Snowy Sunset | Watercolor in 4 colors! Intermediate

1. Snowy Sunset | Watercolor in 4 colors! Intermediate: Do you ever find it difficult to paint winter scenes? What about sunsets? Trees? Well, I have all three in this step by step watercolor tutorial, and we'll be using just four colors to get it done. I'll show you everything from getting your paint ready to go to the under sketch and how to get the shadows just right on the snow against a warm sunset. Grab your brushes, and let's paint. 2. Getting Started: Ha. There we go. Beginning of tutorial. So I found out the best distance for this microphone is about this far away, so hopefully it works. Ah, there we go. Ah. So I didn't really tap get the recording of me taping this down, but this is an eight by ten size. The board I have is 11 by 14. What I did was I took watercolor paper, and I taped it to the board. Personally, I prefer to have art blocks like you see here. But for this particular tutorial, I just wanted to show that you can just do simple taping down and we can always flatten it afterwards in case there's any warping or buckling when the paper gets all funky looking because of all the washes. This is what we're going to be doing today eight by ten snow scene. I have the reference right over here, and let's go ahead and get started. In this bag that I have here, I don't know if the cameras focusing or not, but I know that it is so easy to choose way too many colors for a painting because you see all of those color possibilities and you want to use them all. But I found from my own work that is so much better to have three main colors and to choose a small handful of other ones to be in small little bits here and there throughout the piece. For this watercolor painting that we're going to be doing of a snow scene, I would like to do a limited palette of burnt umber for Dieter blue, you can also use cobalt, Manganese, Prussian, any blue that you prefer. This is the only one that I have that's close to a cobalt look because I don't want it to be a cold winter scene. I want to be on the warmer side, and the other color that I have here is yellow ochre. Yellow ochre is a wonderful color that doesn't turn green automatically when you mix it with a blue. And it's very beautiful in its subtlety. Also, any painting that I have with a yellow ochre, I've noticed also looks fabulous in a champagne gold frame. That's a personal preference of mine. I also like brown wooden frames. But whatever frame works for you. As a sparkle of highlight for that sun that we're going to have in the painting, we're just going to use a tad of cadamium yellow hue. And if you have any cadmium colors, you always have to be careful. That some cadmiums actually do have the cadmium metal, which is toxic to human beings. What I would recommend is having a cadmium hue color from Daniel Smith. Any of the hue variety colors with cadmium, the hue ones have a replacement for the metal cadmium toxic material. Instead, it's just as bright or almost as bright and I really like this one because I'm very sensitive to any toxic material. That's why I moved from oils to watercolor, which is all that I have here. I do have oils, but I don't use them very often. It's more of a once in a while thing. So just those colors, we'll go ahead and mix those up on the palette and get them ready to go. I'm going to be using my smaller palette just because it's easier for me to show you everything that I'm using. I'm going to remove this one and we'll just have that for simplicity's sake. For this tutorial, I only have one camera, most of the time this camera is going to be facing my artwork. Let's go ahead and get that set up and get this snow scene started. 3. Paints at the Ready!: Here's all my colors. I'm going to get those out in a second, but actually, I should probably do those first. But anyway, so let's go ahead and get some paint brushes. This is what I tend to have. I like having a spoon so that I can get water from here and put it into my palette. We'll do that in a minute. We'll want a 1 " flat. I'm also going to grab Number eight. Then I'm going to grab a number four as well. Just for details, I also like to have either a rigor brush which has the long bristles and it's really thin, or you can also use a number two pointed round. I'll use these for this painting. You'll also want a pencil so that you can have some guiding lines so you don't forget where the horizon is, where the trees are, and even the fence line if we decide to add that, go ahead and get yourself a pencil. Put this away. For my watercolor palette I know there's a lot of colors in here. All I want you to pay attention to is the colors we're going to be using for this limited color palette painting. We're going to use our blue. I'll put that in my blue section. I usually have a dedicated space for every single color. Usually this well right here where this dip is, that's always where I have my brown, my burnt umbers. I also have my blue space right here. It's always for blue. Sometimes it's for purple, but most of the time, it is for my blue colors. Go ahead and grab some of that color there. I tend to put my colors. If you look really close here, my colors tend to be at the top of these wells, which you can see are slanted. Instead of being flat, they are slanted. That's where my colors will be. I might actually get a little bit more blue just in case I don't have enough and always make sure to put the cap back on so your watercolors don't dry out because getting them to reactivate it can take a while and it's a pain in the butt. Cadmium yellow, I don't have to get more of this. I can just use what's in my palette. I'm just going to use what's in my palette for this piece because we're only going to use a tiny bit of that cadmium yellow. We're going to have a dedicated space for our yellow ochre. Now this is clean, my spoon. Timber, my blue, my yellow, and over here is where I'm going to have my yellow ochre. Here's my French, yellow ochre and squeeze some out here. I know that for yellow ochre, sometimes you have to use a little bit more than you think to get the color that you want. I always tend to put it up here on the side, but I'll have some up here anyway. Some up here on the side and then others inside the well. Now, one thing that I would always recommend is that you test your colors before you use them. For example, if I were to Only mix up a little bit here. How saturated is that going to be? Well, I won't know until I mix it up first and test it out. Let's see. Is this the color that I want? Yeah, it looks pretty good. I'm just going to mix this for a few more seconds because sometimes there's little granules or globs at the bottom of your well and you won't know unless you smooh it down and do these little circles. I highly recommend round brush for circling around like this because other brushes tend to splatter and make mess. There's the yellow. Now I'm going to move over to my yellow ochre and I'm going to continue pulling in some, swishing it around. If you look here, it looks like it's pretty thick already, but let's go ahead and give it a test and make sure it is the saturation level we're looking for. Oh, my gosh, it's almost like it doesn't exist. Okay. That's why you always want to test your colors before you get your painting started. Go ahead and mix for a while. If you spend 5 minutes just mixing your paint, you will save yourself so much trouble when you get to the actual painting itself and making sure you have enough paint as well. The last thing you want is to do a whole wash of a sky, for example, and realize, oh no, I don't have enough blue, and then you go mix more blue, but then by the time you get back to your painting, no, the blue has already dried and you have a bloom happening or a burn or some color flowering. That's not exactly what we are looking for, is it? All right here I'm going to test that again. That is better, but I want more color. So let's go ahead and use the rest of it here. Testing out your colors, no, how did that green happen? I have no clue. So this is why you always want to clean your palate. Now, what happens when this occurs to you? If you were to have green, for example, invade your painting because there's a tiny bit of blue, how do you get your yellow to be yellow again when you don't want it to be green? Well, simply use color theory. What is a color that will counteract green, red, orange? I have some crimson over here. And to counteract that green, you cancel it out with a red tone or a warm tone. I have a little bit of red. I'm going to put it in here and now that green, almost like it's not even there. That's what we use for this painting is this mixed up color that has a tiny bit of green, but also some red to cancel it out and now it's back to being yellow. If you use too much of either of those colors, it won't be a bright yellow, it'll be more of a muted one. Go ahead and keep that in mind, and it's still invading my tones. That's all right. I can always go up here to the corner to get that little more pure yellow later on. So you don't always have to use what's down here in your well. You can always use just a little bit up here. For this painting, I'm only going to use maybe 3% of the whole piece is going to be this cadmium yellow. That's one of the last or the first things we're going to be doing. I'll remember when we get there. Let's go ahead and test out this yellow ochre again. It's brighter, but I want more color. It's still not quite where I want it to be. I'm going to go ahead and speed this up and test out your own colors and make sure that you are up to the vibrancy, the water to paint ratio that you actually require to get that saturation. Let's test that again. There we go. That's what I'm looking for. My yellow ochre is good. It's okay if your paint water is like a yellowish tone. Yellow is going to be throughout the whole piece, so keep that. It's okay to have dirty water when we get started, but I'll probably clean it out just so we all start from the same place. This is my beautiful brown. This is my burnt umber. This one right here. I'm actually running out because I use it so often in my paintings. I just found that it's just a wonderful subtle color to have in a piece. It also helps me find a good frame. I do like my wood frames and this matches most of those colors. So it has any good frame zoo will match up with a nice wind frame. All right, let's go ahead and test out this burnt umber. If you would like to skip this section and move forward with the painting, go right ahead. Now, this is a good tone. I think I might want a little bit more saturation, so I'm going to be mixing for another minute. Yeah, that's good. That's what I want. Okay. And finally, the blue. Now, I'm sure some of you are wondering, should I bother using a yellow tinted water with this blue? Well, sure. In this painting, we absolutely can. If this water is dirtier than what you see here, I would recommend going ahead and at least getting some clean water for having your blues mixed up in your palette Because at least here it can be nice and clean from other colors. I'm not doing it this time because it's relatively there's nothing there. If I were to take water directly from this thing here, then see it doesn't show up. It's almost like it doesn't have anything there at all. This water is still relatively clean as all things considered. There we go. I'm going to go with this beautiful color here, and I don't want it to be too saturated yet. We'll get it to be more saturated later. This one's going to be more of a 1% milk consistency as far as the paint to water ratio. I'm looking for a light blue and that will work. As always, remember to put your caps back onto your paint. You don't want them drying out. Remember, we're just using burnt umber, blue, yellow ochre, and we're also using just a little bit of this cadmium yellow. Now, if you happen to use more of the cadmium yellow, feel free. This is a sunset painting. You can always have more color if you wish. You can also replace these colors with oranges and other things like that. But if you want it to look like what I have in my thumbnail and the final piece, you're going to want to use these colors. 4. Sketch: Okay. So now that we have all this mixed, we're going to want to sketch in a basic outline of where everything is. Just to keep in mind where the sky is going to be and where the snow is. So I think for this piece, I would like to have a little bit more snow than the sky. So here what we are going to do is we're going to do the two thirds up. We're going to have our horizon line, and it's okay if it's not 100% perfect. I'm just going to make it a little bit darker than I normally would because just because I want you to be able to see what I'm drawing here. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. There we go. I will have the reference up on the left hand side. You can see what it is that I'm drawing. I'm going to try and simplify this piece so that we don't have to be bogged down by every single branch of these trees, which I think it's very easily to get bogged down with. There's almost two different tree lines that's in here. There's one behind, and then there's also the one in front. Let's see, there's one or two main trees over here. I actually think those would be nice as a hero tree. I'm going to keep that over here. Then I'm not going to do the rest of the branches because I don't need to. I will be implying those later on towards the end of the painting. There's a tree line that's happening like this and it bounces up a little bit, comes up, and then it goes back down. Actually goes over here. The whole sky is here, but it's behind all these trees. What do we do? What we're going to do is we're going to have the two different tree lines, and we're going to draw those in after we do the sky first because we don't want to have to worry about painting around every single branch. I want you to trust the process, work with me, and just do the sky first, and then we'll move on to the second part where we put in the trees. If you layer like that, it will look a lot more believable. 5. Painting the Sky: Now on to the section with the beautiful sky that we're going to make and we're going to do our best to blend these colors. Normally, when I approach a painting like this, I also do the foreground at the same time, but I want you guys to find it easier to follow. Instead, we're just going to do the sky first and then the trees. Afterwards, we're going to do the wash down here. I wash number one, this is a wet on wet technique, it's a wet brush and we're going to make a wet surface on this top third. Remember to use this as a guideline. And we're going to go ahead and go across everything. Now, what I also recommend is having your pencil marks be very light. I made mine dark so you can see them. But when you are penciling in your little tree line guide and your horizon, do very light pencil marks because the graphite can be smudged when you do this. Have a light touch when you go across, and you don't want to press down too hard because you can smudge that graphite. You can also use watercolor pencils as well, but I'm not really too familiar with them. I'm biased towards the paint. I prefer just having paint. So if you want to use watercolor pencil, feel free, but just know that it takes a lot longer to fill in a space. Since I am using the backside of Arches paper, I do have to scrub a little bit. Yeah, there we go. Okay. It's okay we have a harsh line here because there is a harsh line in the piece, so we'll go ahead and address that later. But now that I have a nice even tone across the whole thing and remember, one more detail. Something else I've noticed a lot of students do is that they only go to here to here. Well, if I'm only touching here, I'm not going to the edge, we're going to have a dark white spot that's dry compared to the rest of the sky. What I want you to do is I want you to paint over the tape, actually touch it, press down and touch the tape. Because if you do that, if you go over, it will be a nice flush crisp line. When you remove the tape later on, it'll be almost like you have a border, a matting without having actual matting. Remember, we're rking we're working smarter, not harder. We're going to be using two main brushes. I'm not even going to go to the small ones yet. We're just going to be using these two. I have my 1 " flat and I have my number eight round that I have here. It's a Chinese calligraphy brush, but I use it for watercolor. We're just going to use a little bit of yellow to indicate where the sun's going to be. I want you to paint a circle and not fill it in because then the white that you leave behind will be indicating where the sun is. Usually the sun is so bright, we can't see any color unless it's around that we're looking. Let's go ahead and give that illusion by doing a circle like that and I'm going to have it flare out a little bit. There we go. That's all the cadmium yel I'm going to use. I'm going to now switch over to my yellow ochre and I'm going to go along this horizon line. I know there's some blue spots here that happened by accident, but I'm going to work with it later, so I'm not too worried. There's my warm tone, my beautiful yellow ochre, and we're doing a variegated wash of sorts. Go ahead and grab your blue. I'm actually going to move over to my 1 " flat just to cover more space fast. I'm going to touch that yellow ochre. I'm not afraid of those colors mixing because then it creates a nice blend. Nice. Don't be afraid of lifting your piece so that you can get those colors to blend nicely. It's dripping off now. I probably should have grabbed a napkin, but I'm not going to worry about it too much. I think I want more yellow ochre, so I'm actually going to go back over and I'm going to grab some with this big brush and I'm going to pull it My camera shot off because it overheated when I was in the middle of the sky. I'm going to show you what I did here. Again, on this side, I have another one ready to go. I'm going to do that two thirds thing. I'm going to zoom in so you can see a little bit better. I'm going to see if I can just do the sky and not worry about the drawing of anything else. First things first, we have to get the sky wet. I think you already saw that part. I'm just going to do this real quick. And who knows? If this one turns out better? I'll just continue with this painting the other paper was not working well for me. All right. I get a little bit of that beautiful yellow. I'm going to have it go across over here, get some of that beautiful brightness. Now I'm going to go over to the yellow ochre. Yellow ochre, just so you know, is a sedimentary pigment. A lot of these colors like to settle at the bottom of your well. What I recommend is you push down just like you were mixing and switch it around a bit to get those colors to move around. That's actually really pretty. I'm going to add a little bit more color in there just because I want to. I want mostly these yellow ochres. It's okay when you grab that beautiful blue if it starts to turn a little green because whether you know it or not, there's actually a lot of green in sunsets. I'm just going to have that blend like this and you can move across and then don't be afraid of touching this middle zone here. That is acceptable. You can make it turn into a nice mid tone green and it will work for the piece, I promise. Now I want more of the yellow to go upwards, so I'm going to use gravity to help move it and go this way. Gravity is moving the paints and you can see that the water is pooling over here. When you do that, I tend to squeeze this. Then we're going to use gravity to sop up that right there, you can also use a napkin and soak up this section right here because then it won't be too dark on that corner. There we go. I think this turned out a lot nicer than what I had earlier. Instead, I'm going to be moving forward with this painting and when it's dry, I will show you the results or maybe I'll do both and you can see both. But in the meantime, let this dry and move on to the next part. I think I'm going to have this dry at an angle because then some of those yellows will move up this way. I'm just going to use that tiny angle of my palette along with this to give it just a little bit of an angle so that it doesn't go this way but goes that way. 6. Trees part 1: The second attempt for my sky actually turned out a lot better. Since it's so early in the painting, I'm okay with scrapping my old one that I had over here. Look how horrible that looks, and that's the difference of quality of paper. This is actually the side you're supposed to be painting on. This one is not arches. It's another brand, but that just shows you that the front side of the paper is so much better to work on than the backside of the paper. The back side of the paper sometimes can be really good for just testing out your colors and that will give you a ballpark of what to expect when you do your actual painting. Since the sky turned out better, I'll be moving forward with this one. And since there's no trees or anything in here, I'm going to draw those back in. It may not show up too well, but hopefully you'll be able to see it. I'm going to zoom in a bit so you can see better. Okay. So there's a few trees here. Actually, you know what? Before I draw the bigger trees, I want to do the small ones that are in the background that are further away. I'm just going to give you a guideline of what to follow. Basically, we're just doing some little dashes and zags and just having a random going up and down, and it's not going to go up too high. It's only about half an inch tall, at least on my paper, it might be bigger on yours. Then have it be random as far as just how tall each of these trees are. If it was a straight line across, it wouldn't really work. I am going to have a few taller over here. This little beautiful line of yellow that I have, I don't want to cover that completely because it is really nice. I'm going to maybe have one tall tree breaking that up, but then continuing from here. Since it's one big area, it's really dark in that piece. Um, but we're going to try and give that a shot. In order to make that dark toned color, what we're going to do is we're going to mix the blue and the brown and towards the middle where the sun is, we're going to have more of that cadmium yellow and the yellow ochre. We're going to go from the cadmium yellow to the yellow ochre and then further out we go, the darker it's going to be. Actually, over here we'll have some of those more blue tones. Over here, it's still going to be more towards the browns. Let's give that a shot. I'm going to in my palette, instead of touching these two together, I'm going to mix them in here. That's purple. Never mind. I'm going to mix them over here, this black that you see actually is not black. It is a mixture of what's it called ultramarine blue and the burnt umber. I'm just going to use whatever little residue I have left. I might take a little bit of that out. We don't need too much color. I'm going to take some of this blue, this straight from this glob of paint, get it over here, make sure it's nice and saturated and add a couple more drops of water, get some of that burnt umber and move it over here. Now I have this beautiful gray that's really nice. I'm actually going to make that a little more concentrated. I'm going to grab some more of this burnt umber and I'm going to drop that in. This is a very nice gray. It's really close to what I have in the picture over here in the reference. I don't know, maybe I remove the reference over here or here, you'll see in the video. Let's get somewhere blue actually. I really like that. There we go. Look at that beautiful gray. If you use a ultramarine blue, it'll be less of a mid dark gray and it'll be almost a black. But it depends on how much pigment you have according to the ratio of water. There's that. For the trees in the background, we're not going to worry about details. It's just going to be this one long shape with some ups and downs as we go. The main thing I want you to focus on is the variation of the warmest yellows and then we're going to go almost from here straight into the burnt umber and then almost to those grays over here on the outside. We're doing a vinegrated wash just the small scale. Starting in the middle. The brightest spot is where these trees are going to be right here next to the sun and I'm going to have a couple over here. Now from this, I'm going to move over to the yellow ochre, and I'm going to touch all that together. It's okay if they blend. That's what I want. You can see that it's a jagged edge here. That's what we're looking for. It's perfectly good. Now I'm going to move over to the burnt umber and I'm going to start mixing those in. It's going to add some very nice variations in here. And the same thing on the other side, we're trying to attack both sides and make sure that there's some nice even blending happening. Then from here, I'm going to swish out my water and I'm going to start using some of that gray we mixed up. Look at that. Look how beautiful and dark that is. But it's not really black, but it looks like it because of the background and because the sky is so light. Now, this snow we haven't done yet, but we will and it's going to be very blue in comparison to the blue up here that has been touching those warm tones. Now I'm going to move over, swish out my brush again. I'm going to incorporate a little bit more of that blue into this gray because it's getting cooler and cooler the further away it moves from the sun. There we go. That's what I'm looking for. Again, these trees, they're not individuals. When you have more than seven in a group, it becomes a shape and it does not have any individual tree details that you'll be able to really make out. That's how we trick the eye as an artist. I might have a couple more of these browns over here just to break up that gray. Let's go ahead and move over. I'm not worried about these little speckles because these little speckles that you see are going to be hidden behind all of the trees we're going to put on top of this. We're moving from the back of the painting towards the camera, towards the viewer as we go. I could put in some trees now if I wanted to, but I'm not going to worry about it just yet. I think what I'd like to do next is have a little hill here and I'm going to take some of this gray a little bit of this blue, and I'm going to do this. There we go. I'm going to soften that edge right there just a bit. It doesn't have to be too smooth, but I like how that looks and how it shines here. The next part that I would like to tackle before doing the trees, maybe I should wait for this to dry because I want you guys to know where the shadows are going to be. There's some sun glare happening right here in the reference photo. I want to show some of that glare happening. But in order for us to know where the glare is going to happen, we also have to know where the trees are. I'll see you in a few minutes after this is dry. Remember to take your time, don't work on it while it's wet because if you do it might mess it up and we don't want to do that. I'll see you in a few minutes and we'll get to the next part. 7. Trees part 2: Okay, since I didn't draw in the trees last time, all we have is this shape. I'm going to put a few trees back in. Now, in the original picture, the trees are really close to this side. I'm actually going to scoot it over so it's more in the middle and on that two thirds line when we're going here. This is the first third. I want these trees also to come forward and be a little bit more in the piece. Then we both have a beautiful taper that's happening. Okay. Actually, I think the V is occurring more down here, and then this one has a V happening up here. We're going to try and emulate that. These are just guidelines. I'm going to be putting branches everywhere, but the darkest lines are going to be here. I'm going to be only painting from this part up from here down, I would like to put more of that blue tone because the snow isn't white. It's actually just white in comparison to everything else. We're going to have a lot more blue here, but I want to draw on these trees first. Let's go ahead and get a few more here. I'm just going to draw the trunks, uh, I can't get any of these main pieces in. These are going to be closer to where this line is. Further up, closer to the camera. They're going to be breaking that line and I'm going to do another tall one here, another one here, and one last one here. I don't have too many. These are going to be the main ones. Then in the foreground, we will have the grass, but I don't want to do those just yet. I might have a couple indications of where they're going to be because I want to have a slant going this way and a slant going this way. The light is going to go this way, but then the grass is going to go this way, which is a nice beautiful diagonal, which is really interesting and helps ground the piece. And then I'm going to have some more grass here. Okay. All right. So that's the pencil line. I have 3% battery left, and I'm going to switch batteries and we'll get to the painting part. So so from this point forward, we're going to be doing the trees. Everything above here, I'm not going to continue this line down here because I still want to do a wash for the snow. Most of it's going to be blue, but it's going to have some variations in there with a little bit of the yellow ochre. But we'll worry about that in a second. I'm going to use my rigor brush. If you don't have it, you're going to want to use a number two pointed round and number four will work as well or any brush that has a nice fine point at the end. If you have a really big thick brush like this one, but somehow you're able to get a nice tip to it, you're going to want to be very careful with your pressure that you put on. You're going to be very light with your touches. We're going to start near the sun, just like we did with these trees in the background. We're going to start off with some yellow ochre and maybe some of that yellow. All the trees that are very close to the sun, we're going to have almost like a sunburst but on purpose with the tree. I'm going to do a couple of these squiggly lines. I'm going to zoom in so you can see. I'm going to do some of these squiggly lines I'm literally just shaking my hand as I'm going, and that will help give the illusion of branches. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. There's one. Let's go ahead and do another one on the other side. I'm going to grab a little bit of that dark brown that I have, the burnt umber because my pencil line was very dark. I want to hide that a little bit. The end of the while after doing a few of these trees in a row, it's going to read as being a bunch of trees in the background. Now, when we do the trees right here in the foreground, then it will read better as trees in the background. But trust the process, you're going to be doing one step at a time. Now that we're moving further away from the sun, we can do darker trees. I'm going to grab a little more yellow ochre because we're still close in some areas. Grabbing some more color. Now, just to show you what this rigor brush looks like when I'm using it. I'm just going to do an example here. Actually, I think it does some very nice details. Now, I'm worrying about the trees in the background, not these two upfront. So do everything in the background first. We're going to do darker colors upfront When we get. Try to make every tree a little bit different because no two trees are exactly the same. They may be the same species, but they're not shaped all the same, are they? Some of them are just going to be lines. There we go. It's just one tree at a time. Now, if you want to get more of that fuzzy brush on the top, one of the things that you can do is you can use a brush that's more scrapy that has really stiff bristles. If you use the stiff bristles and you go almost perfectly horizontal to the piece, I tend to hold it about here and I'm almost perfectly horizontal with a slight tip to my brush. I get most of the paint off with this brown and I'm going to scrape it along the top. We're going to use the texture of the paper to help us along with some of those effects and it'll look better. The more practice that you have with it, the better it'll look. If you need to practice, go ahead and do that over by the side somewhere on another piece of paper. You want it to be very dry when you do this. I move over to the blue gray tone that I have here and I'm going to use some of that as well. I'm going to fill in this area here a little bit more just because the trees are a little taller. So There we go. Remember, the sky is part of the background, and that's okay and that's what I'm looking for. I'm trying to get this guy in the background because the trees are the hero of the piece along with the snow and the lighting. I'm going to put a few more trees in here and bring that forward. And we're just going to do a whole bunch of scribbles. All of these scribbles will merge into one. Nice. We're going to do a few more over here. Remember, these are background trees, so you don't have to add branches everywhere. I'm just scribbling up and down and side to side, or vertically and diagonally to get these trees to be unique as I'm going. There we are. Now we have all of our background trees. The next step will be the snow in the foreground from here down. We're going to do that. Then the last thing that we're going to do is add the grass and these two trees up in front, I haven't forgotten about them. We're going to get to them, but it's, uh details last and big areas first just so that we feel like we have accomplished a lot more. 8. Snow and Shadows: For this big area, we're going to want a larger brush and I'm going to try and simplify all of these beautiful highlights and shadows on the snow that's blue. So we're going to have a white area around here, and then the rest of it's going to be more blue in tone. I'm going to cover this with a bunch of water, and I'm going to skip a couple areas, and this will help us with our effects. Okay. So now that I'm done with the larger areas with my big brush, um, I gonna touch that up a little bit. So you want your surface to be glossy like this. Do you see all the shines on there? It's hard to see. But that will definitely help you with this effect. I'm going to put some yellow in some places so I don't forget to add them later. Now this is going to be the yellow ochre. I'm not using the bright bright cadmium yellow. The reason why is because the cadmium yellow when it touches the blue, guess what? I'll turn green. Most of you will probably be familiar with that. I'm going to have some yellow ochre here and there. It's just going to be a light amount because there's going to be some hills and stuff. Then maybe a little bit more up there. Now I'm going to move over to the blue. I may not need this one at all, get that blue ready to go. What we're doing is that the yellow is going to be on top, blue behind. That's my rule that I'm following here and I'm trying to be very strategic with my placement of all of these highlights and low lights, these warms and blue tones interacting with each other. So I'm going to have some more blue in this corner, keep everyone in this section of the piece, and it'll be better that way. I'm just going to have the blues underneath the yellows and it should be showing up a little bit better now. I'm going to delete a little bit of this right here. Here we go. I hope that is easily seen. Now we have all those tone. This is going to read more like snow the further we get. I'm going to add some more blue in the foreground. Because I like that. Now we can also keep in mind where these trees are and then if the sun is here, just have it pointed away for those shadows. I'm just giving a little bit of uh, long shadows from the trees. They don't have to be too crazy, too detailed. All I'm doing is I'm starting at the base and I'm moving away. Now that I've done this side, diagonally moving this way. If the sun is here and I have this tree, it's going to be doing a shadow that direction. Then same thing from here to here, and then here to here, and then here to here and here. I'm going to do those next. That will add a sense of realism as far as lighting and everything that will definitely help move this piece closer to being more realistic and believable. I'm going to add some brown here so it doesn't look too orange. That might have been a little too much. I'm going to backtrack a bit. Then adding some brown back in there. Okay. This one disappeared on me, so I'm going to go back a little bit and have some more blue towards the base. There we go. I'm going to get rid of that little blue highlight in this corner just because I don't want people to be drawn off the page. I can always improve these shadows later. But right now, we're just going to be worrying about these. Since I know that these two trees are right here up front and center, I'm going to put that color in right now while I'm thinking about it, which is going to be a little bit darker of a blue because it's closer to us. And start here. There we go. All right. Now I've done those blues and it's just a little bit more in the foreground. I like how it looks. One more effect that you can do if you have enough time is to splatter some water or use some salt. But I don't have any salt right now with me, so I'm not going to use it. I'm going to sop up the edges here. It was just a little too wet for my liking. I'm going to let this dry and I'll see you in the next part to do these trees here and also the grass. Then we'll be done. We could even add maybe a little bunny rabbit or a deer or something. I'll be back in just a minute. 9. Trees part 3: One here we are at the end of the whole tutorial. We're going to be doing the trees, these last two here that are in the foreground, they're a lot darker than everything else and we're going to do the grass that's going to be poking up out of the snow, which is going to be a mix between the yellow ochre and the bird umber. First things first, let's go ahead and grab our brush. I'm not using the larger one because these still are relatively small. I guess I could do the main trunk, but everything else is going to be the smaller brushes. You're going to need these three. You're in order number eight and number four, and maybe a number two pointed round to do these last trees. I guess I'll do the trunk with the larger brush. I'm going to use that beautiful gray that we mixed up. We're going to have that there. You're also wiggling your brush while you're at it. You're wiggling your brush as you go up and I'm just going to have two main trunks with that. Then there's this one, grab more paint. A There we go. There's those two. I'm also going to drop in some of these warm tones into this as well, especially right here where it meets the sky because I want some warmth on this side of the tree and to give some variation as well, so it's not all gray and giving some delicious looky looks for the eyes. If you have all the same color everywhere, it can get a little boring. I like to mix it up and have more color variation in different parts. Now I'm going in with my number two. I guess I could have used this one, but I didn't really need it, so I'm putting that aside. Now I'm going to go with my smaller tree trunks, my branches, and having it be all over the place. I'm starting off with more pressure and slowly tapering off as I go. That looks like this. More pressure as I start and I'm slowly lifting up as I go further away from the main trunk. There we go. You don't have to go overboard with all these tree branches, but I'm going to be put in quite a few just because I want to create some interest. Then having them cross over each other adds more interest than that. You don't have them all spread out like this. You actually have some tree branches doing this and that helps make it more believable and having some crossing over happening. I'm going to have another one down here just to break it up a little bit and get some excitement going here. I don't know if I like that yellow there, but I put it so I'm going to keep it. I'm going to put some yellow ochre on it so it looks a little bit more believable because the bright yellow, I don't think quite worked. What I'm doing here, I'm going to zoom in again. Is I'm just using the yellow ochre just on the outside of this to create almost like a warm highlight on the edge of this branch and that will pull that forward as well and make it even more believable as far as the lighting. Now, we can't really see that in the picture, the reference that we have, but we can always make it up and it will look even more spectacular because of it. There. We don't need too much. I'm just going to leave it like that. I'm going to have a little bit more darks on the base, I think. There we go. I think I might want to add a little bit more of that shadow, but like how it looks here, maybe just a little bit. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take some water and I'm going to add just water to here and just to that, I already got a little bit darker. Now I'm going to grab some more of that blue and touch the base of this so that it becomes even more vibrant. Grab my brush here and kind of pull it along. Yeah, 'cause I want that to be a little bit stronger. 10. Grass and Final Details: Now that the trees are done, we're going to go ahead and do all of the grass. So let's go ahead and grab that number two round, the pointed round, and we're going to be doing some random grasses. I think right here by the base of the tree will be nice and interesting. Even though they are way in the background, we're moving the trees forward, uh, what is that? Pencil mark. That's going to become a great blade of grass. What I'm doing is I'm starting here and I'm flicking it away and that will give more more of that natural grass look. If I were trying to go slow and do every single branch very meticulously, then it's going to be not quite as realistic as far as how random they can be. Don't be afraid of having some branches go this way, some straight up, some coming towards the camera, some going this way, they can criss cross over each other. I switched from the brown tone over to yellow because I'm getting more towards where this light will be and I want that to be a little bit more distinct in yellow. Okay. Maybe towards the base, I'll have I suppose another trick I can show you for grass is with a flat brush. I'm going to try and get this nice and dry, grab some of this burnt umber and I'm going to go here and flick upwards. Instead of going from this direction or this direction or this direction where it's vertical like this, what we want is to have it horizontal like this, but towards the paper. We're going to touch the paper and flick up and we're going to try and do short flicks like this. Here we go and wish me luck. Huh. How's that? Look at that. I'm going to switch over to the yellow ochre. Make sure you have most of the pigment off of your brush when you do this. There's going to be a lot of random grass poking up. This is very thin layer of snow and you just just put random bits of grass here and there. Then these little flicks of grass are going to be smaller the further away you get towards the horizon line, where the tree line is. The closer it gets, we can do more individual grasses. Then what I'm also doing is I'm having the warm ochre colors more around here and the further away we get, we're going to get more towards the dark browns of that burnt umber. And just kind of fill it in as you go. It can be really difficult to get the grass to be the texture that you're looking for. Sometimes having more is better because then you can have more variation and if you mess up on one blade, no one's going to pay attention to that one blade that's really funky looking because there's a whole bunch here giving character to this whole piece. I'm going to add some darks towards the bottom of some of these marks just because it's a little bit darker towards the bottom. I'm going to give a couple longer strands that are individualized. I'm scraping my brush too while I'm at it just to give it if it's too individual like that, that is not really going to work. Another way you can do grass is you can have this flat, almost perfectly flat, but just a slight slant. If the brush is damp but not wet, you can also just do little bits like this and that can help too. Yes. There we go. I'm actually really liking how this looks. I'm going to add some of this darker tone towards the base of some of this grass here. All right. The grass isn't really giving too much shadow at all, so I'm just going to let that be as it is. Here's the painting. The last thing that you might want to get done is putting your signature somewhere. I'm going to put mine right here, but I'm going to wait. Actually, I can do that right now. I would recommend normally a color that really works with the scene. I'm going to do a burnt umber color or maybe that dark color for my signature. You can use a pen if you prefer. You can even use pencil, but pencil tends to fade. I'm using my number two for my signature, and I'm going to zoom in for that so you can See a little bit better. Here we go. Every signature is different and every signature is always scary to do. Let me fill that in right there. Here we go. There we are. Now, I could have done my signature with red or something, so it's mediately visible, but I would prefer for this to be the main hero of the piece. I guess one final thing you could do if you would like, is to add some footprints of some sort, like a bunny footprints, and it will make it look like there's a little bit of a story. If you want to add little animal footprints, you can just get your color blue. If I do two little dots next to each other, it will look like deer footprints. I'm going to take a little bit of that color off. Now I'm just going to one dot each and then you can see where the deer may have gone off too. There we are. Now we have a little story that a deer passed through here. So, there's my little painting, and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. I guess the last thing is, I could pull this off, but it's still drying, so I'm going to wait a moment. All right. So for the reveal. 11. Thanks: I'm so glad that you joined me on this wonderful adventure into a snow scene with a deer walking through, although the deer is not in the picture with all of these beautiful but limited color palette options of burnt umber and cadmium yellow, yellow ochre, and blue. Hopefully, you are pleased with the results. Feel free to tinker with the colors. You can do this tutorial multiple times. If there is something in this tutorial that you feel like you really didn't get before, but because you took this class that you understood it finally, I would love to know. Please leave me a review. Please let me also know if there's something that you think I can improve. Is there something that I did not explain as much as you would have preferred? I would also love to hear from you. What's something that you would like to learn how to do? Is it another snow scene? Is it a landscape that I haven't done yet? Maybe it's not even a landscape. Maybe it's learning how to do clouds because, you know, clouds are hard, or is it a tutorial on maybe animals. Is it birds? Is it bunnies? Is it cats? Is there something in there that you've never tried, but you really want to? Um, I would love to have some tutorial suggestions because sometimes I just don't know what to paint and what to teach you. I would love to find out what those things are. If you have suggestions for future tutorials, please message me. I have my social media right here, and if you were to reach out, I would be happy to answer those questions in a future tutorial or just right there in the message box. And then post your pictures. Don't forget to post them because I would love to see if you took this tutorial and made a painting that you're proud of. And I can also give you some suggestions in my teacher review as well. So, uh, yeah. That concludes this tutorial. I hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.