Watercolor for Beginners- Mastering The Wash Technique

1. Introduction to class: Hi, I'm Abhishek Rug. I'm a professional filmmaker and a watercolorist. I'm based in Bangalo India. I'm here to help you to learn the wash technique, which is the most essential and fundamental thing to learn in watercolor. What is the wash technique? It's basically the background of your painting, the first code in a nutshell. There'll be three kinds of them. One will be the flat wash. It's rarely used. There'll be graded wash, and they'll be variegated wash. So we are going to learn all of them. Flat wash, I'll show you the technique. We are going to focus on graded wash and variegated wash. They're extremely important and extremely fun. As we learn the wash techniques, we are going to apply them and make four paintings, quite simple, minimalistic, but professional looking paintings. So like I said, we are going to do four paintings. The first one will be a couple of boats with still water and slightly wavy waters. Quite simple, and it'll involve most of the time grade wash. The second painting will be a dune painting, there will be a dry tree over there, and that will involve variegated wash with grade wash. So it's kind of a combined one. The third painting will have variegated wash. It'll be a tree, but with a little bit of greenery and leaves on the tree. Yeah. The fourth and the final one, slightly more complicated than the first three, and it'll be men on board, and it'll be a sunset painting. Quite monochromatic, but still warm, delicate and beautiful. So, yeah, I hope you join this class of watercolor wash techniques with me and learn something new. 3. Fundamentals to Water and Pigment ratio: Okay, very, so let's just start with the understanding of water and pigment ratio. So it's basically the amount of water and amount of pigment. It's quite simple, actually, the quantity of water on the brush. Let's just calculate as ten to one in numbers. So ten being quite watery and one being quite dry. It's really hard to pin down the exact numbers. So I just put them into zero to one to four, five to seven and eight to ten. Now, let's just go ahead and explore exactly how do we use it in a practical scenario. We have two ways. We'll be calculating the water to pigment ratio using only the brush, and then we'll learn how to use tissue paper for it. Okay, let's just begin with the brush technique first. Okay, so first things first, let's take a look at the brush. You see, the amount of water I just took will be quite watery. I'm using a synthetic brush. If you use a more brush, it'll be quite different. So all I'm doing is I only took water once, and I'm touching the pigment, making the palette quite watery there, and this is how it's going to look. It's just a simple patch just to show you how water it can be. Now, take a look at this, cleaning the brush, one, two, three, four. So if I reduce four numbers, it'll be around six, So it's quite milky. The consistency will be quite milky. I mean, I I add a touch of pigment there just like this, now, you see the pigment is quite thick compared to the first one. Now, I'm just one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. This time, it's quite thick. Look at this. Just pure pigment almost. So this particular number will be around one, one, two, So it's quite creamy. So we have paint, less number of water, I mean, less amount of water, and it's quite creamish. See. This one, it's just pure pigment, which is absolutely dry. Four stages, you can divide them into three, you can divide them into five, however you want, but this is just to give you an idea. Now, let's just quickly clean this up. So what we just did is about the ratio of water and pigment. This time, On the palate, I'm going to keep the water, taking the paint, mixing it up. And this time, as you can see, I just have too much of water, right? I added more pigment just to make it slightly darker, but it's still watery. So if you want, you can add more pigment to the water, still keeping it watery or dry as your choice. Let's go and learn the tissue method. Okay, so this time, let's just understand how to use a tissue paper to control the water and pigment ratio. Now, first things first, I'm going to create a plain number ten watery pigment. And after that, I'm going to show you how to use the tissue paper. Okay. So this is basically quite watery. Let's just clean the brush quickly and see this. If I touch the tissue once, basically, if I pick the pigment now, the amount of water in the brush is about seven to eight, which is quite milky right now, basically. Now, if I add more pigment, you can see the difference. Now, let's just go ahead and make another swash. Cleaning one once and twice. So if I touch twice or thrice, basically, we just made it quite dry. So in a quick time. I mean, if you have less time, and if you want to go fast, you can use the tissue. So directly from watery, you can just make your paint look quite buttery or creamy or dry. So it's quite easy. Watery, then we have milky, and then the final thing we have will be the dry one or the buttery one. There's a huge difference. So rather than using the brush method, if you are in I mean, if you have less time with you, just go ahead with the tissue method. Now let's go ahead and make the paintings. 4. Fundamentals of Wash: Okay, so the first thing, we are going to learn how to do the washes. So we'll start with the flat wash, then we'll try to do the graded wash, and then we'll try to variegate the wash. But I am just going to use one color, so it'll be easy, and we will actually learn the technicalities, okay? So here we go. So I'm going to use a mop brush, and I just have the crimson red on my palette. And let's just begin. Okay. So we just try to mix the color quite well on the palette. And then the first thing we are going to do is to add a small batch like so. Okay. Now, everything goes after this. So I'm just trying to make one single patch of same color everywhere. Okay. So what you have to do is you try to run down the color from the top area to the bottom area. So the trick is not to let the paper and the paint make any edge, basically. So the second one, Take a look. I'm kind of slow because the color is slightly heavy this time. But still, I'm trying to maintain the color as I come down. So it'll create a unified single patch. This specifically will be called a flat wash, meaning one color, or maybe a couple of colors mixed together, making one color, and it's just there in that hire space. That's that. Okay. Now, let's just go ahead and try to do a grading of color. So basically, I'll be using slightly diluted, but still slightly coffee or milky consistency from top, and then I'm going to dilute the color by using just water like so. Okay. So as you can see, the color is slightly darker on top, and as I come down, the color is basically getting slightly diluted, faded, or watery, what do we want to say? So it's dark to light. This process will be called grading the color. It can be monochromatic. You can use three or four colors. But as long as you have one gradation from dark to light or light to dark, vice versa, it'll be called graded wash as simple as that. The technique is to run down the colors along with water from top to bottom. Always top to bottom. All right. Let's try another variation. Okay. So in this one, we are dividing the paper. So on left and right, we are going to do two different style of things. So I just want to show you how the colors can vary from extremely watery, which is light, and then mixing up a tiny bit of color like so. Again, the trick is same, run down the colors from top to bottom. So as I'm coming down, I'm adding a bit of color to the mix and still horizontal strokes, and I'm mixing it well. I'm not letting the water stay there and create any kind of edge, and that's the trick. So the more you practice, it'll be easy for you. It's not a big deal, but the thing is, you just have to pay attention in the beginning. So you see it's just like drawing dragging horizontal lines with colors. So as they come down, you will automatically have a very smooth transition from light to dark, or if you want, We can just do a dark to light transition. This particular technique will be used for our board painting. So let's just see how it goes. Mm hmm. Okay. That's a good patch. Now, let's just add a bit of water directly. I'm not using any color. Just try to dilute it as I come down and cleaning up the brush, picking a little more water, and here we go. See this? As smooth as it can be. It can be even more smooth, but that's not the point. The point is to dilute the colors from light to dark or dark to light. Grided wash. Okay. In the same way, if you use a little more color, it'll be a very gated wash. It's very simple. Okay. Let's just do another patch over here, and I'm going to show you. I'm just adding a little bit of water first. And this time, I'm trying to vary the strokes, but still trying to maintain the color spectrum. I mean, in our case, the monochromatic spectrum, which is dark to light or light to dark. But I'm just trying to go faster, so you can see what exactly happens when you do that, and I'm trying to keep on adding colors and a little bit of wet and wet strokes right there. But still, I'm not letting the paper dry up, so it'll create any kind of hard edge, you know? That's not good for us. This will be called wearing your strokes and wearing the tonality of your wash and that will be called variated wash. The only difference is we are doing monochromatic and you can use any color you want. So it can be two colors, three colors from dark to light light to dark. There we go. This is absolutely essential to learn. There is no need to hurry. You know, give it a go, be bold, just like this, you know, experiment and see how things work. Once you're ready with this, try to attempt the paintings, but if you're confident, you can just directly do it. It's actually not very difficult, but the only thing is, you just have to pay attention to your strokes and the blending and not to let the paper dry up. 5. Two Boats: All right. So first things first. I'm just going to put some tape quickly, and we'll begin. Okay. Okay, so the reference is quite stunning, and I'll just draw the horizon line slightly on the top for the left one and in the middle of the right side one. Let's just have some variations, you know? So the left side, I'm thinking to have a cloud effect. We'll just add a touch of cloud over there, a distant mountain also. I got this artistic license, you see. So, of course, the boats there. Great. And that's done looking good. Okay? Pretty easy to draw. There's nothing much there. Let's paint. Okay, so now I'll be using Sinis blue, forest green, crimson, and Van **** brown. For the first things first, we'll be adding water. A nine to ten ratio, quite watery, extremely watery, in my opinion. I'm adding a touch of blue and touch of forest green to make slightly dull blue. Now, we start from the top. The basic idea is when you start the painting, start from the top. It's basically background, then the middle ground and the foreground. Sometimes background, the foreground, and then the middle ground depends. But in our case, it'll be top to bottom, which is background, middleground, and foreground. So obviously, we are learning how to do wash wash is basically the background for any painting. So this is how we begin. Okay, okay, okay. All right. Let's just start with quick long strokes. As the board is slightly tilted, the paint will automatically come down. So as we come down with the water, I'll be using very little water to do lighter washes to the horizon. So it's a graded wash from top to the horizon. So once we touch the horizon, we'll be continuing with the same value and slowly build the wash further. Automatically, the gradation will be in reverse now. So it'll be light to dark from the horizon till bottom. So from the top, it's dark to light till horizon, and from horizon till the bottom area, it'll be in reverse. As I'm coming down, I'm adding more paint and making the value, slightly stronger about eight level watery. Now, the values will be even more stronger and thicker. Enter the milky consistency. Great. Now, let's just add a little wet unvet ocean waves, pay attention to the strokes. They're quite long and horizontal. We want this painting to have a slightly settled water and not to wavy because this is not a very advanced painting. Still water style. So let's just wait for the painting to dry and we'll begin the next one. Okay, for the right side one, I want to have a little gradation in the sky, so I'm adding more paint. So automatically, it'll be slightly darker than the left painting. See? Awesome. So I'm putting I'm just So I'm just putting some paint on top so they can flow down and create a nice flow of colors and created sky Simple and clean. I'm not really bothered about the clouds for these ones because they're not necessary, you know. Okay. Exactly, like the first painting, we'll have a lighter tone at the horizon and slowly build the stronger tonal value as we go towards the bottom. Okay, you see that? Oops. Look at that. Okay, just get rid of that. Now, beg my friend. Okay. Here we go. All right. See this, slightly curved strokes, because we want this water body to be wavy and deep. I'll try that. I hope so. So let's just add more green and blue. Tick paint. Nice, very juicy. Awesome awesome awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. Looks good. Yeah. Looks good. See, it's very important to play around now because it's wet. After it dries up, and then, if you apply any pain, it'll have marks, hard edges, so it'll be very difficult to create a natural looking waves. So no need to look for perfection here, but still, you know, have fun. Now, let's just go ahead and add the boat on the first painting because it's dry, so no problem. We'll wait for the second one to dry up in the meantime. This time, let's just make some dark gray. I'm mixing red with some leftover bluish green on the palette. Now, that's too dark. Adding a bit of water. Okay, this looks fine. All right. See this. Press the brush fully and drag. That's good. You see? That looks good. Let's just add a bit of dark here. I'll be wiping the extra pain and cleaning the brush. I'm going to make the edges softer a bit. In reality, the edge will be there, and it'll be visible a little. But, you know, it's almost faded. Step For our learning purposes, it's not really required, but, you know what? Let's just add a little bit of distant faded waves as well. How about that. Nice, simple strokes. Cleaning the brush with water right now. Okay, so we'll do the same for the top to create a distant mounted structure. You must be thinking, but it's almost invisible, right? You're right. But it's there. Very, very, very light. Very, very faded. It's almost invisible, but it's there. See now, snowy style mountains. Now, let's just do the right one. It's not totally dry, so we can add some more waves and slightly thicker paint for depth, Tin strokes on top and thick at the bottom. Pay attention. Thin strokes, always thin strokes on the top and thick strokes at the bottom. That will make that'll make a lot of difference. Believe me. If it is water, thin strokes on the top, thick strokes at the bottom. Okay, the paper is dry now. Let's just go ahead and add the mountain here. Same style composition, slightly gray, and the water ratio will be around seven to eight. Again, press and drag. Now, a bit of softening the horizon. It's important. Tiny changes might make a lot of difference. Okay, let's wait for it. We need a smaller size brush now. Okay. I'll be using a size four synthetic brush. All right. So from now on, if you notice, we need thicker paint and darker paint as well. So I'm mixing and making dark colors to make the boats. The water and pigment ratio thick about one to three. Fantastic gray. You see that? That looks awesome. Let's just go ahead and look at in a close, shall we? There looks good. Okay, so now we will do the boat. Simple, small strokes. There. Now, a smaller front facing one here, just a mark is enough. Now, for this one, same thing, small strokes with a little random highlight. Now, I'm just playing around with the leftover paint, basically, to keep the graze with slightly extra green to match the water. Nothing much. Okay. Okay, now the reflection in shadows. Notice, some simple small strokes. Remember, try to have a unified patch rather than strokes with gaps in between. Now I'm going to use my rhinar or a brush to make some details, as you see. Very simple thing to do, but controlled. Look at them so thin and clean. Now, same thing for all the boats. I mean, we just have to bots. By the way, you know, let's just add a bit of color. What is good. Also, let's just add some reflection, and we are done. Almost done. Let's just add some friends there. Birds. Oh, yeah. Birds will make your landscape painting look quite realistic and natural. They're like ornamentals for landscape painting. They give life and realism. Absolutely fabulous. Two is good, 20 better, but random. They cannot be a pack of, you know, like a group, like a bunch, straight line or something. So be free and add lots of them. All right, the painting is finished. Let's just do a quick recap. Here's the thing. The first one we did a graded wash, graded wash to create a still water effect. The second one, we try to do graded wash, but we also added waves, Tin strokes on the top, thick strokes at the bottom to give that dimension to the water to the water body and depth. After that, we did the boats. The boats in this particular painting will be quite small and quite minimalistic and simple. But still, overall, we get a minimal, absolutely simple basic painting. So that's that? 6. Dune tree: Okay. This painting is fairly simple. However, the essential thing would be the colors. The charm really lies in the colors. They will provide life and give atmosphere to the painting. Let's start with the basic drawing, the big shapes. We are going to start with the dunes, fairly simple outline and they'll look quite slant once the painting is finished. There we go. Now, over here, we have a small tree. The tree doesn't have any leaves, quite dry because it's a desert, you know. So yeah, that's that. Okay. Okay, now, let's talk about the colors. So I'll be using Sophie yellow, Vandy brown, I'll be using a little bit of vermlion and of course, touch of the singulars blue. Okay. So now let's start with the big shape, the sky area. The sky is very, very light, as you can see. It's basically doesn't even have any more blue in there. So I'll mix a little bit of blue quite faded to give it a washed out effect. So the wash in here will be quite flat, meaning the top area and the bottom area till the due will be quite similar in terms of the shade. If you notice, uh, I mean, the reference is quite pastle I mean, the colors are quite pastle like I said earlier, but we'll be adding warmth. So now as we go about the tans, we are going to add slightly more yellow and reddish tinge to the mix, so it'll be quite warm in nature. Girl. So first, we will make a mark and see. We will know whether to make the colors slightly darker, lighter, more dull, bright, warm, and cool, etc, et. Okay, so in our case, we need to cool the colors a bit. We mix a touch of brown, red and yellow. This looks fine to me. Maybe maybe a bit more brown and red. Perfect. That looks good. So a simple wash with grading of tonal values will make a lot of difference. The top areas will be quite light, and the bottom areas will be slightly darker as we come down. Also, around the bottom, we make the colors a bit more just to give a little bit of to the reference that we have. So. Now, mixing up the brown with red with Tata fellow to do these lines. It's wet, so they'll mix, but still creating those light textures. Now, here's the thing. When the paper is wet and you are trying to add more texture in them, I'll give a little more dimension and depth, but still they'll be quite soft. Now, you might feel tempted to apply a lot of heavy and dark pigment in there. But belief me, if you do lighter, you can also make them darker. But if you just apply dark colors in the beginning, things might look quite awkward, you know? So yeah, anyway, that's that, see, it's quite simple. Now, let's just go ahead and do the ground. It's quite faded and colorless, as you can see, but because we are making a painting, let's just add a touch of color, you know. Let's just not make it quite whitish, but creamish is the best term I can use of the word creamish. There, quite faded. It looks quite awesome, you know. Anyway, when the painting is going to be totally dried up, we will be able to see the actual color. Now I'm going to switch to the synthetic brush size ten for some detailing. Actually, the painting is kind of finished, we are going to add only the necessary details to give life and death. Okay, here we go. All right, let's make some lines and create textures on the hills to add more depth. Okay, here's the tip. Don't forget. Do feather touches. Apply gently and lightly because you can make them darker anytime you want afterwards, but. In the beginning, as we are practicing and learning, it's better to stick to feather and light touches. Okay. So for the ground, I'm going to lift a little bit of paint. This will be called a soft edge demarcation, meaning the paper will be damp. I'll be using a damp brush, so I'll just lift some paint. Of course, we are going to show the paper. But if we use a tissue paper or something like that, then automatically, the dry paper will be visible and there'll be a edge right there. Won't look good, so we are going to do only a soft edge soft lifting. Okay. Now, some textures for the ground. These marks will be quite rough and uneven. So why are we doing it? We can add more depth to the painting. Great. Look at that. That looks really good. Moving on. Now, let's just wait for the painting to dry up and we'll do the final touches. Okay, the painting is dry. Let's move on to do the tree, the shrubs, and all those tiny things. I'll be using the size eight synthetic brush. Very light painting is required. Look at the tip. I'm crushing it. If you do this, it'll create a random shape, which is really helpful for creating dry brush effect. Now, with the dry brush effect, we can do a lot of different things. For now, we are going to use the dry brush effect to create twigs, grasses, dry shrubs, et cetera. Okay, here's the thing. Look at this. Use the tip, light touches and vertical touches, most of the times. The trick is to vary the stroke sizes, make big ones, small ones, medium ones. This is something you can practice on your own separately. Rather than this painting, you can just take a paper, take some paint and try to do all sorts of different textures by creating less pigment and, you know, and, you know, uh, using the drivers effect, you can try to do a lot of different shapes than everything. That's fantastic practice, by the way. B. Great. That looks good. Now let's do the tree. Okay, so it'll bit darker and but not very thick like butter, but creamy. We will maintain the light and the dark strokes to give a realistic feel to the tree, round and random shapes for the branches. Okay, so here's the thing. If you're not confident enough, then you should practice on a different paper, you know, and then try the painting. No problem at all. And by the way, just have fun, so no need to worry and no need to worry about the perfection and everything. Less, everybody, less more. Slow, go steady. Start with less strokes and add more slowly. You can add more anytime you want, but start with less and minimal strokes. Only if you really require add more. Otherwise, it'll be too much. M. You know what, I should share this with you. Generally, I used to overdo my paintings before. So what I used to do, I used to add a lot of paint, a lot of pigment, lots of random strokes because I used to think, You know what? This is not enough. I should add more and more and more and more. And finally, all the paintings that I did basically went into the garbage well. Because thing is, rather than self convincing ourselves that we are creating a masterpiece, it's about the experiment. Slowly, and eventually, you will be doing masterpieces anyway. At least that's what I think. Okay, so let's just move on. Okay, we're done here. The painting looks clean and nice. Let's take the tapes out and we'll see. Okay, so let's just do a quick recap. We did the painting in one go. We just dried the painting once, and we did not apply a second layer or any kind of third layer on top. It was having a wash for the sky, for the tunes, for the ground. We uh, dried the painting up, and then we did the tree. So as you saw using a basic wash technique, you can create simple and medalistic painting, and definitely you can frame them if you want to. But like I said, go slow, practice, and also try to do light colors first so you can build it rather than using too many, uh mixes, too much color here and there and ruining it. So that's that. 7. Tree with leaves: Okay, welcome, welcome, welcome. This is the tree painting blue skies and warm green and yellowish land. So anyway, let's start with the drawing. The horizon line, and then we are going to do the tree. So just like that. Quite rough, you know, try to do the outline of it, and that should do it. Here we go. That looks okay. That's more than enough for us. Let's talk about the colors. Okay, so we'll be using cinerous blue. Quantity around same as nine and ten because we have to do a sky wash. That's the big shape, yeah. So we'll be using a slightly graded wash for the sky. And that will be slightly darker, and then slightly lighter as we come down to the horizon. You see, I'm just going left to right, left to right, left to right. Very simple and just keep bringing them down, keep bringing them down. I'm adding a touch of water. There we go. I didn't take any color you saw. Just plain water, basically. Okay, a touch of color and around the tree, just like that, and that should do it. In one go, if you just go slowly and nicely, you can actually finish your wash. You don't really have to add any more color on top, you know? That should do it. Okay. Now it's time for the ground area. Simple. Yellow, touch of red, and no I mean, no fancy mixing and movement. I'm sorry about that. So just a straight line, like so, quite light, quite faded and should do it. Yeah, so I should do it. So picking up a little bit of blue, you know, touch of brown, touch of blue. Basically, the colors will look quite neutral at this particular stage, meaning they don't really have any color. They're basically black and white. But You see? It's grayish. It's just plain water, but it has a gray tone to it. Okay. So as we come down, we are going to make a lot of warm colors to start with yellow. Touch of red. Touch a forest green. Forest green is a fantastic color, you know? If you don't have, you should actually have one. Okay, here we go. Light horizontal wash, half pressed style. Just slider. Quite diluted. We have to make it heavier, but slowly and steadily and nicely and smoothly. So many ads and so many words. Okay, here we go. Anyway. Okay. All right. Slightly wearing the colors. Now, please pay attention. This is mostly a variegated kind of a wash where we are wearing the colors. So slightly warmer, sometimes it's green, sometimes it's yellow. This is mainly yellow as of now. Okay. Looks good. Touch of green now, like I said, greenish, greenish. Look at that. Now, generally, when we do the ground, exactly like the water body, the horizon area will obviously be lighter in color. And as we come down, colors will be slightly and. But in our case, I'm trying to show you layers of washes, so I did not add heavy colors for now. Okay. So the tree. So this is just a little bit of color that was there on the paper. I'm trying to lift so I can do the tree nicely and easily. So I'll be using a small mop brush. Now, pay attention to what I do. Picking up the color yellow, yellow. Touch of brown. Paint ratio will be around five to six. So it's not exactly quite watery and it's not exactly dry. Look at this. Now, I'm adding a touch of darker green at the bottom, like I said earlier, that the bottom area of the foreground. I mean, the foreground area in your painting should be slightly darker than the background. Look at this. The paper is slightly wet, not exactly completely dry. So I can still do touch of wet and wet strokes. Just like that. This is basically to create the textures like we did with the Dune tree, you know? Okay, let me see. Hm. I'm thinking I should do a little bit of textures. I should not require. Okay, so the painting is dry. I'll be using a mop brush. Now we are back to the tree. Tree is the one that we are going to do. That's the focal point. We have to pay attention. We have to go slow, nice and easy. So the ratio will be quite dry. I mean, mm. Let's say, the amount of water in the brush will be around two to three. But the colors will be slightly thicker. So that'll be milky. Milky to creamy consistency. Take a look. That is seriously killing the brush. But that's what's going to make our tree. So here we go. Look at this. Chick. Just random. And killing again. I'm so sorry. There's no way. Maybe this is. I don't know. Okay, so here's the thing. You can do any kind of movement touching the edge. I mean, the tip of the brush. You can go left to left, right to right, circle, circle, and just basically trying to define the outline of the tree. Now, when you do this, so many white spots will be created, and they are basically the gap between leaves. It's so obvious that I don't have to really explain, and I'm so sorry about that. Anyway, so now we are going to add depth. That means we have to have light areas and dark areas. So take a look at this. So when you're watching this, pause and see. What we are doing is, we are making darker colors to create a bunch of leaves kind of effect. So if you squint and see and choose certain spaces and just do the dark colors in that area, you will automatically have light areas and darker areas. So to create the bunch of leaves effect, you squint and you try to see. Wherever you add the first black dark not black. I mean, the darker patch. You can just do the same thing around the whole tree at some random places. So when you do that, you automatically create a dark area and the light area. Automatically, the bunch of leaves areas specifically will look like a realistic leaf bunch. I don't know how to explain this, but you get what I'm trying to say, I think so. Okay. So now, if you squint and see, you'll actually see the effect. Squint and C, squint and C, squint and C. And if you can, squint and paint. And try not to put the darks everywhere all at once and mix them up. That's bad. That will just ruin it. Now these are extremely tiny random strokes or touches using the tip of the brush to create those edge leaves, you know, I don't know how to explain it. So I'm very sorry, people, if I'm not making sense, but I hope I'm trying to put my ideas across. Okay, so now it's time to create the middle ground darker lines, as you can see in the reference. Okay. Here's the thing, people. So when you practice, please go ahead and practice on a separate paper and then come on and do the painting if you have to. So if you're confident, which I would really like you to be, just go ahead. Even if you ruined the painting, that's fine. Do another one. Or take a break and do another one or take a break and do another one. This is my synthetic flat brush. Look at this. When you do this upward throwing kind of strokes, they create kind of a dry grass effect. Very simple thing to do, and you must practice actually. Okay, that looks good. Switching to a smaller size synthetic brush, which is size four. If you have size four, go ahead. If you don't, size two. Just like that. This is heavy pigment, guys, okay? Like three to four and a touch of heavy pigment, brownish, but not exactly brownish. It has green in it. Make a mark. And there. That looks good. So we'll just go ahead and do it. Pay attention to the movement. Tiny strokes, okay? Tiny strokes. There is no need to go for big strokes in one go. You can do that when you have a pro, but if you feel confident, okay, do it. If you're not, then just go slow and, you know, tiny small strokes. Adding green. So we have to make slightly darker pigment so we can have light and dark effect on the tree trunk and branches as well. Look at that. I'm just using a touch of darkness. That sounds like a rock song. Touch of darkness. Okay. There we go. Okay. That looks good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Good. There we go, a little more here. I'm using the reference, but I'm not exactly copying it. Because like I said, I have my artistic license, and so do you. So please just go ahead and do whatever you want, you know? Look at that. The tree actually looks good. I mean, I'm happy. Yeah, iny strokes, iny strokes at the edges. They're quite curved and tiny. Light, also, not very dark. A little bit of touch up for the ground. Iddly speaking, there should be a shadow of the tree. But for some reason, in the reference, also, there's no shadow. Probably because there's some kind of a ground that is dug and the shadow is inside that area, you know, I'm not sure. So, you know what, if I add a shadow, it might get complicated for you too. So let's just leave it at that. And it's not really bortan Okay. This is going to be the yellow horizon area. I'm using the same brush, quite light pigment, light touches. I have a feeling that I might overdo the painting. Okay. Okay. Okay. The edges are slightly rough. So there. That's good. Clean painting. Very important. Just like that. Horizontal stroke. Okay? Yeah. On the top a little. Okay. Good. Looks good, actually, you know? Looks good. Okay. So basically, we have finished here, and I feel I'm kind of hungry as well. I know, I'll finish this first. Switching to a size one synthetic brush. If you have, good, no, if you have zero, use it. If you don't have anything, you have a line of brush. Use that. Whatever you have. B See them? Check it out. So when I do landscape paintings, most of them, I add birds. They are like jewelry to your painting, you know, fine touches, and it adds finsse to not the painting style or the quality, but the reality, I should be a poet. That doesn't make sense, but Yeah. I should stop myself right now. Yeah. Enough of them. To too much we'll just in. So touch of branches. Mm hmm. There, one more, one more. Okay. We shop. We should ideally stop. If we do anything, we'll do in it. Okay, let's just do a quick recap. What did we do? We did the sky. Let's start with the drawing, yeah. So I just did the horizon line. Choosing the horizon line is really, really important. Once you finish with that, make the outline of the subject. In our case, this is the tree. Okay. Then we started with the sky, gridit wash, darker at the top, and then slowly towards the horizon, it became quite light. Then we did the horizon area, which is quite yellowish, and then we started with the colors which are meant for the ground. Sometimes yellow, sometimes brownish yellow, and sometimes greenish yellow. Then we let it dry. Okay. Actually, before we actually let it dry in the middle, we added some fine brownish, greenish wet and wet strokes to add more texture just like exactly like the dune painting we did before. After that, we let it dry. Once the painting was dried, we started with the main focal point, the tree bunch effect, light strokes, and then on top, darker strokes so we can create a leafy bunch kind of effect for the tree. Leaving the white spores will create realistic effect to the tree. So the light is basically passing through all those leaves. So you know, a realism is what we really need to show with a very minimal strokes and effect. I think that's the best way to describe it. And then we started with the trunk, the branches. We added dark and light effect to the branches as well. And then we did a lot of tiny, tiny, tiny branches. And then finally, we left the shadow, which is unrealistic. But in our case, I don't really bother, and you don't you shouldn't bother. You know? So it's okay. And then we did the birds. Yeah. There we go. Fantastic looking simple painting. Let's move on. 8. Men on Boat: Okay. All right. So we begin with the drawing first, horizon line slightly above the middle area of the page. There we go. And this is the mass land area, as you can see here, just like that. Okay. So I'll just consider this like a land area. Nothing much. So it'll be a simple thing to paint. Simplifying the thing is the key. Look at this. This is the board front facing back facing, you can say, because the men will be sitting and facing to the horizon. So yeah, that'll do. It's a very simple thing to do. Just draw some oval shape and put heads to them, and that's that. Now, let's see. I'll be using the colors, right? Sinus blue, Sophie yellow, Vmlion and also I'll be using van **** brown. And maybe I'll just keep the green handy, and that's the forest green. All of them are Seneia paints, watercolor. They're quite professional. Okay. Now, moving on, first, we will make the yellow color properly. Mixing up on the palette is really, really important. The ratio will be around nine to ten. It will be quite watery. So I'm just adding a touch of red there, just like that, touch of yellow, mixing it up pretty well. And here we go. So it's a big mop brush. Look at that. Nice colors from top to bottom to the horizon area. So here we go. That looks good. Quite evened out. Wash. I'm trying to leave a space on the top, so I can blend more colors. It'll have a variegated wash, basically. Okay. So now, touch of brown on top, just like that and blending in with the yellow. Yeah. That looks good. Go with light mixes first and see how they work out. Please don't be afraid, okay. Okay. That looks good. At the horizon, the colors will be slightly heavy, like coffee consistency. So let me just clean the brush. We'll take a little bit of heavy antic brown and dilute it. We'll just see, a wet on wet. And yeah, that looks good. Just like that. Yeah, that'll do. That'll do. Okay. So now, we'll be using pure water on the brush. So adding a little bit of yellow into the mix. Sophie yellow is quite bright yellow. So if you have Sophie yellow, it's fine, if you have any other yellow, it'll just do, so no problem there. Now, we will finish just at this particular spot, and now we have to run the same yellow blend, mixed with red, mixed with brown again and again and again. So let's just take a look at this particular place. We are trying to see if the land mass will have the same bright effect or not. Yeah, that looks good. So let's just run it down now. You know, I should tell you something. It's very satisfying when the colors mix with each other and they create a certain blend, certain tonality. It really feels quite nice. Now, this is a slightly more complicated painting than the other ones that we did before. So please make sure you practice enough. This is going to be the rays or, you know, the highlights on the water by the sun. Okay. Okay. So as we come down, colors will be heavy like we did before. Colors will be slightly darker and thicker with more heavier style of strokes at the bottom with heavier colors. Okay. Great. Okay. So now, let me just add more brown, just like that. And let's see. Okay. That looks. Yeah. That's good. So that's the first layer on water to create the deepest waves that we basically can't really see. So now we are going to apply heavier pigment, brown and yellow. So it'll be quite warm brown. Here we go, just like that, slightly curved and slant shaped lines. The strokes are fat. You can say thick and fat strokes, so they are not quite thin because the thin strokes will be around the horizon, and at the bottom of the water body, the lines will be quite heavy and thick. So just like that, and play around with it. Don't have to, you know, think about how perfect your lines should be. This is just practice, experiment, your learning. So just go and apply lots of them. Because for the waves, it comes with practice, and there's nothing else, color, consistency, and practice. So touch of red here. Okay. That looks good. Maybe a touch of blue so we can make it slightly darker and cooler. So even though it's brownish, because it's water, we're adding a touch of blue so it'll create kind of a dark brownish grayish kind of effect. Not exactly a pure gray or pure brown. But still, you know. That looks good. Look at that. More dark, more dark. Lots of dark. As you can see, it's not quite detailed, but just enough enough suggestion, and it will do the trick, actually. Okay. Okay. That looks good. Now, let's just make the painting dry and we'll come back. Okay. All right. Back to painting. I'll be using synthetic brush size eight. Okay. So now we are going to do the landmass, right? So I'm just using some leftover brown pigment and pre pay attention. Look at those lines. Quite rough jaggedy with hard edges. Now, let's just mix a little bit of warmth and that's too much actually. Let me just clean the brush. Okay, that's good. Touch up blue. Okay. Here we go. Yeah. That looks good. So what we are going to do now is we are going to add more color. Now, when we do this, these kind of dry brush effect, you have a natural realistic formation. But the thing is, they might look quite light, or they might look quite dark. In these cases, keep a tissue handy, just like that. I just lifted a little bit of pigment so the distant things will look slightly lighter than the middle ground. Okay, that looks okay. Let me just add a touch of water. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That looks good. So it's basically touching the tip of it, using horizontal strokes just enough to suggest that there is some kind of a land mass and nothing much. Now, the distant ones should be lighter, always. Because they are far and we can't really see them. So on top, let me just add some kind of a bridge, kind of a pathway, maybe. I'm not really sure, you know, It's not exactly there, but, you know, I have my artistic license. I'm just using my imagination. And so should you, actually. Okay, so now it's time to work on the water body. So this is basically kind of a reflection and also the shadows, like we did before the previous paintings, thin lines, Tin lines on these areas and very minimal strokes required. You don't really have to do too much here is more. And if you feel there, they look quite darker. Use the tissue, lift them up, and you're good to go. So for me. It's okay. It's not. It's good. Let's move on. Okay. So now we will just take a look at these kind of thing. Look at this. I just added a touch of water in a circle of motion. Now I'm going to use a tissue, dab it over there and lift the paint. Look at this. So now we have a sun. And again, at this particular area. Just a tiny vertical nudge, with a little bit of water, lift it up. There you go. Lift, lift. Yeah. You see? For me, as creating an impression of a painting or what am I saying? For this kind of impressionism, we don't really have to go in quite a lot of detailing of how exact the ray or the reflection should be. So a little bit of touch is enough. Okay. Look at this. I'm making a dark color using my size four synthetic brush. That's some serious dark color. Now, closer, take a look. Tiny touch. Just like the previous painting there and a little bit of a reflection. And yeah. That looks good. Okay. So let's just go ahead and add a touch of bottom area, the shape of the board, and a tiny bit of reflection just like that. There we go. That looks good. Okay. Here's the thing. Less is more. So just a touch of oval and two heads, meaning two tiny circles. Just good enough. No need to do kind of a drawing, you know, you don't really have to draw them. So that should do it because they are far away, and you really don't have to, you know, focus and do a lot of detailing on them. Absolutely not required. Anyway. This is a beginner's painting, you're practicing. So just keep it slow, keep it nice, you know. No need to worry. Have fun and just experiment, basically. Tiny lines. Just to give a little more suggestion of the landmarks. And maybe, yeah, a little more water waves. Actually, they are kind of dark, you know? So I'll just do this, yeah. Okay. Okay. So now we are coming down to the main focused boat over here, just like this, it is. So just picking up the same paint. The ratio will be around three to four, quite heavy, less water. This is the back portion of the boat. I'm really not concerned about the shape too much. Just enough suggestion, and that works for me. So touch of oval. And fill that up basically and a dot. So this is a man who's probably looking towards his left to the other guy. And the other guy has his back towards us, so he's facing to the horizon. That's his head, the two hands, and we're going to give them the roll and, you know, the reflection here. Look at this. The painting actually looks quite good even now. Maybe I'm bragging too much, but, you know, I'm liking it. There. That looks good. Okay. Okay. So now let's just add, you know, two quick lines over here, one. And yeah, let's do it and another one over here. So he's like, trying to, you know, row and go forward. I don't know. Maybe he's just trying to stay there and look at the birds. I really don't know. But this looks good to me. Some kind of a story in your painting will actually add a lot of dimension. So basically, the painting is kind of finished, you see. But let's just add a couple of dots on the water. Not quite a bit. Just just a tiny bit, just like that. A couple of them. And here and there. You can also sprinkle if you want to. It's totally on you. No problem there. Okay, let's see. We should add birds, birds. Birds are my favorite, as I said, before they give life. So before we do that, let's just finish with some of the forward. I mean, I mean, to say the birds near the sun, you know, and they will give us the idea should we add more or not. As you can see in the reference, they're like billions of them, probably. There. That looks good. Yeah. Yeah. Use a line of brush. They'll help. If you don't have a line of brush, try to use a size zero, size one or two, synthetic brush. Always use synthetic for making birds. They really help. You know what? Let me just tell you about the shapes of birds. It's just two strokes, left and right. What you can do is you can practice them before you add. So they are quite delicate touches you see. Also add in random rather than symmetric. Continue adding a lot of them. There are so many, you know, like you can see, and they look quite beautiful, actually. Okay. Some of them are quite close to the people, and they're just almost on the water. They're basically everywhere, you know, feel free and add whatever you want them. Tiny, tiny, tiny, Diny strokes, tiny strokes, tiny strokes. Just like that. You should always differ. The sizes. Obviously, vary them. You can't just make a same size bird everywhere. They look like clones, right? They anyway look like clones, but, you know what? You understand what I mean? Okay. So these are tiny water lines, very thin, very light. And, y. Try not to go overboard over here, even I'm trying to control myself. I will shake, please control and stop. Stop. Yeah. Stop. Yeah, so. Do it. This is something that happens to every artist, I think, so you just have to know how to do the creative control. Okay. Now, what I'm thinking is to add some tension towers. I don't know what exactly electrical towers or whatever you want to call them. They are quite far away, but they are there. So this is something that happens to a lot of areas in my country. So this is like a thing that we have seen, you know? So just adding they give a little bit of architectural touch and they give a little more dimension and a little more, you know, reality to your painting, basically, now that we are done, let's see this. Okay, so the painting is finished. Now, let's just do a quick recap. What we did is we started with the sky, and then we started with the horizon area, and then we did the water body. Okay. So after that, we waited, we tried the painting, then we did all the details like the landmass, the darker water body areas, and then we did the boats. After the boats, we did the small towers. We added birds. We also lifted a little bit of pigment so we can show the sun and also the reflection and the shiny parts on the water body. This is not a very simple painting, but this is definitely a advanced beginner's painting. Something I wanted to share with you. I hope it really helped, please practice and, you know, put that in your project, and let me take a look. Do the birds separately. Do the birds separately if you have to and just play around with the colors and have fun, you know, I mean, have fun. Good or bad doesn't really matter. Just now I'm bragging a lot. So all the best. And I'll just see your paintings. 9. Final thoughts: Okay, so let's do a quick recap. The first one, we did the boats. The first one, the left side fed. It has still water, simple grading of colors. The sky is quite faded with a snowy mountain, and also the water body is quite simple, still, and minimal. We added the boats, and it's that. The right side one has a little bit of depth in the water. We added a little bit of waves. Again, the same boats, but the sky is slightly graded. Also, the mountain range, I mean, the landmarks or whatever you can call it. They are slightly darker than the left one. So no snowy mountains, but still quite faded as per the horizon. We did What do you call it, a soft edge for both of them. So we have the edges. I mean, we can actually see the demarcation between the water and the mountain, but it's quite faded. So that is the first painting. The second one, we did the dune tree. The sky was pretty flat, quite faded, no clouds, nothing whatsoever. But the dunes had textures. Overall, the painting has a pastal color effect, quite reddish brownish kind of colors. The ground was slightly faded in the dunes. Then we dried it up. We added the tree. We made some tiny shrubs and those textures for the ground. The main thing is the tree, right? So the tree was quite dry, quite curved and swirly kind of branches. So that's that. A very simple painting that we can actually create just by using the wash technique. No need to fuss about it, you know. The third painting, again, a tree but with leaves. The sky was quite bluish. The ground has textures in them. So the ground was like, brownish, yellowish, slightly greenish. We did some dry brush effect with a flat brush. We learned how to squint and see and make leaves. So if you have to squint and do, do that. That's just going to help you a lot. Now, the last painting was the men on boats. Like I said in the beginning, it'll be a little complicated. It's not exactly quite complicated, but it is complicated. So you have to practice maybe a couple of times to get it right. And if you get it right in once, time to move on and do some hardcore painting afterwards, right? Anyway, here's the thing. The entire painting has mostly yellow, red and brown. The distant areas like the antenna or the tension towers, I don't know what to call them. They're slightly faded. The landmass is slightly darker than that because it's the middle ground and then the water body. Always light areas at the horizon. And as we come down around the bottom area of the water body, always, most of the time will be darker than the horizon. For the waves, thick lines, you know, thick curved strokes at the bottom. Again, you can add them on top two, but the top areas will be slightly lighter and thinner. And the bottom areas will be quite thicker and darker, thick paint. So that's that. What else? Now, all the paintings, besides the tune painting, we added birds. Birds are like ornamentals, they're like jewelry for your painting. So if you add them, they give a realistic feel and more life to your painting. So just feel free and add how much ever you want, but keep them random. That's the learning today in wash technique. So I think that's that. Now, please go ahead and practice and make your paintings look cool. I'm pretty sure they will be cool. So we just put them into the project hab, and I'll take a look at them. If you need any feedback, just, you know, type in whatever you want to know. I'm pretty sure I'll get back to you all the best, and I hope you do great in your watercolor journey. See you in some of the class. Take care.