Water Reflections in Watercolors: Controlling your Wet-on-wet Layers

1. Intro for Skillshare videos: Hello, and welcome. My name is Emily, and I'm an artist and instructor based in Madison, Wisconsin. In today's class, we will look at how to create a realistic reflection in calm water. We'll look at layering wet-on-wet layers and how to control your wet-on-wet layers to create a soft tree reflection in the water. We'll then add wet-on-dry details on the surface of the lake that will trick your eye into thinking that it is a reflection. You'll have access to a tracing template included in this tutorial, as well as some color reference photos and printout instructions that will teach this tutorial step by step. So grab your watercolor supplies, and let's get started. 2. Supplies: Alright, so for this tutorial, you will need watercolor paper. I am using arches, cold pressed, 100% cotton, 140 pound paper for this tutorial. I do find that when I'm doing a lot of wet-on-wet, that I do need cold pressed paper and something of high quality. You can either buy your paper in a block or you can buy it in a pad. I like to buy these three size pads of Arches paper, and then I can cut them down and have 28 by ten inch pieces of paper in one piece here. So with this one being 12 pages, I get then 24 pieces of eight by ten inch watercolor paper. I do like to tape my paper onto a plastic corrugated board. You can either tape it onto a desk that you have at home. You can tape it onto an artboard or these corrugated plastic boards. You can find these at Michael's. And then, same thing. They're poster board size, but you can cut them down into whatever size you need. So you will need to tape it down using either painter's tape or some sort of watercolor tape. I've been using this brand called Kiwi Hub lately. And when you do tape it down onto your watercolor paper onto your board, you're going to want to make sure that you have a really nice, even border on all four edges of your paper. You'll want to have about half of the tape onto your paper and about half onto your board so that it doesn't buckle quite as much as your painting. You will also need a variety of watercolor brushes. You can use any type of medium sized round brush for some of our details. I like using a round size four. This is a silver limited black velvet brush. You can also use a small detail brush for some of the smaller sections of our painting. I'm using a Si zero escota brush, and then you also might need a variety of larger capacity brushes for our washes or for our larger areas. A few different options for you are a quill brush, a large quill brush. This is also silver limited, or you can use a large flat wash brush. So this is a three quarter inch flat brush also by Escoda. Moving on to our watercolor paints, I'm using a palette of Daniel Smith watercolors. Windsor and Newton is also great. Schminke there's a lot of different types and brands of professional watercolor paints. Or if you are wanting to save some money somewhere, feel free to use your student grade watercolor brands. The one thing I do think you should spend a little bit more money on is high quality watercolor paper, being either arches or Bo hong or some other type of high quality paper. You'll need two cups of water, and then you'll also need a paper towel or a rag. Alright, let's get started. 3. Wet on wet blue sky reflection: Alright, so I'm going to start by wetting the entire upper half of my lily pad pond. So for this first step, we're going to be painting wet-on-wet for the blue water and obviously the sky that's reflected in the water. So to do this, I'm using a large quill brush. I am making sure that I'm going up close to my lily pads because, of course, wherever I'm wetting, the pigment is going to go there. And I'm needing to chunk this into sections because obviously, if I try to do all of the water at once, I'm not going to have enough time before that section dries. Now, when I take a peek at my reference photo, I'm noticing that there's a blue that's reflected from the sky. And then there's also a all of my trees and green trees that are reflected. I'm deciding to do that in two separate stages. So this first stage is simply just the blue reflections. And then I'll let that dry completely, and then I'll go back and I'll do the tree reflections as another wet-on-wet layer. So I finished wetting that top section. Now I'm taking a smaller brush around size four or six, and I am now wetting around that little intersection of water lilies. I'll grab some palo blue here, so I'm using my large quill brush for this so that it's a little bit faster. And then before I add my thalo blue onto the paper there, I'm just tapping it onto my palette so that I don't get any really, really deep dark blue sections. Start with my blue in the upper left hand corner. You notice that I'm holding up my board so that gravity can help that blue pigment kind of bleed downwards. So I want this really nice gradient of the darkest of blue in the upper left hand, and then it'll slowly get a little bit lighter as we get to the right side. Now, the top section of the sky still needs to be lighter, excuse me, it needs to be lighter than the bottom portion. And so I still want this sky to be fairly light. I don't want it to be super dark in color. Alright, so we will do the same exact thing for the lower section of our painting. So I'll be using clean water to wet the lower section. And I'm being really careful again to come up really close to my water lilies, the lily pads, but I'm also going to go around the water lily flower reflection. So that reflection in the water is still going to be very light, and so I don't want a dark blue covering that reflection. Before this dries, I'm gonna go in with my smaller brush to wet right up next to the water lilies. And now, just like before, I'm going to use thalo blue on this left side, and then I'm going to bring whatever blue is left on my brush, I'm going to carry it over to the right side. So I'm starting with the most concentrated on this left and then watering it down as I get to the right. The hardest section for you to paint with this is going to be where those two wet sections connect on that left side. So be really overly cautious where the two wet sections connect and then leftmost lily pad. Try to have the least amount of liquid touch that upper section so you don't have any sort of backwash happening there or blooms happening there. I am able to add a few extra colors to this. So I'm not overthinking it. I'm doing this quickly. I added a little palo turquoise to that middle section of the blue, and I'm adding some indigo. I'm using kind of a curved brush stroke here in the lower left corner of the water, and I want that darks section to be the lower left. That's going to kind of give it a little bit more of, like, a silhouette. And that's it. I don't want to overwork it. I can use a few brush strokes to help blend those layers. But sometimes the best blending that can happen is by letting the water blend it, the more that we work on a section, the drier it gets and then the less likely we're able to blend. I do suggest before this whole section dries that you use a damp brush to pull the blue right up next to the water lily pads. Sometimes if we don't do this step, you might notice that your blue is going to dry and there might be a little ring of water there where it's not completely connected to the water lily. And so I like to bring a damp brush, not a wet brush. If I have too much water on my brush, that's going to create a bloom. And so I use a damp brush to pull that blue close to the water lily. I forgot a little section of, like, a little cutout there in the water lily itself. And so I'll add a little blue. And then I'm using a paper towel to kind of clean up some edges where it went over my lily pads. Now, sometimes, I need to remind myself to just stop. And so I'm gonna be stopping and just letting these sections dry. I don't want to overwork it. I want to let the water do what it needs to do. 4. Wet on dry flower and Lilipads, first layer: Alright, so as we let the background dry, we're going to start working on our wet-on-dry water lily flower. So because our water lilies are white, we're gonna mix an indigo with quite a lot of water. You can also add a little bit of blue or a little bit of purple if you want your shadow color to lean one way or the other. Then we're going to use this very transparent shadow color to just paint some shadow edges of our water lily itself. Now, we need to be really careful that we're not touching any of these edges where it's budded up against the blue water, or otherwise, we're going to create some blooms. So I'm just going to work slowly here and just add a few little hints of shadow. Now, while that water is still wet, that first layer is wet, I can drop in some darker indigo just in certain places to make those petals just a little bit darker. I'm taking a little bit of gamboge and painting the centers of the water lily. Even if the yellow kind of bleeds into the petals, that's okay. Right here, I'm actually adding a little bit more yellow to the petals itself, just to kind of brighten it up a little bit. So don't worry if your yellow kind of bleeds through. Alright, so now I have already checked my blue background to see how wet it is. It seems like it's slightly damp to the tonch but it's not wet anymore. And so I'm going to start painting my first layer of water lilies. So I'm wetting the water lily first, and then I'm grabbing some sap green, and I'm going to drop some sap green in. And I'll do this for each individual water lily. Now, if you can allow your background to dry mostly before doing this step, that's preferential. But if you're starting to notice the green bleeding into your blue background immediately stop. Use your paper towel and soak up that green that's bleeding in and then wait a little bit longer. Ideally, we don't want any bleeding happening between the blue and the green. Once I have this green water lily, now I'm going to take some deep sap green. This is as dark of a green as I can get. I'm taking it directly from the well without adding any water to my brush, and I'm adding a little bit of shadow where the water lily is overlapping. I'm also adding a slight shadow in the very center of the water lily, and that's going to give it a little bit more shape. So I'm going to continue this with all the rest of the water lilies on my page. Adding that first layer of green of sap green. It's gonna be watered down. And then while that's wet, I'll drop in some darker green. And I'm dropping in only where I'm seeing a shadow. Remember that with watercolors, we have to kind of jump around because we need our individual shapes to dry before we paint the object immediately next door. So I'm letting that first water lily dry. I'm jumping to a different water lily, and then I'll kind of hop around and paint all the water lilies to give everything some drying time so that it doesn't bleed. Once again, I'll drop in that deep sap green where I'm noticing that there should be a shadow, and I need to do this, of course, while the first lily pad is wet. Now, if your lily pad is not staying wet enough for you to drop in this deep sap green, then continue working on making that first layer wet enough so that you can drop in that deep sap green. You should be able to use the wetness of the paper to help blend those two greens. So I'm gonna keep working on these water lilies. I'm going to speed up this video just slightly so that you can still watch me paint each individual water lily, but so that it doesn't take forever for you to see where I'm dropping in shadows. So now that we've practiced a few of these water lilies, we can also use the white of the paper to act as highlights. So if you are at a point that you want to try this as well, what I'm doing is I'm wetting the upper half. I'm adding some green to the upper half. And then I'm going to use my brush and paint some radiating lines from the center of the water lily. But I'm leaving some of the white of the paper to shine through. And so the white of the paper is going to act as the highlight there. And I go back and I kind of mess up those lines so that it's not perfect. But if you are at a point that you want to also attempt that, feel free to attempt adding some of those highlights there using the white of the paper. If that's too complicated for you and don't worry about it, leave that as your light green. Now, another way that you can kind of level up your wet-on-wet at this layer is by, in addition to dropping in a dark green for the shadows, you can also drop in a highlight. So I'm using a little gamboge and dropping that in kind of on the upper edge of my water lilies to act as just a lighter highlight. 5. Wet on wet Water Reflections, Part 1: Alright, so now we'll start with the shadow of the water lily. So I'm watering down some indigo, and I'm going to first wet the shadow underneath using wet-on-dry. So my paper is dry. I'm gonna wet immediately under the water lily and then pull some of that shadow downward. And then I'll grab some indigo directly from my plate, so it's a little bit more concentrated, and I'm going to drop that concentrated indigo along the water edge. Now, I don't want this to blend out. I want it to be really nice and deep and dark right at that edge. And I don't mind if there's some little spidering of that color that's spidering and veining into the water, because that's what it would look like in real life, with real water. I am going to dry my brush, and then I use a dry brush to kind of soak up in any spots if it went awry. Alright, so now I am checking on the wetness of my first layer of color. I want this first layer to be bone dry, so dry to the touch. And now I'm going to paint my second layer of wet-on-wet. And this will be the tree reflection that we see. Now, it does need to be wet-on-wet because we want those edges to be really nice and soft. But we can rewet the section that we want to paint on using water, clean water. So I'm grabbing some clean water here for this. And as long as we're using high quality watercolor paper, so this is arches cold pressed. And as long as we're not using our brush and rubbing our brush in the same section over and over again, we can do two subsequent layers of wet-on-wet. So as you notice, I'm wetting the area that I want to work on. And because I'm not rubbing my brush back and forth, it's not going to lift up that blue in the background. If you're using a paper that's not arches, I cannot confirm or deny if this is going to work for you. It does work really well with Arch's cold pressed paper. I imagine it won't work as well with hot pressed, since it seems like hot pressed the color kind of sits on the surface of the paper instead of soaking it a little bit more. So be very cautious of the paper that you're using for this tutorial if you're gonna try this step out. So same exact steps. I'm going to wet the whole section, and then I'm going to drop in my very, very concentrated colors on top of the wet section. Alright, I switched back to that quill brush and I'm just re wetting that whole area, making sure that it is even wetness. I want to make sure that whatever color I'm dropping in is going to bloom and spread evenly. So now I'll grab some deep sap green directly from my pan. My brush is slightly wet, and so that's why you'll notice that spreading quite intensely. So the less liquid you have on your brush, the less the color is going to spread. So I started out with deep sap green, and then I grabbed a little bit of green gold, and I'm adding kind of some dots of green gold. That's going to act as the some of the little algae that's sitting on the surface. Now that I have that green gold, I'm going to go back in with some more deep sap green. So I just wanted to kind of place that where I wanted it before adding more of my darker color. So when I'm adding my deep sap green, I do want this deep sap green to be separate, so I'm adding it in kind of dots, but I'm also connecting some of these dots and making some of these dots larger by using the edge of my brush. They're going to be connected the closer to the water lily that you get. And the further away from the water lilies, the less connected these dots are. I'm going to add a little bit of an S curve here underneath the lily pad, and this is going to just look a little bit more like a reflection. I'm also going to drop in a deep sap green closest to my water lilies, especially on the underside of my water lilies. I want to make sure that it's very apparent that these water lilies are sitting on the water and they're not inside the water. And so I need to make sure that there's a nice dark shadow underneath them. Now, I also am making sure that I'm not over blending this dark, deep sap green with the background in the water. So you're noticing that you can still see some of the blue shining through. That's because I'm not over mixing that green onto my paper. Okay. Now, I'm noticing it's still wet, so I can still work in this section, and I'm going to be adding a little bit of indigo to the deepest darkest shadows. So I am keeping it to this largest shadow here above that right most water lily. And then I'm adding a little bit of indigo into this little tiny section in between. I'm still not overly mixing the two colors, so you can see that indigo stand out from the deep sap green. And then other colors that you can add while it's still wet, you can always add some carbazol violet if you wanted to add a little bit of a purple undertone. You can also go back in and add a little bit more of that green gold. I'm kind of babysitting the color and adding more dark intense color as the color dissipates in the water. When I'm starting to notice that my paper is drying and I no longer can make these soft edges, that's my indicator that I need to stop working. So I'm adding just a little hint of violet here, a little bit more green, and then I'm going to let that section dry. 6. Wet on wet Water Reflections, Part 2: Alright, so I'm gonna now work on the lower half, and I'm going to do the same exact ways I did the upper half, where I'll wet the entire section first, and then I'll drop in my dark greens, my light green gold, and then I'll accent it all with some indigo and violet. 7. Wet on dry Details: So while I'm leaving the reflection of the trees to dry, I'm going to start working on the second layer of my water lilies. So my first layer was this wet-on-wet, where I dropped in some dark colors and allowed that to bleed. My second layer is wet-on-dry. So all my water lilies, I'm going to keep dry. And I'm adding a light layer of watered down sap green. And I'm adding a few little radiating lines coming out of the center of my water lilies. I might also add a few lines around the edges. All I'm doing here is I'm wanting to add some hard edged details. Now, your second layer, the color that you mix should not be very opaque. If your color that you're mixing is too opaque or too dark, then the contrast between your first layer and your second layer is going to be too great, and then it's going to look weird. So the sap green that I'm using as the second layer, you'll notice that it's not that opaque. I still mix it with quite a bit of water. And then I'm using a dry brush in certain areas just to kind of fix any edges that are looking a little bit too hard edged. I also might drop in a little bit of indigo, especially along that center line where water lilies have that little cut out in them. That cutout line, I can always drop in some darker indigo to kind of just accentuate that cutout. Alright, so I'm checking to see how wet the background is still because I do want to add a few drop shadows underneath my water lilies. So this is the immediate shadow of the water lily on the surface of the water. I'm using an indigo directly from my pan for this. Section under the water lily seemed just a little wet, which is great. I do want it to be a little wet. I don't need it to be exactly dry. So I'm adding some hard edged lines of that indigo around certain sections of the water lily and my water pads, my lily pads. I'm trying to keep it to the lower section of my water lilies and lily pads. Here on this largest one, as I add the indigo, I'm noticing that there's a little bit of bleeding happening into the water. I actually really like how that's looking. So I'm going to continue doing these drop shadows around the water lilies. If yours is too dry and it's just one single line, that's okay, too. You can keep it like that. But we're not going to worry if there's gonna be some bleeding happening. Now we can also add this indigo, this line of indigo in between two water lily pads where they're one on top of each other because obviously there would be some shadow in that location as well. If you're wanting to level up a little bit here on one of these lily pads, you can try to leave just a little sliver of space in between the lily pad shadow and the water. And what that's going to do is it's going to mimic almost little water bubbles that are showing up underneath the lily pad. I would only do this in under one of the lily pads. I would not do this under all of them, but it just gives a little extra detail. Another way to add a little extra detail, showing that there's water is to have to outline that hard edge of that little S curve. So we did one of those S curves. I'm going to add a second smaller one right next to it, and I'm doing this wet-on-dry so that it has a harder edge. Once again, just like with those little bubbles, I'm not going to add too many of these. Adding too many kind of takes away from the piece, but just adding one or two in certain spots helps to convey water. The last way to kind of convey water is by adding a little bit of space in between the water lily and having a parallel line painted underneath. Now, this line is slightly broken underneath, if you noticed, and that's going to also help make that reflection look like it's water. I'm gonna let that dry completely, and then I'll take the tape off, and I'm left with a beautiful water lily painting. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial.