see it's always different. Every pigment is different. It just depends. You can try it out and see what happens. Sometimes I find that the paint flows too much into the first color, the top color that I did. Then I'll wait a little bit, but if I'm getting like a soft effect where the color is sitting nicely, then I'll just go ahead and do it here. We're doing that dark part of the wave, this brush stroke. I'm just going back and forth my fingers or you could use a little wrist action there. Very small motion. But I find doing this motion with my fingers. Say your hand was like a compass. You could draw a circle. That helps me keep a consistent curve. I'm not trying to be very deliberate with my strokes and like forcing it, but just use the natural curve of your hand motion like this to create a consistent texture here. That's what works best for me. You might find your own technique, just play around with it here. The paints, like getting off my brush. Now I'm moving into a dry brush technique, which you can totally do to create even a little more texture, but that's a basic wave. I would be pretty happy with that. You might want to just define the foam a little bit more where the lip is falling over. Just make sure that's not totally lost. Maybe do it like a little line. I really love to go in with a pencil and add a little outlining. Yeah, I can play around with that. Sometimes where the wave is curling over here. Sometimes I'll do like some little horizontal strokes. There's so many little details. If you start looking at waves, you'll notice all these things even now like I paint waves so much. But even now I'll find a new little things that I can improve on in my paintings. There's a little peeling wave and we've got the sea foam. Lots of good aspects. Next up we'll go over some sand and rocks and that'll tie up our different elements that we could put into a seascape. 7. Rocks: Okay. Go ahead and demonstrate a rocky coast line. So again, I'll preach observation. You really want to look at your piece. But here, I'll just do imagined rocks as an example. Just starting with a sketch of some jagged rocks. If you have rocks in the water, note the tops are going to be the textured section, so a lot of squiggly jagged lines, and the bottoms are usually flat if there's rocks in the water. That's how it's going to be sitting. So we'll do a couple layers here. Into a little pool of water. Yeah, I'll just do the rocks because we already went over the sand. Pretty straightforward. I'll usually just do a wash of a single color. Of course, the color depends on the sky. Again, because the wet sand here is going to be reflected. You might need to reflect those sunset colors or some grays, whatever is going on in the sky, we'll reflect in the wet sand and also just take note of that shading and maybe creating a little texture. All depends on your piece. You can play around and figure out different techniques. But the rocks are pretty unique. From here, we can start with some water. Let me mix my color up. And we'll do a little horizon line again. Then I'm going to just carefully paint around these rocks. It's okay if you go over a little bit because we'll kind of cover them up with a darker color anyway. But I'm here just using water to kind of pull that down. Actually, there would usually be a little bit of sea foam around the rocks because when the water is constantly moving. So there would be some white space like around the rocks, mostly just on the bottom of the rocks, bottom and sides. Just include that little detail. Then down here, I might just go into that sea foam effect I showed you guys after the waters crashed in a little bit. Maybe for imagine scene, a little bit of turquoise in here, tide pool comes in. So sea foam coming in to Okay. So, starting with the background, then we will work our way for. Just kind of touching up around this area. Definitely, you know, slow down, take your time. I myself tend to rush through paintings often and, you know, it shows when you rush, take your time to slow down. Get all the details. We'll give that a moment to dry and then we'll work on the rocks. In the meantime, you can also work on some blending. Here I've rinsed and dried in my brush and I'm going to just hone in on those sea foam areas that would be around the rocks. I would like to soften them a little bit and maybe lift up some more of the paint because I really just jumped right into it for this demo. But if you plan on ahead, you can just save that white space for the waves coming in. Okay. For our rocks, you can have different colors and light and shadow depending on the lighting, say if you have an overcast or cloudy day, the lighting might be a little bit more. You wouldn't have such harsh contrast between the highlights and shadows. But for example, on a sunny day. You would probably have almost some white highlights on the rocks to some really dark darks, like almost black, a lot more contrast where depending on where the sun is hitting it and where the shadows are. And so you have a sunset going on in the sky, then it's going to be more backlit. So really, the entire rock will be pretty dark. Um, And there will be a little edge of light. And in that situation, I might stick to my complimentary colors. So you have a yellow highlight on the edge and purples and blues, you know, warm and cool colors, just to enhance that contrast. So aside from just using the value, how dark or light the color is, you can also use color to create contrast. So keep that in mind, depending on the lighting conditions, that's going to affect all the other elements in your scene. So I think we're dry enough. Here I'll just show you a basic way and then you can adjust depending on the lighting conditions. I'm going to begin with a wash. I'll mix up we'll find a neutral medium brown color, maybe a little bit on the yellowish side. Of course, it depends because rocks common all different colors. I'm going to use just a little bit of white space on the edge on the top edge just to create a highlight. Then where it's overlapping, I'm just going to edge in here pretty close, and I'll let the layers dry in between. Then I'm going to do a wet on wet technique. Here, I'm going to grab some purples, blues, maybe different shades of brown and just plop that in for a very simple yet effective technique. We shod be able to get some cool textures. I throw in some purple at first, then some of that yellowish brown, and then a little bit of dark brown as well. Then I'll just let that flow and dry and move on to the next rock using the same technique. Then also, the rocks tend to be on the bottom edge, can even go in with some gray or in this situation. At the bottom, the rocks are going to be wet and there might be some muscles and things, so we can just plop some of those darker colors on too. Then I can move on to the next one in the foreground. If you find any places that are puddling too much, you can always go in and lift up the black really took over on this one. Just using a dry brush to lift up. That's cool because I think any technique you go in with, you might get accidental effects. That are quite effective for rocks because they do have so much texture. The more texture, the better, really. Here I lifted that up and created some more splotchy areas, which I think looks great and created more of a highlight on the tops of the rocks. So really like that, what happened there? Then I'll go in and do this rock. But at this edge because the paint is still wet, I'm going to leave that millimeter of white space just to separate the rocks and also keep them from merging into one shape. Then the same thing going in with that wet on wet technique, rinsing my brush in between colors, hardly ever use black or gray really, but in this situation, it's pretty nice to have Just let your paint guide you. Again, all the pigments have their own personalities. You can just see what the paint does. Another really important thing if you've got rocks in the water like this is reflections. The way to really pull the scene and make it realistic is to add the reflection of the rock. I'm going to use the same general brown tone, and we're leaving a little bit of space for that white foam, but then I'll just do these horizontal lines indicating the reflection of the rock. Okay. And I might throw in, like, do like a tiny bit of wet on wet in there. So throw in a little bit of extra brown. Okay. Or dark brown or just to match the color as best as I can. I'm not making it all one solid block. I'm leaving some of that blue showing through in between the reflection, so we know that it is still water and then doing my best to mirror that as well. You would use the same technique if you have sea cliffs or bluffs in your scene. So say this was a really large scale. Imagine these are big old cliffs and you're viewing this from way above or really far away. I would use the same technique, use that wet on wet method to create the rocks and then do the reflection underneath. Um, and my area, we do have a lot of bluffy areas like that where it's not just beaches, there are sheer cliffs going into the water too. That comes up a lot and I would do it exactly the same way. Maybe you might have some trees up top, which I'll demonstrate right now as well. If I have, if this is more of a far away scene, I could add some little trees for scale. Just sitting on the rock. And I'm just okay to layer it over the water color. I mean the color of the ocean. So that totally change we went from small rocks to cliffs. Large cliffs, pretty fun. Okay. Can kind of go back in and mess around with them a little bit, lifting up some of the paint. Some other things you can play around with is dry brushing. So maybe later on after it dries, you can go in with some textural strokes using an intense color like that dry brushing I showed you, and you can create kind if there's angles and fractures in the rock, you can kind do a cross hatching motion like that with the dry brushing, can do that with any of the colors that we used for the wet on wet. That'll just add a little bit more just a little bit more texture and interest, so you can play around with that technique. Yeah, we got our rocks and bluffs and sand and skies and water, pretty much all of our elements together. Okay. Um, I encourage you guys to practice these techniques, and then put it all together. Maybe you have a favorite seascape photo or several favorites. You can choose one to start the simpler, the easier. If you're newer to watercolor, you can choose something simple that's maybe just water and sky and practice with that first. Then as you get the techniques down, you can find images that have more elements, like rocks and waves and clouds and things like that. Take it in your own direction, whatever level you're at, whatever you're comfortable with. And of course, I would love to see your painting so make sure you send it to me or share it on social media, Facebook, Instagram, and TagmamFollo on art. And yeah, I'd love to share. Also, if you have any questions at all, you can also reach out and let me know if you want to send me a photo of your painting, had any issues or anything. Just let me know and I'm happy to give you specific advice or talk through any helpful techniques that could help you achieve the visual that you are after. But yeah, thank you so much for watching and enjoy painting sscpes. We'll see you soon in the next class. Okay.