Sky Painting Techniques; Watercolor Landscape Workshop

1. Class Intro: Welcome to the enchanting world of watercolor landscapes. Where the sky is the canvas of your dreams. Get ready to embark on a mesmerizing journey through the ever changing skies as we dive into the first part of this ongoing watercolor course. In this beginner friendly class, I will take you by the hand and guide you through the art of painting, breathtaking skies that will elevate your landscape paintings to new heights from the moment you dip your brush into the shimmering palette of colors to the final strokes of mastery. This class is designed to be your trusted companion. I'll start at the very beginning, ensuring that you feel at ease as you learn foundational sky painting techniques. As we progress together, I'll unveil more advanced methods, empowering you to create skies that are alive with depth, drama, and emotion. But that's not all. I believe that learning from the masters is a vital part of your artistic growth. That's why this course proudly presents a captivating look at the work of the greats. Allowing you to witness firsthand how these timeless techniques were wielded in their awe inspiring watercolor landscape paintings. Fellow art adventurer, are you ready to infuse your landscape paintings with the balanced beauty of the sky? Join me and unleash your creativity as we paint our way to confident captivating watercolor landscapes together. 2. Materials: Before we dive in, let's look at materials. As I mentioned in the introduction video, you don't have to have every single color I have. You don't have to have the same brushes. I'm simply doing this to share my thoughts on materials, the things I will be using. That way, if you have questions about some of these colors and brushes and paper, hopefully this video will answer it. And then of course, along the way, if you feel like some of the materials I'm using may benefit you, then of course, you can always purchase them at your own convenience, but you do not have to have all of these things to get started. Okay, now let's talk about paper. I'm going to be using 140 pound cold pressed paper. It's not as heavy as, let's say, a 300 pounds paper. 140 pounds is heavy enough, however, to do all of the studies and paintings we'll be doing in this class. It's also the same paper I use all the time for all of my watercolor painting. Some artists prefer a heavier paper, like a 300 pounds paper. But for me, that's just a little bit of an overkill, and I just simply don't need anything that thick. One advantage of thicker, heavier paper, however, is that it doesn't really buckle as much as thinner paper. But again, I will be using 140 pound cold pressed paper. I buy full sheets, 22 by 30. I then fold that in half to get 215 by 22 inch pieces. And I fold those in half again, and I end up with pieces that are about 11 by 15 ". So that's the size of this paper right here. So that is 15 by 11 ". And I will use this size for most of my work. As we get into the course, the ideas and lessons we'll start to combine and we'll do more finished work. And that's the size I will be using now. In the beginning, I'm going to be covering skies and different elements, smaller components of the landscape. For that I'm using ten by 13 ". That's large enough to do a good study, but not so big that we're having to use a lot of paper to get it done. Again, this is 13 by 10 ". I will use this for again, like the skies, maybe, elements like rocks and trees. When we're doing just kind of individual stuff. And then when we start putting together more complete landscapes, I will bump it up to the 11 by 15. Okay, so cold press paper, I think works pretty good for landscapes. It has a little bit of texture to it, which is nice rough press, which is another common paper and surface that has a little more texture then the cold press. And that may work for some of you, but I find the cold press gives me that happy medium. So it's got some texture but not too much. There is another surface is hot press and that's very, very smooth typically. That's used for high detail sort of work, portraits, things of that nature, and I will not be using that in this class. As far as watercolor paint, I use hole buying. That's the brand I prefer. Very soft and buttery, very good selection. I've always been very satisfied with it and I've used it since I've started watercolor back in the year 2000. As far as my hues, I'm going to go over those. I don't use a lot of them. It's a limited palette and it helps me pretty much get any sort of color I need or ever could imagine. My palette consists of a lizard and crimson cad, red light, burnt sienna cad, yellow, pale yellow ochre, cobalt turquoise, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue, and then umber. Now not pictured here, which would normally go in one of these pails or pans right here is neutral tent, so that's sort of a gray. Some folks like panes gray. But I've always liked neutral tent. I may use some of that later on in the class, but for now I won't need it for the first section or so. Now my palette is a John Pike palette. It gives me a large mixing area. So as you can see, once I remove the water, I've got all the surface to mix. I even had these smaller areas here that I don't have pain in. If I needed a small wash, I could use those as well. But a good large mixing area is beneficial because you can mix up a large wash. Even if you need two small washes, you can do those side by side and still have plenty of room. The next thing I will cover is brushes. I will first start with my sort of go to brush. This is a number ten pointed round, It's by silver. This is the golden natural series. Again, a number ten, it gets to a pretty good point, which is fine. So if I needed to do a little bit of detail work, it can get the job done. I also have a few specialty brushes. This is a sword brush, so as you can see by the tip, the bristles, it's got a distinct shape to it, similar to a sword. This is my larger one. This is a two inch And then I have a smaller one which is by silver as well. This is a golden natural. This is a four inch. These are great for doing line work, detail work. I'll use this a lot when we get into grasses, trees, and rocks, so very good brushes to have. This is my small number, six pointed round, a little bit smaller than the initial one plus it I showed you. Plus it gets to a little bit finer point again. Princeton, Neptune number six pointed round. I will know that these brushes are very cost effective, so you don't have to spend a fortune on a brush for ten or $15 You can get a really good brush. Most of these are natural and synthetic, so they're a blend. But I've had these for multiple years and they're still brand new. They come to a really good point and they work great. Just as good as the more expensive brushes. The last brush I'll show you is my quill. This is a number eight Princeton Neptune. This can put down a large wash. You know, it's got a large belly to it. I have one that's actually bigger than this, but the number eight is fine. It works really well for the size art that we're going to create in this class. If I were working on a larger scale, then I would break out my larger brush. Actually, I have one more brush to show you and then I'm going to show you a not so traditional brush that I'll use as well in this class. This is a Motler, this is a one, a two inch. As you can see, it's very square. We've got more of a geometric end and bristle to it shape. But this is really good for putting out a large amount of wash and hue. It's really good for painting a lot of landscape elements as well. But I really like this brush. I don't use it probably as often as I should. I'm going to be using it in this class. So again, that's an inch and a half Princeton Neptune Motler brush. The last one is an acrylic brush, so these are synthetic bristles, very firm. If you have an oil painting brush, something similar to this, you can use that as well. But these really hard firm bristles are good for adding texture and certain details and effects that are great for landscape painting. I will be using this as well. This is a royal and laying nickel acrylic brush. A flat or a square. And I think this is a number 12. That's pretty much it for my brushes. The last thing is just a pencil. This is a two B pencil. So I will use that for obvious reasons, and that's to put out my drawings and things like that on my palette. I will keep my two water reservoirs. I've got one to wash my brush with to remove paint, and then I try to keep one of them for just clean, pure water. Over the course of three or four demos will start to get contaminated. So I will change both of them, but if this one starts to get contaminated, be sure to change it. You want to have one reservoir that's always very, very clean, pure water, that doesn't contaminate the colors you're trying to mix. I do have some rags here. These are very important. I'm going to go over this in the next lesson, but I keep a few of these rags. I get these a Home Depot, They're very cheap, but I can take them and fold them up, and I, and I put that right by my water reservoir for reasons I will share in the next lesson. The other things I will share with you here will be paper towels. We'll be blotting out clouds and different things. Plus you may want to have this just for a little bit of clean up. And lastly, this is a board is actually a piece of Gator board I've had forever, kind of thick, very sturdy. And I put this white piece of paper over it, just so you guys don't have to stare at how gross this is. Again, I've had this since the year 2010, since I started painting. But this gives me a really firm surface to paint on. I can put my art on it. And the paper you don't necessarily need, again, I just do that for aesthetics. You guys, again, don't have to look at that board, then I keep my board at an angle. This angle keeps all the water heading downhill. If you paint on a flat surface like this without it being angled, then what happens is the water will start to puddle up different areas of your paper that's undesirable because that can create backwash, ballooning things that you may not want in your artwork. Again, if you don't have a little level like this, a little three foot level, you can get a two by four roll of masking tape. Anything to keep it propped up? You definitely want to consider that a little Mr. bottle we may use. Mainly use it to keep my paints from drying up under the bright lights here. And lastly is some masking tape. You may want to tape your paper down on the corners. Some artist will take the tape and tape around all the edges of the painting. That's up to you. I don't use this a lot. If I use it, it's just to tape the corners and to keep the paper relatively flat while I'm painting. Okay, that's it for my materials. And the next lesson I'm going to go over my set up, why I have it this way, and then show you a really good tip, a very important tip I should say, about your water and managing water. Okay. 3. Finger Test: Welcome back. Last lesson, before we get into our skies, I wanted to take a moment to talk about mixing paint. And one of the common issues we all deal with, with watercolor painting and that's water. Okay, I've given you the tip about having this towel here in the previous lesson. Now let's look at the two paint mixtures that we're going to use the most. That's going to be thin or watered down paint. I refer to that as T then thicker paint, which is in between milk and honey. There's a little finger test you can do. Let's say I want to mix a little bit of blue here. Actually I'll just do a lizard and crimson and a little bit of my brown. I want this to be fairly thin. A good test you can do is to run your finger through the paint. What happens if you had the right amount of water? Is this going to automatically back run where you drag your finger through the palette? I'm going to move this over so you can get a little bit better shot of that again. Let's say I want a very thin mixture of paint here. I want it, okay, Something like that. Now, the finger test is this. When I run my finger through that paint, again, you're not going to see the palette because there's so much water there that it runs back into that groove. And that's going to give me a fairly pale wash. Now, conversely, I'll leave this over here so we can get a good angle at it. If I wanted a thicker paint, and this will be style number two. I can mix a little bit of paint in there. I'll go a little bit more. Okay, So we'll get something like this going now. As I run my finger through it, okay? It doesn't backfill as much. So where I rub my finger on the palette, it tends to stay open like that. That finger test is a really good test to do. If you're trying to do a thin wash and you want to be very transparent, then obviously, if you just did a little finger test, then that would tell you that's wrong. Now, you can use the tip of your brush too, but that doesn't really work as effectively. The little finger test is good. You can clean it off if you want over time. You're not going to have to do that because you want to start to get familiar with the paint. You can tell the way it's responding on the palette, if that's thin or if that's really thick. Okay, as I put that thicker paint down, that's going to be more opaque, less transparent. Then I can say, okay, well I need something a little bit thinner for the next round. Then I can start to see how that is moving across the palette that's going to be very thin and transparent and maybe more of what I need. The two types of paint we're going to be using, the two types of mixes, I should say. One again is very water down thin, the other is thicker. The little finger test is something that may help you determine if you've got the right mix on your palette. Obviously we can go thicker. You can go with a damp brush and very little water at all, and get these really very opaque strokes down. I use that once in a while for highlights and details and finishing touches, but I don't use it very often. It's either a very thin, transparent wash, we start going a little bit thicker into that milk and honey zone to get either more color, or we simply just need to go a little bit thicker so we get maybe a little more intensity out of our wash. Okay, hopefully is a good tip about your paint and that'll help you as we move forward. 4. Simple Gradated Sky with Watercolors: All right, welcome to the first sky, and I'm going to lay out a rectangle here. I'll leave a little space on the side over here just to test my colors for the demo, because we're going to focus on sky. I want the majority of it, sky. And I'm going to move this horizon line way down here. Okay, for this one, I'll use my motlar brush for no other reason than it can put a lot of pigment down. This will be a very simple painting, we're going to build upon it, though things are going to move pretty quick. But starting with a very basic sky, very basic technique is the way to go. And then of course, each time we do a sky, it'll get a little more challenging. A little bit of water there just to soak the sky area. I left the land dry. Okay, so I didn't wet all of this down here. Now, I'll clean my brush. Give it a tap. Tap, a little bit of water down here. Just a little bit. Then I'll take a little bit of my cerulean blue. I want this fairly weak. Okay, clean my brush. Get into the fresh water, maybe a little more water. And remember, you got to go a little bit darker than what you want. Okay. So finger test tells you there is water, but it's not real soupy. Okay? Because if it was real soupy, that would backfill pretty quick. Now, I'll start at the top and go nice and smooth. Don't go too fast or you may get the roughness of the paper. Okay? If you go fast, it won't spread it as evenly. I can go up and down if I want, for this one. It's not going to hurt it a whole lot. Now, I'm going to go a little bit more paint into this. No water though. Then I'll start at the top and work my way down. Maybe once I get down towards the bottom there, I'll back off of it. And a little more paint, I'll go a little bit darker towards the top again, letting that stop towards the middle of the sky area. And a little more paint here that's a gradated wash. What we have is a sky that's going to be a little bit towards the top than it is at the bottom. We did that basically with using less water. So we pre wet the paper. I use a little bit of clean water to start with. Added some paint to it, got a pretty thin mixture and then put it down, applied it to the whole space. Then added a little more paint, did just the top area, and then repeated that process. Okay? And that's going to give you this result. It's not going to look the same. If I did the same gradated wash on the same paper, with the same brush and the same paint. It's not going to look the same the next time. It'll be similar, but it's not going to be a perfect match. That's water color. You're dealing with a wet and wet surface. Okay, wet paint, wet paper, wet brush. It's hard to get the exact same. Now, for the sake of just finishing the piece here, I'm going to use a little bit of yellow ochre. I'll apply that to the ground area here. It's okay if it bleeds, so we can touch that blue area a little bit and that's fine. Now if I wanted to get a subtle gradation like I did in the sky, I actually turn this upside down, I can take a little bit of this burnt sienna and just run it right along. The bottom there. Okay? And then I'll give it a subtle gradation. Now, I want to add just some small trees in there just so we can the first demo. And every demo we do pretty much has a painting to it. And then that way you can see your progress and have something to show for your work. Again, the colors, cerulean blue. And then I just simply added a little more paint to the top of that. Okay, so just something like that. And then I used a little bit of our yellow ochre and then a little bit of burnt sienna into that. Now, I could have used a little more ochre too. That's what we have. I'm going to take a dryer to this, a hair dryer, and get this dry. And then I'll just finish it off real quick with a few trees fairly dry. I didn't really dry it up here, just really where the sky meets the land. I'm going to use my small point around. This is my number six Princeton, Neptune. I can just take what colors are here is fine. It's basically a little bit of brownish yellow, with a little bit of blue. Now I'm going to add a little bit of turquoise to that. If you don't have cobalt turquoise, you can use a little bit of cerulean, that's fine. A little bit of yellow ochre, that'll give me a pale green. The finger test says that's soupy. But it's still got a little bit to it. It can go a little more water if I wanted to, but I don't. I want it to be a little bit thicker, so I'm going to add a little more paint to this. Maybe even a touch of this Cad yellow pail. Get all that excess water off. Okay, very important. Load the brush up, Then we can come in here and then add a few strokes here just to suggest some trees, a little bit of vertical interest, Something like that. Now, I don't want the trees to be very big, though. It knows how small all of these trees are. That gives the sky a sense of scale. It makes it look a little bit bigger. This may be something in there. All right. Now I'll take a little bit of my ultra marine into this. I can touch just dots. That's all I'm doing is just adding a few dots into those trees. I can take a little bit of my ochre now into this, so we get this brown color and we'll do the same thing. We're just, again, adding a little bit of interest to this. Maybe I'll put a slightly bigger one back in there. I can even take a little bit of my ultra blue into this. I'm just getting a little bit darker color here. Maybe add a little bit of sienna to it. Maybe we'll add a few cast shadows. So some of these are taller and they're just getting this thing here. I'll take some of this burnt umber. This is umber rather, just raw umber. A little bit of blue. A little bit of my yellow ochre. Again, just playing with a few dots to finish it off. There you go. A lot of those greens were just made with the blues and the yellows I had on my palette. Okay, so we've got the greens. And then in that I just played with the same idea of working wet into wet. I dropped some yellow ochres, some umber and burnt siennas, and to get that look of just some distant trees. Okay, keep it simple. The goal here isn't to really paint a finished piece, but it's just to start small with this gradated sky and then we'll build upon that. 5. Gradated Sky with Cumulous Clouds: All right, we're going to build upon that simple gradated sky. Again, I'll leave a little area here for my swatches. Again, a very low horizon. Okay. We're going to focus on skies. I'm going to switch brushes, so I'll go with a quill, something bigger and not so square. My number eight, I'll clean it off really good. Give it a tap and do it a few times. I haven't used this brush today. Then some fresh water down there. I'll start with Sullan, very weak, and then I'm going to do a gradation. But this time we're going to do some other techniques there that are going to create this cloudy day effect. Not too cloudy, maybe light fluffy cotton balls or something there floating in the sky, maybe a little more water. You can go left to right here, up and down. You can turn your paper, maybe towards a light source and see if you've got everything covered. We don't want it uneven. You don't want to puddle up anywhere, is try to smooth it out. If you have good paper, it shouldn't be a problem to go back and forth. If it's cheaper paper, you may find that start to break your paper apart a little bit, so the surface will get a little bit fuzzy. Now, I'll use again, cerulean, little more water here, and then a little more paint. The finger test tells you, yes, it's got water but it's not too soupy and that's what I want. Okay, Something like this will work just fine. All right. So I can work left to right. I mentioned earlier that you can go up and down too, but obviously if you're doing a sky, you want it to be darker up top, then you want to work horizontal, left to right to left is fine. I just said that just because I knew I was doing a first wash. And then I would come over it and do a second one. And then I would work that second one left to right and that would give it a gradation where it's darker up top and lighter at the bottom. I just want to clarify that just to make sure there was no confusion. Now you'll see that sometimes it's streaky. So you can see these horizontal streaks in there. That's normal because my board is at an angle. Because it's all wet, it's going to smooth out, it'll even itself out as it dries. Now I want to fairly dark towards the top again. Instead of using the same color, I'll switch to ultramarine blue. Maybe a little more cerulean. A little bit thicker paint. A little bit thicker paint. I'm going to again, add that darker blue towards the top, working left to right. As I get towards the bottom, I'll just let that bleed into each other. Again, you'll see a distinct line now, but again, gravity water fusing colors, bleeding, that's going to look just fine. While this is drying, I'm going to just add a little bit of land there. I'll just come over here on the right hand side of my palette. A little bit of ochre. To start, I could do green too, but I think this will be just fine now. I'll do the same colors for now. Because again, it's not really about the land at this point anyway. But I just want to give you guys nice complete painting here that you can have for your studies, just a little more sienna maybe at the bottom. I can streak that across the land in a few places too. Okay? Paper towels. You can use tissues, toilet paper. The main thing is, don't use a paper that has lotion on it. Lotion sometimes can be oil based. And that oil isn't going to mix very good with your water color. Just make sure it's like non scented and that sort of thing. I'm going to make sure it's clean so I've got a little bit of color there, but it's not going to hurt. Then I'll ball it up and get this roundish looking shape. Now what you don't want to do is a bunch of dots, so they're all the same size, same shape. The idea is you'll hit the paper and then drag it a little bit and then do different sizes and things like that. Hopefully, I will illustrate that as I get into it. You see just dabbing, right? Maybe in the distance the clouds get a little bit smaller. Okay, They're further away from us. And then maybe I can do a nice big one in here. Okay, So just a few cumulus clouds there, and that's a nice look. Now what we can do is build upon that a little bit, okay? Clouds are three dimensional, I think sometimes they get thought of as they don't have any form to them. But let's say for example, our sun is up in the sky and we had these clouds that are floating below it. Clouds are basically the cubes, different shapes. They may be, they have this, they may be small. If they're in the distance they may be really tall. Okay. But as the sun hits the top of them or the fronts, or the sides or whatever, they, they get, they're lighter. Okay. So they, they're whiter up here. Then underneath, they have sort of a shadow right like that. So underneath this, that shadow is because again, the light source is hitting the top of the cloud or the front of the cloud or whatever where the sun is in the sky. Sometimes if you have a low sun and it's a sunset, then the color is hitting underneath the clouds. The shadows and all that will be up top. But in this case, the sun's high in the sky, our shadows are underneath. These things have volume. As the sun hits these guys, this is our land. The clouds will actually cast a shadow on the ground. Okay? Or the water or whatever the surface may be. So that tells you they have volume. That's sort of what we're doing here with this exercise. I'm going to switch to my small round here and I'm going to get sort of a bluey gray here. I'll take a little bit of my sienna into these blues and that'll be fun. That's like all the color. I mean, I'll create this grayish underbelly for the clouds now as things go away from us. Okay? As clouds get in the distance there and they move further and further away from us, they're going to get lighter in value. Okay? Things that are closer to us are darker in value. I'm just going to soften some of these edges. I did is I applied the color, I went in, I clean my brush, get clean water, get all that excess water off, and then you can soften those edges a little bit. Now, I'm going to take a little bit of this water and dilute this. We've got really soupy water mixture here. Then the distance, this color is going to be a little bit weaker. Okay? These are further away from us in nature. That's going to make it lighter in value. Okay? Now I can take a little bit of my Umber, a little bit of blue, a little bit of Sienna. Actually, that was a lizard and Crimson, that was bad. Let me try that again. Sienna Blumer. I'm going to mix something that's a little bit thicker. We can do some of this in here as well. Okay, Just on the clouds that are closer to us. Okay, So that again, gives an illusion of depth in the landscape. Connect those a little bit. That is a simple way to add those cumulus clouds that gather in the sky. And what we'll do in the next lesson is build upon that and we're going to do this layered effect. Okay, But before we break away here, let's talk about colors. For the gradated wash, I used a little bit of this cerulean blue. Okay, that's probably a little too strong, so I'll add a little bit of water there. And then I added a little bit of ultramarine blue to that wash. Okay, we got that layered look. Then we use our paper towel to lift. I added a little bit of burnt sienna to those blues. That's going to gray it out. Okay, that will give us this gray and created the clouds. Then for the land, we did a little bit of ochre. I added some sienna for gradation. Then I went back into it with a little bit of umber, a little bit of sienna, a little bit darker, and enhance those shadows a little bit. Now I'm going to take a drier this and just to finish it off, we'll add a few trees. I'll use my pointed round here. If you start to get these hard edges like this, you can blot it out a little bit. I just don't go into it too much. There's another little hard edge again. Take that napkin and blot it. If it's dry, you're not going to get it, but it's no big deal. It's still a nice cloud, it gets the point across. And what you're trying to say, a little bit of turquoise. If you don't have turquoise, again, you can use cerulean, a little bit of cad, yellow, pale, a little bit of ochre in there. The ochre has a little bit of red in it and it'll muddy up the greens a little bit. I'll do a ultra marine in there as well. Maybe a little more of this yellow to punch The green finger test tells you that's pretty thick. Probably the thickest paint we've used so far for this demo. Again, we're going to do just some trees in here just to cap it off. I'll mix a little bit of these reds in there, that's fine. Maybe we got a taller tree here, something like that. I'll touch some of those colors in just a few other areas, and then we'll get these yellowy colors just to indicate a little variety in there. I'll take some of these grays that are on the palette, maybe add a little bit of blue to it just to cool it off. Finger test tells you that's pretty weak and that's what we're after, we can do again, the real simple shadows along the landscape there. Something like that. Again, we're getting that a little bit different feeling, a little bit fluffier clouds there and it all started with the gradation. A simple gradation. Cloth towel, whatever napkin, paper, towel, blot out your clouds, add a little bit of gray underneath. We know why that happens now. Right, That's the deal. Make sure as you go back in space the color gets a little bit weaker. Right? A little bit lighter in value. I'll just take a little bit of water and dilute that. We can add just some grays here and connect them, even there you go. A nice simple way to create this fluffy cloud day. That's the best I got. This is the only description I can come up with right now. Hopefully it's something again we can build upon in the next lesson and add a little bit more complex complexity to our scene. 6. Layered Gradated Sky: Okay, so a multi layered cloudy sky. Again, building upon our previous lesson, we'll pre wet all of this. I'll actually just take that water right down into the land here. Shouldn't hurt anything back and forth, up and down. Okay, so with the sky, a gradation, so we'll keep it the same theme here. A little bit of turquoise in this one. If I did the finger test, very weak and that's good. Start bringing this down, get to our land clean, my brush, get that excess of, maybe even touch, a little bit of ultramarine. Now, a little gradation here, you can see it starting to pull up a little bit in that corner. That's fine. I don't freak out about stuff like that. Again, we're not perfect. Humans aren't perfect, I should say. The medium is not perfect. And that's going to happen. Now while that's setting up there, I'll add a little land, just a fairly weak ocher here. Just running that across there, obviously because I wet it, everything here. That's going to do some bleeding and it's not going to hurt us. It's not a big deal. Now, I'll take a little bit of Siena into this and just touch it in a few places like that. Flip it back over and get my brush clean. I'll remove some of this. Take the paper towel here, we're going to dot out some clouds. Same technique. Remember, don't do a bunch of clouds that are all the same. Don't do same sizes, try to keep the cloud formations interesting and maybe even one in the distance there. That'll be good. I don't think it needs to be much more than that. While it's wet, I'll go ahead and add a little bit of gray. I'll mix that using Sienna, ultramarine, fairly weak, maybe a little more blue into that. It's not too gray because we used a paper towel on this. It's going to be dry but just your brush, but remove that excess water. Very important that you do that or you're going to be, sorry you didn't. A little more water on my brush just to make this gray a little bit weaker. And maybe something like that. Again, just a few touch of white in there. Something like that I think will work good. Remove that hard edge. Now I've got to let things set up a little bit. I want this to dry 100% Then I'm going to come back with another layer of clouds moving in towards the middle and distance. I'll take a hair dryer to this and I'll be right back. All right, nice and dry, I will just use my quill on this next set up here. Lots of blue, maybe even some cerulean touch of a lizarin. I made a mistake last night of leaving the lid off. My water colors, things have dried up a little bit but they're not so dry that I have to completely toss them in the trash bin. I'll just have to keep softening them until they loosen up. All right. That's very violet. Before I forget, I always forget to do this with the gradation in the sky that was a little bit of cerulean and a little bit of turquoise. Now blotted out some of those, We added some gray for the clouds. The land mass was a little bit of yellow ochre and a little bit of sienna. Now the sky is going to be this violet color. That's my main base, but I'm going to add a little bit of umber to that just to remove some of that intensity. I don't want it to be so violet that it looks too happy. Okay. That's all I can come up with there. What I mean by that is it's basically gray clouds, stormy situation. Now, I'm going to wet it right in here. Don't go too close. I'll come back something like that. Now, I'm not going to disturb it. I don't want to get in the air and start moving that around because that could easily agitate the wash underneath. I don't want to do that. Let's just do it like this. We'll turn it in this angle just so we throw our vision off. Sometimes when we look at things upright all the time, then we get this predictable result. I don't want to do that. Finger test tells you that's fairly thick now. Don't go too far up in the sky. Okay, we want to keep this in here. Moving into the scene. Here we've got this cloudy, stormy situation that creates some excitement. We don't really know. It's just mess it up a little bit. Get a little wispy action with your brush, but you don't go too far with it either. That's pretty good. I'm going to remove all that paint. Just a damp brush now. And just a little bit of this in here just to create a little more movement and a little more dimension in the cloud. I'll take my small pointed round again, can remove the excess and soften a few of these edges. Okay, so that does a pretty good job there. No, this is going to dry a little bit lighter and what I will do is let it completely dry and then I'll come back and do one more layer for the land. I'll hit it with a hair dryer and then I'll be right back. All right. I'm not sure if the camera will pick up on it, but it's noticeably dark, lighter in value. Now, that's what you have to anticipate with water color. I think the mistake is to mix and put down a color that you need. And you say, oh yeah, that's perfect. Then by the time you put it down and it dries, it's not perfect. It dries too light. Now, just a nice thick mixture here. Of green and I'll do some. We'll just a little bit in here, we don't want to, again, do things that are too big, Keep it fairly small. I'll go a little bit darker here, maybe I'll do a little bit taller. Bush or tree or something there. Something like that is good for that land. We did a lot of the violets that were already there. I'll mix in a little bit of these ochs, give it a little variety in there. And maybe we'll throw a little bit of blue in there. And we'll maybe do a few shadows, something like that. Maybe do a little splash in there, so I can get a really dark green here, a little ocher, something like that. Yeah, a really nice effect. I think multiple layers, obviously. A little more challenging than what we've done, but that's what we're going to do in this class. The idea of whatever it is we're focusing on is going to start out fairly simple. Then little by little, we make it more challenging, and that's what we want to do. I can even lift a little bit of that. Maybe let's try something here. That's all. I don't want to get too fancy. This is all about the sky, multiple layers, building upon a simple gradation, blotting for white clouds, a little bit of gray underneath those bellies to give it that dimension. Letting a little squirt there just to make sure we don't go back on a complete dry surface. That's going to give you areas of the paper that are wet. Some areas will be dry because this is not going to cover everything is going to splatter on the paper. And that's fine. I didn't spread it though because I didn't want to disrupt the wash underneath. Just because the water color is dry, this paint was dry, doesn't mean you can't disturb it because you certainly can. Then we put that down, we lifted some light areas in there, let it dry, and then came back and added the illusion of a landscape. 7. Negative Space Sky: All right, cracking forward here again. Adding more and more techniques, different ideas to the sky. This one is going to involve some negative space painting. For those of you that don't know what that is, let's say I tell you I have a square that's on the paper. You'll say, well, I don't really see a square on the paper. And I would say, well, yeah, I guess you're right. What I can do to help with that idea is take my paint, brush and paint around the square. Okay, so negative space painting is painting around something versus painting the interior of whatever the shape or object that may be. That is negative space painting for you. I will use my Quill brush for this one. Again, we want to wet the paper. We don't want to over wet it because then that's just going to slow down the process. We have to sit there, twiddle our thumbs, or we have to break out a hair dryer or something like that to get it going. And I'm not that patient. Just enough water to cover it, but we don't want to puddling up now. For the sky, it's going to be very, very pale. A little bit of water. I'll use a little bit of turquoise in the sky with a little bit of my Cerulean, a little bit of water here. And that should be pretty good right there. I will actually, I didn't want to really do that at all. While that's wet, I can just blot it like this. This is a good thing for me to show you. Actually remove that because I got ahead of myself, had no idea why I did that. I want to do some gray, very subtle grays. I'm going to use these blues a little bit of Umber. I can test that if I want. That's not bad. I want to be a little bit cooler. I'll go blue into that, clean my brush. And maybe even touch a little bit of red in this. Sometimes a little bit of red, maybe even a little bit of yellow brings out a really nice gray. This is wet as you know. We're just going to do a few of these little swirls in the sky. Again, don't try to control it too much Now, I'll clean my brush and then just lift a few places, just run it across a few of those strokes that will soften the edges and it'll add a little bit of water and diffuse some of that color. Now I'm going to take a little bit of ochre. Just a little bit clean. My brush, fresh water there, clean water. And I'll take a little bit of this ochre into the sky. Okay, that's going to create a little warmth. You can even take a little bit of red. This is going to be a beautiful day. Lots of fluffy little clouds in the sky. That's what I'm after. I'm going to let that dry now. It may look a little bit dark in the beginning and that's fine. But when that dries, I think will be pretty good. All of these grays that are blue gray, we had a bit of a yellow gray in a little bit of a red gray in there. That's a mix of what I did there in the sky. Now I'm going to get rid of that hard edge while I'm letting that set up actually make this green. Let's go with a little bit of these yellow turquoise, a little su, let's add some green across the landscape here. While that's wet, I'll take a little bit of a lizard and crimson, a little bit of ultramarine blue mix in with those greens. We'll just do a little drag across like that indicate maybe a few shadows or whatever is anything to break up that green and give it a. A nice variation versus flat color. Now I need this to be completely dry. All right? So if this is not dry, then it's not going to have to look after. All right. So I'm going to take a hair dryer to this and dry it off. All right. So we're good to go there. Still a little damp down here, but that's not going to hurt us for that green before I forget some turquoise. A little bit of ultra, a bit of a Cerulean. And then took some of these browns and whatnot and use for those shadows. Big brush. Anytime you can use a big brush, you want to use it. Okay. You don't want to sit there needle with a small brush if you're doing a decent size area. I'll take a little bit of ultra, quite a bit of cerulean here and I want this to be fairly thick, but not too thick. Okay, there's your finger test. Maybe a little bit more water, something like that, I think will work pretty good. Now, I'm going to do that negative space painting to achieve what I'm after now. Just to mix it up a little bit, I'm going to turn this this way. That gets me in a different state of mind. Now, if I try to do this the way I envision and I have the paper upright, a lot of times it gets predictable and it gets stiff. What I want to do is try to create something that is a little less predictable. Okay, let me go with a little bit darker color here. Let's see how this goes here. Something like that. And then I think on this side I'll change it up and give a little more turquoise and we'll do something like that. Okay, now that's the look I'm after here. And I can come in and maybe add a little splash, splash here and there. Do some things in there to give it a little bit more exciting, look clean. My brush off really good, that's damp but it's not soaking wet. I can soften up a few of these clouds that are in a distance may take some of these edges. Soften them up, that's good. Now that brings you right on to that landscape. Now I want to do some trees coming up into this area, but I know that's wet. But over here it's not bad. But I want one tree at least connecting to the clouds. I want to dry this off. All right, we're good to go here. I'm going to take, actually I'll use my small pointed round first. Let's get some umber, a little ultra, something like this. Let's just play with it. Let that brush drag across the surface a little bit, just in a few spots. Everything is nice and low. Nothing is big. Because if you do that again, it's going to ruin the scale of the sky. It's going to make it look smaller. We want to look vast, clean my brush, a little bit of ochres and yellows into these blues, obviously that's going to make some greens. We'll just do something like that. Now, I'll take my pointed round, go into the Umbers blues, I'll get greens back on here that I use some of these darker notes as just a reminder for you guys of some of the colors and stuff I used. Something like that will work good and let's put maybe a little bit taller tree in here and maybe something a little bit weaker and smaller in there. Add a little dot there for a shadow. Maybe I'll run some shadows like this. That's good. It doesn't need to be a lot more than that. That shows you a little bit different technique we can use to create a really nice effect. Something we see quite a bit in the landscape, using that negative space painting and then dry it off, come back, hit it. Remember the technique of just flipping things, your paper or stuff like that? Sometimes just to change it up. That's always a fun thing to do if you've never tried it. I'm going to make this into more of an evergreen tree just for giggles are we'll give that a little bit bigger shadow, give it a shot. I'm constantly trying to just share some different tips and ideas you can do just to get you to think a little bit differently, do things a little bit differently. That's the whole purpose of teaching. If I were going to do a very generic course and teach like everybody else, then I'm not really doing you any good at all. There's no point in you watching it, if I'm sitting here blurting out the same old stuff you've probably heard 1 million times. So there you go. 8. Soft Sunrise Sky: All right, let's see. The sunrise. Sunset. But the sun is gone. Okay? It's either below the horizon, it hasn't come up yet, or is below the horizon and it's already gone down. Again, we'll do maybe something a little bit different and maybe add maybe a lake or a water passage there. Again, this is about the sky. Okay, I'm just trying to make it interesting here. I'm going to pre wet the paper. We can pre wet everything. I'm going to go over a little bit about what makes this time of day interesting and unique as that water soaks in. I'm going to go over what happens here whenever the sun is set, organic, hasn't quite come up yet, but there's still light in the sky. Okay. So basically if I did this dome and this is the ground level, this is high noon, let's say. This is down in here is like that golden hour where it's just coming up and this is where it's setting. Or either coming up here, Sunrise, sunset here. The light is very low. It's illuminating the clouds, all the orange, yellows. And those beautiful colors are going to be on the belly of the cloud. And then you'll have shadows above it. Okay. Like that. It's the opposite of some of the things we've done. Now. Once it goes below, but it's still illuminating the sky. What happens is you get this play of light values and dark values. The light values of the sky will be silhouetting what's happening in the landscape. The landscape and any shape that may be there is going to be fairly dark in value. That's what we're doing. If it's dark in value and it's not getting much light, then it only stands a reason that we don't put a lot of detail into it. You don't get a lot of detail and things like that. Unless there's light, the subject or the object is getting a good amount of light. Just an FY I there now, this time of day, mother. Nature is incredible. It's going to be different every single day. I'm going to say there's a little haze in the sky, not too many clouds, and it's casting this yellowish violet color. I'll start with my yellow and I'm going to go with this yellow mixed with a little bit of ochre. I'll clean my brush and then get some fresh water there. Now I know this is going to get knocked back a little bit because as it dries, it's going to be lighter in value. Plus I'm putting it into a wet surface there. The water is going to eat into that pigment as well. The sky so far is this pale yellow. Now, I don't want a lot of definition with this next layer. Once I start putting these violets in there, I could care less if they blob out into nothing. That's fine. Again, this is a more of an atmosphere, less of heavy clouds, that thing. I don't want to make the color any more saturated then like that yellow. If I do that, it's going to look a little bit too heavy. I'll just take some of this Cerulean and there maybe a little more of that blue. I think I'm losing that red. To losing that violet feel something like that will work pretty good now. I want to just add that in. So I've got my brush loaded up. We've got maybe something wisping in here, and then maybe like that, just a little bit of atmosphere there. Again, try to refrain from putting too much into it. The water is a reflective surface. Water is going to receive the light from the sky. In that case, we can let the water be a mirror of the sky. Now I want to do, the sky is done. We just have to let the medium do its magic. Now as this dries pie, it's going to decrease in value and intensity. It's going to bleed a little bit more. These colors are going to run into each other and create these lovely effects. So long as I don't fool with it. What I'll do is I'll hit it with a dryer. But when I'm drying it, I don't want to hold the dryer too close to it and force it to do anything. I'm going to hold it probably 8 " back. Just dry it slowly and give it more time to bleed. Then once it's dry, I'm going to add the finishing touches. Okay, there we go. Now I just have to finish this thing off. I'll use my half inch Princeton Neptune sword. Remember what I said, The light of the sky this time of day is going to make all of the verticals, the landscape elements a silhouette. That doesn't mean they're black or so heavy that we get this cut out look. I'm going to basically mix colors. I'll start with some umber there. A little bit of ultramarine. Something like that is good. The finger test tells you there's water there, but it's not too much. Maybe even take a little more umber into this. Just drag that like that. I don't want that distant rocks or whatever they are to be too much. Just a little now I'll take a little more umber, a little more blue. I can even add some yellow into it. We'll go a little bit darker for this one now. I'll go a little bit darker for this one. This one is a little bit closer now. Just rub like that. I can drop a few dots in there just to make it into something, but the more you fool with it, probably the worse is going to look. Just let those strokes go down and just work their magic. I can soften an edge just by like touching that brush to the top, but that's really all this painting needs to be. That's a really nice look. It's got a nice glow to it. That is a, again, a time of day that's unique, interesting, peaceful, I think. Time of the day. Again, all of these colors here are just some gray, a little bit of blues, a little bit of umbers, things like that. That's that. 9. Winter Sky: For this one. It's going to be a wintry landscape. Not like snowy wintry, but very cool snow on the ground. The palette will be towards the cool side. You get the idea. We again have our little ground plane in here. And still working with these wet and wet techniques using my Motler. I do not want to go into the ground plane here. I want to take that water right up to that line and then stop. All right. I got some excess water here so I can just tap my brush, which will remove any excess that's on my brush and then go over this and remove just a smidge of that water. I just mentioned a cool palette, violets. And then some reds. The reds are going to be very pinkish. This idea in painting, we're talking about hues or colors where you have a warm and a cool, we're looking at reds. The warm red on my palette is this red, pale. All right, so you can see that has more red than anything else. The cool red. I'll pull that down a little bit, which is this Alizarin Crimson comes across as a burgundy that has a little more blue in it. When you compare these two, this one obviously looks warmer because it has more yellow in it, and the other one looks a little bit cooler. If you looked at my blues, this would be a cool blue. This is more of a cool blue. This is more of a warm blue, ultramarine blue. It has a red bias to it, where these obviously look a little more like a true blue. These will be cool, this will be warm, and so on. If you looked at my yellows, this cad yellow pie is more of my cool yellow. This yellow, yellow ochre is my warm yellow because it has a little bit of red in it. That's the idea with colors, what I'm going to do is take a cool red, which will be the Alizarin. I'll only need a little dot of it to get this amazing pink. Alizarin is one of those colors that is very intense. It doesn't take but a little bit to get what you need. That's obviously very soupy and that's what I need. It's going to be very pale. I don't want this color, this pink, to be too heavy and saturated. I can start down in here is fine, and then just work my way up. Not much of a gradation in this one. I can even work it up and down and left and right, so very smooth. Okay, now I'll take a little bit of red, just a little bit there. A little bit of water because I think that's pretty strong. You can see that little bit just made that much pinker than what I had before. Then, maybe in a few places here, I'll add a little shot of that slightly darker color. This is what we have so far in that sky. Now what I want to do is put a violet in the sky. I wanted to blend. I don't want this to be clouds or anything like heavy or too defined, but I also have to acknowledge that this is still very wet. I actually put two layers of color in some places, some have one layer, some have two. Okay, where I put two layers, it's going to be a little bit wet. This is where timing is critical, even like not waiting an extra 30 seconds sometimes. Is all the difference between nailing it and saying, okay, well, I guess that'll work. It's not perfect, it's not what I wanted, but we're going to make that happen. I'll make good use of my time. As I wait here, I'll get a little bit of these grays going. I just scoop or take my brush along the bottom of my palette, sometimes down in here, and get a little bit of this excess paint that's like dried up in the corners. Good way to clean your palette too, that's a little bit too muddy. So I'm going to take a little bit of this cerulean into it. Just make it blue. To get rid of mud, you just add either a warm or cool color to make it look either more blue, or more yellow, or more red. And then immediately the mud is gone. Now, I want this to be very pale, so I'm going to put a lot of water into it now. Just taking the side of my brush here and just dragging it along the surface in a few areas. Okay. That's pretty much all I want to do there. I'll clean my brush and just do it in a few places like that. That's it. That's going to give that impression of some snow with a few shadows. And that'll work. While I was doing that, this background, I think, is ready to go. If it dries too much, then my wash is going to be too stiff. Let's go ahead and mix our color. I'm going to use for my violet, crimson and ultramarine blue. That's a little bit too magenta to me. I'll just push that more towards a violet by adding blue. You can see how strong that red is because it's really holding on. I put quite a bit of blue in there and it still was trying to hold on to that red biased. It's obviously more of a purple and that's where I'm at. I don't want it to be too strong. I think I even need some more water. There's your finger test. Okay. That's where we're at now. We're going to do these swirls. Okay? In there. And you get one shot at it. I do those swirls and then let it go. Notice that was upside down. Okay. I wasn't trying to control it and manipulate it too much. Now I'm going to mix up a little bit more. Again, I'm dealing with the intensity of that Alizarin crimson. This is more of a true violet there, very, very blue. I'll just streak a little bit more and then maybe add a little bit at the top there. Something like that. That gives you that wispy cloud effect that I wanted. Again, we have to be patient at this stage. What I'll do to hurry things along a little bit is probably take a dryer to it. I think that'll be fine. And then I can finish it off with just a little bit of life there in, in the grass. Just adding a little bit darker color there, again, keeping that wispy look about it. Now, if you're letting this dry on your own, you can turn your paper upside down, that it runs a little bit this way. We can mix it this way, we can turn it long ways. Whatever you feel is going to give you the result you want. Like if it's invading the horizon too much, then I can turn it this way. If I wanted to force it down, then I can do it this way. If I want to force it this way, then you get the point. You got a little bit of control there, but you don't go into it too much and keep fudging with it with your brush, because then it's going to lose the freshness. You're never going to get the perfect result. Okay? You're never going to get exactly what you envision. Water color is not that generous. The medium wants to do some work, it's going to react a certain way because again, you're dealing with water. But surface wet paint, wet brush. All right, so I'll be right back. All right, dry enough here for me to do what I need to do. I'm going to add a bit of texture and just detail in the foreground. I don't want to change palette a whole lot. In other words, I don't want to come in here and start adding green and yellow and all these colors that are going to confuse the temperature. The temperature is cool, violets and reds. I'm just going to add a little bit more pigment to all of this. Again, all of these colors are these violets, pinks, all of that in there. And then all of these blue grays down in here. I can take a little bit of these blue blues if I wanted to and drop in there. But let's just get in here with some of these. I'll make it a little more on the blue side. We can just add a little bit of detail, different things that could be happening in this landscape here. Again, not too much grass, it could be like a little beachy area, things like that. And maybe even something a little bit bigger, shrub or something like that. Again, keep it simple, not too much. You feel like something's a little bit too heavy, you can always blot it out like that. I can soften that edge, just blot that color out just to push it in the distance a little bit. Then conversely, we can take a little bit stronger color for something that is a little bit closer to us. A little splash, Maybe this is loosen it up. Now we have that lovely, cool feeling to the painting. A lot of that was done through color choices, of course, just giving that illusion of snow in the scene. Again, I know this is about the sky. While I'm thinking about the sky, that this is considered a variegated wash, unlike the others that we've done. I'll get this one that we started with. That's a gradated wash, one color, dark to light. With a variegated wash, we're dealing with multiple colors. Okay? We're dealing with violet pink, and we're mixing wet into wet. And that is a variegated wash. That's the definition of what that is. So as you can see, a very limited palette to make that happen and that's it. Okay, so hopefully enjoyed it. You got some more ideas. Again, remember to put it down, leave it alone, and let the medium do a little bit of work for you. Okay. 10. Approaching Storm Sky: All right, last sky here and then we'll move on. I think this will give you a good variety of what you can do here. Another large cumulus cloud. But I'm going to do is more of a gray, thunderous, ominous cloud. Again, a low horizon here down there. I'll just pre wet the paper. What I'm going to do is a quick glaze. I had a little more color on it than I thought it would. All right though, I'm going to do a glaze first. This will be multiple layers. This one will have a very light blue. I'll use turquoise and cerulean first. I'm going to do that up in here, then maybe a little bit more, just down in here. Okay, now again, very wet. I overwet that a little bit. I didn't want to go that wet, but I did. Now I'm just going to let this bleed out or dry out rather, and then just let these colors blend and do their thing. Now before I do, I'm going to take another clean paper towel here. Just create a little, a white cloud coming in here. And then I'll do the same thing right near the horizon, right in there. Okay? All right. So again, we'll let this completely dry. This one started out as an accident. I made a mistake of wetting the paper a little too much, but I kept going with the idea of painting the sky that has this impending storm moving in. Once I got these washes in and remove some of it to get these clouds, cumulus clouds floating in the air there. I wanted it to dry because I wanted this to mingle and get a layer where I can come back over it and add another one. As I look at this, there's tons of accidents. We've got these water spots here, a little cole flowering, you can see it right there. And not exactly what I envision in the beginning. And again, making that mistake of overwetting it, set things up. But this is the nature of watercolor painting. You're going to have situations like this where things didn't quite start out in the middle. There are certain things that happen that, where the medium just got away from you and that's fine. The key is to recognize it, back off of it and come back and like I see this stuff, I mean, that's all things we can work with, with watercolor painting. You're always going to have situations like this. It's just par for the course. Don't throw things away or make a decision to disregard it or put it in the trash bin, because a good watercolor artist will work with mistakes. They know how to not get flustered, when to back away, and how to make these things into something. Because watercolor is an imperfect medium. If you try to paint photo realistic stuff with water color, in my opinion, it just doesn't capture what the medium is really good at. I think it's a medium that is designed for quick painting, for imperfections, mingling with areas where your subject is visible, and that's the charm of it. Okay, I just wanted to point that out. So I've got my Mr. bottle here. And again this is completely dry. So what I will do is just give it a little squirt. Okay. Not much. Just a few there. And that's going to reintroduce the moisture on the paper. I've got my large mop brush here and what I'll do is a mix up what I have on the palette already. It's pale gray. I'm going to do some clouds drifting along in the horizon here. These clouds are really far away from us to see. Hard to see so much but they're very pale. I'm going to take small round here, just feather the edges, blot these out a little bit because typically that's what we would see in distant clouds. Then I can drop a little bit, maybe in the bellies of them, just to get that three dimensional look. Again, just some clouds drifting there. And I can also take and put a few of these up and here like that, just a few, maybe even some that straddle the white of the paper there or the white cloud and the blue cloud that's not bad, can even blot out some of those and maybe do one more like that. Okay, now I'll take the same color and then we'll do this storm that's moving in from this area very low in the sky. I don't want to put it way up here, I'll keep it down in here. That's going to be the lighter value. Again, just all using that same premix that I did of the gray. Now I'll get something thicker. Okay. If we did that finger test on this, it would be a lot thicker than what I used. Now I've got that gone, but what I will do first is I'm going to put a little touch of orange maybe is picking up a little bit of light from the sun towards the top of this cloud. Maybe a little more red. I can do maybe something like this, Again, dropping some color in there. I can even take an area and go a little bit thicker, just adding a little bit thicker color. And here now, taking my big brush into these darker grays, maybe a little bit of umber in there as well. I want this fairly thick. Now you get again, one pass at this. I'm going to put a little bit of red in it too. We don't want to mess around with a color that's not going to work. Joining in the joining to this wet stuff that I've already put down that's obviously bleed and blend and all that stuff. I can take that. I'll remove some of that paint now and we can just tap some of that into these clouds in here. Had to find my pointed round. So I'll clean it off really good. Remove that excess water and now soften those edges. Okay, I think this is interesting technique, multiple layers. Obviously a little more advanced than what we've done, but what I love about it is we had an opportunity to see what it's like to work with those mistakes. Before I get into just adding a little bit of land mass there, I'm just going to clean my brush, remove the excess water, just some of the darker colors in here just to get a little more dimension. To the clouds and then I can even take a little bit of water here. Maybe just to soften that edge a little bit. That's fine for the sky now, just a little bit of land in here. Something to finish this off. I'll go with some of these grays that I've already got. That's fine. I don't need to mix a brand new color. If I did that, then it'll get too colorful. It really just needs to stay where it's at. In terms of palette, I've got all the colors I need on there. I just need to hint and suggests some detail. We'll do the same thing, We'll just, let's see, I know all of this is wet, but it's drying really fast. So I'll just do some trees, maybe a very rural landscape, we can touch it into that wetness right now. It's not going to hurt something like that. It's good to, I think, go over the trees because it creates the clouds, Because it layers, you have that feeling that the land is in front of the clouds, it looks really cool. Again, maybe a few little sticks, tall trees, dead trees, whatever, something like that. I think a really good lesson here again, started out as a want want. But I think if you just take your time, well, first of all, you have to acknowledge that and accept that water color is going to do this to you. Again, imperfect medium. You just have to know when to say, okay, I can back away from that. I can back away from it now and let it dry and do a thing, and then come back and salvage it. That's totally within the possibilities of water color. Now, you always going to win at that game, but I think you can give yourself a good chance. I can just add maybe a touch of a different gray in here just to mix it up. Something like that. Anyway, I didn't really do a good job of giving you a clear idea of my colors, but I think we got some really good other tips for this one that'll do it. 11. Nocturnal Sky: All right, let's go sky crazy one more time here and we'll do a nocturnal scene. Maybe a little bit of a moon light or something like that out there. Really interesting sky to do. You don't often paint night scenes, but for some of you that may be curious about it, I thought it'd be interesting to put this in here. Let's go ahead and again, we'll just a hint at some hill bushes or trees, something like that. The moon will be in here somewhere. All right, so as you can imagine, a night scene is going to have dark values. Let's start there. I've got some leftover paint here. Before I get ahead of myself, let me, I'll just wet everything for now. Again, don't go too much here. If you go too much when you start putting your wash down, you're going to be so excited to do the next stage and it's going to be too wet. If you're using 140 pounds cold press, usually one good pass with a decent size brush will do it. Sometimes you may have to. I'll do one more just given that a second just to soak in. If you wait too long, then it's not like thick paper. You don't have to wet it again, so it's not going to hold too much because the paper is not that thick. Now, I want to put some color in this, but it doesn't need to be a lot of color. Let's think about maybe some orange, a little bit of this pinkish, Maybe some violets, Something along those lines. I think I've got this little moon here. I need to consider that. Maybe what I'll do first is just take some of these grays that are on the palette. Just tent it so that I don't have any issues with a bright white circle in the piece. That's probably all it needs to be. Again, knocks it back a little bit. Now we can start to think about the next stage. Typically you want to work light to dark. There's going to be multiple layers here. Everything is going to be working wet into wet. I'm thinking with this pinkish color first. As you know, this crimson makes a lovely pink, but that's way too much for a night sky. You go putting that color down and it's going to be way too intense. You're not going to get those intense colors at night. Let's take a little bit of violet. A little more of this, maybe. Let's even take some of this red and go into it here. I'm going to even take a little bit of Uber. We want that pinkish glow, but it has to be knocked back enough to make it look okay. Something like that I think will work. I'll go around the moon here, but you have to remember things are going to bleed. Just give it enough space there to allow it to bleed. I can even go right over this land mass here, and that's fine. I'll take a little tissue here, ball it up, and just hollow that moon out a little bit. It doesn't need to be a tight circle. Okay, now let's go with some orange into this. Again, we're starting with this color that's going to draw a lot lighter, but we're going to start putting some darker values into it. Let's go with this red, this yellow, to create the orange Now, because I already had this color into it. It's not going to be intense because it's going to mix with that. I can go ahead and take that right into the landscape there. Just like that. I'll dry this off. Clean it, dry it off. Now, I want some violet colors. I'll get into crimson. We'll get into our blues. And that's okay. I was a little bit sloppy there, but it's not going to hurt us too much. I'm going to take a little bit of umber in that, just to gray it out a little bit. I think something like that should work pretty good. I'm going to go a little more blue though. Let's try that. We can start to put this right over into what we already have. Basically maybe working it again. I'll touch that color in there. I can go a little bit thicker, same colors, maybe getting a little bit too brown and muddy there. I'll just go one more pass and here now I'm going to wet my brush here that's a little bit too white. I'll just put that water in there. And what that water is going to do is make a conduit for these other colors to bleed into it. I've got some grays down here as well, so I can take some of these grays and just drop in there just to diffuse that moon a little bit. That's looking pretty good now. I just really need to do this land mass, whatever I put there. But I'm going to dry this off. And when it's dry, I'll come right back. All right, so everything's looking good. You see all that moon, as the paper doesn't like jump out at you, I think that would be like probably the most common mistake an artist would make. The moon's white, so they leave it white. Let's go with some violets here. Just a little bit darker than what we've got down in here anyway, But not too dark. It's not going to you don't want to stand out too much. I'll actually, I'll just use this. I'm going to use the side of my brush and just get in maybe a little tree shape or something like that. We can drop a little bit more color into a few places. But again, you're not going to have a lot of definition this time of day. Don't try to force it. There you go. I think something like that is effective. I can remove even some of this just to give it some variation, soften it up, and that'll do it really a very limited palette here. Darker values, obviously, because of the nature of the scene, you have another sky there at your fingertips. Obviously you can explore colors. Do that thing on your own. It's up to you to take this idea and run with it. Just giving you some of the general basics, the guidelines, the inspiration, maybe to do that. All right, that's that. 12. Master's Sky Examples: Congratulations on making it this far, but we have a lot more ground to cover. But before we get into other landscape elements such as grass, rocks, water, and so on, I wanted to pause right here and let's have a look at some of the Master's works. We're going to explore Edward Sego and John Singer Sargent, two very famous watercolor artists that probably use very similar techniques that I've shared with you. In this class, we will look at their gradations, their variegated skies, and then also how they use warm and cool colors. Then we'll explore some techniques that are very unique to their approach. Things that I haven't shared with you, so you get a really good idea on the options and the different techniques you can use to paint skies. It's really unlimited. If you take ten different classes for painting watercolor, landscapes, you'll probably have a lot of ideas that each teacher has used or uses in their work. And they're just simply sharing those things with you. So it's important to get these different ideas and to explore these different techniques and to try them. And some of these will speak to you, you'll relate to them. And they'll start to make their way into your watercolor art without any further ado. Let's have a look at the Masters and I'll see you guys in the next section. Enjoy. All right, I believe this is a John Singer Sergeant, We can appreciate his lovely touch for water color. Just an amazing artist to, but let's not focus on anything but the sky. We can see, it's pretty clear. There's just a simple gradation going on. That gradation working from top to bottom, probably just use a little cerulean or co ball blue. I'm not sure even what they had back in that day. It could possibly even have gone in to a wet surface. Maybe pre wet the paper, put it in. But you can tell in this area, the gradation or the blue was applied. Maybe even where we see this stuff in here here. Maybe went in with a damp brush and just use it to just streak it in there to break up the flatness of the wash. Yeah, that's just again, an example of how some of the techniques we've talked about were probably used. And let's go on to the next one. Another Sergeant here, just his cloud study. Obviously a lot more went into this one. Probably you could easily say these blues, I'll go around these here. All of this stuff probably was some negative space painting going on, I would say with something like this. Because water color, you can't really layer light over dark values like you can with acrylics and oils. We're dealing with transparent color. Perhaps they're using the white of the paper and here applied some grays in this area, different areas. Look at these warm grays too. This is what I was talking about earlier. Like when you look at the sky, it's not just the flat grays like this, you're actually getting these warm grays as well. Look at these really cool grays. All right. Good variety that's a little bit cooler scot a little more blue in it. But a really good variety of grays in that. Had he only used one color like this gray here on the entire, for all of this white cloud area, then it wouldn't have had the same effects. That combination of using the muted, just say just gray, then the warm grays in there, along with the cool grays. Then over top of that, we can see some of these blues that were probably applied. If I squint down or maybe what we can do is take this, scale it here, I don't want that. I'll try to add a. A layer over top of it. Let me see if I can make it black and white. There we go. Looking at this at a black and white scale, this blue, let me get that layer. We can see this cool gray is, this is a darker value, this is a darker value. All of this right in there and here. So those are your darker values that probably were, was used or applied later in the game to sort of silhouette some of those white clouds. Use some of these warm grays. And here some of these cool gray, probably this is roughly the same value. This color and this blue are the same value. But anyway, just trying to analyze a little bit of the techniques that were he did some drawing in here too, We can see the curvy strokes that were done with a really small brush to indicate some clouds, the fluffiness we get and feel and see what the clouds. But you added some brush technique, brush strokes that were very much as if he had a pencil in his hand and he was just basically drawing the clouds. But anyhow, another cloud study by Sergeant. Let's take the same idea and let's gray scale that we turn that on. Just paying attention to the clouds, we can see these darker masses and here, look how this is. Then some of the grays down here. Even though we have that same idea of these grays and these darker values, this trumps it. Things get a little bit lighter as they go back, and that creates that illusion of depth. Okay, let me turn this off. So if we look or analyze this using again, the warm look at, you can really see these curvy strokes where the artist is basically just sketching with the brush here, just drawing clouds in and trying to get the curvature nature of some of the edge quality. But yeah, you can probably say this color here, these white, these grays were added in there first, reserving some even looks to me it's hard to say because you just don't know. With these older images, the photo was taken. It was probably reproduced and reproduced and reproduced. But when we look right in here, see the white of the paper. I would probably gather to say that's probably the white of the paper that was left. Maybe this is the white of the paper again, that's just he could've taken a really light warm value or just barely anything at all and toned it and then came back over it and started adding these very subtle warm and cool grays. Again, we've got, we've got some warmth over here mixed with some cool. We got the reddish grays. I think this is interesting to see those red grays in this, with the blue grays that a common issue I see with artists. They tend to only use one temperature of gray. They don't even really think about if it's more of a blue, a cool gray or a warm gray. But having that mixture in there really makes a big difference. A combination. But yeah, I mean, I would probably say maybe these clouds were painted initially, these white clouds with those warms and cools and came back in. This is all wet and wet in here. You can tell by that edge quality. That's all you put in, Wet and wet. We've got wet and wet going in here. Probably mixing, some warm gray, some darker, cool gray, letting those blend and bleed into each other. Then we've got some hard edges too. You can see these hard edges in here. Definitely some strokes were added to this that were on dry paper as well. But technique mixed with a little bit of dry got a lot of hard edges down in here. Just using a combination of the two. Again, just analyzing this stuff and trying to pick out some things we've talked about so far, and I think that's a pretty good one there to work with. It's got a lot of nice qualities to it and things we've talked about. Let's do one more here and then we'll pause it, maybe go to video two. A very simple sky here, gorgeous painting. This is Edward Sego, love it. Look at those beautiful, hard and soft edges. Such a great example to me of the essence of water color and really what the medium is. So good at random painting. Just letting the colors bleed and blend. A little splash here, a little splash there, And I know I'm getting way ahead of myself here, but really to me, it just captures not only the scene but just the medium in such a charming way, beautiful piece. But if you look at the sky here, it's pretty easy to say. That's just a simple gradation Look how much blue green is in that too. A lot of green blue in that sky. And again, as that fades down in here, away from us and distance it pales. That's just a simple gradation really. I don't even see any yellow in the sky as like just pre wet And then a little gradation there. This really light blue, green, very weak to the sky. But obviously the artist didn't want to put a lot of impact in the sky because this is where the artist wants you to look, right there. Imagine if we had a bunch of clouds in here everywhere, then it becomes very busy. You don't know what to look at, but we'll talk about that stuff later on. But anyway, another thing I'd point out about this would probably, I don't think I'm going out on a limb here, but if you really look at these little white specks in there, that's the texture of the paper. I would probably say the artist mix the paint up for the sky and probably didn't even pre wet the paper. Because if you pre wet the paper, you're not going to get a lot of these little freckles, you're not going to see a lot of this texture at all. So probably just applied it right to the paper. And then maybe once it got down in here, maybe just used a brush that was just wet, no color at all, just water, and just smoothed it out a little bit. But I would probably say that's a technique that was used on that. Let's pause it right here and then we'll come back and look at a few more of these masters examples. All right, in this example, more sophisticated sky. Here we can see the gradation happening of the very cool gray blues. Down to these subtle, subtle yellows. You'd probably say that stage one was a variegated sky, so we've got that variegated sky. And two, it looks to me like the majority of that was wet or dry. This stage one, stage one was allowed to dry and then came back over it with these grays to get that the lower level of clouds in it. And then once this was applied, stage two, which was just the gray cumulus clouds here, this was worked wet and wet. It was applied over the dry variegated sky. But then once these grays were applied, you can see this right through here, how he probably went back in there just with a damp brush or something and just do it in there a little bit just to loosen it up. Then back here is the same thing, because look at all these edge qualities, how tight and stiff those edges are. They're not soft at all. Look at that hard edge right there. A erase that so you can see them. That tells you it was put on a dry surface. You can't get that result on a wet surface, painting wet and wet. But this was applied dry. And the same thing, probably clean the brush really good and then just dropped it in here and maybe ruffled up a few edges. The artists really used the texture of the paper all in here, see all these little dots to make the clouds look fuzzy as opposed to like right in here where you get that brush stroke that just probably applied slow and heavy, maybe going, you don't get that texture of the paper here was probably put on a little bit quicker. So you're getting that texture, it really makes the edge quality of the cloud less stiff. It makes it fuzzy, similar to a button wet. But all of this here is probably him just going back into it with just a damp brush. Now, the last thing I'll point out here is look at the value shift. Look at the value shift from dark to light, okay? These grays in here, look how much lighter they are than that. That's pretty clear to see that this down here is probably half the value of that. Had you put these really dark clouds down here that were similar to this value, it would throw it off. You wouldn't have the same feeling of depth in the landscape. It's a simple cloud, simple cloud formation. I think the techniques are fairly simple, but the execution is brilliant. It's just real crisp. You put it down, you leave it alone. That's water color. When you can have that effortless look. I think it's just done, It's probably thought about in advance like, okay, I'm going to do a variegated sky. Let it wash, come back over it, boom. Get my gray clouds in there, dark then to light, and then maybe loosen it up a little bit. With a wet brush, you get in, you get out, and you get on down the road. I think Sg is a master of that. Just some beautiful work. It's got detail to it, but when you look at it, the detail is just nothing more than just real loose, quick, playful strokes. And it's just done. The timing of everything and the control over the color and stuff like that is brilliant. But let's look at another one here. Again, I picked Seg and Sergeant for this first round here. I think both of them are just really good examples of some of the masters watercolor art. And we can just really take a lot from what these artists did, but for this round, that's what we're sticking with here. Look at what we got. Very similar situation. This painting rather went with more of these blues, very light in value. Again, these little pigment at all down here, I would say same thing, stage one, I'll just put a variegated VAR, and just stop there. Then dry, right? Let it dry 100% come back over it. I would even say we've got three layers. Okay, layer two is probably this layer right here. It's warm grade to it. We get a little more yellows up here in it. We've got some yellow here as well. It's like that pattern of yellow is just hitting these fingers of the clouds in here. Yeah, that's a little bit darker. Stage two were these this cloud, say warm clouds and then layer three. And that was allowed to dry. Same thing, that was allowed to dry and then we came back over it. And you can tell by, again, look at the brush stroke quality. Look at the edge quality of all of this stuff. Those are brush edges that you wouldn't be able to see if. It was painted wet into wet. All of that was allowed to dry. I don't really see much evidence of the artist even going back in. And this is just another warm but darker variety of the sky, the same color as this up here. Stage two is just a little bit darker, maybe added a little more gray to it. You almost see a hint of green in here, like a earthy green. But when you have a few water marks like this right here, this ballooning right in here, I think that's where this was applied in here. And then maybe this stroke was applied and they merged into each other and it just bleeded down into it. But yeah, again, working with the same idea, same techniques, but this particular version, there was just not much wet and wet other than when a layer was applied. But as the layers were stacked on top of each other, they were done over a dry layer. Anyway, Let's move on to the next one. Looking at this, we've got a lot of negative space painting happening here. Probably all of this stuff in here, white of the paper. So you can imagine stage one, look how warm that is to really look at that one color right there. Probably a little bit of red, maybe even a little burnt sienna mixed in with just a lot of water. And that was probably just stained a little bit towards the bottom because this is all fairly white. But yeah, you just got the stage one is a light wash, right? Some warm notes in there that was probably allowed to dry. Because when I look at this, all of these marks that are sitting on top of that, that again, is dry. The artist tends to let a layer will apply a layer, let it dry and then goes back over it with this next layer. Probably did all of this stuff in here. The cool violet looking colors look how lovely that violet color sits on top of these creamy warm whites. Just really great contrast there. It would look totally different. If this initial wash here was a cool color or just muted gray, it would look totally different because that's sitting on top of that warm, white fluffy cloud. Those violet grays are singing to you, but this has a little more blue to it, right down in here. Who knows? That probably could have gone down in here for the next layer. I'll just say some cool light blue violets. Then again, let it dry. Then on this third layer, we get these darker values. This is wet and wet. This layer here, that's almost more of a warm violet. It's got a little more red in it right here, layer two. But yeah, I was put over it dry, faded out, and then dropping the more blue violets into it while it was wet. We can see that edge quality is softer. I will say darker violets. And a little, I'll just put in right here just a, just a little bit of that. Wet and wet for darker note there. That was a cooler note too. Then lastly, this is all negative space. Look at that dry, dry edge. That's all created just with the brush. Okay, That's all brush strokes. That's all texture of the paper right there. That's all negative space. And who knows, that could have been done before all of this down in here, who knows if that's exact steps that were taken. But obviously all of these notes were added, these warm whites in here, and then allowed to dry and then came back over it and really shaped that cumulus cloud. But another lovely piece right there, another lovely sky to look at. We'll do one more very similar scot to what we've already seen. But we got the gradation from blue to warm, allowed to dry. Then when we look at these colors, even though we're just seeing these smoky grays down to the browns, I would probably say that those browns on top are a little bit darker. And they are, if I just did a black and white there, we can see that up here, it's darker. And then as stripes move down, they get lighter in value. Again, capturing depth in the landscape. Even though those notes are warmer, they almost like is that darker? But because these are darker here, these are a little bit lighter in value. That creates depth, that creates distance. Everything that's happening up here in the sky is to you as we get back in here is farther away. Again, dry and dry, variegated wash allowed to dry. And these are just like quick horizontal stripes going across to create that illusion of just some rows of cumulus skies that are going across. But a very warm sky feels like it's the middle of August there. It has that summer feel to it. Anyway, that's that. 13. Recap & Projects: Congratulations on finishing the class. Now you have a better foundation for Butter Color Landscape Skies, a reminder, this is just part one of what will be an ongoing series for Butter Color Landscapes and part two which will be coming soon. We will look at trees. Now be sure to upload your project. There's a section for the project where you can share any images, thoughts, things like that, that you have created and perhaps have from the course. I would love to see your work. I will often check the skill share projects, see what you're doing, answer any questions. And even perhaps I give you some advice if in fact you're asking for it. Okay, thanks again for checking out the class. I appreciate your support and hopefully I'll see you next one.