Watercolor and Acrylic Birch Tree Painting

1. Introduction: Do you love creating textures in your paintings? Are you curious about how to incorporate watercolor and acrylic paint into a single artwork? Hi, I'm Elizabeth and welcome to my class Watercolor and acrylic birch tree painting. I'm a professionally trained artist and art educator, as well as a published author, Illustrator. In 2020, I began developing classes on skillshare sharing my creative and explorative approach to art materials, art techniques, and artistic processes with my students. This is intended for creatives of all skill levels as a way to create a beautiful winter tree scene using some basic paint and texture technique. By the end of this class, you'll have created a colorful winter scene featuring some lovely textured birch trees using techniques you'll be able to apply in other artworks. I hope to see you in class. 2. Class Project: Thanks for joining me for our class project. We will learn how to use tape to define our tree trunks and our snowy ground, as well as how to build up a bold sky using a wet and wet watercolor application. Then we'll work with black acrylic ink to build up and define our bark texture and then some soft watercolor application to finish off our birch tree landscapes. The first step is to gather up our art supplies. Let's head over to the next lesson to see what materials we'll be working with in class. See you there. 3. Materials: Welcome back. Now let's talk about what materials we're going to want to have on hand for this class project. All right. Our materials for class include watercolor or mixed media paper. I'm going to be going 912 for my class project, but you could work any size that you liked. For that, we're going to need water color in blues and purples. So any kinds of blues and purple water color that you have, whether that be two water colors that you squeeze out and use pan water colors. Any brand, any work, I'm going to need a cup of water to activate my water colors and to wash my brush. I've also got a microfiber cloth that I love to have in the art studio because I can wash it and use it again. But any kind of kitchen cowl paper towel will totally work great for painting our watercolor part. I'm going to be using a 1 " flat brush to do my sky and then I'm also going to be using this size six. Anything smaller like this, I wouldn't, you don't really need smaller than this. And you don't want too much larger than say, a ten or 12. But this is going to be for the detailing of our snow. And adding a little to that section of the painting, we're going to be using tape to mask out our trees in our snowy ground. I like to work with washi tape. It's pretty inexpensive. It goes down really easily and it peels up really easily. But you can also use painter tape if you prefer it. And then we're going to be working to do the bark texture with black acrylic. I'm just using Craft smart. Any brand of acrylic paint will work great. I have a reusable palette that I like to use when I'm doing acrylic. This one is a disposable palette. But any type of palette that works for acrylic paint will be fine. We're only going to be working with black. For that, you may to modify your birch. If you need to bring some lights back in, you may want to have white acrylic on hand also, but black is ultimately all that you need. We also are going to want to have some scrap paper so that we can practice our birch texture prior to going into our trees on our final artwork. So this is one I've already used to practice some birch texture which is why it has the practice there. This is just copy paper. I love it, it's inexpensive. I use it in all sorts of ways in the studio. A couple sheets of this might not be a bad idea to have on hand for ensuring that you have the right amount of black paint on your cardboard. We're going to have a small piece of cardboard, but we're going to be dipping in the paint to create the texture. Anything that's roughly an inch and a half to 2 " wide will be great. We're just going to be using the shorter end of it. I just cut this off of the end of one of my boxes that I'd gotten in the mail. Small piece of cardboard scrap paper, palette black acrylic paint. A large and a small watercolor brush, mixed media or watercolor paper. Blues and purples in your water colors for your sky. A cloth to wipe off your paint, brushes a water container, some tape to tape it down. And that is all that you need for our class project. Take some time to gather up your materials and then head on over to your next lesson, where we will start taping off our trees in our snowy ground. See as soon. 4. Taping Trees & Snow: Welcome back. Now we'll preserve our whites by taping off our tree trunks and snowy ground. The first step, after we've taped down the edges of our watercolor or mixed media paper, is we're going to use our Washi tape, or painter's tape, to create the trunks of our birch trees. I like to start with one strip going at an angle and then I add a second or third overlapping at the top and then widening toward the bottom so that we get that narrowing as it goes up towards the top of the birch tree. You can put as many birch trees down. As you want to think about though, what's going to look good as a composition. If you want to sketch and plan these out in advance, you can. I like to just go with the flow and see what happens and build up the composition as I work. You could also cut your washi tape or painter's tape into thinner strips if you like to create even more variation in the size of your birch trees. But if you overlap them and you go ahead and aim for an odd number, you'll have a really good composition going on in your page. Just make sure you don't evenly space them out. Then for the ground, you could cut your tape to do this or you could just kind of pinch it down. As I go like I'm doing, I started on the edge and I go across and to create the rounding of the snowy ground, I hold my finger down and move the tape, and then just keep pushing it down and up so that I get the rolling hills in a pretty easy sort of way. And then I add more layers of tape to help secure any folded areas as I'm going, because I'm going to be doing a light wash of paint over the whole upper sky and I don't want that to bleed through onto my snowy ground. So make sure all of your tape is secured down very tightly by rubbing it and just ensuring that everything is sticking as well as you can. In our next lesson, we will add our watercolor sky. See you there. 5. Painting Sky: Welcome back. In this lesson, we'll be using a wet on wet watercolor application to create the sky of our landscape with a large flat brush. I'm doing a wash of water across the sky, going right over the washi tape because I'm fairly confident that it's secured nice to my paper. A nice even wash water is what you need. You don't want it bleeding under. Just get it wet but still stay in control. And then I'm dropping in my darkest blue so that I really get some pops of boldness in the sky. And playing around with letting it fade out as it goes. And I have less pigment on the brush and going back and forth with that color. And then I'm going for a bolder, more ultramarine blue to pop some brighter variation on top of that. Just have fun with, just lay down your color. Be super loose and relaxed. Just make sure you don't over paint it. Otherwise you'll lose the variation of colors that you have and it'll all become one single color wash, which that's fine. But having a multicolored valued sky is much more exciting for this project. Then I'm going to pop in stem purple as well. The what I love about my flat brushes, I can do bold washes of color, but I can also turn it sideways and get more line detail. Because of the wet on wet application. All of this is going to soften as the pigment moves out, but it's going to be really beautiful in the end. Now we need to let our sky dry before we move on to our next lesson. See you soon. 6. Adding Bark Texture: Now we need to carefully remove our tape from our paper. Once all of your tape is removed, we're going to be adding a little bit more paper to extend our tree trunks down onto our snowy landscape. Then we'll be using our black acrylic paint to begin adding our tree bark texture, so now it's dried. I'm going to carefully remove my washi tape. I am peeling the tape back on itself very slowly. This is sped up, so that's why it looks like I'm pulling it off kind of fast. Take your time with this step. You really don't want to rip your paper because that will ruin the quality of your painting In the end. Get all your birch trees and then my washi tape is coming up on my borders and I don't need it taped down any longer. I'm removing that as well. The last step is removing my ground very carefully. Making sure that I pull the rest of the birch strips as I go. And then the final border off at the bottom, and then you can discard your tape. But then I want to extend my birch trees down onto my snowy ground so that it looks more realistic using small sections of Washi tape. I am continuing to do the truncated widening at the bottom, making sure that I'm not overlapping any of the birch area because the next thing we're going to paint with acrylic paint is going to be the texture of our birch trees. This step is all about mapping. How far down do you roughly want to go for the bottom of your tree, where it comes out of the snow? Now I've gotten out my black acrylic paint. I'm just using regular craft paint that I picked up at our art supply store and a small piece of cut cardboard. You can practice this on a separate sheet of paper to build a little confidence and to kind of help determine how much dabbing you're going to have to do to get the excess paint off your cardboard. So you're going to dip it in the paint, dab it onto your palette, or an extra sheet of paper. Press it down to the edge of your tree and then quickly drag it across while lifting up. If you have too much paint, you're going to get really large swatches of color. So that's why the dabbing off on the side is very important because you can always add more paint. But once it's down, it's a little tricky to get it off again. You can't get it off again. But there is a trick that I can show you for fixing that, should you have too much black paint that goes down. But this step is really fun because you touch it to the edge and then wish and then whisk it off to the side. Pushing over and lifting up. At the same time, the cardboard is going to give you a really beautiful variation to how it goes down, which I really love. I like doing all of the left sides of my trees at one time so that I'm not trying to manage going back and forth. You can do the right and the left to the left side and then do the right of the same tree. But this is a nice, easy way to keep yourself in the flow of movement. And then you always go to the same direction. If you're left handed, you may want to do this reversed. Then I flip my paper over and now I'm doing the opposite sides of my trunks. So same concept. Dabbing the paint. Dabbing off on the side. My cardboards absorbed a little bit of the paint. So it gives me more ghosting lines, which I really love. And you can do a little bit of a wiggle when you first touch it down and then lift it off. Then if you want to put even more, some horizontal bark texture, you can use the corner edge of your cardboard and then drag the paint across a little bit to give it some more line details that are a little bit more controlled and a little bit more pronounced. You just keep going until you've finished up betting bark texture to all of your chunks. If you do end up with areas where you have more black than you want to, you can do a reverse of this. So you can do a secondary piece of cardboard and you can use some white acrylic paint and just do the same thing we did with the black. But now you're going to do it with white and go over the top, it adds even more grays. Well, it adds more grays to it because you've got the white and the black mixing a little bit on the trunks themselves, which can be really nice. I like to use this just as a corrective measure so that I don't go overboard because it is very easy to overdo this step of our project. But that is a way to fix it. If you need to tone down some black patches on your bark and just add as much texture as you want to make sure you don't go overboard. We don't we want to have a nice randomness to it. Make sure that you're not doing an evening out of those lines. Because that's our tendency is to even them out. Our brain wants to even things, but we want it random because we're mimicking nature. Now I'm defining that edge a little bit. I have a couple of spots where my paint didn't quite push down, ready on the edge. I tweak that a little bit by going along the edge, but for the most part, I'm letting that happen and exist because I like it now. You could wait for your black acrylic paint to try either do this step carefully. If you're doing it like I am, well it's wet. Or wait for your black to dry. And then come in and take the washing tape carefully up from the bottoms of your trunks. Now that we've added our bar texture and carefully removed the remaining pieces of tape, it's time to paint in some very subtle details with watercolor on our snowy ground. See you in the next lesson. 7. Painting Snow: Welcome back. Using minimal water color. We're going to add some cast shadows to our trees, as well as add some depth and dimension to our snowy ground. Now that I've removed all the washi tape, I've gotten out a small watercolor brush and a clean cloth, and I am using a fair bit of water to a very small amount of pigment just to kind of indicate some cast shadows below the trunks. Just kind of going right along the edge of the trunk and then feeding it out, letting some of the line texture exist there you can decide how soft you want to make this and how minimal or how bold you want to go with your color. I really wanted this to be a very soft part of the piece so that it didn't compete with the boldness of the sky or of the darker parts of the trunks. I'm being very minimal with my color. Dabbing it off on my rag and going back and forth with water back into that even further soften the marks of water color I'm putting down in my snow, I did have a little areas where the pavement was a little stronger than I wanted to. I tried to scumble it out of there in the second tree from the left. It didn't work that well. It was already set in the paper. Go fast but slow with this step or you can always go darker, but sometimes it's hard to back it off. Then to add more realism to this and to help map out the depth of the forest, I'm doing a little bit of the same technique along the top, the backmost edge of the snow where the snow meets the sky here. You do need to be careful because it is possible to reactivate your watercolor sky and have that bleed down into your snow. So just be careful. The watercolor is dry, but it can reactivate. So I'm just very subtly going in with a little bit of blue on the edge of my snowy landscape. And then fading that out so that I still have the brightness of snow below and it doesn't become something that looks more like water and less like snow. I'm realizing that I had done very flat bottom trunks. And in reality, trees are rounded, so instead of going flat on the bottom, I could round that instead and let the tree trunk have just a slight indication of the roundness of it. But I'm happy with the flatness and I kind of like, that's a little bit of a funkiness to it. It's been so fun to create a watercolor and acrylic birch tree painting with you. Let's send it over to our final lesson to wrap up the class. See you there. 8. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for taking this class and creating a watercolor and acrylic birch tree painting with me. I hope you had a lot of fun incorporating watercolor and acrylic techniques into your paintings and are feeling inspired for ways that you can use this in future artworks. I'd love to see your birch tree paintings. So please head over to the Projects and Resources section and click on that Create Project button to upload a photo of your painting. And feel free to add some texts sharing how the process went, how you felt about it, and maybe even some ideas you could share for future application of any or all of our painting techniques. It's also really fun to check out the projects of your classmates. So after you post your project, be sure to take some time checking out the other work in the student gallery and leaving likes and feedback on classmates paintings. As we build a community of supporting each other on our creative journeys. I'd greatly appreciate it if you left a review. Student feedback is the best way for me to continue growing as an online teacher, as well as finding ways to improve past, future, and current classes. I know that as a student, I really appreciate the option to leave a review. It gives me a chance to share what I've learned and to provide some thoughts about how things went. And it's a great opportunity to connect with other learners on the skillshare platform. I greatly appreciate it if you took the time to leave a review and let me know what you thought about the class. I love sharing my art adventures and sharing my student's work on my Instagram. If you are also online sharing your work, please tag me so that I can celebrate it, see what you're working on and continue to connect on social media as fellow creatives. You can also follow my art journey and get additional demonstrations by following me over on my Youtube channel under the name Elizabeth Welfare. If you check it out, be sure to click the subscribe button so we can stay connected beyond Skillshare classes. If you want to stay up to date on my newest Skillshare classes, be sure to click the Follow button, and I'll see you next time.