Super Easy Watercolor Windswept Pine

1. Introduction 1: Welcome. This class is a little bit different than the classes that I've been posting here. The classes that I've been posting here have been a bit more advanced. I started making classes based on the paintings that I am painting as opposed to paintings that I use to get to where I am. So where did I start from? So I'm trying to teach you basic lessons using more advanced classes. Whereas, I mean, I didn't start off painting advanced paintings. I certainly tried, not for lack of effort. But then when I really wanted to get serious and I really wanted to learn, I really focused on what was important. And that is a few simple things which are shape, which is the shape of our painting here. But our triangle, we've got our branch, we've got our rocks and some leaves and whatnot in there. So you can start off by making your very simple shape. Sticking that. Then we move on to the form. Okay? And by form, I mean that is where the light comes from and gives it like a three-dimensional shape as opposed to a two-dimensional drawing. I will show you an example there. We've got our pen and ink outline here. So this is just a pen drawing here with this pen. And we've got our branches. It's all said and done. And we started off with this basic shape here, which is our, sorry, our basic shape here. And now our shape is our two-dimensional shape, and then our form is giving our two-dimensional shape a three-dimensional look Bye, using light areas and dark areas or shadows. And then as we move on to our painting, we take those, that form and we enhance it and make it more three-dimensional by using values and colors. So here we've got our dark area down here, which is our dark color, which is our darker values. And on this side here we've got our lighter color, which is our lighter values. So this painting is meant to give you a, when. This is a painting that's meant to so that you can practice these techniques without just drawing cubes, spheres and cylinders, and something that's kinda fun. It's very loose. It's certainly not photo-realistic, but it's also something you can do with a sketch book at the side of the road. I mean, you could, this is essentially what urban sketching is and that's what this painting was when it originated from. I was on a kayaking trip, and this is a tree that grows in a park here. It's an iconic windswept pine. I mean, it's much more windswept, different than this one. I made this painting lots of different times and it always comes out a bit different. Here. It's got a bit more twist in it. But you can make it however you like. It's more of just a concept of a simple shape and a simple subject using very simple colors, paints and brushes that most people will have on hand that have any interest in watercolor painting whatsoever. This is a fantastic horse for beginners. I cannot stress that enough. You will definitely learn. It's same principles that I use in my more advanced paintings and my more advanced classes. If you've mastered this, there is zero reason why you can't move onto paint that most difficult painting that I have or a class that I have on there. Nothing comes easy. It all takes practice. The more you do it, the better you're going to get. But again, at the end of the class, please, please, please post and share your results so that other people can see and get inspired by what you do. And I can give you feedback. 2. Materials: Let's take a look at the materials of our super simple watercolor painting. We have over here on our right, we've got our palette. This is my small little mini version of my larger palette. And the colors that we're using on the palette today are going to be a basic, simple brown. We've got yellow, we've got blue, and we've got a burnt sienna color in there. My point is, I'm not pointing out any names of the colors here for a reason because I don't want you to get too caught up in go and get this color, go and get that color. This isn't about that. This is very simple. The values which is a lightened dark of the colors, isn't far more important than the colors themselves. Just for your reference, if you are curious, the blue I used is fallow blue. The yellow I use is cadmium yellow medium. My yellow ocher type color here is raw sienna. This is burnt sienna, Van **** brown. And I think I used a bit of burnt umber as well. The red I used was a quinacridone, magenta, and I used indigo for the darker values. But again, use what you have. Blue, yellow, brown. That's pretty much all you need if you want to add in some red, adding some red. You could add some red to your brown to give it the burnt see sepia type color. But don't worry too much about it. Get it done. Don't stress about the colors, do not run out to an art store and say, Okay, Paul used raw sienna or CPU or whatever it is that color there. And I need to get that because you don't if you have yellow ocher, it's pretty much identical to that. My point is, just keep it simple. For drawing. You can use a pencil, you can use a pen, you can use a ballpoint pen. You can use a dip pen and ink, which I talked about in the class. But simple again, we're just using simple shapes. So to start with the first exercise, we're using regular plain photocopy paper. You can use scrap paper. You could draw right on your table just to practice. So we're using our pencil just to get a basic outline and shape here. And then we can go over top of that with our marker. I'm using a micron pen. There's lots of different types of these. This is my broken one I think. And we're drawing very loosely, scribbly, nothing too stressful. I do use a sharpie marker in the video only so that it shows up in. So it's easier for you to see because when you're drawing small pencil lines like I just did, you can see that it doesn't show up that well in the video. So as you're watching the video, if you do see some lighter pencil lines, don't panic the dark Sharpies coming. Okay, just so that you can see the basic shapes and forms. So that's just basic, simple copy paper your paper. Whatever pencil you have, whatever pen or marker you have. Used the drawing pen or use a ballpoint pen, or use a dip pen wherever you like. And then our watercolor paper today I'm using Fabriano soft press. I liked this because it doesn't have a lot of tooth in it. So it's easier to draw on when watercolor paper has a very rough or whichever lights like Arches paper tends to. It's hard to harder to draw. And I don't like that. You could use, but if that's all you have, by all means, use it. So you could use a hot press paper if you'd like, is also very smooth. This is in-between hot and cold press. If you've got cold press on hand or you've got a sketch book on hand, Use that don't run out and get something new. More importantly, with respect to paper and paints is getting used to one that you have because they're all going to act differently. So they're all going to go down differently. So it's better to learn how your paint is going to dry in how you're gonna get your little watercolor paint effects and whatnot with what you have, then running out every time and changing it because it's going to change how you paint. It's going to change how the paint dries. It's going to change how your paper will change how the paint is absorbed. It'll change how you draw on your paper, all of those factors. So keep it super simple. That's what this is about. Simple, simple, simple. 3. Drawing The Tree: Hello and welcome. Today we're going to learn some very basic principles about shape, value, composition, and form and all kinds of things like that to help us improve our watercolor painting. The goal of this is to be able to make a painting that is simple and easy and quick, but still achieves something that you can be proud of. Having. That inspiration will help you go forward and make you want to paint more. And the more you want to paint, the more you will paint and the more you paint, the better you get. Make no mistake. Watercolor painting, it's 100% of vote practice. There is no magic, There's no secret, there's no special abilities are gifted talent or anything else like that. The more you paint, the better you get, it's that easy. So instead of trying to start with something really complex and complicated, I thought I'd start and show people some of the simpler things that I used to paint. Some of my earlier paintings that helped me get to where I'm at today. And these paintings helped me understand shape and value and composition. Why do all these things mean? Okay, so shape, what am I talking about when I say shape? Also keep in mind. These are my words that I'm using to explain what I do by shape. I mean the shape of your object. So in this case we're going to make a tree. And that tree is going to be sitting on some little rocks. And those little rocks are going to hang out over the water. And if I were to draw this shape like this onto my paper and make some branches. Put them on different levels. Too symmetrical is never good. Give it some character will make some rocks. This here is our shape. The shape tells us where is our shape on the paper, write our composition. So we've got our composition. What is our composition? Well, if we look at our overall composition here of this drawing, we can start to look and say, Okay, we've got this like an off-center triangle here in our composition. If we move this over to the very edge of the page, it's gonna be more accentuated versus having something just straight down in the middle, right in the center. That's bland and boring. Experimenting with different compositions and positions is a great way to explore your creativity, to make your paintings more interesting and whatnot. So this very basic shape that I just made here is what we're going to be learning today. So don't be intimidated by it. I did this on some cheap copy paper for about $10. You can buy a huge stack of this and you can make these trees. By the time you're done this, you'll be, you'll be a Rembrandt, okay. So just practice away, get used to making some shapes. Don't over-complicate it. Don't feel like, you know, you need to sketch this out perfectly. Let's look at what we've got here. Here's where our branches are in the tree. We've got a triangle here. That's all it is. So essentially, you could make this painting if you want to be really simple. You can say I'm going to make, here's the top of my tree. And if I want to, if you're, you know, you, you'd see children go to school and they come back and they make trees. There's a tree, right? Make different size tracing, put them around. But now what's different about this and our tree? Not a lot. The difference is our branch then it comes down on an angle and then goes like this and then we've made the trunk a little wider. Okay. We follow this up to the point here. Here's our trunk. You got your leaves, your branches, sorry. And then what is it sitting on here? And you can make a shape if you want, and then you can define it more. Okay, Let's see what we did there. So again, Let's do that one more time. And if you don't like how it looks, you want to get your eraser. I use a kneadable eraser and you can set it down here, and then you can take this and you can do this. My point is, don't worry about it. Practice. Throw away the paper. I mean, recycle it. And try again. It is not. This is an enjoyable exercise. So again, let's look at what we've got here. We've got our shape where our branches are, which is a simple triangle. Everybody can draw triangle. Then our branch comes down like this. That's where our trunk is. And then our trunk sits on some rocks, lean themselves down. So again, we can look at this as another kind of triangle shape here. Okay? So we've got our rocks here and make it whatever shape you like, you can close your eyes and squiggle if you're nervous about it and don't know where to put it. Now, one thing you can say, okay, our water where the rocks meet the water, that's gonna be a straight line. Always water doesn't float or rise up on its own. So it's always going to be straight. Depending on where you put your horizon, you're going to have some waves in the background. So we can just say, okay, Will you put your horizon wherever you like? Your horizon level will change depending on the viewer where you're standing are looking. Okay? So we've got a really simple shape here. I'm going to make this a little bit darker here so that you can see exactly what we did. We've got our top here, we've got our straight line. We've got a bumpy kinda rock that is sitting on. And we've got There's our water there. We can pick a horizon line anywhere. We like, put a few waves in and voila, we've got a tree on Iraq. Now. We can make this more defined by coming up here, making our branches and so on. So, okay. Now we can take it up a bit further and we can make our tree has a trunk or give it a shape, a three-dimensional shape. So here, let's take a look at this drawing here. Okay? Now we can see, okay, here's another example of it. We've got a tree on Iraq. This is on watercolor paper, ready to paint. We've got more shape here. We've got around trunk here, and we've got some branches here and we've got our rock and where the water meets down here. So now that's our shape. We've got our shape and we've got our position on the paper. Next we have our form. So what do I mean by form? Form is taking something that's flat on two-dimensional paper, then giving it definition. Okay? So if we take this tree here, and if you see on the one side I've got a darker area here. I can just, I can even sketch this in really quick and show you where I've got my branch and the shadows that form underneath. So by putting some shadows down here, now all of a sudden it starts to stand out. You know, we've got a little nod in here and it's got some shadows. We come up here and I'm going to bring our branch out like this. And underneath our branch we're going to have some shadows. Because it's under the sun. We're assuming that our sun will take my little kneadable eraser and we'll stick it up here in the corner, and that will be our Sun. Okay, so we've got the sun is shining down. Actually, you can see my studio lights here are going to be exactly what we're trying to achieve. You can see this shadow here is being cast. So this is, our light is coming in this direction, so our light is coming this way. So our tree, now that it's no longer round, it's going to cast the shadows here. Okay? Yes, I'm doing this now with pen and ink, but we're gonna do it with watercolor as well. All in all the same. It doesn't really matter what medium you use as long as you use one. Okay. Here is our tree. You in mind, I'm making this up out of my head. It's not a technically it's not a perfectly accurate tree. It's more of a representation of what a tree would look like. What I'm imagining this to look like. So again, just making it darker on the side here. Okay, So now you can see that we've got a light area here where our sun is coming from, and we've got a shadow here or our shadows coming from. So now we have our form. So we've got our shape, and we've got our form. Now we did this in a very simple method just using pen and ink. And when I say pen and ink, I mean you can use a pencil, you can use a pen like this, like a drawing pen. You can use a dip pen and ink. I quite like using these. This is a beautiful ink fiber castle Incan. These dip pens, these are super cheap. This whole setup with the nib which comes out and pull this out, it does come up. I don't think I've taken this one out nears. So it might be kicked in everything, but these do come out and it'll handle them separately. I think there are seven to $10 maybe in their wonderful to draw with, and you can buy some ink. This is a very expensive one. By any ink. Some banks are gonna be more waterproof and some are gonna be less. That'll have an interesting effect which will make your ink bleed if you like that. But anyways, it doesn't matter. My point is we made our form, we gave it shape by making the shadow here. Okay, now, we're going to do that with watercolor. 4. Drawing Onto Watercolour Paper: All right, welcome back. So as I said, we're going to do this one more time with, I think this might be broken. We're gonna do this one more time and walk through the whole thing. So we're going to put on our ink here and with the broken pen. And I will make the trunk gradually go up and get skinnier and skinnier and skinnier. Now, please feel free if you want to do it the way I'm doing it by all means, go ahead. But if you want to draw the triangle like we did and really simplify it. Go ahead. It's like there's no right or wrong way to do this. If you want to change the shape of your rocks here, go ahead again. No right or wrong way. This is just an exercise. Just make your horizon straight as you can. That will give it a sense of realism. And we're going to add in some folks want to keep this line straight to, whoops, it easy. If I said, what's it easy? Okay, there we go. Alright, and that I've been here about our branches, some squiggly lines for our tree here. Nice and easy. I'm just very lightly holding onto this pen here. Alright? So again, you can see now my shape and tree is completely different than the other ones that we did. And that's okay. We can let me get a different pen, one that's not broken. Time to retire that fellow. I think this one is a bit bigger, bit bigger of a nib on the end, so it's going to look a little bit darker, but that's okay. You'll get the same result. Okay, so I'm using my pen and ink, as we mentioned here, to help establish the value. So remember the value, here's our sun. Light is coming this way. So our shadows are going to be on the opposite side there. And there. You can really go to town on that if you want and make it really dark, like really darken it up. There's no right or wrong way to do this. Well, I guess there is technically, if you put the shadows on the wrong side, that would be wrong. But my point is just relax and take it easy, enjoy it. Okay, So we've gotten our shape, they're easy. There we go. Okay, So the paper I've got on here, this is regular soft, cold press paper. This is made by Stonehenge Aqua. You can use any kind you like. When you're looking for paper, you want to remember cold press or soft pressed or hot pressed or if you prefer. But you've more importantly, you want 100% cotton and then the weight of the paper, which is the thickness, should be no less than 140 pounds. You can use thinner paper. It's just not going to handle as much water. It's going to buckle and more, you're gonna have to tape it down more. I find this as a nice, happy medium on a painting like this. I don't even need to tape it down because we're not going to use a whole crazy amount of water. We're just going to make it how it is. Okay. So again, we've got our second one there. You can see here is our first one. However you wanna do it is fine. What we're trying to establish here is just the shape. That's all that is the shape. And then we're, we're hinting at the form by making our dark areas. So when it comes time to paint, you know, this has to be a darker value of paint. And this has to be a lighter value of paint. This has to be a darker value of paint. And this has to be a lighter value, pink as our sun is coming here, we're going to have some shadowy crevices down here. We're going to have some darker area at the base of the water. And our waves will have a darker area in them as well. Because of our form. When I'm talking about value, if you've not taken any of my classes before and value essentially you can think of it to simplify it as light or dark. That's not exactly what it is, but that's a very easy way to understand it. So the darker your paint is, let's say we'll go through this again when we get our paint job, or the darker pink is, the more value it has, the less value it has, the lighter it is. It's just a term that's used. And I tend to just kinda speak the way that I've grown up learning painting. And that's why I say that's why I wanted to explain that. So now I'm going to grab some paint and we will paint this picture. 5. Painting The Tree Trunk: So we've got our palette here now. I've got my palette. I hope you have yours too. This is a very simple palette and it's got some simple colors on here. And I'm just using a regular round synthetic brush, nothing fancy. What do you want to make sure with your brushes that it fits inside the area that you want to paint. But let's say we were painting something really large. Well then I would want to have a larger brush to hold more water and more paint. Other than that, it's a pretty simple choices, is just regular synthetic hair brush. We've got Daniel Smith paints, ceramic palette, some water, and our paper. So the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab one of my darker colors here. See what we got here. That's a nice dark brown. I'm going to add in some little bit of try and brown. And up there I added in a little bit of a burnt sienna kind of color there. Again. Any brown we'll do, Don't worry or get hung up on the colors here. I don't even know what these are. I know that's indigo and that's yeah, that's about it. I'm not sure what the other ones are. I it doesn't matter. It's more about the value than the actual color, brownie color for the wood. And then what we're using. We'll go along the edge here of our painting with our brownie color. Now, you notice we've already got this because we went over this with our pen and ink. We've already got like a dark value. Okay? So everybody said your value, That's the lights and darks. So now I cleaned off my brush and I've just got clean water on there. And now I can just come along and touch darker value. You see what's happening there. I'm just picking up some of that paint. And I'm coming around now and look at that all of a sudden now our tree has got shape. That simple. So we had the dark value from our pen and ink. And again, your ink can be either a pen and ink. It could be a ballpoint pen, it can be a sharpie marker. It could be a pencil. Doesn't matter whatever you like. Okay. It will grab the darker one. I'm going to put it down here underneath. Clean off our brush, get some clean water up there to the top. So see what we got there. We've now got our I'm just going to put a bit more, sorry, dark up here. This a bit more definition. Okay, so now our tree and see clearly the light is coming from this side where we put our ink underneath and we use the bit of the darker brown color, we have a darker value. That's simple. That's essentially what watercolor painting is in any painting, in the most complex painting and the most challenging painting and the easiest painting. It's pretty much all the same thing. And you got lights and darks and values that form shapes. And forms, sorry, that makes shapes and forms. Okay, So we'll come back over here. Same thing. Our sun is up top. Today, it's not underneath us. So we know those shadows are going to be below. And so we're basically just putting a bit of dark underneath our branches there, There's brushes a bit wide for this, feel free to use a smaller one if you'd like. But again, this is just for practice. Okay? So there we've got our dark value underneath. And we can really, we can go to town like by all means, make this as detailed and as you like. I'm sake of keeping you interested, trying to keep it as simple as possible. So there's our, we've got our little knot there, we've got our branches established. Our tree looks good. 6. Paint The Rock Water And Pine Needles: So now we need to give our rock some definition here. So what's going on in our rocks here? So these rocks are wondering my imagination, or from a place up north called Georgian Bay and here in Ontario, in Canada, where I live. And there these beautiful granite rocks and they basically all kinds of colors. And sometimes it's very apparent that there lots of colors and sometimes it's not. But again, we wanna make sure, most importantly, that we've got shapes and values here. So I'm really, you can see I'm not doing a whole lot there. I'm just lobbing, not on. I'm going to grab some of this orangey brown color here. You could use burnt sienna. You want to use burnt umber, you can use orange and mix red and yellow together. Yellow ocher, whatever color, this color up here, this sort of earthy yellow color is, I believe, yellow ocher. We're just basically represent making a representation of rocks. Your rocks could be gray, they could be more rock color. I like the I like adding some bright colors and here we've got some pink in there. Just for fun. And yeah. So what else can we put that? I've got some yellow. There we go. Now we're really starting to come to life. There are rocks will be darker on the bottom. Because again, where the sun happens to be positioned at the top and you may have some crevices or something in your rocks. Rocks may have boulders or they might be some shadows falling underneath some of the areas here. Give me your rocks more shape. Just keep it fun, keep it easy. Simple. Maybe your rocks have some moss on them. I bet they do. I bet your rocks of moss on them. So we make some blue and yellow there. I do have some green there, but blue and yellow also makes green. And I'll add in a bit of green spots there. I'm not letting my paint dry. If I were to let the paint dry, I would have you would have more layering type effects. So that's your fancy by all means. Let it dry and do this and like between each color and you can build it up that way. This is not my darkness is not dark enough down here. Come on darks. There we go. We now have some shadow up here from our tree. Or sun's coming this way and it's going to cast some shadow on our rocks. Here. The brighter on this side because again or sun's coming that way. Grab some of this. This is either indigo or fallow blue, whichever one we will just call it blue for today because that's about as him. It's really not important. What blew it is, so long as it's blue. Unless of course your water is green. Maybe you are on a river. Now. One of the things I'm doing here, you can see I'm leaving some white streaks in the water there and that's how I'm giving my water waves, giving it, bringing it to life that way. You can choose. However you like. One is important is to keep the values where they are in the shapes where they are, sort of value will be darker where our rock meets the water. It'd be darker in front of the wave because the sun is behind the wave. There we go. We can declare our water done. We can, if you want to add some more colors into your tree, you can just put some of them down in the water too, that way you get that reflection in there. So we had some yellow up there. We've got some yellow and the water. That might be too much. That's one of these things. That's definitely cadmium yellow. It's very opaque, very potent color. So I'll just trump that with some indigo, even darker color there for some of that down. Now that's really dark at the bottom. So now we want to increase it up here so it doesn't look funny. So I'm just using some of that indigo to help with the value there. You can do that up at the top of the tree there if you'd like. I'll grab a smaller brush here. And my indigo smaller brush. And I'm going to come along the edge here, just on the darker side, increasing the value there. And I think I will make my water a bit more blue up here. We go. Kind of made a mess of that with the shadow, but that's okay. We've got more shadow. You get the idea. Okay. Now our leaves, our paint up top should be dry enough. I'm gonna make my leaves a bit more bright green, maybe, maybe not that green to dark. Okay, and we're gonna put our leaves or branches on the top here. There we go. Nice and light. Easy-peasy. I'm just dabbing his arm because really like with branches and stuff there, they're not like a solid color right there. Nice. The broken up kind of shape. That is that that is our tree. 7. Recap and Conclusion: Let's recap. What did we do today? Basically, we took some very basic shapes. We took a triangle, we took a stick, we turned our stick into a cone. We put it on a lump here. We called rocks. We took some lines off of there and made them horizontal to show where our water goes. Okay. So again, we made, and then we put these lines in here to show where we want our branches. And again, you're not going to do this in a deep dark marker. I did that so that it's very clear to show up in the video, but you could use it in a very light pencil like this, so you might not even be able to see that. Again, we've got a triangle here and whatnot that way. Then you can go over it with your pen and ink, whichever method you choose to use, you could use a ballpoint pen. You can use a marker. You can use something I suggest using is fine of a marker as you can, or as fine of a pen as you can. Because that way, it's easier to add more than it is to take it away. You don't want big lines like this and you're painting, it's going to look ridiculous. They won't, they'll show up, it'll look, they won't, it'll just look silly. So Uses fine one as you can. Still get detail out of it. So you still want to have those nice lines in there. So again, we've got our lines here, we wanna be able to add those. Okay, so that's where we started. Then we establish where our sun was coming from in our painting here. So our sun is up here. And then because our sun is there, we know that it's going to be lighter on this side and it's going to be darker on this side. So we're going to have, whoops, I guess we need more branches or to show that. And we're going to have some shadows down here. We're going to add some shadows down here anywhere that is pointing to. And you can see here, remember we used our eraser to show the shadow underneath it. Okay? And yeah, so very simple than we did not. Then we broke down our our painting into this and we used our fine line. You can see how, if you take look closely like just how loose and free that is. It's just scribbles. That's all they are contained our scribbles inside this shape here. Okay, There's our triangle, Here's our stick, here's our blob. Okay, that's simple. And do you know if you want to do this stage like ten times by all means, do it, tear the paper in half? You can do like that's 1234. You go front and back, right? On one single piece of paper. Each piece of paper, like when I would do my watercolor painting, I consider each piece of watercolor paper a painting lesson. And then we got our drawing on our paper and we put in our dark value first or shadow area first using a dark brown, then we use clean water while it was still wet to gradually pull that away and make our lighter value here. Then we did the similar thing. We just added some different colors on the rocks and then we added some shadows underneath there. Then we added our water, remember our water lines, you want to keep those straight? And using the not very large brush, we weren't carrying a ton of water, so that allowed us to make it a bit more streaky here and leave these white spots, or in this case we can call them the top of the waves. We made the background. To make it look further away. We used a lighter value on the watercolor paper here, and a darker value up here where the shadow is. And to give it more depth, the darker and more richer colors are going to be in the foreground. And as they go into the background, they fade away. So again, this is a very simple painting. This isn't something that I would paint on a regular basis state, although I loved these doing these, this kind of urban sketching kind of thing with pen and ink and watercolor. I really liked them. I think to me this is a true art form that doesn't get depreciated enough. However, it's not a purest watercolor painting. But what it is is a very easy way for you to get from this to that pure is of watercolor painting without a lot of headache or grief. And you can have fun doing it because all of these factors in here are in the same as any other paintings that I do or any of the classes that I teach. It's all the same thing. You've got shape, you got value, you've got forum, and that's it. Nothing more. So don't over-complicate it. Keep it simple and enjoy this. Sometimes people really struggle with just getting started and something simple like this is a great way to get past that. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed this. I enjoyed making it.