Watercolor Autumn Challenge: Enjoying Every Season

1. Introduction: Hi? I'm Irina Trzaskos, professional artist and illustrator. Welcome to my studio. Here, I create my artwork and also I held my classes and creative challenges. Today, I invite you to join my creative challenge, inspired by autumn in the forest. I believe every season deserves to be celebrated through art and that's what you'll be doing in this challenge. For the next seven days, we will be drawing and painting elements of autumn forest. We'll celebrate with change of seasons and beauty of autumn. I'm so excited about this challenge and I can't wait to get started. If you're new on my channel, press the "Follow" button, and let's get started. 2. Supplies: For this class, you'll need a sketchbook or a paper. I made my own sketchbook. You can make your own or you can buy one. You can also just use paper. I made the sketchbook with this paper. It's watercolor paper, cold press, 140 pounds. Also, you'll need paint palette, paper towel, water, watercolor paint, or any media of your choice for this challenge. Also, you'll need a medium brush, a small brush. This is Number 6. Medium brush is Number 6 and the small brush is Number 2. Also, you'll need your favorite pencil for drawing. We said all the supplies we need today and let's get started. 3. Autumn Colors: This is the sketchbook I created for this challenge and for this creative adventure. First what you'll do, let's select and mix some autumn colors, which we'll be using today. I have my paint palette. Here's the paint. If you don't want to use these colors, you can use any colors you like. Even if you choose to use one color, it can be beautiful too or maybe you want to use a different media or mix medias, whichever keeps you creative. That's the most important part. The first color we'll be using is the Naples yellow. If you don't have Naples yellow, it's okay. You can choose any earthy yellow you have. It can be raw sienna or yellow ocher or Naples yellow. If you don't have any earthy yellow, you can mix any yellow you have with a little bit of violet and it will make it more muted, more earthy. Not as bright as in summer. For second color, we'll be using today is we'll mix Naples yellow with some magenta. It's this orange-magenta. Not even sure how to call this color but it's kind of orange. Another color I will be using is some classic green. We'll also be sometimes mixing it with Naples yellow. Also we'll be mixing some Naples yellow with a little bit of violet. You'll see this Naples yellow is one of those colors, which will be binding the entire color scheme. We'll be using a little bit of it everywhere, so it creates a nice color harmony. When we mixed Naples yellow with violet, we got this color, this neutral mushroomy color. Also, we'll be using some cadmium orange and mixing it with magenta. Because it's too bright, we'll be adding a little bit of classic green. Classic green decided to run away. So orange magenta and classic green. A little bit more orange, this is too brown. I'll get this red orange color. You don't want to mix these two colors, so you can always use directly red ocher which looks very similar to this. Then we'll use some red but the red on its own is so bright, we'll be mixing it with a little bit of green. Get this deeper red. Then another color that we'll be using today is sepia. It's a dark-dark brown which we'll be using instead of black. These are all the colors we'll be using today, and also sometimes we'll be mixing one in-between each other to keep the color scheme harmonious. Let's get started. 4. Forest Mushrooms: In today's lesson, we will be drawing and painting forest mushrooms. I will be using a pencil. Use your favorite pencil or if you like to draw with ink pen, you can use that too, instead. I'm using a pencil. Let's start with a big mushroom. We have a big mushroom and a small one next to it. Let's start with the stem of big mushroom. I intentionally want to make it feel as a sketch. We'll be doing a lot of lines with our pencil to give it this alive feel of a sketchbook and to practice our pencil drawing. Here, the mushroom will have a skirt. Let's make it hipier. Here we'll have a big mushroom hat. Again, you can challenge yourself, I do not want to use eraser at all, and just keep all the lines. Some of that is texture a mushroom has. Next, just show some of earth with these little loops. Here, we have another little mushroom, because mushrooms usually grow in groups. You can often see a small mushroom next to a big mushroom, which I think is adorable. Let's draw some more skirt on this one too. Let's draw some grass. There may be some other plants growing next to the mushrooms. Besides, looks more winter cycle. These are the leaves, that's why I'm drawing them. But you can draw them in your own way if you don't want to draw them like this. These are our mushrooms. Next, let's paint them. First, let's make some Naples yellow with a little bit of violet. You can see violet is so dominant. You add one drop of violet, and it takes over. Let's add a little more yellow. You can see this beautiful mushroom we'll color. Paint right over the tassel. We are painting over the light watercolor wash. You can leave some white spaces, you can add a little more purple here and there. I'm using a medium brush. Very watery, very light. The same paint on this little one, like this. Now, let's make some beautiful color for our mushroom hat. Let's have some Naples yellow on this side. Next, let's add some magenta to it, and let it mix on the paper. Next, let's take some red, just got a little red, and add some classic green to it. This is too much. It turned into brown. We need more red. Mushroom is drying. This is the right color. Now, let's add it right to the mushroom. A little bit more of this mix of magenta with Naples yellow to bring it all together. This part is too yellow, let's blend it in a little. This is better. Now, the little mushroom. I used this mix of yellow with magenta for it, like this. Maybe, a little bit of this dark red. Beautiful. Now, when I look at this, it's a little too dark: the stem. So I'm lifting the color up with the brush. Now, let's wet this earth with some clean water, as clean as it is at this point. Let's take some Naples yellow. Mix some yellow for grass under. Let's add more green to our red. Paint some grasses here. No rush, just relax and enjoy painting. Know what time is a good time to slow down. Now I have this brown, let's add a few more details on our mushrooms: little dots. This one's still wet, it's okay. Little lines, maybe, to show the texture. Why not? A few more grasses here and there. These are our forest mushrooms. Thank you for painting with me. 5. Squirrel: Hi, in this lesson we will be drawing and painting a squirrel. You can see so many squirrels in a autumn forests so that's why I thought it would be so cute to draw and paint one in our sketchbook. Here is a squirrel's nose, and it'll go with the shape of a head. Again, don't be afraid to make lines. Here is a ear, a second ear, and next, I like drawing the eye, so I know where we're going next. A little smaller nose squirrel. The upper body is rounded. Here we have a little paw or jinx it. Her body sitting, so it is wider. Don't be afraid to make a lot of lines, they seem very charming in sketchbooks. Here is another paw and another paw. A little tummy, and of course, a big tail. Maybe her back could have been narrow. It's a nice big squirrel. I'll give her berry or a nut. Again she'll be seating on some surface probably earth or moss or a rock. This is a quick drawing of our squirrel and next, we will be painting it. Let's add some texture to the tail first. Make big pencil strokes. Next, let's add some color. This part will be white, so that's why we need to add some more strokes so we don't paint over it. Let's take our mix of Naples yellow, little bit of magenta, this is too much magenta. Add some cadmium orange, and just start with very watery water coat painting the squirrel. Let's leave the ears unpainted for now so we can add some darker color. Let's mix some orange with this brown we had. This was the brown from our previous lesson when we mixed red and green. Let's start painting some darker color while our squirrel it's still a wet layer on it. Nice. You can see how the lighter orange nicely mixed with a darker orange, and we got this beautiful soft transitions of color. Now let's add more water to this mix and paint the tail. Big brush strokes. I wish I had more of this brown. Let's take some red ocher and darken these parts too. Next, let's darken more the tail too before I take another color. Next, I want to take some sepia. Pretty thick not too watery and smash the tail. No, that's not what I wanted. Add some dark details on the ears and the eye, nose, little paws. Let's take some water and we'll blend the paw color into our orange. With more watery reciprocal let's paint the paws down here. With the same sepias let's add some texture on the white and this line and maybe a little bit on the tail. Although you can see the pencil brush strokes which helps a lot. Darken a little here. Next, let's paint another or whatever she is holding. I chose to paint it in Naples yellow and give some white in it too. Let's make mix some green into this orange. Add some moist under the squirrel like this. With simple want to add a few more details. Here is our little cute squirrel. Thank you for painting, gave me. 6. Colorful Oak Leaf: Hi, in today's lesson, we will be painting and drawing an autumn oak leaf of course. Let's start through the drawing. Pick up your pencil, and let's draw a wavy line, and a few lines on the sides. These lines will be veins of the leaf. They'll help us with drawing the leaf. Then we can start with outlining. This is, I think, a scarlet oak. It has some little long and sculpt edges on the leaf and I think it's very pretty. You can see we're going around the line we drew previously. This is our leaf we drew it and now we can start coloring it. I want to have a lot of colors mixing on my leaf, yellow and red and orange and green and I hope you'll join me in this coloring. I'm starting with Naples yellow and next I want to add some magenta with Naples red so lets make some magenta. You have to work pretty fast before that yellow dries. This is magenta with yellow and we have this reddish-orange. I'm painting the half of the leaf and then I'll switch to another half. You have to be very careful because this is a sketch book. Feel free to paint outside the lines but leave some white spaces. Just whatever you do just be creative. I'm taking this green. Mixed classic green with some Naples yellow, beautiful. Now you can switch to this side. Let's start again with green, I guess. We're out of green, so let's add some yellow. Next, let's mix some red with a little bit of green and may be a little bit of yellow. Green is jumping with me today. Insert a little bit here. I love how this color is bleeding into the yellow under. A little bit of green here. [inaudible] It's okay. Let's keep painting with some pure Naple yellow. Let's finish with a strong green. Mix it with a little bit of Naples yellow, but still keep it dark. Maybe this is [inaudible] a little bit of water. This is nice. Now I want to take some sepia, mix it with this red we have here and paint the stem. This line is a little too harsh, so let's wet the brush and dry it in the paper towel and blend it in a little bit, just a tiny bit like this. We have a little puddle here. Ideally we'd have to absorb it, but I want to see this imperfection of water color when it dries so I'll leave it. Other than that, I want to a few more lines and I think I'm pretty happy with this leaf and I'll leave it like this. Thank you for painting with me again. 7. Hedgehog: Hi, in today's lesson, we will be painting and drawing a hedgehog. A hedgehog doesn't have a lot of colors. However, I want to show you how to draw the textures with a pencil. You can see them through water color afterwards. Let's start drawing the hedgehog's head. We start with the nose lining again and then we can link it here. Here will have the eye , ear. This line will show where the needles end and I will put it there on the ear. From here it's easy, there's a paw. I'm going to fix this side a little. Here's our main shape. Here I'll have another paw. Now let's draw the needles with the pencil. Just like little conglomerations of the grass and say so it just looks squiggly lines. Just keep going, leaving a little bit of space between them. It doesn't matter which directions you go, as long as you fill the entire surface with these squiggles. That's why I told you to use your favorite pencil so you did enjoy drawing the textures. Don't forget to leave some white spaces. I'm almost there. You can fix them outline a little bit going, these squiggle lines all the way around. Like this. So here is our little paw and the second one. Now I can start painting. Let's mix some yellow with a little bit of sepia. Paint the head and the paw, very watery like these. So sweet. When I'm taking some sepia, a dark one, painting into a paw. You can see how beautifully this dark color is diluting into the light one. Take some watery sepia and paint another paw. Now let's add a lot of water to our sepia and add some color to the needles. Just a little bit. We don't add a lot we still want to see the texture we draw so nicely. I'm leaving this space lighter because the sun is hitting from above so this surface will be lighter. I see pellets [inaudible], even those. Oh, my hand was still wet so it painted it, it's okay. Now let's add the little leaf in here like it gets dark and the needles. Exciting yellow with my gentian. Let's add a couple of branches around this. Make it more illustrative. Why not? This point is total dark so we need to lighten it up a little and let's make a branch. Scattering off to our pencil, and no pencil after that to make these. Then another branch this way which is way harder to me because I am right-handed. Try to drag it this way. You can turn the sketch book anyway, like because you're not filming. You can have it upside down if you want to. Don't struggle like me. You can just turn your paper anyway. On this side, I [inaudible] in here. So this side I want to have some berries, just a few. On this side I'll take some magenta and mix with a little of red and I will add some leaves. Let's take some green mix it with these colors and just paint a few leaves. You can see because we're mixing the green with yellow and magenta, it's some more of the green. It's not a bright spring green. It still has the feel of a fall. I think this is enough and our little illustration is ready. Thank you for painting with me. 8. Crabapples: Hi. In today's lesson, we will be painting a crab apple. We have crab apples around our house and I thought it's such a nice object to draw and paint for autumn challenge. We'll start with crab apple itself and it will be a small crab apple branch. Here is the one which inspires me, which is right in front of our house on the edge of the woods. It's a pretty simple shape and just round and has these beautiful details on top. Again, and don't be afraid to add more lines, just to make it even prettier. Then I have this delicate stem, which almost looks like a cherry stem. Here, we'll have a second one and the third one. I'm not going to draw the fourth one. I think three is enough. I want to add some leaves too, so it'll get some. It will be a beautiful about five axons and drawing and painting. I'm not afraid to add more lines to the branch itself because it will just better show the texture. Here, I want to have a leaf. Here, I want to have a second leaf. Let's try to give the lines pretty consistence. Here I have a lot of lines, but I'm just trying the same pattern of lines all over. Also when we look close at crab apple, it has these teeny tiny dots, which I think are adorable. Let's add some dots and they will be covered by a color. We can always get some more with water color. This is a simple drawing and I think it's beautiful in its simplicity. Let's start with some yellow added on one side. Then another side will have some red with green, and yellow. It's mostly red, but it has a little bit of green and yellow in it, this. For the top, we'll take some sepia and while the crab apple is still wet, we'll add it right there. You'll see this color blending a little bit into the red, which is pretty too. Let's do a similar way for next one. This side we'll have yellow, some here red. In a separate pad, let's makes some red with sepia for a darker red. Let's add it on this side a little bit. Again, we'll paint this part with sepia. This one became so pale, so let's add a little more red to it. Now, let's paint the third one. Here's again some Naples yellow with red. I want this one to be lighter than other two, so I'm very careful by adding red to some Naples yellow, and sepia. Let's round this one a little bit. Next, let's take some red with sepia and paint the stem. With a very watery sepia, I'll paint a branch for now. Then I'll add the texture with a darker sepia. For the leaves, I'm taking some Naples yellow. Let's add some green to it. After we've painted a part of the leaves with yellow, the other half we'll paint with green. Now, let's take some few [inaudible] here and add some details to our branch. Little dots. We have green. Let's stretch some lines. It's still very wet. These are our crab apples. Thank you so much for painting with me again. 9. Fox: Hi. In today's lesson, we will be drawing and painting a fox. It's not a very realistic fox, it's more stylized, but I think you'll like it. Let's find the page, which is here and we'll start to have a drawing with a pencil. As always with animals, we're starting with the nose. It's a curved, raised nose. Then we'll have eye, the ear, and a second ear. It already looks like a fox, doesn't it? Then we'll have this lower part of the head. Here, we'll have, as I said, it's stylized so it will be like this, and here we'll have a big tail. Easy. I didn't draw the line right, it has to be higher. I'm just drawing it right the second time and then leaving the previous one because I'm trying not to use the eraser and just embrace all the mistakes as they are and to see what they turn into when I'm done. This is a tail, and this is our fox. I'll say, I want to show where we have white part, so we have white here and white here. We get our beautiful little fox. Also, I want to have some branches here, just like we had in other painting. Like this and some on this side too, just to create with some in those two difficult position of a relaxed fox in a outdoor forest. I think this is enough for the drawing, we can add a little bit of texture, especially where we'll have white parts like here, and the ears will also be white and dark on the edges. Let's take some orange and mix it with this [inaudible]. Hopefully, it looks rich orange, so let's add some yellow cheat and a little bit of this sepia to calm it down a little bit so it's more muted. Next, I'll just paint the fox and will leave a part which need to be white. Add a little more [inaudible] to give you some watercolor wash mark. Interesting, we need some color transitions like this. Let's put in a little bit of color towards the tail, and a little bit on the ears, and here. Next, let's let it dry, and meanwhile, let's paint a little branches. I just need to color some leaves and took some sepia of a little bit of red. Get it too dark some, lifting up some color. We have a dry brush. Take some of this green and paint the Earth under. I think I should have done that before I painted the branch, but it's okay. Next, let's take [inaudible] in some more branches where our fox is drying a little bit. Next step, let's take some sepia and add some dark to the ears with the tip of a brush, into the eye and the nose. Also, let's add some little bit of texture to the white, just a tiny bit, don't overdo it, and the same here. I'm pretty happy on our fox, I hope you are too. Thank you so much for painting with me. 10. Owl: In today's lesson, we will be drawing and painting an owl in autumn forest. We'll start with the drawing again. Usually, we're starting with the nose which looks like a diamond. Next, we'll draw two curved lines like this, and then we'll have the eyes of the owl. It already looks like an owl which is good. Let's draw this. I don't think this are the ears, but they do look like ears. The top of the head, and then to make half circles here, almost circles like this then they're going down. Again, we're adding the texture where the pencil. I'm going to add some more pencil to the eye. Because owl will be sitting on this side, it curves into this direction. Here I'll have paws or legs on the branch, some evergreen branch. Then I'll have the wing here and I'll finish this part. Feathers are prettier, will be still a jungle lot of texture, well, some texture away water coat. Lets finish drawing the body up to the tail. Again, a lot of brave lines, don't be afraid to be a little longer. Next, lets add a little bit texture with a pencil here, and the rest we'll try to do it watercolor. It's like these eyes are different, aren't they? Just a little bit of squiggles. This branch needs to be a little bigger for this big bird. We won't have a lot of colors on this drawing sketch. We'll just have a yellow eyes. Let's take some naples yellow straight from a pan and paint in on this and at these parts of the circle. [inaudible] a little bit because I'm not planning to add in more color to to this part of the hat, well, to this side next to the eyes. Next, let's take some sepia and run it in and start a tank of a dark color. In a little bit, I'm trying fix it in the nose. Some parts I'm leaving white because some owls have white. Next, I want to add to a lot of water in here. Again, with the very same sepia, add some texture. I'm just putting some dots and leaving some white spaces too. Here we have some dry paper, and her we have a wing. I'll take more of the sepia, and I'll just finish these few lines in the eyes. 11. See you Soon!: Thank you so much for joining me in another creative journey. It was such a joy to paint with you. If you share your art on Instagram, please tag me so I can see it. I can't wait to see you in my other classes and in creative challenges. Bye.