Watercolor Fall Farm Truck Painting

3. Painting The Truck Part 1: For this next segment, I go ahead and get out a couple of your round brushes. It's nice to have one brush that's strictly just for laying down water because we are going to be using a wet into wet technique. Meaning if this is your first time experimenting with that, we're going to layer the initial ground with water and then lay paint on top of that. Truly, this whole painting is going to be a lot of layering. It's not my typical style, which is more gestural and loose. We're just mixing colors as we move along and not really adding more on top of that once they dry, but just leaving them as is here. We're going to allow things to dry, add another layer, but also be working wet into wet as well. Maybe have a brush that's strictly just your water brush and then have another one for actually laying down the paint. How we get this result here is by, like I said, you can either put the color on top of the painting and then while that color is still wet, you will mix a different ratio. We'll have more of like a cough syrup ratio rather than a broth, which would be attributed here. And you darken around the edges here. And I'm going to show you how to do that. But just wanted to mention beforehand that's how we achieve that. Or you can completely layer a layer of water and then move forward and start layering here one color, go back in and add another layer of color. Hopefully that all makes sense and you'll be able to see, obviously, as we move forward and paint this together. If you want to have this off to the side, you can. It was more for the illustration than anything else, not necessarily the actual water color concepts. But I did want to just mention that we have that available off to the side if you're wanting to refer to that. Along the way, I've squeezed out a bit of the greenish umber onto my palette. I'm going to go ahead and mix that now by taking a wet brush and dipping straight into the paint. And I'm going to pull that color out here onto the palette, mix up a really nice Cough strip consistency. If you'll remember from my previous classes, that is 70% paint and 30% water. Really get into the paint here that we have a nice thick, thick coat of color. Then come one step out, mix a new pile, begin adding water for broth consistency, rather than completely do a layer in water. I'm going to head in with a really washy broth, meaning that it's heavy on the water in my brush, rather than like blotting off my brush and then picking up color. I'm leaving quite a bit of water on here. Because what I want to happen is I want this to stay wet enough so that I can head back in with my cough syrup ratio and add another layer of color while things are wet. We're also going to do it when it's dry, but we're going to do a little bit of everything squeeze a bit more. Greenish temper doesn't go a long way, like colors like Prussian blue only need a touch of it to really just like maximize that color. But I find with this color, you really do need to be generous with it and have enough on your palette to move through however much of it that you need. Okay, we have a nice thick pile here and a nice broth here to touch more water. If you want, go ahead off to the side on a separate piece of paper. Make sure you have your consistencies here. You can see that, remember, water color dries two to three times lighter than what you see. You need to accommodate for that. This is the top here and the broth is the bottom here. You might want to do that off to the side just to be sure. Then we can move that off to the side and begin layering in. What we're going to do is we're going to stop at each segment. This will be a segment, and then this will be a segment. And just move through in pieces, rather than doing the whole thing at once and feeling very overwhelmed as to how to keep moving and keeping track of exactly what's wet. Okay, I'm going to lay a nice coat of paint here. Pick up a little bit of water and just begin moving it down. I'm just pulling it down, pulling it sideways. I want a nice base coat here. Picking up a little more water, a little bit more paint. I'm going to come up all the way through here. Up through the top, all the way around the window, it's okay if you go a little bit over, there's room for air. Don't feel like you can't make a mistake. And plus you have the file. If things go completely awry, you can always just reprint this nice little line here. Moving that through, this helps working in segments to not feel overwhelmed by the, the size of the painting. This is a rather small painting, but sometimes we have a lot of surface area to cover and it can be daunting. Continuing to work through here, things are still nice and wet. I'm just pulling the paint, our broth consistency, and then also picking up water as I move along. I don't want to go too dark initially because there's no room for me to darken up things along the edges. You can already see we have something that's a little bit lighter. I'm just going to stop right there. We'll be able to b***d that when we need to. Okay, we have a nice light coat here. What I'm going to do while things are wet is pick up a little bit more of that broth consistency and head back in right here along the edges that things are just a little bit darker. If you're wanting to use your reference picture, you can see that that's exactly what's happening in the painting. Just right here, dropping it in. The important thing in the beginning is to make sure that you have a nice wet surface. If it's too dry, this isn't going to happen. Your paints not going to move at all, then I want to make sure that I don't go over this barrier here, because in our painting, it's going to be a quite a bit lighter than what we have going on up here. Just letting things dry for a moment. That, I wouldn't say downside, but you have to be a little bit more patient when working wet into wet because you're really just waiting on the paint to do what it wants to do. You hot environment, things are going to dry very quickly. If you're in a cooler room, then it might take a little longer. It's just taking note along the way. Okay, this is drying. I can see this is very wet. This is drying. So now I'm going to head into my cough syrup mixture, which as you remember, is the one that's just a little bit thicker here. I'm going to work on this area. I'm just going to lay that color here along the top. I'm going to do the same right here. Just moving the paint along and then we just have to give it a moment. Then what you can do if you have your Filbert brush, what I like to do is I dip it in water, make sure it's clean, blot off that excess water, and then we can lift out a little bit of the paint and then blot that on a paper towel. Like I said, it's a damp brush and I'm just running it along the surface here where I want there to be not so much color. There we go, Moving that along, lifting out the color bit, dipping back into my cough syrup. I'm going to come here just a little bit more paint flow. It's such a beautiful process. I don't work this way very often anymore because I'm usually moving quickly as I cover a large area. This is nice to just have like one segment at a time. I can see that this area is drying over here, so I can do the same thing, taking my cough shirt mixture and coming right here along the edges, letting that paint do what it loves to do. Just sit there and lay on top. This is how we are creating depth and dimension. We're going to do the same thing down here. Moving along, taking the toe of the brush and just gently dabbing the wet media. You can do is take your brush that you're using exclusively for water as well, and just begin to b***d some of the color together. You can also pick up the broth consistency if things are looking too separated and just touch it up against the edges here, create some really pretty bleeds. This is one of those classes where I want to give you free rein to paint this, how you want to paint this, Giving you the education, but allowing you to really play here and find your happy place. I like where things are at right now with the paint. We're going to definitely need to do a little bit more work. But let's continue moving forward and painting the whole body of this truck. 6. Applying Gestural Marks: This last and final step is optional. It is a nod to just my style of painting. What I coined, what I call back in the day now as Lutanical, which is just a b***d of loose watercolors and botanical concepts, it involved a lot of this. This is really where my roots are with layering. And really taking my time through painting, gradually moved into more of a gestural and loose style. Not simply just out of preference, but also because being able to move efficiently as I brought children into my life. I started out as having no children and moved into raising a family. That style is more suited to my lifestyle. However, I still do love to paint like this. Occasionally one of the things I do like to do is to add gestural markings to my painting, which just add character. It makes it unique, it just makes it feel like my own. Again, very optional, but I'm going to show you how to do it. You can decide if you want to or not. What you're going to do is take your Filbert brush and you're going to dip it immediately just into the paint to pick up a very thick ratio, even more so than Cough Sir, this is more like horse radish. If you've purchased my book or if you've worked through any of the material, we talk about those three consistencies. And this would be like the horse radish, it's a very sticky pasty texture. Looking at this painting, I've added one right here underneath the door handle to create a shadow. Basically, what I did is I took paint and I just dragged it underneath the door handle here and b***ded it as we did elsewhere. But what we can do is add that in other areas too. Just to rough up this truck a little bit, I'm going to take the paint and I'm just going to come along the edge here. I'm just going to drag it just gesturally. Then I'll take my round brush and just a little bit soften things up, but I'm going to leave the bulk of the paint here so that it just serves as a nice dark mark. And I'll do the same thing here, just adding a little bit of character to the truck here. I'm going to do the same thing right here along this line. Like I said, again, this is more of a nod, just to my style of how I paint not necessary. Taking the brush and moving through the paint, leaving areas where it's a little bit more texturized. Do the same thing. Here you can see this just adds a nice element to the painting. I feel like it gives the painting body volume depth. It adds imperfections, which, you know, I'm all about leaning into the imperfect and embracing mistakes along the way and figuring out what to do with them. Taking my brush and just softening off here, trying not to cover up this little highlight here, because we love that. At least I do. I'm going to add just a little shadow around the window here. I didn't want to skimp you on those details. I could have just added them and left it and then come back and said, hey, this is what I have now. But I want you to feel like you got to go through the entire process with me. Even though these are just, like I said, very innate to just how I intuitively paint. I want to show you that so that you can opt to include that or not. I'm going to do one last one here, pick up a little bit more paint. It is something that I may do after the fact too, because I'll look at the painting and think, okay, well it just needs a little bit more and add it post production. But for the most part I'm happy with where things are. Again, you can continue to just move around the painting like that. Those areas where it's dark, that's where I find it's best. It just is a really pretty fun way to add some character and depth to the painting. We're going to stop there and then we're going to come back and do tires together. 7. Painting The Tires: Let's go ahead and dip into our Jane's black, right here. And pull it out onto the center of the palette. Make yourself a Cough consistency. Then let's pull it out one more time for something a bit softer. Broth consistency, we want to make sure we have those two ratios to work with. Go ahead and put that off to the side. I'm going to use my round brush and I'm going to dip in here to my broth and begin to layer in the paint. And just move it down. I'm going to move a little quicker here since we've got the concept down. It's just really the same thing. I'm not going to be overly careful here but just making sure I get the majority, hey, I'm going to cross that barrier and then pick up a little bit of the cough strip consistency. And let's head in here and go ahead and add some nice little bleeds into here. And appear again using Cough strip consistency around the edges. I use my second brush, just throw it across the room. I'm going to use my second brush that has mostly just water on it to fill in here, just because I don't want this giant white space. So I'm just going to b***d that together for a nice there we go, so we just have like a little peak of the white here. Then again, in consistency, I'm going to go around the perimeter leaving just a bit of white space here. And again, do the same thing down here. Cost consistency while everything's still nice and wet. Picking up my Filbert brush, just b***ding a little bit here. Let's go ahead and do the same thing on the other side. We'll start with broth consistency, just continuing to move that paint around and crossing over that threshold, bringing a little bit more paint into the nearly center. I'm going to leave a touch of white there. Again, we'll just start with the layering of the Cough ser, consistency along the perimeter of the wheel. And this is a little dark over here. So I'm just going to lift a bit of that paint out. Just moving all around here as I see fit, pulling out a little bit of the color using that Filbert brush. I also have my other brush in my hand. And just working here, dabbing, while things are nice and wet. I also don't want my tire to look like a flat tire, so I'm going to curve that out a little bit. Here go. I'm bring this one down just to touch too by creating a new barrier. Then we have here in the middle of very dark spot. So let's fill that in. Do the same thing on the other side. It doesn't have to be perfect. We're making it our own here, adding a bit more cough syrup around the edges here. I'm going to take the toe of my brush and just run it along the pencil line here to create some details. This area is still a little bit too wet to do that. I'm just going to leave that as is, again just darkening up the areas around there. You can see this was very dark and now it's lightening up. Same thing is going to happen over here. We'll help it along by lifting out a little bit of color and running it up against the very edge of the bottom of the truck here. I like how there's some rough areas over here where the paints not fully saturating. You can choose to crisp up those edges or leave them a little bit rougher. It's completely up to you. But in essence, this is pretty much the entire tire painting. You can, like I said, we things are a little bit drier and then take the toe of your brush and just Gt line. But as you can see doing that now things are still a little bit too wet. You would just wait till things are a little drier. Then taking the toe of your brush, just move your way around, creating some markings in the tire. Again, completely optional. This is where I leave it to you to decide how much to omit, how much to add. It's completely up to you. 10. Painting Pumpkin 3: Our final color mixture is going to be the burnt umber, with our Jens black touch. More burnt umber, there, something that looks right about there. We're going to use this mixture to create a very light color, not necessarily white, but just a soft linen beige tone by taking a bit of the color, making a new pile, adding water to it. This is one version of white. Again, referring back to my vintage color guides, I have one that is solely focused on how to create white tones. And this is a very similar mock up. I believe we use a lamp black and burnt umber or lamp black and sepia to create white. This is very similar to that using genes black and burnt umber. Okay, now we are ready to paint our third pumpkin. I'm going to use my Filbert brush just because it's nice for those curved edges. But you can use your point round two if you like. I'm just going to begin to lay in the color here. Don't really mind these two colors up here where I spilt over a bit. In fact, that is a technique that you could readily invite and encourage for these colors to b***d into each other if you wanted that more, really loose light look so many ways to paint this, that's why I wanted to give you the blank file so that you could again and again just opt to do different things with it. Fling it in here, adding just a touch more color to it. And I'm going to come along the bottom here, along the side here, right up here near the stem. Will create some shadows by coming behind these little lines, again, just darkening up a little bit along the edge just to create a bit of dimension here. Then we can, if we need to feel like we need to use our, rinse it off and then pull out a bit of the color. Don't need it so much on this one, but you can find those areas where you want it a little bit lighter or to create a high light. You can even go over things when they're dry too, and pull out more color. Let's say you wanted it lighter through here, you would just wet that brush and then continue to execute those strokes by lifting out the color. We're going to use our burnt umber for the stem. I'm going to put a little bit of that off to the side of my palette here. You can either use your point brush or your filbert. You'll get more of a loose gestural feel if you use bert. Whereas your point is more for precision, just take that into mind. I'm going to use my filbert. I'm going to just come around the edges here and just repeat again. It doesn't have to be perfect, invite imperfection into the painting. You can move that, brush around, get those corners if you like. You could do different colored stems, you could do some green. I like the cohesiveness. Could you have a little area? I have a little area where it's still wet. And you could put the paint for the stem down and let that flow into the area of the pumpkin too, and that looks really lovely. For example, you just touched that there and now you have the paint running into it. You can create some shadows. There are so many ways that you could approach this. I'm just giving you one of them. There you go. You can continue to layer if you like, or you can leave it like that. Pulling out high lights, adding more color in the areas where it's darkest, essentially, that's that step. I'll leave you to it there, and then we're going to come and add just a little bit of paint down here just to make it look a little bit more rustic, a little more vintage.