Watercolor Landscape - A Simple Art Challenge for 14 days

1. Introduction : When I started with watercolors, I always wanted to paint landscapes. Frankly, I was pretty, not sure of where to start out. This class is going to be for pillows as well as intermediate artists who are struggling to paint landscapes. Guys, I am with Lana and artist instructor, mothers, share teacher and of vibrant parcels where we manufacture handmade stage book artists, great things and much more. I usually give out videos every week on Youtube. You can find me bargaining, but como dot illustration dot letter, as well as on Instagram where all works are displayed. Today's class is all about painting 14 beautiful and amazing landscape within the time frame of 15 to painting minutes on a daily basis. This class is for 14 days in total. And every day there will be a new project that I will upload for you guys. We will start with a practice excess, it's a very small practice, and move on to the first day of the painting. Every painting has got its own set of colors that we are going to use. Some of the paintings are done in limited color palette, and few of the paintings are done in multiple colors. So that you guys can have a complete range of colors even during the winter season. Each of the landscape is special. Some of the landscape has mountains, some of the landscape have water. Some of the landscape is all about the light of the sky. You are going to experience a full frame of these winter landscape through this entire journey. Come and join me enjoying these 14 days, which are all packed with lots and lots of information about water colors, as well as easy paintings that you can hang on to your wall or give it away as gifts to your friends or family. 2. Key Pointers: There are a few important points that I want to discuss before we start the class. The first and foremost is the paper. The paper needs to be 100% cotton, 300 GSM. You can go with arches, Fabriano saunders, or any of the 100% cotton paper rather than celos paper. Celos paper will not allow your water to stay on the surface for a longer period of time. And hence the emphasis on 100% cotton paper. If you're going for a lower GSM paper, your paper might buckle. And that's one of the reasons there is a stress on 300 GSL. Only watch this glass on a bigger screen so that there are no details that you miss. Either you can watch it on laptop or Lm pad or any of the bigger screens that's available with you. Watercolors is all about being patient. Do not hurry up with the process. Believe me, none of the projects are difficult. It's just the mindset that you need to have for completing each of the projects. Give it the stipulated amount of time that it needs for the paper to try out and then only go with the second year. Most of the projects are done in one or two layers and you will not require a really huge amount of time to complete any of the. Lastly, whatever colors or brushes are available with you, you are good to go, just have the colors that are approximately the same as what I am using from my palette. Let's start off with our first lesson now. 3. Materials Required: Let us discuss all we need for completing this series of paintings. You can see that I've already painted this particular one, now this is made on Fabriano Artistico, 300 SM paper. But my most favorite and go to papers is the Arches paper. It's from brand Arches and it is 300 SM, 140 LP got paper. The size of the paper is 17 centimeter by 20 centimeter. It's not a very big paper, but it's close to around five size that you guys are comfortable painting on a medium sized paper in 15 to 20 minutes colors, I would be using the colors from hole, being artist square water colors. This is a 24 set color which I have as well as I will use some of the colors from my own palette. You will get the set of colors for every painting at the beginning of the video. Let's discuss the brushes. The major and the most important brushes, which I'm going to use is a wash brush. Of course, we needed for all our paintings. Now, this flat brush is usually used for softening of various parts in our snow. You can also see it in this particular painting, I will use my flat brush to soften up these areas. That's the major purpose of keeping this flat brush. I'm keeping a round brush, the three by zero Pitt that's there. Then the brush of the Vince Casino. You can also keep a size bore brush that I would leave it up to you. The C Casinoobrush. This is often used for all my practice exercises or for painting. Disguise bust is zero by zero, this is double zero. Silver ruby satin brush, I will use it for making the trees branches and lot more work that you will see as it comes up as the story unfolds. All the 14 days of printing, keeping our tissue very handy. Of course, I am re using this tissue, it is used from back side, I would be using this side. I like less of paper wastage and hence that's the way I go about it. A washi tape for taking down your papers so that we get these kind of clean edges in our painting. I will have an acrylic board. Now this acrylic board is more like any surface which you want to stick to, that gravity can work, we can move our painting and there, and that becomes very easy, a ceramic palette for your paints. Lastly, two jars of water. This is for washing your brushes. Another one for picking up any of the fresh water whenever you need it is bleed proof white. It's not exactly, it is white color. This white color is opaque in nature. I have been using it for quite some time. Just thought to introduce you guys to this particular brand. You can use wash or any other opaque white water color. Petting white is also great to go. 4. Cutting the paper: It's all about cutting imperial sheets. I usually prefer cutting out the smaller sheets from an imperial size of paper. I usually take the longer side of the imperial size sheet. Then I do mark out about 17 centimeters. So that it is of exact size that I really need for my painting. The size of the painting is 17 into 20 centimeter. You can also take it as 20 centimeter and then cut out as 17, 17 centimeters each. I would leave that decision up to you. So I went ahead with 17 centimeters. And I feel using 20 centimeters would have been a better idea compared to 17 centimeter. Do exercise that option and let me know if you did like that better. I have gone ahead and I am now folding my paper. Once my paper is folded, I would use a paper cutting knife and just slit my paper down now so that I can get a long thin paper. After I get this long thin paper, I need to take out about three to four papers out of it, like whatever be the size, exactly that I need. And accordingly, if there is a smaller size paper which is left out, I usually take it or use it for any of my other paintings on Youtube or I also do it on Skillshare or any of my other gift cards, et cetera. It can be used anywhere, as this is, again, a 300 SM paple. Another question that you guys might have is that, why am I even insisting on cutting out an imperial size paper? Imperial sized paper are usually cheaper compared to the ones that we usually buy as five, size, four, size three, et cetera. Imperial size paper gives you with more freedom in terms of the size or the choice that you want to exercise. You want a circular paper. Just cut out a circular paper. You want a square paper of any size shape. You can cut that out. I always like the fact that I have a lot more freedom with imperial size compared to the paths that I usually get from outside. As well as the third point is this is a bit more cheaper compared to the ones that you buy as pads. Lastly, if storage is an issue for you all, then of course I would refer that go ahead and use any pads for this painting. You can also go ahead with five size paper. That's absolutely okay. Just take down the exact size and shape and then it's perfectly fine. I am again, using my knife to cut down. You can see how closely I am just cutting out from in between finally getting about 14 sheets ready for my entire journey. Every day will be a new sheet in case you are failing on one side. Do use the other side of the paper. I have also done it for my paintings. 5. Practice Part 1: This part is all about our practice session. Now in the practice session, we are going to understand few important basic techniques. One is your gradient wash. Now before I go ahead with the gradient wash, let me tell you the speed of the video. The speed of the video for this practice part is going to be two X. I'm mixing two colors. One is my royal blue and another one is my blue. I will go ahead and just start adding the gradient. Every time I add a darker value, I will go ahead wash my brush. And then again go with whatever amount of color left in my brush. Again, wash the brush and start adding the colors towards the bottom area till the time we get the lightest of the value towards the bottom. And the darkest of the value will be for the top of the sky. I did apply a line. Now this line really allows me to depict the horizon, which is majorly separating my sky from the snow area. I'm going ahead with some of my burn Siena. Now the burn Sienna, I think already had some blue in it, so I'm not getting the correct color. I have again picked up the color, and now you can see that my colors are moving. But at this stage, I did wait for about a minute and my paper doesn't have a lot of water because of which the colors are not moving to a great extent. The second part is that I have used a pigment which is from the brand C, and it doesn't move a lot. Whereas there are pigments from Whole Bean or other brands that do move a lot. Some of the senaliar pigments also move a lot, because of which I try to not use them for this part of the painting. Going ahead with my flat brush. Now this flat brush is very important at this stage. It allows me to give that soft effect for the bushes which I have added for my background area. This is majorly differentiating my top part of the sky, that is my horizon line on top of that line only I do add it. Now I'm going ahead with the scene mix of colors which I had had. The paper is Dqd. I'm going ahead with a few lines and at this stage I'm going with my thinnest brush to add these lines, as I don't want my colors to be moving to a great extent. Now, this particular part, what this particular thing which we say is water control. Now, water control, of course, is a tricky thing and you might not get it at the first go. There are points at which I also don't get it. Something that I've learned over the years is a flat brush is of great use when you are not getting the correct flow or there is a lot more colors that you have added. Use a flat brush to just pick up the extra colors or create that soft effect. This is a really simple trick, but it has worked wonders through all my paintings you will observe going ahead with a mix of my ultramarine, include the colors that we have already added audio that is royal blue and plow blue again, the gradient. I'm going ahead with the darkest value towards the top and while I come towards the bottom, it is the lightest value. Adding some of my brown again towards my left to show the bushes. Now this time you can see my burn. Sienna is glowing absolutely. I will even add a bit of my ultramarine into the burn Siena. Wherever I have extra colors, I will go ahead with my flat brush again to just pick up the extra pignans towards the bottom area or towards the horizon line. I'm going ahead and adding the darkest value of brown. Okay, time to add some colors for my mountain area. The mountain area will have some of the area in snow and some of the area in darker values. Though I haven't planned anything where I should add the darker or the lighter values while I come towards the bottom, it would be more darker towards the top. As you know, there are snow capped mountains, et cetera. I'm mixing two colors as you know. One is the Tra Maine and one is the Bn Siena. I have created most of the darker values of brown or the darkest value which you want through these two colors. Only in most of the paintings, I will again use my flat brush in the area where I think that I have added more pigments or I'm not really happy with it. I will go ahead and use my flat brush to just pick up the extra colors. Okay? Adding some blue to create the ridges of the mountains, the depth into the mountains. And picking up some color, making the area more soft as you know that the flat brush can soften it up to a great extent. Now applying some water and then some amount of blue for the snow, we will be using the white of the paper. The white of the paper is always amazing and you should use the white of the paper to be used or to be seen as snow always. The transparency of watercolor is the important aspect. If you are doing winter landscape paintings, you can always go ahead and use the transparency of watercolors and show the white of the paper for the snow. It is easier than go and it looks much more realistic that way, as well as it shows the maturity of the artist as you progress in your watercolor journey. The right side of my painting is still wet, whereas the left side is completely dried off. You can see some dry plants, et cetera. Over there. I will go ahead and check that whether my paper is a dried or not and then go ahead with an absolutely part of the tree area. These are basically the branches of the trees. It's pretty imaginary that I have added. These two are separate paintings and they are showing two different kind of paintings in total. Let's remove the tape pattern angle and have a look at all the important points or the takeaways from this painting. 6. Practice Part 2: Colors are coral opera composed violet, saprine, ultramarine. And paint screen. Let's start with our basic sketch. Of course, it's a simple mountain that I'm going to add. This is a thumbnail sketch. For thumbnail sketches, you have to frankly divide your paper into parts. First is your horizon line and the second part is the mountain that you want to show are not going to add any more element to it. We usually leave out a lot of elements. I go ahead and add in my full painting. The size of our paper is really not this small and hence we will get an opportunity to add more elements as well as show a bit more details. Let's go ahead and first check the sky colors. I am adding coral along with it. I have kept some amount of brilliant print from the brand Jello Mission Gold. You can leave this out. You frankly don't need it. You just need opera and compost. If you don't have opera, you can use quin alone Coral. Or you can go ahead with any of your other pink shades. Car, mine or even your red, scarlet, red, et cetera. Anything can work. In this case, you have to see that how harmoniously these colors are moving into each other and that's what we are doing in this Thumbi sketch. This is frankly your pre round. It takes half of the time that we will use for our final painting. Why thumbline sketch is important for me? It's most important so that I can understand my color palette, how it is going to move around with each other. Second, the most important part is how I am going to place my elements, how I am going to work on this composition. That's another very important aspect. While we talk through the more important points of this thumbnail sketch, let's go ahead and add some water towards the bottom part. You can see the size of the paper is really small. I'm going ahead and wetting the bottom part of the paper where I want to paint the snow. This is basically my ultramarine that I'm adding. It's a very, very light shade. One thing in watercolors that I've understood is using light shades always help you through the entire process. It's difficult to get back to the white surface doing it with the help of lighter shades or just diluting our colors more always be of great help in any kind of a painting. This is more of ultramarine that I have added. Now going ahead with some of my darkest value, you can use pcindo or else you can also go ahead with any kind of paints gray in co. These are the shades that you need to some of the parts of the bottom area. Once you have added these colors, go towards the top, which is just near the horizon line, and then add some more colors over there on a smaller paper. To a great extent, you cannot control your colors. They will move. That's one of the reasons you should try a Thumbail sketch on smaller paper. And once you do it on a larger sheet of paper, you get to understand that this smaller paper is a great help towards the final painting that you have planned. Let us use our flat brush to our advantage wherever it is necessary. And I am cleaning up the space a bit because the white is really less. While we come towards the bottom area, I'm applying some water for the top part of my horizon line. It is just the bottom half of the mountain. Then we will start out by painting the mountain area. I'm going to go ahead with a really, really light wash of any shape that I want to apply for my mountain area as well as I have plant, a small set of plants, or you can say trees that we are going to have towards the right part. And then it would move a bit smaller in size while we go towards the left side. You can start out with pain play or pico. As your paper responding, we, you will see that the colors will automatically flow. You do not need to do much in this case, just apply the colors and they start moving. Only thing that you need to keep in mind while you do this is not to use the colors in all the spaces. Give a bit of gap so that the white or the snow or the mountains is seen. Well, I'm going ahead with my size three brush, or size four casino brush is also good. I have both of them. You can use any one of them for adding this kind of strokes. These are smaller strokes and you can see now I'm starting out with green. As I did tell you earlier, simple simple lines just to show that, yes, there are trees that is there in the background. We will even add these trees to showcase our horizon line in a bit better way. I will mix the colors. Initially, I have gone ahead with Sab Green. And slowly I am working through the darkest value, which is my forest green. As I go towards the horizon line, it would be more darker in value. You can also make some amount of blue into your sap green and then get a darker sheet off your green and apply it. Now is the time to create contrast. Now, what do you mean by creating contrast? Either your mountain that you are trying to paint has to be darker in value than the four grows that you are painting. Or it has to be lighter in value. Now this is something that I always keep in mind when I am creating any of the painting. Either my background has to be darker or my foreground needs to be darker. Either of it will help you to define depth as well as contrast in the painting that really defines your painting in a much better way. I'd like to add some loose lines here and there. The paper is almost dry and hence I can't do much at this stage. I am blending it with my blending brush. Now I'm using the same brush of cost to blend. That's absolutely fine. Once we are adding the blue color, you can see it touches the green and then they move together. Bleeding into each other is absolutely fine. We do not need to worry about the bleeds code, let them bleed with each other. You will see the small things which you are more worried about while you're working on the smaller painting get absorbed as you work on the bigger part of the painting. This is a very important practice session. I have a lot of stress on this practice session when it comes to watercolors. When you try in the first home may not turn out well, but when you give it a second try, it is always going to help you in a much, much better way. I'm adding some of the lines like this. You can see even flat brush can be used for adding your smaller or the darker shade of the trees. As I'm doing right now, blending the colors now while I go towards the bottom area, leaving a few loose lines here and there, I have to also go ahead with a few dark brown marks on the top. You can also go ahead with absolute paints gray. For me, I love to mix a bit of brown into my paints gray and get the darkest value of color. Though I say paints gray is equally good. Go ahead and use only your paints gray. This is just a small thumb sketch which we are going to do, adding one or two smaller dots here and there as you see me progressing. Then we will add some more of these dots. You can see how well we are adding it and progressing very easily through the entire part of the mountain. One more thing, which happens when we are working on smaller Therminale sketches, you get to practice, which means that there is very less scope that is left in terms of the mistakes that you can make in the final painting. The final painting that we are going to do is on a bigger size paper, and there are chances to make a lot more mistakes. The stage of paper would be much more higher. If you actually do this small exercise. It might look like a bit more effort, but I can tell you that it is one of the best things that you do to yourself and create the beauty. I have created overall, three paintings. One of the the name exercises another painting, and then I got the final version done for you guys. It happens, we also make mistakes. Watercolor is never perfect and it is best to leave it as imperfect. This whole painting was out of my own imagination and I'm so happy that it came out so well. Let's move on to the final painting now and then have a look at this smaller version on a bigger size paper. 7. Day 1 The Red Barn: The colors are Conacdone, coral, crimson or pink purple, ultramarine blue, Bruscian blue, royal blue, Perk Siena as gray or indico. Today's painting is all about red pan. We all love to paint this pan, but we have to see exactly what's the perspective horizon line, the vertical point, spanishing point, et cetera. So many things come up in this whole sketching painting, et cetera. I want to relieve you from all this and just enjoy this painting because of which I'm going to simplify the whole process. I have divided my one simple line that is from the middle into three equal halves, almost two of the halves I would be utilizing for the roof part, one of the parts I would be using for the Porto Media. Now, this is as per what I have observed, this can be even named as a snow cabin, but you can always go ahead and decide for yourself what works best. I am adding a small tree, or you can say it's a plant basically which is dried up and there is some snow on top of it. We will be leaving white spaces as well as using a bit of quash to create the snow wherever it is needed. I will be highly using wet on wet technique. Along with it, you will see that I even use a lot of wet and dry technique which is going to make the whole painting come to life. That is a combination which I guess works the best, though I am a supporter of wet on wet completely. If you are someone who is in love with wet on wet, I have a previous class of mine which I did release some time back, and it has five winter paintings inspired from the winter season, it's a winter marathon. Please go ahead and refer back to those paintings. I think you will fall in love with each one of them as they're all inspired from the quinto, as well as this crazy celebration season that we usually have. Though all of us want to be in that cozy corner of our house which works the best for us because of which you have this series that we are doing today. It's all about painting in 15 to 20 minutes. We are not going to go beyond that for any of our painting, I have added the mountain as well as the four grows the horizon line. There is not much in the four crows except the few trees going ahead with a mix of my blue, this is my royal blue along with it. I'm using some amount of lavender color from the brand Magello Mission Gold. You can also go ahead with any of the other shades that you have or else mix some amount of Chinese white. I would not tell you to mix a lot of your titanium white into it because it is opaque in nature and we don't want a lot of opacity. Though. You can have a percentage which is like 30% of Chinese white, 20% of the titanium white, and 50% of the purple color that you have. And get something closer to this, the most important factor at this stage is to create some peaceful shades for the sky, which are more from the blue as well as from our purple shades. I mixed a bit of yellow on the top, but really did not like it. I took it off with the help of my biggest brush. Now going ahead and adding some of the shades, the same color, that is blue and purple towards the top part of my mountain aum. Usually wherever there is no clad places, you will see that there is some other mountains or it could be some hills. It's usually at a elevated region. That's one of the reasons we are also going ahead and adding that to our painting to create that realism. Having said the realism part, I would say for me watercolors is more like a freedom. You can always go ahead and interpret the language in which you want to describe your painting in your own way. So many of you have asked me, how do you find your voice in watercolors? What should you do more, et cetera, to get that voice? I would say the style of painting for every watercolor artist does evolve a lot. And it takes years and years of practice to have only one single style that you absolutely love, adore, and you want to continue with that. Even that particular style will go through some minor changes as you progress. Hence, it is not so important to stick yourself with the fact that we need to have a voice style, et cetera. Keep painting. And that's what will help you to get your own style, process, progress, et cetera, everything that you want. By the way, in the meantime, I did apply some of the colors of the pastel shade for my snow, as well as I'm using the same indigo and brown mix for the background bush as well as for the bottom area. There is touch of colors that you would see. I'm using with the tip of my brush. It's not that I want to cover the whole area. The snow clad mountain remains the same. The top area has some amount of dampness in it and that's one of the reasons whenever I apply the blue or the browns in the top area, you will see that some of the spaces might become more lighter and the colors will move or the pigments will move. I would continue to do the same for the tree. It's not that I want to have a lot of branches or leaves on it. It's a very simple process, pretty dry, but yet there is a lot of snow and I want to show the same through this tree. Let's go ahead and do that. Blending the colors in the bottom area with the blue that I had. And I'm using Pi mop brush from the Vince. This is size zero mop brush from Series Casino. It's one of my go to Series. Always. You might have always seen that I use this for most of my painting. I'm using the royal blue again for the top part as well as the bottom area. Also, I'm de touch with royal blue. Along with that, I'm using the same mix of indigo and brown for a few parts of the trees. This is mostly in muted colors. The only bright part that we are going to have is the barn. I have kept the rest of the area of the background completely in muted shades. The whole focus of the painting is on the bar. So we are going to even add a few more details here and there to the tree or to any of the other background things that you see. But with the help of my color, what I've done is I have tried to focus on the barn itself. Okay? Adding some amount of smaller dots here and there. And once that part is done, we will go ahead and add the colors to our bar. Always, the process is slow, interesting, as well as it helps us to mature in our watercolor journal. The only thing that I always stress for each and every person who has joined my earlier classes and who continue to join me, I always say a regular practice is very important. I have seen it for myself. For the past five years, I have been painting daily and I still love to paint daily. Though there are occasions where I have to release classes or I have to travel, I have to work on my business. There are things where I can't do much, but I try to always do even smallest of the painting just to send across as a thank you card to someone. Those kind of things I do keep in my mind. Okay, going ahead and adding the mountain for the background. Again, using the beautiful blue along with a bit of mix of your glue and brown. Sometimes it's just touching the brush with the color and then just applying it on the paper. That's all we are going to do in whole of this particular painting though. There are other paintings also which we are going to make. Just hold on, you will see a lot of things coming, adding one of my most beautiful color, that is my Quinacridone coral to the whole of the barn area. Though you might have only seen red bars and people love to create red burns, but I just wanted to do it as a twist, and I created this bit of pink in it. I mixed, and then I created this whole of the barn area. Okay? This is a red violet color. And the red violet color is nothing but adding some amount of your purple into the Quinacridone coral or the pink that you have and creating the darkest value for your red violet. Okay, add some more color. Continue to do that. Just add, add, and we will leave out some of the spaces for the white area of our smallest plant that we have in the foreground. You would see the whole of the painting is mostly done in bicker brush. We have really not switched tower brushes much because I wanted to complete the whole of the painting in largest of the brush possible. We always do not need smallest, thinnest brush to complete our gly paintings. That's one big important takeaways for everyone who's starting out. Because this particular lesson or this particular class is for each one of you who wants to dive into this beautiful medium of water colors. Please do not stop yourself with your brushes or with the colors that you have. Paper is the most important thing. If you have the paper of the correct 100% cotton, I would say even 185 GSM, it is great to go ahead and paint on 185 and above any GSM is great. Your paper doesn't buckle much. If you have 300 GSM or else paper mind buckle a bit, but this 185 GSM arches paper is amazing to work around with. You can go ahead with 200 SM Fabriano paper, 190 GSM saunders. I mean these are great brands to work on. They're all 100% cotton and will give you almost the same kind of result that you see on a 300 GSM paper. I have been using Sketchbooks made out of these paper that we do under the brand fibrin parcels that I own. And they are seriously something that you can think about working on for. Continue to add some of the darkest values. Touch your brush and go. I have switched on to my finished rush right now, or else the colors will move a lot, and I don't want that at this stage. The colors are still wet on the paper, though we have gone ahead with wet on dry method at this particular stage of the painting. But still, there is a lot that you can play with. Mostly these red pants are made out of woods and then you paint on top of it. That's one of the reasons I'd like to even add these lines with the dark value to show that part of the wood. I would continue to add it even for the top area. Adding fuel lines like this as you observe me over here, continue to do that. Even for the top area, just the way you see on the right, we will replicate the same for the left. It's time to paint our windows. I do keep some of the white houses. You all know that white is something that I always love to preserve. The white of the paper. Though yes, there are areas where I do use even the white ph, but we are not going to use any kind of masking fluid throughout the S. That's the best, we will be making use of any kind of masking tape. That's something which I have used in many of my earlier paintings. And if you have washed my earlier class where we did winter paintings for around 28 to 30 days, you would know that? Yeah, I do use a lot of masking tape to mask out a few areas wherever it is necessary. That's something I always keep up to adding some brown as well as some amount of neutrotent. You can also go ahead with black or nico as well as paints gray if you do not have that particular neutritent. Because my neutritent does flow a lot and I don't like to use it for the same purpose. I mix my indico with some amount of brown to create that darker shade that I need. Going ahead and creating, adding some lines, some dots. I love to add these dots. They look so loose yet so beautiful and interesting. Over the years, I have learned nothing about water color painting. The more loose you can paint, I think that gives you more freedom to express. Now, freedom of expression is something that each and every artist have on their own. I feel very strongly, I have a particular way to show the backgrounds, backgrounds, everything. And it's the freedom of my own expression that is working out through my watercolors. Someone might like to do it more hard edge that their freedom of expression In watercolors, this is more to do with how loose you want to paint for me. Painting loose comes over time. It doesn't happen on one single day. It did take me a lot of years in terms of to learn what is my style of loose painting. I like to have those pleads on the paper. I love to have those. Soft edges, which really helps the whole of the painting come to life. These are what I think worked for me. But there might be different ways in which you should also explore for your freedom of expression in watercolors. This is a particular term that I use for myself when I have to express in a particular style, in a particular way through my watercolors. I have done it in other paintings too. As you see the series moving, there will be a lot of paintings which will come up. Most of them are wet on dry. We have not applied much of water initially, and yet we have achieved those soft edges that usually will see in my other classes where I have used lots and lots of water. This fine balance of using water is something that you learn. I'm here to help you out with all the doubts, et cetera, that you have. Please drop messages or please drop your doubts. In the discussion section, I would be more than happy to address any one of them. If you cannot get something right or you have doubts about it, do right over there. Okay. Going ahead and adding a few lines for my tree. Before that I did Go ahead. White quash. It is opaque in nature. I am using one of the opaque white mediums from H. Martin. Of course, it is water soluble, it just works like white quash. Hence, I'm using it for quite a number of years now. It's amazing. It's a small bottle and you can use it for years. It doesn't end or it doesn't just go away. It is not hard. That's one of the best ways to use this particular go for me. Okay, continue with your painting of the trees and the branches. I would continue to touch few of the spaces with some of the other dots that I want to add into my tree or into the snow. The snow is practically done in lavender and the blue, I have told you these are more to look like pastel colors, though you will find other paintings, like a tree that we did paint, covered with snow in the sunset. There are a lot of colors as well as paints which we are going to use. Do not worry and do not stress a lot. There is everything done in real time, step wise, which you can follow and you will get almost the same results. You just need a bit of patience and that's the key to any watercolor painting. Okay? Adding a few of my white quash dots on the tree as well, even on the barn that we have painted. I have already told you that most of us do paint the red barn. And I did go ahead with a bit of pink in it. Just splatter some more of the snow and you are done with the painting. There is not much to be done Now, you should know that where to stop. This is something that I always say in most of my paintings. It's important to know to stop. Or else what happens is that we continue to paint and the whole painting might get through in somewhere, or it might have turned a bit better if we would have stopped at the correct time. Those are the things that do come to mind, and I really don't want that to happen to anyone of you. Continue with it. Have a look at it before you finalize it. I've even added a few blue dots here and there. It's the royal blue from the Branson. Eli continue to work with that, then have a final look. I think you would be also happy with the final outcome. See you all again with the next painting. The key takeaway from this painting is how to draw the barn, that is, something we all don't know properly. And how to add the snow with pastel colors, using less of wash and presoking the white of the paper itself. 8. Day 2 The Winter Forest: Let's check out all the colors for today. I will go ahead more with a limited palette. Persian ultramarine, royal blue paint sky or indico. We are starting out by marking major the horizon line. Or you can say this is the snow area which divides the sky from the snow area is this particular line. Okay? And there's a small stream which is, we have to mark the area of the stream. Of course, I was not very much okay with how I want to show the stream to be flowing. That's one of the reasons I did erase it a few times before I wanted to finalize it in a particular way. Once that is done, we will go ahead and start out with our painting. There's very less sketching that we have in this particular part and there are majorly only strokes for the trees that you have to keep in mind. Going ahead with our royal blue and tramini mix, I will just add some more royal blue towards the top. We will work out with some of our burned CNO while I go in and around my horizon line. Sometimes the horizon line is not straight, it is more curvy In this way, of course, you can draw even a straight horizon line that marks the difference between the sky as well as the line dum. I am going ahead and mixing it with my quite a huge mop brush. It is size zero from the Brand casino, but you know that the size of the paper is really big that way and we are going and covering out a lot of spaces. The best part about painting on white is we will be a lot of white of the paper. There are a few things that I'm going to show as such, which you will understand that can help you even in your future watercolor paintings. Let's wait for that before we go ahead with it. We are just working on our background bushes. I'm mixing some amount of my ultramarine and just blending it with the brown that I've already added. This looks pretty amazing and I'm very happy with the dark and the lighter mixes of the brown that I have over here. Of course, the colors might end up not so dark. And do make sure that you have a lot of water in your brush when you're adding the colors. As I want the colors to get mixed up with the sky and not have any difference between the brown as well as the blue that you have of the sky. Going ahead with some of my brown and then blending it with ultramarine color. Now, ultramarine and brown will even give some darker values here and there. Now these darker values are very, very important when you are working in a river or because some of the areas will be in the shadows and some of the areas will be reflecting the sky along with it. Some of the areas which are in the shadow will even show the reflection of the trees that we are going to paint. Yeah, there are a lot of trees and a lot of bushes. It is a very easy painting just that you need to have some amount of patients. I'm going to even help you out with how to not make your paintings look flat like here we have curves, et cetera, of the snow. But to make it better, we will add more shadows into it. Once we add the shadows of the trees, you will see how beautifully the curves get shown up. This particular lesson that you are actually working on can really help you to work even your future paintings when you're adding some stream trees, et cetera, in a larger painting. The whole idea of the painting goes beyond just working through this painting as of now. That's what was always in my mind when I wanted introduce you guys to this whole set of landscapes. Landscapes has been my favorite forever. I wanted you guys to also experience the magic of working with winter landscapes that are super convertible to spring or to any other way you want to hold it adding some darker values just near the snow area, You can see I am just mixing with some brown to get the darker colors, although I have kept some neutritant with myself, but I'm not adding it much. You can use your paints gray or indico rather than Neutrotant. I'm to create some reflection of the trees. As I did already mentioned, we are going ahead and going with the darkest value. You can see that I'm going with my paints gray or you can also take indigo. As these are two alternative colors that can always be used to create the darkness or the depth into the painting. Contrasting is very important at this stage. Contrasting will help us to really understand that there is no which you can see. And this reflection will help us to actually show the fact that the stream doesn't have a lot of movement. It's more of a mix of a calm as well as moving water. I am adding some now. What are these blues? Now these blue lines are majorly your shadows of the trees into the snow area. This also helps us to define the curves of the snow. Will the land area is not flat, it is curved, and it moves downwards as we come towards the stream, the stream is basically breaking into this land area. You have to see that there are some more amounts of snow that has ended up on top of the land part, whereas it is not there in the stream area. Okay, I will go ahead and just blend it in few areas. I will keep the whites intact of the paper. That's very important. I don't like to use H, as I have told you, it is usually used in really, really less quantity in spaces where I need, not for mountains, not even for any of the spaces. You will hardly see me using white Bh. I'm so much not in favor of using in terms of winter paintings. Winter paintings are supposed to be fun. Watercolor is a transparent medium. We should not be mixing it up more with some of the very opaque mediums that we know. Try for the left side two in the similar way of adding the shadows. And then we will let the paper to dry up completely. Once the paper dries up completely, we will start out with our trees or plants, whatever you want to say, they will be absolutely dry. There will be only a few lines. You choose your own brush, whether it be size 01234, whatever you want to take. I prefer size zero brush for creating my trees. I will continue with that. You can go ahead with the brush that you're more comfortable with. Comfort is very important at this stage because it is all about strokes and straight lines. You have to be really comfortable with your brush as well as with your hand. It should be stable enough. If you are someone who has yet to try these out, write out on a simple paper. Any paper is fine, even the paper we take notes without any GSM, anything. You're just trying out how to go ahead with your straight strokes. Just go ahead with any paper and try them out. My paper is dry now. I will go ahead with my background trees. When you are creating your background trees, always know that they need to be in lighter values. They are far away from our eyesight and we cannot see it really dark. Always make it more lighter and with the lightest value that you have, even if it be a dark brown color, it has to be the lighter value or more transparent value of that. When you are coming to the foreground trees, of course, they have to be more darker in value. You will see that at regular intervals I'm adding these lines. I'm not cluttering all of them at one single place. If you start adding all the lines at one single place, then it will not look gratural, it will not look the random things that usually we see in nature. And hence, I keep it all throughout the whole of the place. Let's start with our four rounds. This is going to be the most interesting part. I did already tell you a lot about the four rounds, how you should have your steady way of adding the lines, and how much you should be comfortable with your brush. You can see how I'm adding the darkest value towards the front. I will not branch out all these trees to a great extent. I will just continue adding some of my trees. That's what I will do and you can see even the reflection of these dry trees into the water, few branches here and there. And we will continue to add more of the trees. I love to add trees and these are one of my strengths. I feel very strongly that adding the trees helps me to not only calm myself down, but it also helps me to work on things that I feel actually helps me to become more patient. As well as it gives more perspective in terms of just going with the flow, not thinking much about the final outcome. We have already created the shadows. Adding a few trees will help us to justify those shadows. That's all that's going on in my mind when I paint all of them. Few of them of course, have to be in the background or they are not very close to our eyesight. Few of them will be really close to our eyesight. There are a lot of reflection that I've already added into the painting. And there will be a lot more that you can also add. But yeah, a few more will add then I will just even add a bit of movement into the water. That's also I'm going to create. Let's continue with our trees for now. I want to be very focused on it. It's one of the best things that I do in the day to create this cheese and I only get to create them when they're dry, like these during the winter season. I don't want to get away with this winter season. I think it's one of the best seasons to paint your trees dry. Leaves, less of spring, is there less of colors are there But those red burns, these dry trees make up for everything that we want to paint. Okay, continue with your painting and sells you with your branching part. Just be focused. I think you will mail this painting. This is not as tough as the first one. Of course, the worst has more to do with the intermediate kind of a level. But this is lowered down and you will see the third painting, more lowered down, which is more of a mountain. And you can do it within 15 minutes of your time span. So there is a mix of your bigness to intermediate level worth in this whole of the series. And I have not decided much in my head when I was designing it in terms of the flow of the class, it is just like random as I say. I've kept it like nature because landscapes are one of the most beautiful aspects of nature and I wanted to leave it as such. Go with the flow. Enjoy your paintings. Love doing everything that you want to do in a landscape. Landscapes are always lot more beautiful and it gives me so much pleasure to bring to you all these landscapes. Okay, let's see you and add more trees on the left side. Continue adding them and I am branching it out few places. You know that I love branching it. I have only used my size zero brush for creating the whole lot of trees. And that's one of the reasons you may find that I have taken more time, but for me having the control in my hand and I have a really good control of this brush, which I want to keep it that way and continue to create the trees. Okay, cool. I guess some more trees needs to be there. It seems pretty less when I look at the foreground, some of the foreground trees will come up very, very soon time for the moment which I was waiting for. I did tell you yes, there are more fork ground trees which are coming up. I am not adding much of shadows of all of this into the snow anymore. You have already seen that I did it earlier and I'm going with the same thought. Adding the trees is what is there in my mind. Because I have to justify those shadows that I've added earlier as this has been the flow even earlier. So we will continue with the same flow and mindset that we had a. Remember that some of the trees needs to be thinner, some of the trees needs to be thicker. A few of them will originate from one single point. Maybe two trees originating from one particular space. Only some of them will be branching out more, some of them will be branching out less. All of this you will continue to work on when it is watercolor landscape, a bit of reflection into the water and I am done. I'm creating some of the darkest parts of the bottom area for showing the snow that is major. This part is dark because snow is on top of it. Usually you'll find the bottom area into the shadow part, hence it is on the darker value, adding some thinner lines into the water area. This is it. We are not going to complicate it anymore and leave it at this stage. We'll let the paper dry off completely, Then only remove the tat n angle. There are a few key takeaways which you should stop and read before you finish off with this painting. 9. Day 3 Mountain Calling: Colors for today are royal blue, marine paints, Gray or Prussian blue. Any of these shades can do. This is a very easy to go, a mountain painting that we are to doing. We are starting out with two long lines. You can see they're almost parallel to each other, but at a distance from each other, what I'm going to do is I will join them as you see me working on it. Let's make some of the ridges as well as some of the areas which are more darker in values than some of the areas that are being more lighter in value. By only defining a few lines, et cetera, we are going to go more wet on wet for some of the areas and wet on dry for some of the areas. This particular series has a lot of mix in terms of wet on wet and wet on dry. We are not completely adding water on all the parts of the paper and yet you get a lot of feel of the wet on wet technique, which you are going to experience in every painting that you are going to do. Okay. Continue to work and then I will add some of the pats exactly the way you observe overhel. The sketching is easy, the painting is equally easy. Believe me, it did not take me more than 15 to 16 minutes, except the drawing time that I had. It's a real time video. You can follow along and paint along with me. No need to worry, just do it. Most of the colors that you are using are like indigo, et cetera, which is equally easy to have in any of our palettes. And hence, everything would be a very, very smooth flow. Let's now wet some of the parts for our mountain area as these are more darker in value. And I'm going to wet those parts first. Some of the areas I am going to preserve in white that I have on the paper. You know that I am a person who is in love with the white of the paper as well as I like to keep that itself but without any masking fluid. For this series. Exceptionally excited to seriously check out and do this because there have been many paintings where I've used masking fluid, but it is not available for each one of you And when it is not available or it becomes difficult than even peeling off, sometimes the paper that you use as handmade paper, which is around 300 or 400 GSM, that works well with water colors, but might not support equally the masking fluid that you are using. Keeping all of that in mind, I just thought a sees without any masking fluid part having a lot of whites in it. So let's continue with this part. I have mixed a bit of my black into the Pruscian blue earlier, but this also has a similar tone and value, just the way you get in an Indico. And hence you can also go ahead with Indico though I do not like to use black. But the whole being series that I purchased a while back has the black in it and I thought use it a bit as this whole tube might go for a waste, which I really don't want as each of the tubes are pretty expensive and they are great colors. They don't move a lot, which is great and amazing thing that I saw exactly the way Magello Mission Gold operates. You can use these colors also in a similar way it will not move on even a wet surface to a great extent. That way your water control becomes way more easier. I have tested many colors till now, starting out with Megello, Michel Gold, Senala, Winsor, and Newton. Or as well as this particular brand. Hole being my favorite, two of them is Magello, Mission Gold. And being as they do not move a lot, but if you're doing a lot of it wet or dry, you can of course go ahead and use QR moves the most out of it and the other shades don't move to that extent. Values play a very important role at this stage. You know that I am actually creating lighter values as I go towards the top of the peak area. While I am towards the bottom or moving downwards, I am making it more darker. That's how I like to keep my colors. At this stage, we might go ahead with bit more darker values as we progress. Progress is very important. Progress is a very important word when it comes to watercolor. You don't always need to have that perfect outcome, I would say. Always compare yourself to your own painting a while back and I do it on a regular basis. I just want to improve on my own skill set. Anything and everything that helps me to improve on my own skill set. I'm super happy to explore this. I would request you all to give that 15 to 20 minutes in the day to create these paintings, because I know that they're very easy to go, Asmlls. You can gift it out to your friends, or you can keep it and frame it for your own self in your houses. Send it across to your near and dear ones, maybe in next Christmas. Or just say a happy New Year with a beautiful card. Say thank you With these cards, what's your weights? And they are not small paintings that the best part, it's a bit smaller, I think it's a bit larger than five. Or maybe a similar size like five, which is not a very small painting. And I'm really happy and appreciate the thing that we could cover this huge area of A five size paper two within like 15 to remain. So it's not an important aspect to go ahead and just think that you can't do it or you need a lot of time. It's a daily practice. Even when you are sipping your cup of coffee, you can't paint alone. So it's just taking out that perfect time. What I usually do as a particular way of operation, I will tell you. But before that, go ahead and apply some darker values till your paper is wet. You can see I am doing it right now. I have switched over to my size three. Or you can also go ahead with size two brush. This is particularly the Vinci round brush that I'm using, again from the casino series. You know that I'm more addicted towards brushes of the Vince as well as a lot of my brushes are from the poles from Cada. Yes, those are two of the brands that I have been referring to for quite some time, and I've been using it very often for majority of my paintings. I always say that whatever you have is good to go. I preached it from the bottom of my heart. I have been doing it for myself this whole year. I just purchase, I think, two or three brushes for myself, but I just go or spend a bit extra for that purchase as I want myself to be happy with those brushes as I continue to paint, you can see that my paper is damp. Now, there is a difference between when you have a lot of water on the paper and when you want to work with the dampness of the paper. For me, this is more to work with the dampness or the moisture of the paper that's really not shown as a sheen on top of the paper. It's a very simple process of understanding, I would say, but it takes a while. If you have seen the techniques part, you already know that yes, there is a free flowing water where there's a lot of water and your pigments will move a lot. Whereas if you have controlled water on the paper or you just know that this is exactly the amount of moisture that I need for painting the clouds or for painting a particular part of the painting. You are going to nail that painting and that's what I am using for the darker parts of the mountains. It's just, this whole painting took me to two attempts, I will show you. It is once done on the back side of the same paper and I do on the front side of the paper. I was not really happy with how the outcome was and I wanted to try it once more with more of wet on wet idea in my mind. The second time I tried, it was just a flow. It did not get stuck anywhere. I was not thinking much. I just enjoyed the flow of water colors. This flow I have always looked out for in every painting that I do. If you enjoy water colors, you are going to nail any of the buildings. I am just taking off a bit of your colors from fewer areas. This is my flat brush from the brand silver ruby satin. It's one of the beautiful brushes that I've explored very recently and I'm still exploring more of it. Having said that, I think this one is more to do with wash, but it works even well with water colors. That's the beauty of I guess black velvet brushes, they are always amazing. Any silver brush, the create. Going ahead with some of my Errelium blue towards the top part of the mountain. We will have a very faint mountain towards the back side of this painting. You will observe we are having more mountain painting. Do not, do not worry. Continue to just there are a few lines that you see towards the foreground part of this mountain. It was just a bit of lines that are I don't want to cover all the areas of the white that I have on the paple. I have told many times, but I'm again, iterating it as it is something that usually doesn't sync in with us when we are starting out how to preserve the whites. We have so many questions. Why can't we use the masking fluid? Why we have to leave? Why not the quash can be used? Of course, I am someone who does use a bit of white quash too. Or any water color, opaque white color, maybe something like the titanium white. You can also use anything that is naturally done, which is more, the paper looks better. That's the only thing which I always say, and this is something we learn over years. I want it takes the same. Believe me, it looks so beautiful. Always it looks very amazing. It's so natural. I am adding some dry brush. Dry brush strokes is nothing but you have just the least amount of water on your brush. And you will get strokes like these, majorly for the mountain area, we usually need it. You can also do it like these similar kind of brush chokes for any of walls or you want to paint wooden parts areas, et cetera. Those can also have these strokes very easily on top of it. And it looks very nice, maybe even for the old gates and all locks, et cetera. What happens is, over these years or usage mainly gives out the fact that it is all rugged, the look, feel, et cetera, any route is higher on it. And hence these dry strokes shows that pretty well. Adding a few pine trees towards the bottom corner, and you can see that how I'm adding it again. They're small, it's not that they're really large, we are not doing any large pine trees. Some more dots here and there, and that's all I think before I act on it, you will see. I just see that. Do I need it here? Do I add it here or I add it somewhere else? It's something that is there always in my mind, I think, and then I progress. I don't want to add everything. Something that I've learned over the years is to paint less. Less is always more. If you paint a lot, of course it's good. But covering up in watercolors or getting back to the lighter values is very tough, which is one of the reasons whenever you are working with watercolors, make sure that you are not going overboard with any of the colors, paintings, et cetera. Okay? Time to create that beautiful mountain. For the background, you saw that I left my sky to dry up a bit. I did not touch it, and now I'm going ahead with my blue color. This is the royal blue shade. And then blending it a bit with the bottom area. Once this part is done, we will do a touch of our or mine most, one of the most go to blue colors, which is ultramarine blue. And then add a bit of ultramarine blue towards the top and the bottom area. Okay, just some more detailing and then we will have a fun look at this painting. Let the painting dry off properly before you actually take out the tape. Now this is something that I've learned over the years. If the tape is not peeling off properly, do use a hair dryer. And that hair dryer will help you to peel off the tape easily. If you are doing a hair dryer, it has to be hot air. Basically, whenever you are adding the hot air on the sides of it, washy tape comes off pretty easily. A quick request to everyone who has been using the carpenter tape or the masking tape, which are white, they stick to the paper and sometimes they don't peel off at all. That's one of the reasons I always say in each of my classes, do not use those tapes, please, to invest some money on washer tapes. Washer tapes are very important for all your paint things. If you want to leave out that white space rest, I think it's good enough to progress with whatever you have. As I say that, do not stop yourself because of the products or materials you don't have. Let's remove the tape and have a look. 10. Day 4 Northern Lights: Getting a list of all the colors. The first one is cobalt green, permanent yellow or lemon yellow, crucian blue, indico or paint screen. These are all the shades which I need. I'm going ahead and marking my horizon line now. This is basically a very simple line. I do not like to make straight horizon lines for this kind of painting, and hence I am going ahead with one of a crooked line. I would say to an extent because there is small mountain, usually these northern lights are seen in Iceland or in Finland, in Canada, et cetera. These are more colder places. Hence, you will have some mountains, et cetera, existing going ahead and just cutting out my tape and then adding it on top of the paper along with it. I have added some water towards the top area. After adding water, I will just check the glaze on top of the paper and then start with my lightest volume. Now the colors can be lemon yellow or it can be permanent yellow Orlin or any of the shades that's existing with you line I usually don't prefer because that's a shade which really moves around a lot. Very difficult to control. Having said that, every company has various or different shades. And to be frank, when you are doing our Northern lights painting, hardly you have a freedom or you are left out with less freedom in terms of the control of water. You have to let water do its work and just sit and enjoy the flow of the pigments in water. I'm going ahead with my Coba Green. Now this Cobain you can also replace with horizon blue or turquoise blue. I would leave that decision up to you. I am using the Coba greene from the brand allow Mission Gold. You can also get this Cobaltreen and Siningliar. Most of the brands to have it even whole, been, has this a shade which is in between the green and the blue color. I am just moving around the colors to a great extent. There is a lot of water that's there in the sky area. I'm using that water to my advantage. I cannot imagine a series of winter paintings without the northern lights, and hence, I am going ahead with the darkest value now, which is prucian blue. All the colors that I have taken, I wet with the help of my spray bottle. This is really important so that you can easily get the colors to move around on the paper. You can see now I am allowing the colors to move towards the bottom. Areum, always keep a tissue for the cleaning purpose. Very, very handy. Of course, you are seeing that the green is coming towards the bottom. And we might have to again, go ahead and add some amount of our yellow to show the yellow that is there towards the bottom area. The addition of colors we keep doing at various intervals as my yellow is the lightest value and the most important thing that you should keep in mind is the lightest value will be covered with the darkest value very quickly if you allow water to only do the work, and this happens in any kind of painting, you have to move around your board. Having a base for your paper where you can stick onto is very, very important for these paintings. I have kept the painting really simple. The bottom area is more lighted one, and when you go towards the top, we will have more darker values coming in. The colors that I have is from artists, great paints, whether it be senior, whole pain, or any kind of watercolor like white nights, Mijello, mission Gold. All of them are good to go. Whatever is available in your own country, you should go ahead and purchase that. No need to go ahead with the highest value, one. But somewhere in between, you can purchase and then start out with your watercolor journey. As many of you do, ask me that how my colors are so bright, vibrant. One of the important reasons for the same is using artist rate pigments. Having said that, if you are going ahead with a student rate pigment, you might have to go with two layers to get the same vibrancy. Or maybe three layers as they have more of fillers compared to pure pigments and only binder which you find in artist rate paints. One of the reasons for artist rate paints being more expensive compared to the other paints that you find in the market. I have already rested my paper now, but there is some amount of blue which I want to add on the left as well as on the right. Majority of the time that we are going to spend in this painting is for our sky. Let your water do the work and don't worry, when you are working with Northern Lights, whatever final outcome will be pretty and nice. You need to be fearless while you work with watercolors in a space which is more dictated with water compared to what you wish to add. I'm clearing out a bit of space on the right. And then I would go ahead and add some more amount of cobalt green and then just add some more blues towards the bottom. This is it. I am just moving around the water a lot so that I can relax and just leave it with water rather than me doing any job as of now. Clear out the edges always with the help of your tissue. Whenever you are working with Northern Lights, I did mask out some of the areas of the bottom. You know, because I like to preserve the whites of the paper intact and hence use the masking tape to do the same. I have purposefully, not used any masking fluid because there has been a lot of cases where you have faced a lot of difficulties while using masking fluid, et cetera. Masking fluid and Gh are used. What white gash is used as minimal except the snow, et cetera. In a few cases where we need to use it orals, I have just tried to avoid it as much as possible. It can be avoided. And I did understand that not many years ago, just one or two years back, initially, I was okay to use wash at any moment, but over time I have realized the transparency of water colors and the white of the paper can frankly do our job. We really don't need anything else. I did allow my paper to dry off and can see such a smooth and beautiful blend which has come out of this northern light. I'm going ahead and wetting my paper, then using some amount of the existing colors on my palette. Adding a bit of my going to it or paints gray and then getting a very transparent wash off it. Adding it towards the bottom area, it will move on it soon. We are not covering the entire white space that you see. Switch my brush and I have loaded it with some more paints of indigo or paints gray, whatever is available. Again, I always like to give you a lot more options when you are working with watercolors because many of these paints are usually not available, always with every one of us. And hence, having some options with us is helpful. Okay, the top part is more darker in value as that is in the background, and I love to keep it that way. The bottom part or the foregrounds, which is more closer to us, it has snow on it and hence it is much more lighter in value, with a lot more snow showing up. I'm going ahead and working with my flat brush. Now, this flat brush really helps me to soften my edges every time. It is a very, very simple technique, which I discovered pretty late in my journey of watercolors. Believe me, I was not aware that this simple technique of using a flat brush can make your paintings look so much soft in nature, as well as it gives such beautiful glow to your paintings. I am now using this technique in most of my paintings that you are going to do with me as the bottom part of the painting right now is already dried up. I have to just use a damp flat brush again to make it a bit more wet and then use the colors on top of it orals. I will not be in a position to frankly use the water colors. I'm using the same dirty mix of water color and adding a few more lines. The bottom area, of course, would be darker as you always know, but it is not as dark as we have painted the background mountain or the snow area. It is night time and you can see that there would be stars, et cetera. I did not paint till now. I will go head and paint it. All of that is still pending, but let's do the toughest of the job. For me, it is practically painting our Pines. I have trouble in painting Pines, believe me or not. But being a teacher myself, I say this, that every brush is very different, every brush has different strokes. If you are adding the background pines, go with a thin brush and just add some thin, thin lines crossing it and make the pines. If you are going ahead four ground trees which are pines, then you have to use a broader brush. I usually prefer the Vinci Mob brush, which is three by zero, something like that. For doing this, it's not even the zero size that I'm going to use. Three by zero is usually much more smaller than the zero ones. Going ahead and adding some few dots here. And this is just my own depaling part, which I want to continue to do. I continue doing it in most of my paintings. It's time to get back to our smaller pines again. We will start it out and just make some thin lines. You can see that I go really slow when it is about painting pines. Yes. When I'm making foreground pines, I will go a bit more quicker because they are broader strokes and it becomes easier for me that way. For the background ones, of course, I'm using my thinnest brush and hence it is taking more longer. These are smaller in size, shape, et cetera. Though you can also make some small lines and just depict points exactly the way you will learn in the next. I think within one or two paintings, you will see how I make points for other paintings too. There are different ways of doing one single tree or one single part of a painting itself. Whether it be trees, whether it be skies, we have various ways of painting it and you continue to learn each and every way. See, if you are learning on your own, then the process is way more longer. As I always say, I always do it on my own. And the process has been really long, but there is a lot of enlightenment and discovery, happiness, et cetera, When you just get to learn something on your own which you did not know, maybe Odium. Those things, of course, stay the same, but you can learn from anywhere and everywhere. And each and every learning in watercolors comes very handy when you are doing watercolors. Watercolor is a medium that you have to get it right in the first go. There are no second chances most of the time way I would say many other medium. Scrolichtcea leaves you with a lot more opportunity and space to play. Whereas watercolor, having said, is a tricky medium. But the kind of happiness that it brings in, the colors, the lights, et cetera, I don't think that I really can play with so many techniques, et cetera, in any of my other mediums. Going ahead and making the bottom area more broader, you will see how I continue to make it more and more broader as we progress. This is very thin pine that you observe. We cannot have such a thin pine for water. Colors are at this space where there is so much snow, et cetera. Okay. Continue with softening of the bottom area of the pine as it is on the snow. I will just blend it with the snow, it looks more organic that way into the painting, it moves in. We continue to use the same method for the other pins of the foreground. Usually, I like to paint one or two pins together. That's how I will continue to add it, even for this part of the painting. One of them, of course, is larger, some is smaller because we want to really hold the randomness of nature in front of all the spectators of this painting or just replicate it in our own painting that we are doing. Most of my paints are different from each other, they are not look alike. Usually, that's how nature is, and I love to hold the same, even in my paintings. Okay. Going with some more darker values here and there. For the other pine trees I extended, while even I go towards the bottom part. You can go ahead and add one or two more pines if you want. Just a few lines here and there. Smallest of the tree that I'm adding now towards the right. Okay. Let's start adding another pine, and this is on top of the snow area, which is our foreground. I'm going ahead with very simple brush strokes, extending it towards the right and extending it on the left. Not thinking much while I do this process. I just want to make sure that as the pine goes towards the bottom area, it is more broader. I continue to add, add it and add it. If my colors become lighter in value, you can always go ahead and retouch it with some what darker value of dico or paint scray, whatever you are using. The same process of blending is used over here. And then you can see how softly these pines are touching to our ground area. Adding few pines for our background. Frankly, now it's all about detailing. Only we have done the majority of the part that is getting the sky area correct, then just adding pines for the trees part, we just need some stars of course, in the sky that I would love to add always, but not a lot of them. Of course, we want something in between that is not as well as not much to say covering the pine trees with my hand as I think they were still wet. So I did not go ahead and cover it with any of the paper. I am going ahead and again, splattering it. If one or two drops falls in here or there, you can use your indico touch some parts of the pine, just exactly the way I am doing right now. After I removed the tape, I did realize that my pins have really turned out light and I wanted to make it a bit more darker. You can do this process a bit earlier rather than waiting for it just exactly the way I did. What happens is sometimes you can just get away with the sharp edges and let it be fine. But otherwise, there can be times where you get one or two marks over there, which did not happen, luckily for me. But it can happen for anyone. If you have dark parts for your pies. No need to retouch it. It is only because I have really, really light values. There are a few takeaway like let water dance with the pigments. We will only pave the way for the same. We will help it to dance, but we are not going to control it. Stars lit up the skies. Use Opah or opaque watercolor for the same, retouch your paintings only if need be, and enjoy the flow of water colors at the end. Let's have a final look and meet you again tomorrow. 11. Day 5 Pastel Skies: We have already discussed this particular painting to a great extent during our practice session. Please go ahead, check out the colors given on the top. And let's start out with the basic drawing. I am going ahead and just drawing a mountain. You will get this painting as your reference in the resources section as well as all the other paintings. Day four is also uploaded in the resources section. Go ahead and check it out there. Once we are done the mountain part, let's go ahead and just make another small hill towards the bottom, there will be a small line which is basically marking our land area or the snow area that is more flat and it has a lot of snow in it. So yes, I would be marking that area too. I have already practiced this painting earlier on a smaller paper. That's one of the reasons I'm very, very comfortable right now doing it, though there are a bit of increased elements, but that's absolutely okay. We can go ahead and always deal with that later on. First is the less value and that is Co. Then I'm going ahead with Opera paint on top of that compose palette. You can also go ahead with any purple shade that's available on your palette in case you don't have a coral, you can mix some amount of your orange into your naples yellow that you have and create a shade that's closer to the coral that I'm using. You can also use brilliant pink from the brand Mijello Mission Gold. I have been using this brand color for quite some time and I'm in love with that particular shade. To though that is more towards pink and less towards coral. But it can also serve as one of the shades. Do remember that these shades are really opaque in nature, which makes it difficult to work with it in future. And hence, the transparency might be a bit of a challenge. Use a lot of water. While you are adding these sheets on top of the paper, I will continue to work through my cloud area, then move on to the bottom part. You will not see that I have created a really dark sky. I did create earlier, I made three paintings of these. One was the first one that I really did not like, as the sky was very vibrant and bright, which is usually not the case during the winter season. This one is particularly from my own imagination. That's one of the reasons I did not strike the perfect balance when I was just starting it out. It takes a while. Painting from your imagination is difficult and hence you need one or two trials. That's one of the reasons you should always try on a smaller piece of paper and then get onto the bigger size paper. I am just wetting the bottom part of my hill area. You can see that I'm using my biggest wash brush and then going ahead with my sap green. Though this was not our approach during the earlier painting because I had a smaller paper and I was going ahead with the mountains first and then with the bottom layer. But in this one, I have changed the approach a bit. It is usually the case when you're working with bigger paper compared to the ones when you are working with a smaller one. First, I'm applying a sap green. Once I have applied the sap green, I would go ahead with some of the darker values. Either it be forestry or paint scray, or indico, whatever be the color that's available on your palette. You can always mix some blue with your sab green to get the darker values. Values and tones really play a very important role in your painting. That's one of the reasons if you want me to water colors, I would request you to go ahead and check out my earlier classes on monochrome paintings. You can get two of them already published. One is with multiple colors and one is only with my favorite shade that is crucian blue. Both of these classes can be of real help to you. I am really in love with the shades, or you can say the darker values. When we add it towards the bottom, usually that's the case. And the soft wet on wet approach really, really touches me as well as it can help you to make the painting looks so much organic, nice, soft, and it's actually the touch of winter. Therefore, going ahead and just adding some more darker values towards the bottom, I am extending it, that is the right side, a bit lower. As you can see, the forest has to be random. It cannot be in one single line, right? The horizon is also not always align. That's one of the reasons I just wanted to keep it a bit more random. Adding that randomness to this painting, I continue to add a lot of randomness to my nature inspired painting. Of course, most of my paintings are inspired from nature, some of them uninspired and some of them are more from my imagination. Though even from imagination, it is inspired by nature. Nature is a huge inspiration for me and it stays the same. I'm going ahead with my darkest value, And you can see I have two brushes. One which is going to help me add the darkest value, and another one is helping me to blend the colors. That's how I go about it. Now this is a bit of an advanced technique compared to the ones that you may be as big no can follow, but that's absolutely okay. Go fearless with all your paintings. Anyone who is a bigger will also be an intermediate as well as an advanced level artist. Always think that way, you can nail every painting of yours. There have been days. During my initial years, I have struggled to paint. I did paint like 2345 paintings in a day. Nothing worked out in my favor. Slowly, steadily. I did build on a regular habit of painting. Now, I paint 34 paintings regularly on a single day. There are most of them as videos, some of them for skillshares, some of them for other channels which I have. And yes, it's a habit that you have and you are not scared of it. Some of the area on the lower hilltop, I've kept it as bite to show the snow and then I did apply some amount of water towards the bottom area. I'm using my tram hering and just blending it a bit. Taking it towards the top, you can observe me doing this exercise. Like in most of my paintings, it is similar. This particular easy way of blending your colors with background, using a flat brush, can be used in all your paintings, and I would thoroughly use it in all my winter paintings. You can see how easily the blending happens and how soft is the approach. Cleaning up some of the white spaces wherever it is needed. With a bigger brush, sometimes a smaller brush can't do the job and you do need a bigger clean, damp brush to work on the same. I'm pretty happy with the whole snow and the darkest value that we are adding now it is mostly the Ingco or the pain scray. I usually prefer pain scrape because my pain scray has some blue in it. It is not as dark as you usually see in most of your shades. This is from the brand Jello Mission Gold. And I have been using this pain scra for quite some time though. I think every brand has two or three pain scrap of their own and some of the pain scra darker in valve and they have less of blue in it. Once we are done and the top part is dry enough, we will go ahead and start adding very light color of opera into the snow part of our mountain. The sky is a bit more darker compared to what you might have observed earlier. But do not worry, There was a big, huge drop of water that did fall on my sky area, so I had to redo it a bit, but with a light wash of water, I did it. And hence, once it dries up, you will see that it is similar to the earlier sky that we did point and the one which we have in the small size painting, going ahead and adding some more of the pink in view of the areas. I love this opera. I have been in love with this color for quite a few years. And then my next favorite is being Quinacrodone coral, as I have used it in many of my floral paintings as well as now I am using it, the Quinacdone coral. For skies for everywhere you can think of, I'm using it. Okay. Time to go ahead and add some more blue. Blue has to be ultramarine. Ultramarine is my favorite shape that I go ahead with. If you don't have ultramarine, you can go ahead with Don three. You can also use Pri blue blue. Ultramarine still remains my favorite shape. Yes, I'm blending it a bit more and then getting the lighter values here and there. I will keep the pink which I have added in the background. I will love to have it as very light value on my mountain space. It's time to add the darkest value to our basic part of the mountain area. I am going ahead with my darkest value of paint screen and adding it, you will see that I have worked in layers throughout my mountain. I work from the lightest value and then go to my darkest value. Creating the contrast, contrast and to values, as I have always stressed, is very, very important for any kind of a painting. You can observe that the foregrounds, which are lighter in snow and the background that are darker. This really helps me to get a good hang off the foreground as well as the background. To anyone who is looking at this painting can understand, Yes, the background is mountain, it has some greenery, whereas the foreground is there, completely laden with snow. That's how you create that contrast and lighter and darker effects, though there is snow even on the mountains. But yes, it is done in a way that we can see the ridges then some rocky areas. So keeping all of that constant, we keep working on it. Let's just add some darker values while we go towards the right. I'm using my smallest brush that is size zero by zero for doing this as of now and then extending it towards the top for my mountains. You have seen that I go from the darkest value of that is in the bottom area and then going towards the top, I have mixed some of my paints gray into the burn Siena and adding few dots here and there. These are basically the ridges or some of the rocky terrains that you can see in the mountain area. I'm clearing out few of the edges which are bleeding, but bleeds are good even if they are there, do not worry. Continue to add these smaller dots. These are basically details. We are not going to add it in a large amount, we are not going to completely occupy the space. We are going to add it in really small amount on towards the bottom, or only towards the top. It would be mostly towards the top, you will see. And while we go towards the bottom in few of these spaces, it would be dominating in few of these spaces. It would not be seeing much. Booby Frank. I'm pretty happy with how this painting has turned out. There is not much that we need to do at this stage. Most of the work is already done. You have to just add a few details and then your painting is all set to fly. You can go ahead just complete your drawing process and then remove the tape at an angle. Have a look at your final painting. All these paintings I would request you to do on 100% cotton paper, as I did even tell you earlier. So that will always stay constant. Some of these pieces are still wet, and in those spaces, my colors are becoming a bit like bloom. But that's absolutely fine. Let it be bloom. I think blooms are good for watercolors and we will continue to allow the paints to bloom in a few spaces, wherever it is blooming or where it to sweat. After working with watercolors for a few years, all I can say is watercolor is a medium which has its own happy accidents. And there will be blooms, there will be plates, we cannot avoid it in few spaces. We might end up adding more darker values or sometimes more lighter values. Over the lighter values, you can again go ahead. Whereas when it is taco value, you have to go and paint again. These are some of the takeaways that I had from my What color Jewry, which will always remain the case. As I did tell you, I had to paint this particular painting three times, like this is a third attempt and then I got it tried. It takes a while and still I have doubts or still I do not get everything right at the first go. Yes. Even after so many paintings under my Belton, so much creativity that has gone in. All I can say is failure is way to success. That's always been the case. The more you fail, the more you learn, the lesser time you take to paint something. The first time I painted this particular one, it took me 30 minutes. And when I ended up doing it the next time, I did it in ten to 12 minutes, and this time it was 20 minutes. So you can see how it changes. The smaller one, of course, took around ten to 12 minutes and the bigger one came down to 20 minutes. So yes, you're improvising each and every day you paint. Let's go ahead and have a look at the key takeaways now. Again, there's a big bloch. I don't know why this keeps happening, only to me. So, yes, I am, again, adding a bit of color over there. Please, do not retouch your paintings. It's not a good habit and I don't know why it is happening to me every time I am retouching it. If you did not have any problem, do not retouch any of the areas. Watercolors is not about retouching. It's about one shot. Less is always more. Continue to have that thing in your mind and have a look at this painting. It's breathtaking already. See you again tomorrow, and we are going to explore various colors, the sky. So be ready. 12. Day 6 Evening Sunset: Colorful skies have always attracted me. And today's painting is all about adding multiple colors to our sky. We will be leaving a larger area for the sky and then we are going to have a bit of perspective into the bottom area. There is a background mountain that's existing. Then for the fronts, we have smaller hill like structure. Or you can say these are small, small snow like structure here and there. On top of it we will have one single pine tree. I will show a close up absolutely how I am drawing the tree and it would be a wet on wet technique that we are going to exercise. I'm super excited to introduce you to a few more advanced techniques compared to what we have done irritate the initial three paintings. Of course, the first one was not so easy and it was more like an intermediate level. But the second and the third one where big intermediate in between there. And hope you have enjoyed those paintings to a greater extent. Going ahead and marking the areas of the pine which I want in the snow. Then, I would add some more of this part while I go towards the bottom. We did not sketch a lot in the last two of our paintings. I just thought to introduce bit more sketching in our fourth painting, it is something like this pine tree is occupied by snow, some of the area is absolutely having a lot of snow. And some of the areas where I want to add the darker values, I'm going ahead and shading it. What happens with the shading is you get a better idea of how to progress with the darker values over there, I'm adding a small rock towards the front which is again, um, completely covered with snow. I continue to add some more shading Pima tree, where I'm going to add the darker values. Once this part is done, we will go ahead and start adding our lights or you can see beautiful colors to the sky. I always like to add some dry plants or maybe absolutely dry branches to my painting. This usually marks a winter season because most of the plants or branches of the trees, et cetera, do not have any leaves except the pine trees of yes, I usually add all of that to show the winter season has arrived and hopefully you are also feeling the chill. It's pretty cold over here, even in the eastern side of India. Let's go and continue to add some of our lightest value for the sky. I am not going wet on wet this time it's completely wet on dry. Going ahead with some of my Naples yellow. And then I am just adding some water on the top part of the sky. Once I've added the naples yellow, I'm mixing it with some of other ingan yellow that's always existing in my palette. I have my palette always ready with these beautiful shapes that I love to use. Mixing it with some Moseningir orange. I will take this color a bit towards the top and then mix it with some of my car mine. Now car mine is a very beautiful color and I would be using this shade for this part of the paint thing though. You can go ahead with any pink that's available with you, whether it be carmine or any of the other pinks, whichever is there in your palette. As I always say, the important part of creativity pinks, et cetera, you can always go ahead and match. I'm going with my favorite Tra, Marine, and you will see that there is a bit of a granulating effect which I really like for winter season skies. Completing the top part with some royal blue. You can also go ahead with any of the other lighter shades of blue or even cobalt is good to go, go ahead with some more pink and mix of orange. Now is the time where I go ahead with my Quinacridone coral. Now this is a beautiful shade and one of my favorite shades from the brand, Daniel Smith. If you are someone who is in love with the pinks and wants to paint any kind of floral skies, et cetera. This is a good to color though. If you are not having this, go ahead with, again, any pink that is available with you, mix it with a bit of orange and you will get a shade that is closer to the one Quinacodon coral. Always try to mix and match your shades rather than buying it from like individual tubes, et cetera. I know all these artist red paints are pretty expensive and all of them are always not available with us. That's exactly my point of view. I have accumulated all these colors over years and years of investment, into smaller tubes, et cetera. It goes long and hence I usually have it existing with me for a good long period of time. One thing that is very important at this stage is how my tree will look. You are saying that I am actually covering at this point in time with a good amount of color shades, et cetera. How is it going to work for us? It is wet on wet. And you can see that the sky has come up still. We have to show the snow of the tree. Now is the moment where I'm going to go with a damp plane brush and clear out a few of the places from my snow laden pine tree. I will keep clearing out with the help of my flat brush, all these spaces. And believe me, when you clear it out, usually that layer of paint which is existing on the paper also goes away. I have been using this method for clearing out the spaces with the help of my flat brush. Very often, even for the sky area. You can see when I need to do this, I will go ahead with my flat brush and out the areas wherever it is needed. This flat brush, of course, is damp in nature and hence it blends very well with the tree. Going ahead and adding some blue towards the bottom area, you can see the blue is my favorite, which is ultramarine. I have been using this color very often for all my paintings, and it's been an amazing, amazing discovery to actually have a color like this in your palette. Some darker value that is Prucian blue. I would go ahead and add towards the top area somewhere. That's all. We will continue to just define the horizon line a bit more. Now, since the paper is wet, what happens is anywhere where I'm adding this color will become like a bloom and will work around that area well, so just blending it a bit more with the background and then again, just cleaning up some more spaces. Yes, cleaning is very, very important. I am still cleaning the area urals. I'm not sure how my blue is going to react with all these shades that you have. There is yellow also, which means that it might become greenish, which I don't want in this painting. The color of the blue can be ingo uls. You can go ahead with paint three. I'm using my size three brush to apply the colors right now. This is going to spread a bit as the paper remains damp at this stage. Or you can say it is moist at this stage. Not exactly the water is flowing, but still there is dampness or there is some wetness in the paper that exists and it really helps the colors to move around a bit. I'm to add the darker values right now. We will go ahead with the darkest value, that is my paints gray and take it on a really small brush, more in dry way. And drop in some one or two dots here and there. I'm going to apply the same process for all the parts of this tree. I will add some more drops of this darker shade, even towards the top. But you can see that I touched my brush a lot less while I go towards the top. Whereas I am going towards the bottom. I do touch my brush more. The paper has the moistness which I need. It is all about water control. Now, water control is something that, believe me, no one can teach you. It takes a while for you to understand and it took me a great number of years to discover it myself. Having said that, I have tried to make it easier for you and hopefully you will be in a position to also get the same kind of effect that I have right now on my paper. You need to create some more loose branches here and there. And once our known and the shadow area which is majorly the tree leaves is done, we will go ahead and start painting our branch or the tree trunk. You can see the branch which is like the major of the branch and the main, main tree trunk will have more of the brown shade in it. I am going to go ahead with Per Siena to work that out. Along with it will mix it with a bit of paint screen, just blending the color a bit more as that part remained white to a greater extent, which is not the idea. This tree looks so much snow laden, but I guess till we complete it, you cannot have a final look at it. I'm super excited and super thrilled to show you this small and simple way of creating your branches, leaves, et cetera. And yet it is so fascinating. And initially it was overrated. I feel when I thought how we can create it and how it can be easily created, there was so much of experimentation which went in. And I guess finally the outcome that I have right now on the paper is very good. I am very happy with how it looks, the whole tree. And then go ahead with some more of the blending as you observed over here. Once the blending is done, we will just add some more darker values towards the top part to show the tree trunk again in the middle area. Which you did see that I applied the darker shading into it while I was catching it's peeping out from a few of the areas. Yes, That's how this dreamy, snowy, beautiful pine tree looks like. It's, of course a bit advanced than what you might have created earlier, but it is something that is different from all our audio creativity and it looks super fantastic at this stage. It is the highlight of the painting, and I hope you are also liking it, dropping in a few dots here and there. And now it's time to work out the snow. Snow is going to be the lightest value in our painting. If you are someone who is still struggling with values in watercolors, I have two classes and monochrome, please do, go ahead and check them out. I think it would be of great help for anyone who is working out. Snow is something where we are going to use the transparency of the paper. I'm someone who loves to use the transparency of the paper rather than using white quash or any of the masking, the masking fluids, et cetera. At this stage, at least when we are creating all the beautiful landscapes, I will allow my paper to about one or 2 minutes of time before I start adding these lightest of the lightest values. But this is still darker than what we have already added. It is to create the contrast and the depth. Everything that you do in a snowy painting is with very light values, whether it be you are adding it on top of any rocky area or creating the contrasting places. Whenever you are working in white, you cannot leave white just like that. You have to add a bit of blue grays in it to create that white final outcome of the painting. Painting white or snow has been really challenging for many of you. And believe me, some of my colors that I always use, whether it be a white flower, we snow is your ultramarine. Then your paints gray, your neutrotent. These are the sheets that I always use in lighter shades or tonal values to depict these parts. Because then you can actually show the snow in a better contrasting manner rather than only leaving it white, just which is there on the paper. I'm really not happy with how the colors are spreading at this stage. In my background heal place. I would go ahead and just blend the colors and remove it a bit with the help of my damp clean brush. I guess now it looks better. That's all added some clean water on top of the smaller hill. Then going ahead with some of my browns to just show the background, drier trees, et cetera. That's all I would be doing even on the right side, blending it a bit with the background area. Once this part is done, we will just clean up the space a bit and add a bit more darker value. That is the paints gray While we go towards the bottom part, I will use the same paints gray to apply some dots here and there. Even on top of the snow. See wet on wet and wet on dry. Both are very, very important methods for every painting, and you need to strike a balance between both of them. Some more dots here and there. And then we will add some of the lines, which are basically the dry plants which we did. Of course, you have already sketched them and we need to go ahead and just add those lines. I think I'm pretty happy with how this painting has turned out and it is very much detailed. Just a few loose strokes and lines which is just giving this uplift to the painting. Now I'm for some browns or you can say these are basically the rocky parts that you can see when a snow is there on top of a hill rock, et cetera, that also I wanted to show. You can see it in many of my mountain paintings too. The last one that we did also had a similar effect and we are going ahead with the same effect that we are creating in day six of today's painting. Time to add the lines and go ahead with your thinnest brush to create these lines here and there. These are very thin lines which we are going to create. And then add these lines towards the bottom part of the area which is majorly in the snow. All of us have this in our nature. We continue to work on a painting till we are happy and satisfied. But it's important to note where we want to end it. I have learned it over time that you have to always in water colors less, Do not continue with lots and lots of det, it and let it flow. Flow is what is most important. Let's have a look at a few of the key takeaways from this day of ours today. 13. Day 7 Winter Cabin: Let us discuss all the colors which we need for today's painting. Yellow, burnt sienna in go or paint. So yellow, blue, ultram, it's a small palette. Let's go ahead with the sketching. Now I'm going with the bottomost part, which is basically my snow area. I would take some time to draw the heart. Where exactly I want to place the heart is very important for me. I usually follow the rule of Thirds. The rule of touch is pretty simple. When you divide the paper into nine equal halves, you will get the intersecting point. You should place your subject over there, for me to be subject over here is majorly the heart that is littered up in this winter season. Of course, the winter is pretty chilly right now, even in this part of my country. Hence, I wanted to show the same to you all hope. You are also feeling that with the help of this painting, and you can also see the dazzling stars in the sky which we are going to observe and paint. We're here. Let's go ahead with a simple heart structure. It is not much of a difficult part, we are not following any perspective, et cetera. Very simple way of drawing and then adding a few windows so that you can see the light from those windows falling into the snow. For most of my drawings, I am trying to stick to using only my freehand line drawing. I do not want to go ahead and use a scale. See, freehand line drawing is the best if you can do. But there are cases where you are not so confident in those cases. You can, of course, take the help of a scale, but preferably freehand drawing. One more thing that it really helps you to develop your own skill set in drawing straight lines. Now, the drawing of straight lines doesn't come so easily to everyone. Even for me, it doesn't come so easily. It's just a lot and a lot of practice that you need to put in when you want to draw straight lines anywhere. Like all the lines that I'm drawing a straight and it takes a while to, I mean, draw that to way, it's perfectly fine. You want to draw need rules. Start drawing straight lines wherever possible. Horizontal, vertical, every kind of straight line you can draw and see. And then also go ahead and approach the shut. I would leave that decision up to you. The sky is really small area that I want to go ahead with, and most of the part of my mountain is covered with snow. We will use the blue color to show that snow. You have already learned in the last painting that there are many shades which can be used to show the white color. Now the pale or more of watering mixture if you use, then you can frankly show the snow in the lightest of the blue colors, in a bit of darker color. Also, all that can be done, it's just that you need to go ahead and try out lighter values first is my lightest value for this painting, which is yellow. You can go ahead with any yellow that's available for me. It is Indian yellow from my palette. This Indian yellow is from the Branzinalia. I have been using it for many years now. I forgot to make the chimney of the house, and hence, I'm just adding two of them in two different places. That's it. And a small window on the top part. This is just the scene I had. I used to watch a cartoon during my early childhood days, and it was Heidi. I don't know how many of you have watched it, but they used to have a very beautiful house like this. And I always wanted to go back to those days and watch the sky from that small window. So yes, sometimes we want to see beautiful skies, beautiful winters. And feel the cold too in the winter season, because winters are meant to be cold. So you should feel the cold, right? Go with a mix of yellow and burn Sienna. You will get a lighter color and then slowly you can go ahead with only burn sienna. My burn Sienna has some amount of red in it, underlying red. And that's one of the reasons you can see that it looks more like a red brown. You can also go ahead with red brown as your color. I would leave that decision up to you. See the colors really don't matter to a great extent. The only thing that matters is a daily creative practice. And this daily creative practice comes from easy paintings. But you should also think about the fact that slowly, steadily, all of us need to level up with these paintings. And most of the paintings that are there in this particular series have got more of big no friendly or it is somewhere in between bigners and intermediate. It's not absolutely like Big Nurse, where one or two paintings of course you will find which are absolutely big nose. And I always put it that way to enhance your skill set more. The more you enhance your skill set, the better you will find yourself growing with the medium watercolors. Hence, the more you grow with watercolors, I think that challenge, or to accept the challenge of painting daily, daily creativity comes on its own. You don't need to, at that time, do much. Going ahead with some of my paints, gray, and adding these lines with the help of my sales brush, which is zero by zero. Yes, this is from the silver velvet. And of course this is not the silver velvet brush, it is from the brand silver brushes. I am super happy with how thin the lines are and how beautifully I can add these lines. The paper is moist, or you can say damp. Now, what's the difference between damp and having water, or a lot of wetness on top of it? The only difference is that you will not find the colors to be moving to a great extent in damp or underlying wetness that's there. Whereas if you are not having that underlying wetness and you have a lot of water, you will see the colors moving to a great extent. And that might become difficult to many of you like for many of us also to control. For me also at one point in time, it was very difficult to control this. And I really did not understand how to work around with this medium on together so that I could get that perfect wetness. Usually what happens is once you pink, just wait for one or 2 minutes, you can see that the shine, which is there on top of the paper is gone, but still the paper is wet. That is when you should go ahead and start painting over it, adding some more of my burnt sienna and then clearing up if it is just too much. That's okay. For the top part of this house, I would keep it an absolute white. Some of the things that I haven't told you is sometimes you can also use absolute white of the paper for your painting. This is what I'm going to do even in this painting with a mix of my ultramarine and paint scray to get a sheet that looks similar to this one. You can also mix some amount of your tailor blue in it. I would leave that decision up to you. Just any blue mix that you can take and start adding a sky. I do not want the sky to be too dark. That way, I would be in a position to preserve the softness of the whole of this painting. I'm just adding some more colors towards my sky area. You can see how beautifully the colors are spreading and moving into each other. Once you touch your brush with your people and try to blend it, it's one single shade. You can also go ahead with a mix of shades. I would leave that decision up to you. Just do not make it a lot darker. That's the only request. Once this part is done, we will let this area to dry off and we are not going to work on the mountain right now. We will focus a bit more on our heart. Heart is taking a lot of time. You might see that most of the time till now has gone behind the heart. All the parts that you're going to paint is not the focus area and hence we are not going to detail it so much, it's just the foreground, some backgrounds that we are going to create for the mountain area and that's it. Whereas for my heart, we have to focus a bit of the light on how we want to add smaller lines, et cetera. You can also do this painting on a bigger paper if you want, though. I've used the same size paper which I have been using for all my other paintings. But as there is a good amount of detail living in the house, you can switch on to bigger size paper. I'm using a bit of my white ph and adding it in the white part of the window area just to show the light in a better way. I would go ahead and also add the light in another window as well as in all the other windows which are existing. I guess I'm pretty happy with the final outcome till now. Let's add some more. Uh, for the light, this is not majorly the quash. It is opaque in nature and hence you can see the light of the window in a winter way. What happened in one of my previous paintings? I think you all have already done day 5.6 Usually, I have this tendency to drop some water and I have to go again over the sky to paint it. And hence, what I did this tempt to cover up the sky rather than allowing the water to move into it. Because it is in a semis situation, the paper is not affecting the sky, but it is also helping to protect that particular area from getting wet or not getting the exact, I would say texture, et cetera. Because what happens is once water falls on it, you have to go with another layer and that layer might become darker, Which I really don't want for this painting, just adding some more of the darker values towards the corners. I love to keep my corners a bit more boring compared to the other areas. This blue really looks a lot more darker than what I wanted. Hence, I'm blending it. Blending is always good. You will see that all the colors that you add will be one or two shades lighter than all the other shades that you right now see on the paper. What happens in an artist's red watercolors. It might dry out one shade lighter if you are doing wet on dry method. Whereas it might dry off two shade lighter if you are doing a wet on wet method. Whereas if you're going ahead with a student red paint, it is a possibility that it might dry way much more lighter than what you can think of as it has way more fillers into it rather than only the binder and the ping going ahead and using my thinnest brush to draw the pathway. This is basically painting the pathway that goes into or follows you to the house that takes you to the house. Very happy with how the whole thing is adding up together, we have to go with a bit of darker value again, to create some more dots here and there, a bit of line and then some dot. That's it. I think this has turned out pretty much as I wanted it and I will not touch it a lot after this. We have to go ahead with the top part of our mountain and paint that. Now it's time for the mountains going ahead with a very, very light wash of our indigo palo. Once I've added the color, I would add some more clear water and make a bit of lines and add the colors. Take it towards the top, towards the bottom. Just wash your brush and use the colors that's there in your brush. It's always been the case for me, or just pray some water like this on top of the paper, but make sure you do not touch your sky. That's something which is always there in my mind. I have ruined one or two paintings that way. And hence, I want to be sure that I don't ruin any more paintings of mine. You can see how light my wash is. Now I'm again washing my brush, blending it towards the top, just extending the colors that we have already added. Nothing else which I am trying to do, just clear or go ahead and add the complete colors on any of the white areas that we are having. Towards the bottom area of the mountain, The bottom area of the mountain would be darker in value, and the top area would be lighter in value. The top area is more snow laden. Now it's time to add the darkest of the value towards the bottom area. Again, I'm going with my thinnest brush and just adding colors, or you can say, this is basically my light value of. Paint, screen color, which I'm adding on top of the values that I've already added on the mountain of the values of the colors, of course, was one way more lighter compared to what we are adding. Now, I always go from light to dark. That way I can protect myself from going back to any kind of a or just regretting your decision that why did I not make it lighter initially and then going ahead with the darker leaves. A lot of confidence. It also builds up a lot more intent of you to understand water colors in a better way. How it flows and how you can frankly go with layers or even work on a moist paper and create some amazing and stunning outcomes. Not going only with a lot of water or wet on dry, using somewhere in between the technique where you are working with moist kind of paper and getting an outcome that looks super pretty. I would be process again and then I will meet some of the areas with brown, smaller dots, et cetera. Those are basically the pterin that you can usually see in a mountain area during the when you go towards the bottom left corner as you can see, I want to add some of my bushes over there. There are still some whites and I really don't want that white at this moment, I'm covering it up. If we would have just left it as mountain, I could have let it be only white spaces, which is usually the snow. Otherwise, let it cover up and then we will go ahead with our blues and rounds to create the background bushes. I'm using my burnt sienna to create the smaller ridges, et cetera. These are random lines that I make. Believe me, I do not have any kind of particular thought process while I create this. Just adding some lines practically shows me that there are some of the spaces which are rocky and they are not covered with snow. Which looks more authentic, real, and it has real closeness to the reality. Adding some more of my brown over here. Now the background is red paint screen. When your background is in paints gray and you add some burns and on top of it, the color will become darker or it would become somewhere in between your CPR or Nk Brown. These are the colors that you may get. It's absolutely okay. Do not mind if you get these kind of shades. Go ahead with one more darker value of paints, gray, and add a few pots. As you have already added this color, what happens is that the new color which you had on top of it will become a bit like blue and it looks more like wet on red. But it is wet damp technique, which you're applying right now, it is way more advanced and you can see how by simply doing a few things, we have made our whole painting look advanced, as well as how it creates the pup that you capture of the nature in every painting is something that is truly amazing to my eyes. Every time I paint, I think it's a real blessing, which we have when we can seriously create nature and whole nature in our own painting. And you can row with your brushes on paper. Something that I am always fascinated about. Okay, continue to add some more dots here and there, and then let's just add the final details. Final details are not much. It is just a few lines here and there. To mark this snow laden caven in a better way, I've forgotten to paint the chimney, which I should go ahead and do next. Going with some of my burnt sienna and doing it, the burn scena, of course, it looks more like the darker value of burnt sienna. Or you have mixed a bit of paint screen to it, which is of course fine. Once this part is done, let's have a look at the stunning and final landscape. Blending it a bit. This inner artist of mine doesn't allow me to stop. And sometimes I have to really stop myself and say that, no, I'm not going to add anything more on top of it. Let's go ahead and discuss a few takeaways while we paint the stars on the sky. Let us discuss our takeaways. Always work with water, more and less of pigments. While you create the snow, place your subject either on the right or on the left. Never place it in the middle of the painting. If you want to create a balanced composition, stop at the correct. Do not keep working on your painting because that would lead to overwork. And it would practically make a Missy painting rather than making a balanced painting. Finally, a few bigger stars. Then let's remove the tape and have a final look at this breath taking painting. 14. Day 8 The Legendary Tree: Colors are ultramarine, royal blue, Burn, Siena, and paint screen. Today's painting is going to be really fun. We are starting out with lots and lots of crooked lines. First to mark the horizon, There is no straight horizon line. The curve horizon line that you can see, the background, of course, would be in darker values. Or you can say it would be more a mix of brown and ultramarine, which has always been the case. And the front would be just a tree that we are going to add painting. I'm super happy with how this whole painting is balanced with just one single tree that we are going to paint and rest everything. We are going to keep it pretty simple. Let's go ahead and start making our snow, which is more rocky, and have some of the lines which are really, really crooked for the trees. Trees is absolutely random, as you guys know, hence, I'm just adding some crooked lines as my sketch. The better you can sketch, as I always say, the final outcome is always better. What happens when you sketch? It's like a framework for your final painting though. When I started out with watercolors, all I can tell you is that I did not like to sketch anything. It was like, let's just make our eyes in line and move ahead with our painting. But slowly as you progress in the watercolor journey, as we are also progressing in our watercolor journey, sketching has a very important value. It holds a real, real important space in our final painting. That's one of the reasons I have now started a bit of emphasis on the sketching part. You would have seen even the last painting where we were making a winter came and had a bit of sketching involved. Similarly, the next one that we're going to paint, that again, is just like a winter cabin. We are going to make a house and it is in snow area, winter season, sunset, and then some of water control things like we did for our pine tree. We are going to repeat in this one too, so be ready. We are going to explore lots and lots of things. And it's not complex, just that we have to think, it's easy. Taking it easy really makes the whole painting come to life very quickly. And the whole fact that you guys can do it because everyone has done it in the past, cannot be a rocket science, right? It is really easy, just that our thought process sometimes holds us from painting something or we just think that we don't have the time, we don't have the energy. Why do we need to even spend so much amount of time on our creativity when we can do some other course? I did also come from the same school of thought, and believe me, it took me a few years to develop that habit. It always takes some time and some push from your own end. Going to gym is not something that everyone enjoys. But over a few months, you will start enjoying it. And how does this happen? It doesn't happen overnight. It takes a while. Every habit that you develop takes some time. Believe me, you will start enjoying it like anything. Okay, let's continue making our branches of the tree. We have already done the trunk. We are onto the branches and it's very, very exciting for me. We are going to, again, work with limited pallet and create the magic on paper. Limited palette has been my go to a palette for the winter season when you can work minimal. Why to go ahead with so much or so many of the colors, et cetera, we can. It's not that we're not working with multiple colors, we are working with multiple colors. But along with it, I would request you guys to also focus on the being minimal with minimal shades and colors that we can work around with. I sometimes do erase a lot of my branches or whatever I'm trying to do. I really wanted to show that we all don't get it at the first show. It takes us a while even. The eras and pencil is given for the same reason. But do make sure that you do not erase it a lot on the watercolor paper, or else there might be marks. Or if you are working with a very, very dark graphite pencil, what happens is that once you start working with the transparent watercolors, you can say to profit marks may show up. The black graphite marks, which I mean may show up, which might not look great when it's about painting with watercolors. That's the only thing which I keep in my mind while I paint with my watercolors is to erase it a bit. If it is really dark orals, leave it as such. Because anyways, after the first wash, it's going to get way more lightened going ahead with whatever ultramine I had on my palette. And then I would go ahead with the fresh ultram which I have on my main palette. This being my palette for quite some time, I think the whole of last year, I've been working with the same palette. And I'm pretty happy with how the final outcome is with this palette. I did set up the palette, which are my favorite colors, and these colors can be used for florals, for urban sketching, as well as for kind of landscape. Let's continue to paint with the ultra main color. Again, it's my favorite color, as you guys know. It has a bit of granulating effect, but that would look good when it's all about the snow laden tree. We are going ahead with the blue color to show that snow. Then working with the background, you can either do it with Cerelia blue or you can go ahead with royal blue. I would prefer not to go with ultra meaning at this stage though, the ultra meaning that we have added is pretty light in value. But going with a different color is always, always helpful. Just go with either the royal blue or else the erlian blue or any other lightest value of blue that is available on your palette. Adding some more colors, continue to add it on the branches of the trees. This process is a bit slow. Enjoy the process, enjoy the flow, enjoy the colors, See how it moves around and how it creates the beauty all on its own. I have loaded my size four brush for adding these lines. And then you can see that I would even add some more of the smaller lines here. And the rest, we will just wait for our smallest brush to do the magic. Okay. Background. Now it is the royal blue. As I did tell you, I'm going ahead and spreading it everywhere for the background. And then we'll go ahead with Burn Siena for the tree area. You can say it is me, Joe. The dry trees which usually found during the winter season. If you are thinking that your colors are bleeding, let blades are good and enjoy the blade. I'm telling you you will not be in a position to enjoy these kind of blades later in many of your paintings, so enjoy it and then start adding the burns in exactly the way I am doing this is size three or size four brush. Whichever brush you're more comfortable with, go ahead and add it with that. When you make some amount of ultramarine into your burned skinner, you will get some of the darker values like this, as well. As you can see, the granulation. Granulation usually happens when you are working with water colors, which is ultramarine. It is by nature, more granulating compared to other blues which you usually have on your palette. But I like this granulation, at least for the winter season. Let's continue to work with this water color. Sometimes I'm really practically amazed with how a whole white paper can really give life or can really turn into something so beautiful. With the help of only colors, it really keeps on amazing me while you continue to paint with some more ultramarine. And the darker values, I will keep even paints very handy right now. What you see on the paper is really not what's going to finally come up. I'm just applying some amount of ultramarine now and then blending it with the help of the same brush. I'm using a more brush from brand Casaneo Vince. It's one of my favorite brushes, using some amount of my pins gray to apply on few of the spaces where I have just now applied some of the colors. I have specifically left some of the areas in white while I was painting. It's okay because it's so you don't need to actually paint the complete areas. You can always go ahead and leave some areas is in white to depict the snow in a better way. Okay, going ahead and making some more lines. Here and there, you can see how it is coming up. We are continuously mixing some of the colors or picking up some colors and adding it on the paper. Your painting is still not done. It's not even halfway through, believe me. But what I am more happier right now is we have started adding the elements that are important to complete the painting and it's time to add the burns burns in. If you mix it with a bit of paints, gray, you will get a color like this. And that can, of course, be used in most of the rocky area, which you want to show wherever there is snow. Of course, sometimes it happens not all the areas to get covered by snow and hence there are a few spaces which remains more rocky as well as it is more like not covered with snow. That also you need to show for showing nature in a better way. I would say it's not always it happens. But yes, many of the times it happens that way. Going ahead and blending my colors a bit here and there. I'm using my size zero brush right now. Why I'm using zero? Because my paper already has wetness. It is damp or it has some amount of moisture which makes it wet. It's not that it has a lot of water which is there on top of it. And you need to keep this in mind when you are painting through the entire series, which you have joined in right now, most of the time we are using the wetness of the paper and not the water wetness which we have added on top of it. Now, how do you use the wetness or the dampness of the paper once you have applied water and waited for three to 4 minutes, the shine on top, which comes when you add the water goes away. And once that goes away, your paper becomes damp. Moist. A bit wet in nature, but it doesn't have a lot of water. So that any strokes that you make becomes a bloom, which we really don't want in this kind of painting. And you can see how I'm using this particular wetness to my advantage. I know that it might take a while and it's absolutely fine. Do make your mistakes. I have made like at least eight to ten paintings, which I did not like, or I did paint on the back side of that painting. It's absolutely fine. You do not need to furry. We all make mistakes. We all make failures. Failures are the pillars. Believe me, every time I fail, the next painting that I do is much, much better than the earlier painting, so do not do not give up in the process. The process is tough, but if you start enjoying it and if you do not think about the failure, just enjoy every stroke that you paint. Keep enjoying the colors that you are adding. Try to or fall in love with this limited palette which we are using. Where there are only minimal amount of colors that you use. Some Ceriliu blue or you can use royal blue. There is a from marine then paints gray and burns. These are like three to four shades that you use in the whole of the painting. It can make up a beautiful painting. I mean, full blown putiful painting can come up from very, very simple excises and I am lady in love with this painting, Believe me, I'm already already so much in love with it. It's slowly picking up and once we start adding these branches, I can tell you that the whole of the painting will come to life very soon. Some of these pieces have dried up and that's also okay. Go ahead and add some strokes over there. For the background trees, I will make one or two lines just to show that yes, there is tree in the background which is dry. I would add these strokes even on the right side. Time to fill up all the whites. That's still pending. You can see most of our painting is done. Once we are done with this white particular space, then almost it's going to be a complete full blown painting. I'm getting more excited at this point because I know that the whole painting is coming to life very quickly, which initially, I was not sure of how it is going to turn up. I did this painting two times myself. On the back side of this is also painted, believe me, and we all do it. We all may sometimes not like what we paint and then we go over it again and paint it. I really did not like the first time what I did, and it was just too long. In terms of sketching and all, I don't like to sketch so much. I'm not saying that we should not sketch at all. We should sketch to an extent where it is simple and easy to understand with watercolors. All I've understood this, simplicity is the key. The more simple is your approach, the better would be your outcome. As I always say, less is more in watercolors. I mean it completely that always more watercolors. Go ahead and drop in one or two drops of your darker value of paints here and there. Once that part is done, we will just add some more lines, dry lines like structure and even some in the background. The background random, I have not thought about anything, just added some colors and now making a bit of a darker value. Adding the darker value, of course, for the background trees, or you can say the darker bushes to show the contrasting effects. Contrast is something that I've always, always vouched for because it helps us to create the depth in the painting and the required amount of showcasing the foregrounds and the backgrounds. Once you start adding the contrast, you can actually see it in a better way. Some of the area of the paper still has that dampness. Now this happens when you're using 100% cotton paper. For me, I'm using archers. You can go ahead with any other 100% cotton paper that's available in your country, but it has to be 100% Cotler doesn't allow your water to stay on top of the paper for a longer period of time or even get absorbed. The water gets absorbed very quickly, and we do not want that in this kind of painting. Going ahead and making some more lines, you can see I'm dropping in a few dots. Once I have added these dots on the top part of my watercolor branches, I would then add some more depth and contrast even in the other parts of the tree. Let's just add it to make it more dramatic. I would say the tree looks more and more dramatic now though it was not planned, but it happened. That's the flow I always talk about, that's how we start getting the partnership, or we partner with this medium. Watercolors, It's not that you always plan a few things, it just happens in the process. And I really like that planned nature. In watercolors, it is such great and happy Accidents which happen sometimes, yes. They are not so good also, but most of the time you will actually see the beauty coming up on its own. There are a few takeaways that we have already learned, but it's just that I want to go through it again, is all about. Don't try to plan every bit of it. Whatever you paint, work with limited palette to explore the painting in an easy way, Create contrast to show the depth. Even a few dots are sometimes enough to show the rock and terrain. Less is more. You should always, always keep this thing in mind in every painting of yours. Final few dots here and there, and I'm not going to touch my painting anymore. Let's have a final look at it. Remove the tape at an angle, and then we are moving to tomorrow as our day nine. 15. Day 9 Colourful Winter: Colors are quinacrodon coral maple, slow composupera ultra marine paint screen burn, sienna, and eneliar orange. This catching is very simple. Just a few points that you need to keep in your mind. First is that we are going to mark a horizon line. The horizon line is not straight, it is a bit curvy, Keep that in mind. And then you have to mark a few lines which are slanting in nature. This is majorly meeting at one single point which is called as the vanishing point. The whole of the sketching is as per perspective and you will see how I'm going to add the roof of the heart or the cabin, whatever you want to say, how I am going to add both sides of the cabin according to this rule of perspective which you say. Let's just add a few lines according to actually this is on top of the line that you have previously drawn and we are going to only add some straight lines. Now for showing the heart, it is simple, but you need to only draw the initial sketching lines. Those initial sketching lines are the most helpful lines which you do for yourself. Now, I could have introduced more difficulty in this, which I really did not want. The sketching needs to be simple. The more simple you keep, the better is always your outcome. Keep adding some more of your windows as well as doors. I'm first adding the door towards the right side, and there will be three to four windows, which I'm going to add on the left side. Along with it, I will do a bit of shading into it. Now, this shading will practically help me to add the darker blue color into a few of the areas where I think it is necessary. The sky is a lit, so we are going to add multiple colors on the sky, but do make sure that you do not end up making it more dirty. Try these colors on a sheet of paper earlier. In any sheet of paper, it doesn't need to be 100% cotton paper. And then go ahead. On top of your paper, I have the palette made for myself. I have tested all those colors on my paper, and then only I go ahead on top of this paper and paint with it. Let's continue to add some more windows. You can see how beautifully the windows are getting added. I'm going on top of the same lines that we did add earlier. This is according, again, according to the rule of perspective. So we will go ahead and continue to add some cross lines for the wingers. Some of the pieces where I want to mark the snow, which I want to show it a bit more in darker graphite marks. I'm going over the same lines and marking it. That's it. We are going to do this as well as I'm going to add some tree branches, dry tree branches which are laden with snow. You will see, I will mark all of that towards the foreground. The background has this beautiful evening sky along with this cabin. From where you can see the sunset. Yes, it's an amazing evening. I am waiting to show you or walk you through. The entire painting is one of my favorites, again from the series. There are a few favorite paintings of mine was the Pine tree, which was snow laden. Another is this particular painting, which is and dear to me. Yes, there are a few of them which I really like while I do a series, and these are one of them. You will find another boat painting coming up very soon, which is also one of my favorite. Time to add some water on top of the paper. I'm going ahead with the entire part of the paper. While I'm wetting it though, I know I would be only painting the sky at the first row, but still I would love to wet the entire paper. I want the colors to be flowing a bit into the roof of the that we have, though the colors of the sky will get reflected into the cabin and hence a bit of flow of the same sky color into the cabin is great, Naples. Yellow is my first favorite and I would be going ahead with the same color when I'm starting it out. This is the lightest value which we are going to add into our sky. Once we have added this lighter value, you can go ahead with any of the other shades. Now you can use the colors which are analogous in nature, or you can also choose split complementary colors. I would say analogous colors will be better in this case, colors which are just lying next to each other. In the color theory or in the color palette, they will work well. This is more warm, I would say the sky, and hence I'm going ahead with the pink. Then your Quinacridone coral, These are the shades which are my favorite and I love to go ahead with them mixing some amount of blue. And you can see how we are getting the purple to the sky area. Now you can also leave the sky at this stage, but I really wanted something more glowing and vibrant. That's one of the reasons I went ahead with darker shades of purple and some amount of blue. Then blending it with the already existing colors of the sky. Blue, purple, and acrodone coral. These are the colors which is litting up my sky. Frankly, they are not blending into each other. That's one of the reasons I'm going ahead and again trying to blend with a smaller brush, bigger brush, so that they can move into each other. Till they move into each other and blend in a very, very easy manner. You will not get the kind of sky which you usually look into, like if it's nature. They are continuously blended with each other. The colors do not show separately. And that's what I'm also trying to achieve over here. If you have already got it, leave it at this stage. Blending took me a while for this painting and hence you can see the time has increased a lot, making some of my background bushes in the orange, red brown shades, whatever you have. And then we are going to go ahead and clean up our roof area. This is my flat brush, which you have already seen in the other paintings too. I am going ahead and cleaning up this area with the help of my damp, clean brush. It's a good exercise that we have done even in our previous paintings. And I'm doing it even in this painting just to show you how easily you can clean up or keep the white spaces as white. Only get some brown in your palette or whatever color you have that is in the darker shade. Maybe even a bit of purple is great. Do not need to worry on that part, It's only the background. And add it for the bushes, I'm using my Naples yellow. And then blending the colors again a bit. Of course, it took me a while to blend the sky because it's a really small area that we have used. Have a bigger area, your sky blending will be way more quicker and easier. But since it was a small area, it took me some time, my Naples yellow. Again, for the ground area, blending it and again blending it more, applying some more of the Naples yellow. And then I will add some clear water. Water needs to be really clean. If you are working with watercolors, you always need to have one jar of water which is clean for the fresh supply. Fresh supply usually works very well in watercolors. We often need to add this particular p of water to our painting, adding some blue. This is the beautiful ultramarine. It has property of granulation and I really like it. You can see once the color settles down, it will move away from each other. There will be spaces that you can see will be more blue, and some of the spaces would be more in. The white, which is basically the texture of the paper, can be seen in a better way because of the granulating colors of the artists may like it, many of the artists may not like it. But for me, granulating colors really adds a great outcome. Or the sheets that you get from the granulating colors are seriously amazing. I am, myself, always amazed when I work with the granulating watercolors for the snow area. Because some of the areas become more whiter and some of the areas are not that white. Overall, it's very, very good experience cleaning up the spaces wherever needed with the help of my damp brush. And then blending it for the snow pathway, which we have coming from the basically or the cabin. We're going to add the blue shade as well as extend it a bit the snow area, the colors you can see are blending with each other. It doesn't give me a green. That's the best property of your Naples yellow. It will not create the doty green, which we usually get with the other shapes. If you even use Low blue with Naples yellow, you may get that shade, but you will not get it with Ultra Marine and Naples Yellow. Both of these colors are tested and then only I have practically applied it on the paper, or I keep applying it on the paper and use it in various other paintings too. There are frankly two ways of approaching this painting. One is to clean up the space and then apply the blue that you have to add, because otherwise you will get the green like colors. Just exactly how we did during the pine tree painting. And you have seen that that project turned out very well this way, but I wanted to keep it more loose in this one, and hence, I went ahead with just wropping in the blue shade here and there. It was not a much thought through process, I would say very random, and I went ahead with just thought that we will add a few of the branches which is snow laden. And hence, this kind of structure I did add, the paper was already wet because of which you can see that the colors which are being added with the help of the brush have become more blue. Adding a very light color on the roof, which is majorly in the same colors. I would go ahead and pick up a darker value after this and start adding some of the darkest value onto my tree area. These are majorly the branches which I am going to add and some drops for the darker leaves here and there. Most of the places are wet. There is wetness of the paper that's allowing the colors move a bit, whereas some of the spaces are not so wet. And hence, I'm going ahead and making the branches. Now this is more of an iterative process and you will continue to add one or two branches, some of the dots here and there. That's how we continue to go about it. As you know, some places are wet and hence the colors in those areas. Continue to add some more of the darker values. For this darker value, you can take paints gray or nico, whichever is available with you. You can also go ahead with neutral tint. If that's something you painted with, I would not refer altogether. I am not a person who really falls in love with black all the while or all the time, and hence I just avoid black in most of my paintings. You would have not seen much of black in any of my paintings. Okay, let's continue to paint a bit more with these leaves and some beautiful dots here and there. Let's just pick up the colors from some of the, and then just rub it off on the tissue. I am again picking up the colors now and rubbing it off. We continue to do this process again and again. When any of the places become too dark, just add some more of this darker value of blue or paint screen. That's all you need to add and then just have a look at this. It looks so beautiful. The blooms look more like it is laden with snow. And this darkest value adds the depth to the painting. Overall, the contrast really helps this painting to bloom a lot on its own. Contrast really creates that depth, and you would see me adding a lot of contrast. In most of my paintings that we have done for the winter season, I have concentrated more on one single focus point. But over here, the focus point, of course, remains the house. But with that, there is some good amount of foreground also, which we are going to paint. Having said that, I am not going to detail out a lot in the foregrounds. I am just going ahead and adding some details to this no laden tree. That's it now adding some browns and making some dry small small plants. You can see these plants are always dried off during the winter season. As the winter becomes spring, in the same dry plants, you will get the leaves and beautifully they will bloom with flowers, et cetera. Blending is the key right now, keep blending it with a damp brush. You can see how I am blending the colors. Take it a bit towards the middle area. This might look a bit advanced and it is longer than the usual 15 to 20 minutes video, but there are quite a number of elements that we have added in it. And hence, keeping it absolutely, very, very simple or easy would have not justified this painting, to be frank. And that's one of the reasons you're finding it a bit longer than any of the other videos that we have done. I'm going ahead with my most beautiful shade, and that is Quinatrodon coral. I will mix some amount of my compose opera in it. That's again one of the colors which I have always fallen in love with. Along with it, you can also use some amount of your orange. Now, this is Sceniliar Orange from the brand Sceniliar. Yes, adding a bit of my Sceniliar orange over here towards the bottom. I will not touch the windows. I would go in and around it with the colors. Some of the spaces, of course, are in the blue shape that I'm going to add. The darker value will be in the blue shape for the door as well as for the window. Then you can just mix some amount of the orange again with the Quinacodon coral and extend it towards the right. This is a beautiful winter cabin, is all I can say. Into the woods painting, where you can see beautiful pine trees snow laden. Then there is. Winter snowy effect soft. Nice. Yet, so interesting. Please believe me, keeping the paintings soft is all I'm looking forward to. In most of the paintings you would see, there is less amount of work that we have done towards the wet on dry approach or even wet on wet. We have kept it in a way that we get the softer approach like right now. Also, I have blended the colors and I've just added some amount of blue. Now this blue can be your paint screen, or it can be even the ultramarine that you have added. The colors are moving a lot, and hence I have to shift to my thinnest brush. Now, the paper was wet because of the colors that I've added earlier. And some of the paints are becoming a bit like blue. That's what you can avoid in your paintings. I guess that can really help you to ease through many of your paintings that you want to work around with. Going ahead with some royal blue and then blending it with some amount of paints gray or Go. We will go ahead with Go or paints gray even for the shaded region of the other windows, which you can see. I would slowly just take it towards the bottom. I'm not going to extend it, only the shaded area with the pencil, I'm going to apply my colors on top of it. Here are some lines that I'm going to add. Once these lines are done, then we will go ahead and make some. You can see how I'm adding lines which are grooming a bit on top of the house that we have already painted some more dry fees and it's done. Let's have a look at all the takeaways we had. I would focus on one major important takeaway, when you're working with too many colors to test them on the paper separately so that you do not get any totally mixes. The second most important thing is always, along with perspective, always use a vanishing point when you sketch your hut. These are the two most important takeaways, and let's go to the next painting. 16. Day 10 The Frozen Lake: So the colors are Tello blue, ultramarine paints, gray burn, Siena, optional. You can keep a CPM. Let's go ahead and start with our sketching. I would just make a middle line which is basically slanting and then cut it out into two equal halves. Now how do we cut it into two equal halves? On the left as plus on the right, just measure 3.5 centimeters on the right and 3.5 centimeters on to left. Once this part is done, we will start making a curved line. As I go on the top, my pencil is to etch, and hence you will not see really dark lines on the paper. Something that I always avoid in each one of my watercolor paintings. If you have dark graphite marks, what happens is that you may not be in a position to see the colors, or the transparent water colors may shine over that, and the underlying graphite marks will also be seen. In that case, I usually try to avoid the situation and hence I go ahead with wet pencil. You can also use any kind of other pencil. This is more of a drafting pencil, which I am right now using for my sketching Only the boat is the tougher part to sketch. And once we're done with the boat, you can go ahead and start making the horizon line. The horizon line is bit towards the top area. You will see how I added this boat is lying on the snow. Because it's winters and the lake is completely frozen, the boat cannot say anymore, and hence, you will see some amount of snow even on top of the boat area. Let's go ahead and add that part. And once this part is added, these are more crooked lines here and there you will see how we continue to paint with blue to create all the snow. I'm super happy with the limited palette that we have created during this winter season, and I have always used the winter palette. But this time, I guess I'm just happy to see how the winter palette has resulted into beautiful outcome of various subjects. Sometimes it's trees, sometimes it's mountain, then it's a boat. There are so many different sceneries that we have painted, the landscape that we have created. Everything has got a small subject in it. I usually like to keep it that way. You can observe even over here, boat is a subject and we are going to paint only the boat a bit in detail. Rest everything that we are going to paint. Very simple. Even the sky is pretty simple. We are going to go ahead with shades like palo blue or from rain. But when we are working on the board, you have to be careful about how we go about it. This is a small area, again, as per the rule of thirds. If you divide the paper into nine equal halves, there's a focus point or the intersecting point are usually known as the focus points. Now this intersecting point, which is lying on top of the paper, you can see I have painted the boat over there itself, some dry trees which I'm adding to show the winter season. Once this part is done, we will start with the easiest of all to gain a lot of confidence and that is my sky, whatever it is, Just try to keep the sky lighter. That's the only request because we are going to focus on the boat and hence keeping the sky lighter will always give you an added advantage. I'm going ahead with a mix of Tao blue that you can see on the left and some amount of my ultra marine I would add on top of it. Continue with your To blue, wherever you need, just put it off a bit. Wherever it is needed on top of the tissue. You can always use the tissue to clear out your brush. I am again adding some amount of Taylor Blue going from the right towards the left. Some of the areas, of course, will be left in white. I will use my pain screen while I go towards the bottom area, cleaning my brush and then blending the colors. While you go towards the bottom, I am adding a bit of the Taylor Blue initially, and then we'll add my pain screen. The Taylor Blue of course, moves a lot. And you have to always keep this in mind the kind of colors that moves a lot. It would be difficult for you if your paper is too wet, in that case, in case your paper has the correct amount of wetness, in which case, majorly, your paper is damp and doesn't have a real huge amount of shine on top of it, then these colors will work wonders for you. But if that's not the case, then the colors may not work. And you will see a lot of moving of the colors from here to there, which sometimes we do not like in a painting. For me, I really don't want to have that in this painting. And I'm cleaning up a few spaces because they have really become like Bloom, which was not needed. Having said, all of this can be done with the help of a dry damp brush. I'm using my thickest brush, which is majorly my wash brush. You can use any wash brush. I'm using this one as the wash brush, but anything and everything can do time to make some ultramarine and add the taco values wherever you want to just take off the extra colors from the brush off on the tissue. The tissue is just lying on the right side. Now why most of the things of mine right on the right side, I'm a right handed artist and that's one of the reasons if I put it on the right, it's easier for me to go ahead, pick up the colors or just take off the extra paints on the tissue. Having said that, I do try to even show the palette which I'm using. And hence, I have placed the palette on the left hand side. I make a lot of mistakes. That mistakes are like, you will see that there is a whole amount of water which is come on top of the sky sometimes because I was trying to do something with my brush and I did fall on top of the sky. These things to keep happening with me always today. It happens each and every time I try to do something. Yes, happy accidents are common with me. And I am okay with those happy accidents because they bring me so much amount of joy. And there are times when these happy accidents have created such beautiful paintings, which I never thought I could create. Going ahead and adding some of the blue towards the bottom area of the boat. And you can see how I am blending it with my biggest. It's the same mix which we have used for our clouds area. The middle part I have kept as MD and I would be working on it once my sky is absolutely dry. I do not want to touch it right now or the colors will move from here and there, which we are not ready to accept. Yes, we are not going to let the colors move a lot right now into the lake area. Going with some of my ultramarine again and just adding a few lines. These are random lines which I'm going ahead and adding over there. The left side would be a bit more darker in value as the boat is tilted. And hence, we would like to keep that sometimes even making very simple paintings with simple sky and your bottom, which is more of the fore grounds, can really add a lot of, I would say, beauty to your painting. Rather than always going ahead with a lot and lot of complex work, you can focus on the simpler parts too. Simpler paintings are better paintings. As I always say. I'm to add the snow for the boat area, I'm going ahead with a beautiful color which is telo blue. Yellow blue has been one of my favorite colors for quite some few years, but the only problem with this is you will get a green even when you mix it with Naples yellow, which is a very, very subtle and nice color. That's one of the reasons I have practically switched to ultramarine or Coval blue, which really doesn't give that kind of an effect with Naples Yellow. And you know that I have worked with Naples Yellow and blue as a combination for a really, really long period of time. If you observe me, yes, there are a lot of paintings which are done in both the colors. Going ahead and just blending my colors a bit in a few of the spaces, I'm even going ahead with the darkest of the value that can be your indico or paints grade. These are alternate colors which can be used. I always love to suggest you with any shade and color which can be of much help to you as you progress because you do not need to own all the shades. You can mix a few shades and get the colors going ahead. Again with the tailor blue, whatever I have on my brush, it's a very, very light wash that I'm adding for the lake area. You can see how the colors are very. Light wash means that you have a lot more water in your brush than the pigments that are actually picking up from the palette. You need to keep that in mind when you paint this part. Just blending and making the horizon line more softer. You can see that I have done this exercise even previously and I'm doing it in this current part. Two, I always blend my colors to a great extent. And it's important to keep blending the colors at every point in time. Once your blending is done, we will go ahead and start adding the rocky area on top of our horizon line that we have already added. Now this is the brown shade or burn sena, whatever is available with you, we are going ahead with that. And then adding in some amount of paint scrap for the darker values of particular mountain or here, whatever you want to say in the background. I infuse the darkest of the values with the thinnest of the brush as I don't want it to move a lot in all the space that we have covered with the burn Siena part. I'm going to add it only in a few spaces and hence it's going to flow only in those spaces. The paper is wet. It has the right amount of moisture in it, and hence, going with a darker value will always help the shades to mix up well and blend well and give a good final outcome. I'm even adding the same shade on top of the area which is majorly covered with snow for the boat. And then taking it towards the right side, even in the middle, we're going to add it. Once that part is done, we will go ahead with the burn Siena. My burn Siena has an underlying red in it. If you do not have this kind of burnsena, go ahead with any burn Siena that's available with you. It's good to start out with and then extend it in the entire boat area. This was more like a flat wash, which I did, and now I am just picking up the colors from the middle part of this boat. Once I have picked up the color from the middle part of the boat, I would go ahead and start adding some of the darker values of my brown. Now this is more concentrated and a mix compared to what we have added earlier. I'm going with my thinnest brush for adding the same colors. And then again, I am going ahead with the darkest value of the burn, sienna and then making this line in the middle part. Okay? Extended. Extended in all the areas wherever you think, we will either get a CPA to mark a few of the darker areas better later on or else you can also mix a bit of pain screak into your burn sienna to get a really dark shade, just the way I am adding right now. And to work on the left side of the boat. Again, the same exercise we are going ahead with Bern Siena. And then we will extend with the darkest of the value. You will see how I work with my thinnest brush to create all those lines that you usually see in a boat. Now, sometimes what happens is the dampness of the paper can actually create wonders. I try to go ahead with the same dampness for the entire part of the painting, which we are doing, some amount of CPR that we are adding, or else you can also add any dark value as I did tell you, to mix a bit of burn sena into the blue that you have and create a dark value or a dortal mix of color that can act as CPO, dry all the shade before you apply it on the final painting. That's something which I always say do not just apply directly on the paper. Then what happens is after so much of effort that you have put in, in the sketching and even in the painting, everything will go for a toss, which we really don't want. We are almost about to get done with this part of the painting. Just some shading which is needed on the left side of the board that is more into the shadow and the dry trees which I'm going to add again on the left part. Some dots and final details along with it. Do take a thin brush for creating the lines that is basically plants and branches or the dry, dry phones that you want to paint. First, I'm trying to go ahead and blend the area in a bit easier way and make it more softer as you observe. And then I would go ahead with the darkest value of brown or CPR. Darkest value of Brown either would be your Brown or CPR. Though there are various values even with one single color, as I did tell you earlier, even if you are working with Burnena, you can have various values of Burn, Siena, but over here we are working with the darkest value which is Major Vendi, K Brown or CPA, whatever. You want to go ahead with simple lines, break the lines at few intervals and that's it. We are going to create one or two more and then let this paper dry off for a good amount of time. Once that is done, remove the tape pattern angle and have a final look at the painting. I very, very excited to see how easily and how only with minimal colors painting can come to life. I usually always say that to each and every person who joins in, that less is always, always more. And we're going to keep working with less colors and shapes. Let's have a walk through with all the takeaways, Though there are really less takeaways on this painting, but still, let's do it for the recap, kind of what we created, how we created, et cetera. Finally, this is done feeling so excited. Let it dry off before you remove the tape. Never, never peel off the tape before your paper is entirely dry. 17. Day 11 Birch Tree Forest: Colors for this painting is ultra marine burns and A paints green, naples yellow. You can keep more colors like CPA et cetera. That's up to your choice. Let's start out with a basic sketch. I am starting out with my horizon line. Once I have added the horizon line, I would go ahead and start adding the trees. The trees, I am going ahead and only making the tree trunk. I do not want to add the branches in details right now because we have a lot of time to go through all that. But this major tree trunk is very important as I'm going to mask out this area. It's more of birch tree that we are going to add with the help of only the masking tape. You will see how I'm going to just mask out these areas. You just add the masking tape on top of it, then throw it, cut it out, and again just paste it on top of the paper. Make sure that you continue to do this process. For most of the birch trees because these are only in the foreground, we do not have much of difficulty in painting all of these as it is just a few trees here and there. And that's all we are going to add. Even in our painting, I've told you it's a simple, easy art challenge. If it's a simple art challenge, we will paint a few trees, and sometimes we are not even thinking about what is snow and how we are going to paint the snow. Snow is, of course, in a really, really light of value, hence, we will go ahead and add just a bit of color with ultramarine to show that the colors of the sky, of course, will be reflected in the snow. And that is how every time it has been, I am done. Now it's time to spray some water on top of the sky. Either you can spray the water or else you can also go ahead and apply it. With your wash brush, there is no need to only spray the water exactly the way I do right now. Going with my most beautiful and favorite shade, which is ultramarine, applying a very, very light wash on top of the sky area. The whole of the painting will come together very quickly, just that a bit of patients. That's all you will need. I guess watercolors is all about being patient. And every painting that we have been doing, I have been preaching this to everyone. That if you are into watercolors and if you are painting with watercolors, it's important to be patient if you are not patient enough that it might be really difficult to get a final outcome or the outcome which is up to your liking. Going with some of my burn sienna and you can see a few of the spaces that we are getting has become be more darker and value because ultramarine and burn Siena do always mix up with each other to give us dark values. The bottom part where you can see I have added the naples yellow blue. It still doesn't give me a bad, dirty mix of green or it doesn't show as green. That's what I'm always happy about, and I have told that even in many of my other paintings, Naples Yellow. When you mix it with ultramarine, it will not give you a bad or a green kind of a shade, which you usually see in other paintings. Watercolor somewhere or the other can be overwhelming because of its varied colors. And all the colors, most of them, are really vibrant, which makes it very enticing for each one of us to go ahead and paint with each one of them. But having too many colors in a painting is always not a good idea. As well as boot, try the shades on a scrap paper before you go ahead and apply it on the final paper. This is something that I have been following for many years, though. I haven't shown you this in this particular series, but of course every series does have something or the other coming up. You will see in day 12 how I test my colors on a rough piece of paper and then only apply it on the final painting. Though, I know that these are the colors that work well with each other. I know my palette well. I have worked with my palette really well. And that's one of the reasons I do not need to always test the shades which goes together or which doesn't go together. I know telo blue and maple yellow will not go well together because it might produce some amount of greenish color or bundy mix, which I really don't like. These are the shades that I already know exist in my palette and yet they may not work well with each other. Potato blue individually is a great shade to work for. E. Or if you really want to create the cobalt green out of it or a turquoise out of it, it's one of the shades that always go forward to. Hence, I do have that shade on my palette. Continue to add your colors. This painting particularly is kind of go as you like. There is not much that I need to practically teach you. All of you already know how to make trees, how to add trees. Just a few strokes here and there, and sometimes a darker value while we go towards the bottom with the help of blue and some amount of flower Bird Siena, that's all we are going to do. You can see I'm going ahead and adding some water on the snow area. Then we'll add a bit of my yellow. Followed with the ultramarine or the blue that you will see will come up for the shadows of the trees and we will have beautiful lines coming up. Super excited and happy to see how the whole painting comes together. Sometimes when my round brush is not of much use, I would go ahead and use my flat brush to clean up few of the areas wherever it is necessary. Going with the thinnest brush, or you can say the size three brush of casino, but this is still thin compared to ones that we have used. And adding a few lines, which are majorly shadows of the trees onto the snow area. Snow is again yellow in shade and color. This is because it's a sunset or sunrise painting, whatever you want to say. For me, it is more of a beautiful shadow that is falling on the snow. This creates a lot more contrast. Now, why is a contrast so important in a painting? Contrast actually helps to create the depth as well as it helps you to see an object. Whatever may be a tree, may be a shadow in a better way. It helps to distinguish various objects from each other. That's one of the reasons contrasting the color sheet Tonal values becomes very, very important as you progress through any of your watercolor pagans. Let's continue to work on this. You can see that my paper is still wet, which is one of the reasons the lines that I'm trying to add with the help of my thinnistbrush may become a bit like a bloom, which is absolutely fine. Let them move, let them create their own beauty. Let accidents happen. Yes. Sometimes you should let, go off all your fears. This is something which I have learned in my watercolor journey. Sometimes I'm too much of a controlling kind of a person. But overall, when I understand how I want to look forward, how I want to move forward, it's important to not have so much control over your watercolors. Another common mistake that I would say most of the people do is to have a lot of control on water colors. Watercolors cannot be controlled to a great extent. It's a very random as well as it's a medium which has its own way of flowing because it is water. And we cannot control water to a great extent. Hence you have to leave it asis. Continue to just add some more water towards the top here with the help of your flat brush and adding some dots as well as soft structures which look more like your leaves, et cetera. Though there are not much leaves in the trees and that's absolutely okay. We are making it really soft and easy to go rather than making it really tough or difficult. And again, I'm just waiting some more space and then adding some more of these smaller dots here and there. Though, the colors, you know that di is granuting, which is one of the reasons you can see various colors coming up in different places. Whenever you mix your blue paints, gray and burn sin, there would be different colors that you would get absolutely different shades, et cetera. I really like when you mix it up on the paper rather than mixing it separately on the ceramic palette and then bringing it to the paper. I love the color mixing on the paper to a great extent. And believe me, this color mixing has got so much. Value in itself when you see more of your paintings on bigger papers, the color mixing actually plays a great role in those cases. Continue to add some more of your browns which is Burn Siena, and then we are going to add beautiful, beautiful branches to these trees. Though you could have also avoided adding branches, but I think branches is the key. It's dry winter season, It's dry winter season means there will be dry branches dry pre trunk and it's limited pat way. We are again moving forward. Yes, this is it. And then removing the masking tape. Now, the masking tape removal is should be taken up very quickly. Or one more thing you should always keep in mind. If you are working with a handmade paper, it becomes really difficult in those cases to take off the masking tape hence, or the washing tape, whatever you want to say. I always prefer using washing tape than masking tape because it is easier to remove it rather than using all those carpenter tapes which are really difficult. Get off from the paper and peter off your paper if your paper is a bit older or if it's not a dried off, all those things and accidents to keep happening with the carpenter. That's one of the reasons I try avoiding it to the greatest possible extent. The white of the bur strain now needs to be filled up with a bit of our darkest value of brown. You can mix a bit of ultramarine into your burn ciena to get her darker value color. Or even CPA ins gray into your brown will also give her darker color like the one you are using right now. Most of the work is done. It's just these trees and the branches which are left out which is going to take the maximum amount of time that we're going to spend in this particular painting. The backgrounds and the foregrounds were very simple. These trees are the more complex ones that we are going to take up. Having said all of it, this whole of the painting will come to life very, very quickly. And it looks maybe a bit complex, but once you start doing it, you will get into the habit of working quickly with this medium. As well as the final outcome of all the paintings that we have done till now is so great that I'm very excited and happy to see all your lovely projects that you have been uploading on the skillshare platform. So yes, there is lots of beautiful paintings which I am observing and I continue to watch each one of them. Okay, let's just add some more of our branches, breaking it up further. Add the background trees to. These trees are also like in the background and pretty far away, so we'll get away with only a few lines. Just draw a few lines and you will be done with it. Really less to explain in this part. As of now, it's just some amount of lines that we are going to add, then few of the spaces which we are going to cover, some of the spaces, we are going to keep it as such. I will use my thinness brush to create all these lines. And once this is done, we have to create some more lines to show the, I mean, the empty branches without any leaves. All of that will be done. This is an iterative and repetitive process. As I did tell you even earlier, it's a bit boring, but it's very meditative as well. It helps you to not only actually develop a lot of patients, but also it has helped me to really improve my brush strokes. Now some of the strokes are more controlled that I can do, and some of the strokes are less controlled. Even every brush that you try to use, thin, large, whatsoever you are using. The most important part is to understand how well you can use the tip of that brush for me, I'm going ahead with a very thin brush and then using it. But you can also go with maybe a zero sized branch rather than 00, which I am using, and create all the branches which you observe me also adding it. As we progress through this painting? Yes. As we progress, you can see more and more coming up. One thing that you have observed is that the color which I have been using is almost the same. It's a mix of your paint screen and Burn Siena. It's nothing different than what we have used even for the background. Only differences that now. It is much more darker in value compared to what we have used for the background, which was more lighter in value. That's the only difference. We continue to work through it and add more and more branches. Oh my God. I can't keep saying the same thing, but yes, that is it. There are so many trees and we have to continue to work through these trees before all of this painting comes to life. Okay. I guess we are onto the thinnest and the smallest tree that we have over here. There are some of the branches which I would be even, I mean few of them. I will break it up. There will be a lot more branches arising from one branch, and some of them will be one or two here and there. I forgot to tell you the backside of this painting is also as per your an nine. You remember the house that we did make, the colorful house? I first tried that painting on the back side of it. Now, what color papers can be used on both the sides? I used this paper on both sides because watercolor papers one side can be used. If you don't like it, you can use the other side. And if you get a good painting, why not continue to work with that? I'm doing the same thing for this watercolor paper. I have told this earlier, but I use it for my own self too, in many of my paintings. But when you see all these paintings individually, yes, I have 14 paintings and even more because some of the paintings I did not like, and I had to practically discard or use the backside of those paintings again, again, paint them. There were a lot of tools and fos when I was actually working through all of these paintings together. Yes, it takes a while. We also commit a lot of mistakes. Mistakes should be happy to accept, You should be way, way happier to accept these mistakes and move on. Let's have a work through or look through all our key takeaways from this painting. Few key takeaways are, simplicity is the key, using less number of colors, even going with a very simple drawing, that's how we go about it. Mix the shades and colors to create your own like all the colors and shades we have used till now, burn N and Ultra Man can be used to create darker values. Use both sides of the watercolor paper. If you have failed on one side, do not hesitate to use the other side or do not burn down your paper. Do not ruin your paper thinking the fact that you have not got success in one side of it. Remove the tape. 18. Day 12 The Ropeway: Colors are Naples Yellow compost opera from burn siena indico or paint screen. It is sketching and painting is a bit special because many of you have seen me using a lot of colors in my painting. But I want to really tell you how I select my colors. I always select three of my shades, which practically dominates my painting. In this particular painting, my three shades which dominate my sky are Naples yellow. Then any kind of pink you can take for me, it's composed opera. I would be taking some art fromer. These are the three shapes which are going to dominate my sky. It's a very easy painting, just that a bit of sketching is there. Which is majorly for the rope way which we are going to add. The majority of the part that we are leaning is for the sky area. Now the sky area will be dominated by the three colors as I've told you. Now, in between that, of course, we can go ahead and add a bit of different color, maybe ind, three blue or something like that to get the darker values. But do make sure that you are adding weight on red. Why wet on wet? If you're going with wet on wet, what happens is that your colors will be one or two shade lighter. Whereas, if you are going wet on dry, then mostly it will just be one shade lighter. In wet, it can be two shades lighter. I wanted my sky to be really subtle, hence I wanted to go ahead with a soft approach for the sky. Going with the line area, the reflection of the sky will be on the line. And it is a bit of a Rocky Mountain Rocks we will show in burn, Siena and some of the other sheets which is darker value of burn. And now once we add a bit of blue into burns and you will get it, okay. I'm adding the stands of the rope way over here. And then we will join it with the rope. Now the ropes, of course, are there, but along with it there are carriers of the rope way. This carrier is majorly a bit difficult to add once I was drawing it in the beginning. But then I got a very easy way to approach it. Just draw a rectangular structure, you will see how I do it. And then divide it into shapes and sizes majorly square. And all the shapes and sizes that we are going to do every time. Whenever I approach a painting, I just think about the easier shapes and sizes, how I can break my whole any difficult part that is there in a painting, I would break that into easier shapes and sizes. Even that's the case when I am drawing any floral or any of flowers and all. Let us now draw this carrier which I was mentioning earlier. I have already divided into a rectangular structure and then I am further dividing it into smaller structures, fuel lines. I will add another line from in between and add one smaller line from the middle. Just follow this, I mean, watch it on a bigger screen. As I always say, then you can easily follow the instructions the way I'm drawing it right now. Then a curved line towards the top. That's it. Which we are going to add for our structure of this particular seating arrangement. Then let it work for other like in a similar way, we would be adding it on the left and further away as you go further away from the foreground area. What happens is the difficulty that we have included right now will also become way more easier. And it would be simple, simple structures that you just need to add. Always keep in mind whatever is in foreground or whatever is closer to your eye will be way more detailed compared to the ones which is away from your eyes. While I continue to add all the structure, all I want to say when we paint our sky is you can continue to drop. But let me just get into the bit of details into the sky area. The bottom area would be lightest in the value which is a Naples yellow that is near the horizon line or near the mountain area. Then as we go further away from it, it would become darker and darker, which means that towards the middle tone and towards the middle part, it would be Naples Yellow. Then some your compose opera. When you mix compose opera with Naples Yellow, it will give you something like a orange shade. This is also quinacrodon coral that you can consider then why I have chosen ultramarine blue. I really wanted the beautiful granulating effect for my sky. And hence, that was the color which I did choose for my granulation of the sky area. Okay, let's continue to draw. Yes, there's a bit of a drawing that you might have to follow in this case, but I've tried to simplify as much as possible. Once this is added, then we would go ahead and start adding some more of the structures far away from us. You know that I love to add these structures and this structure actually is pretty wholesome. You will see that I have not placed the middle part of the basically the pillars of the roof in the middle of the painting. Now, initially when I was trying to draw, it was placed in the middle. But as you know, as per the rule of thirds, you should never place your focus or the major part of the painting somewhere in the middle. Always try to place it in the areas which are the intersecting points, and hence, that's what went into my mind. I have had two small people over there sitting in the rope way, pretty excited to start out with the painting process. You can see one third of our time that we did a lot majorly to our sketching. And sketching is a very, very important aspect of any watercolor painting. The better you can sketch it is just like a framework that you have in your painting, though I could have made the sky a bit more easier. It's just that I wanted to add all the colors in a very harmonious way and not allow it to look more chaotic in nature. That's one of the reasons I always, always try to add the colors initially, the lightest value, and then going to the darkest value. Why I say there's a lot of noise if you add too many colors in the sky? Because first of all, it's a winter painting. It needs to be soft, it needs to be that nice effect along with it. If you have too many colors, you may get some muddy mixes or you may get, I mean, you may lead to overworking on this painting because there are too many colors. We don't know how to handle it, how they are reacting with each other. Always make it a point that you test this color on a separate piece of paper and see how harmoniously they're mixing into each other. As I know, the Naples yellow doesn't react with your blue. It leads the ultramarine blue to produce the green. That's one of the reasons I'm using ultramarine blue. Even with donthrine blue, it doesn't react much. But if you use low blue, you will see a lot of reaction. I mean reaction in a way, it will become more greener and we really don't want those greens in our painting, hence, you can see that I'm slowly taking all the colors towards the middle part. I start from the sites and take it to the middle. All whether it be bottom area, whether it be top area, the corners are always, always very, very boring. That's how I like it to be that whenever a spectator is having a look at my painting, they concentrate on the focus area which is majorly my rope way and the pillar of the rope way, as well as some parts of the foreground mountain. Right now my sky might look way, way vibrant, but it will not be like that. You may not believe me actually right now. But as we progress, you will see the colors will become way more lighter. In fact, it went two shades lighter than what you're observing. As well as you may pour some water exactly the way I am doing and take the colors towards the corner area. By this method, what you do, you keep the middle portions. Very, very lighter in value and continue to work on the outer side. Most of the work that we are going to do is in the middle part, which means that the colors that I'm going to add, or you can see the rope way, et cetera, that I'm going to work on is majorly in the middle left side corner. And I'm keeping that area pretty lighter in. I continue to add bit more colors here and there with the help of my flat brush and take it towards the middle part. Blend it with the sheets that are already existing on the paper. I'm to add some more sheets, and this is the sheet of pink. As I see the colors becoming very light in shade, and you can see how I get this purple. This purple is majorly a mix of the blue that was already existing. And I did add some amount of compose opera in it, giving me this purplish shade that you see on the sky. I'm pretty happy with how the sky has turned out and I'm not going to work on it a lot more from here. I would let it dry to a great extent and then have a second layer which is majorly my bottom area. It would also reflect the same colors of the sky rather than it having a color of its own. This is majorly covered with snow. That's one of the reasons you have to work it. Oh, that week. You can see that I'm almost done. And this will turn to shade lighter because of wet on wet effect. Wet on wet is one of my favorite ways to go about it. And now I'm adding some indigo onto my paper. Along with it, I would use the pink or the compost opera that is existing on my palette. Just add it on the mountain area. I did allow my paper to dry off completely because I really did not want the colors to move around from the top towards the bottom. Yes, I did make sure that the area is completely dry before I work on the ground or the snow area of the mountain. The snow is never white in shape. As I say that though it is white in shape, But it would always reflect the shade that's there, the sky or if you say whatever be the shade of the sky, water, et cetera, like water will reflect the sky, then the snow will reflect the sky. These are the things that usually happens in nature and we have to work around the same. Water has got a different nature altogether. There are different kinds of water that we have practically, if you really want to work through water. I think I have two beautiful classes, which is about watercolor. Ocean waves 1.0 and 2.0 Then there are watercolor Water scape, which is majorly a class that is only having two kind of paintings. And it's very easy to follow along while we continue to paint. With our beautiful shade of burn Siena, our blue, you can mix a bit of ultramarine into it, or the indigo paints gray. Whichever you have used for the lightest value of this noia, you can actually mix that to get the shades like this one and add onto the mountain. Once I've added the Burn Siena kind of shade or a darker shade of brown, I would go ahead and add the darker shade. That is the paint scrape and it has very, very light amount of brown in it. Now it's time to make the pillar. I will mix the burn Siena as well as paints gray to create the shades and just continue to paint on top of it. There is not much over here that can be explained. It's all the similar color shades, et cetera, which we are going to use to continue to paint all of it. I am to work through the seating arrangement of the rope way on which usually people travel. So let's just go ahead and use our thinnest brush. To do this complete exercise, I am loading my brush with the same mix that I have used for my darkest value of the pillar that we did draw. And using the same one I'm just, or going over the lines that we have already drawn, now we are painting over it, just allowing it to look more nicer, natural, and everything. For me, this is a very interesting painting as it has very less exercise in terms of painting, which is practically only going with two thirds of the time. Whereas one third of the time we did spend on the sketching part itself, where sketching becomes the base. And we have not done much of it in any of our previous exercises. But as we progress on this journey, it's important to even work a bit on our sketching part rather than only concentrating on the watercolor part. Actually, it can help as a framework. Always, it boosts up a lot of confidence when you are going towards any kind of watercolor painting. It helps you to improve your watercolor painting to a great extent. I'm not saying that this is it or this is all that you should work through, but it is a major part of your watercolor painting. It's almost time that we should now draw our rope. Always, always go with the thinnest brush. Now this brush you should be also comfortable with because we do not want a lot of lines or we want very, very stable strokes. That's one of the reasons I'm going ahead with my thinnest brush. While I paint any part of this painting, it may take you a bit longer time compared to what you would have spent if you would have gone ahead with any of the other brushes. But over here, it's all about detailing. And detailing takes a good amount of time. So whenever you are detailing, make sure that you are going with the brush that you are more comfortable with. It should be thinner and you should have stable strokes. With that, let's have a look through on all the key takeaways which we had during this painting. The dominating colors are very important for any paintings, so choose your color. Do not use a lot of colors at it, creates a lot more noise. Try to focus a bit on the sketching, as it is the framework of the final painting. If you have a good sketching talent, I'm pretty sure about it, your final painting will turn out even well. It also helps you to develop a lot more confidence while you are confident in a watercolor painting. It also helps you to actually develop your skills in a better way. Okay, let's continue to add some more lines and then we are done with hole of the painting. I'm just waiting to take off the tape and have a final look at this painting. It's one of my favorites again from the series. Hope you also like it. We are just left out with two more days and it's done. 19. Day 13 Skiing: We have gone to in depth length about a limited palette, but I guess it's still not enough. I have a lot more to tell you, and winters are all about using less colors and getting a beautiful painting out within a limited period of time. As we do not need to add a lot of colors each and everywhere, it's only about a few shades and you are done with the painting. I'm going to do a skiing painting in this particular one, and I'm super excited to peach you the skiing painting, there is, of course, you can consider it a girl or a guy whatsoever you want to go ahead with. We are going to make that person skiing. I have not placed the person in the center as always. I like to place it either a bit on the left or a bit on the right side. That's how I go about in all my paintings. When I have to place my subject anywhere, there will be mountains in the background. And we are going to also paint a bit of sky and clouds. Going to be a very easy to go kind of a painting. You do not need to go with the flow. There is hardly much of work that you would be doing, just how I go about it step by step. I think you would be in a position to understand how easily each and everything can be drawn out in very, very simple steps. Simplicity is the key for this painting. We are going to keep everything very simple. First, let us just go ahead and sketch the person. That's the most difficult part out of this whole of the painting. Everything is going to be super easy, so yes, continue with how I go about it and then we will make our background mavens. As I did tell you, that's the only thing we are going to add for this painting part. You can always go ahead and use your eraser, but only thing that you need to keep in your mind is whenever you are using an eraser, there will be a graphite that would be left on the paper. What happens during this time? If you leave a graphite mark on your paper? It may lead to not so good lines which you do not want in your painting. That's one of the reasons I like to use my eraser as much less as possible. I go ahead always with my drafting pencil when I am drawing my mountains or drawing the foreground background, anything like that. Now it's time to start out with a background mountain. Now for my background mountain, whatever color is available on your palette, that should be put for me, it would be ultramarine blue. But more than that, first you need to go ahead and apply some water. This is a wet on wet technique, which we are going to do. Be confident while you do this. I can tell you you are going to nail it completely. You have done lots of paintings before this, and it is nothing new that we are going to apply. Going ahead and starting out with a few simple brush shots, you can see I'm not applying the colors on all the parts of the painting, only on few of the parts. I would go ahead and apply the rest of the parts will be having all the white of the paper. I would be using the white of the paper as always. The transparent medium of water colors will enhance its beauty. When you have the white of the paper seen in a good way for all the snow covered or Snow Pak mountains. Let's go ahead and add some direction. Now why do I see it as a direction now? The direction is how the mountain is carved out. Direction of the mountain is very important from where it is going towards the top. Like you can see, all the lines are running. Together and they are converging to one single point on the right. Similarly on the left it is in the same way we are going ahead and adding. I would apply a bit amount of my dico into the ultramarine that we have, then apply it towards the top. We will continue to do this process again and again from the bottom to the top area. This is a pretty continuous process and there is not much that you have to work around in this. It's very simple process of adding the colors darker, lighter value. We are changing the tonal values to, we have already added the blue, going ahead and adding some darker values. Now on top of it, I'm not covering the entire area where I have added moving towards the top of the mountain and adding it in view of the areas. Very tricky, right. Wherever you think about this and whenever I initially thought about it, it was so tricky for me. How do I go about it? How do we create these mountains? How can I really show that this is how my snow covered peaks are? How do I create the direction but slowly and steadily. As I was more friendly with my brush, I started using the tip of my brush. I made the broader strokes towards the bottom and the thinner strokes towards the top. Everything started falling in place. That's what I always say. Start being comfortable with the brushes that you use. If you really want to invest in good brushes, please go ahead and invest one at a time, which is very important for any watercolor artist. If you really plan to go ahead and keep working with watercolors even in your future, I'm adding the darkest value. While I go from the bottom and move towards the top, some of the parts, even from the top, I add the darkest value. Those are basically the rocky regions which you can see sometimes in a snow mountain area. It is the area where skiing is done and hence most of the areas will be in blue. We are, again working with limited palette. As I did tell you earlier, the best part about snow or snow laden mountains, et cetera, you will go ahead and work with a very simple palette. You really do not need a very difficult palette to work around with. And that's the simplicity of any kind of paintings that you do. Okay, continue to work around with some of the further colors. And this time it's burn sienna. My favorite of the shade it is the burn sienna that I've been working with. I basically use two kind of burn Siena, one from the brand PWC, and another from the brand Mijello Mission Gold. Both the colors are manic. There's a bit of a difference between them. But they have some underlying red in it, which I'm really not sure of. But it gives me a mixing results when I mix it up with some blue. The burn Siena that is there from general machine Gold of course gives a bit of a dirty green kind of shade Because of which I'm avoiding it for the current situation. I'm using the PWC one. But you have to experiment with your colors to exactly know how it works. Continuing with the browns that we observe and adding it while we have the peak. Now there are some dots and some small rocky area which we want to show nothing much. It's more about detailing. Go with a lot of confidence. You have majorly done the difficult part of the mountain area. Some of the background trees which is majorly your pine tree, that again we are going to do a bit in an abstract way is going to come up. Now I'm wetting my paper, which is already bit dry up and adding some amount of burns. And of course, burn sena will be my lightest value over here. And then we will go ahead with some amount of my paints gray or the blue that I already have on the palette, and add the trees for the pines, et cetera, which I really want to show. Continue with this process and keep adding it with all the confidence you are absolutely going to engld. It's a very, very easy painting. Sometimes when we see your painting, we think that it might be tough or we not be in a position to do it. But as you progress, the confidence increases. And that's what I want for each one of you, to increase your confidence and go with a lot of confidence when you're working with watercolors. Let's go ahead with the bottom part. Right now we have a weighted this surface and once the weighting is done, we are going to go ahead and add some amount of blue. The blue is again the one that is available on the palette. It's more to do with the paints, clay or the indigo, which you have. Once you have applied the blue, I would just let the area dry off before I go ahead with some of the dryer parts. On top of this snow area, you need to make the pines or the area which is majorly in the forest one more softer. And hence, I'm going ahead with my flat brush to work around with it. Adding some of the dots towards the top area and then blending it with some of the darker value of brown. Once you have added the darker value of brown in a few dots here and there, and it is almost done, the background mountain, we will go ahead and paint our sky, but I'm pretty happy with how the background mountain has turned out. It is so soft, nice, and the effect is the gloomy one, which usually happens during the winter season time to paint the person whom we are going to add over here, this is majorly in some vibrant color, which I want to add because the whole of the background is pretty dark. And the foreground, I want to have something which is really vibrant and nice. Going ahead and adding it with some of my orange. You can also use Pon. You can go ahead with any red kind of color for getting this part done, for the jeans or for the lowers or the bottom area. We are going to go ahead with our blue and add that area with the blue color. I'm using my thinnest brush because this is a really small area and I do not want to create any blunder at this stage. Most of our painting has turned out pretty well over here. We just need to add some darker, lighter values exactly the way you see me adding some of my purples in few of the areas. This is to just create the contrast. Once I have created the contrast, will go ahead and add a bit more of my darker value and see how the painting is turning up. I think that this looks really nice. You should observe this on a bigger screen. This is a really, really small space, and I'm going ahead with some of the darkest value right now, which you might not be in a position to see if you do not observe it on a bigger screen. One of the reasons I always say do work or do see all these classes on a bigger screen and then work on your paper. That really helps you to is through every painting which you go ahead and do. I'm adding some of the other areas the cava use and then creating the skiing stick. Once that past part is done, I think it's time to just go ahead and add some of the dry brush technique for the bottom area. I really want to add some dry brush technique to show that there is some movement or some lines which has happened on the snow as people are skiing and it's not a flat and even snow anymore. Those kind of lines and dry brush as dots here and there. I want to add. You can go ahead and just finish it off the area which is majorly the head in some of the value, again, that would be my value of blue. You can also use Burn Siena kind of a color, and then just blend it with some water to get the top part. After adding these smaller dots, I would go ahead with my wet brush and just make it a bit more softer and nicer. This is equally important to show the snow in a pretty soft way. I'm not saying every part I'm going to do this, but in some of the areas I would make it a bit more softer. Okay. I guess I'm pretty okay with how this has turned out. Some of the lines here and there to show that there are some details which is there in the background. I just wanted a bit of highlight. And it had with the pink, but I'm not sure how it is working out though. I felt that this is good and hence, I just added in making one more line to show the perspective in a better way, and then leaving it as such by adding some more lines here there. Once this part is done, let your paper dry off completely and then only work on the sky area. This is a very important trick at this stage because your bottom area, if you touch, then you may not get the final painting in a good way, let it dry off, and then only work. I'm going ahead with my lightest value. And my lightest value is the royal blue. You can see there is a lot of water which I have inside the hole of the full pan which I have of the royal blue. It's more of water and less of paints going over it with some of my darkest value of blue. And that darkest value will be also pretty light in shade so that our whole painting shines through. This is something which I always, always want for any kind of snowy landscape or water color painting that you guys are doing. This is it. I'm pretty happy. Let's remove the tape at an angle and have a final look at the painting. I'm pretty sure about it. You're already fallen in love with it. Let's see through a few of the takeaways. 20. Day 14 The Castle: One of the softest skies that I have ever painted for any of my winter landscape is the one that you are going to observe today. We will start out by drawing the castle. For the castle, I will make a middle line and after this middle line, I will cut it. The top part is majorly the tomb kind of the area which you usually have, the roof area of our castle. And the bottom part, we will again divided into two or three halves. To get the outcome, you have to remember one thing, that castles are easy to be made or easy to be painted. Just that we are not concentrating so much about the only castle that we are painting. We are looking at the overall beauty of the painting. And that makes a lot of difference, I guess, to this whole painting. There is a beautiful pastel sky that I'm going to add. And after that pastel sky, we are going to go with the bottom area that is majorly the snow part. There are a few arcs which I am adding as well as further I would be adding some of the windows towards the top area, as well as some more windows that you will see at the second level. Now overall, what I can see from this particular painting is this is the last day and you should be the most relaxed one for actually making this painting. You have nothing to go wrong about. And we will be working with very thin brush so that there are no ways that we can go wrong with our clouds or with our bottom part. Anywhere smaller or larger area. Do not worry, just go with the flow and enjoy the painting. You have already done all the 13 days and this is the last day that is there. You should enjoy this as the most, I would say, important and the easiest of the painting that you can think of. See the painting is not going to take much of a time. It is around 20 to 25 minutes, though it is a bit more extended than all the other paintings that we have done earlier. Having said that all the paintings cannot be done in a particular stipulated time, and sometimes I also go with the flow, adding a lot more details than I would have expected that I would be adding on. Hence, you do see what you see right now on the paper. Continue to just sketch. Once we are done with the sketch, we have a framework ready for us. This framework will act as a piece for our painting. Why? I always focus a lot on the, I would say the important part of the painting, which is majorly your sketch part, you know, there is less chance of going wrong then I would not say that there are no chances of going wrong. Still struggle a lot of times with the sketching and I still struggle a lot with the painting. So all of this anyways, will remain and we do screw up a lot of paintings, and that's absolutely fine. But this actually builds in a lot of confidence and it helps you as a guide to pave the way for the final beautiful painting. That's why there is so much of, I would say, stress that I do add when it's all about the sketching part. Continue to add some more windows on the castle part, and then we are just adding a background mountain as well as a foreground mountain. Of course, this is situated on a hill. You will find many castles situated on hill or by the seashore. We do find all these castles there. Hence, I am going ahead with the same. It's pretty much not how I do plan to always paint things. I do change a lot when it is about a winter painting or any of the paintings. This particular photograph, when I observed, is not exactly what I did come up with. You will just see that idea I get inspired from, but I do change it to a great extent and then convert into my own. Going ahead with my Naples Yellow, I'm very, very excited to use. Naples Yellow always is more like a pistol shade, and that impresses me more when you want to use it as a pistol shade, it works as a pistol shade. If you want to use as a yellow shade, it works as a yellow shade. If you want to use it as a brighter one also, then also it works. So something that I've always gone ahead with is Naples yellow, deep. It is from the brand Senala, and I have been using it from the time I have got introduced to watercolors. So that's the beauty of Naples yellow. And that's the beauty which I think it has added to all my paintings to date. Almost of my paintings have naples yellow in it, and it creates the best of the paintings, I would say. Going ahead with some more of our coral color. Now this coral color is from the brand White nights. If you don't have this color, there is another color called this brilliant pink from the brand Mijello Mission Gold. They both can be exchanged for each other. I would say whatever color is available with you, it's good to go in case you do not have any of these color, just mix a bit of your Chinese white plus titanium white. In the ratio of Chinese white would be two is 23 add titanium white would be 123. Along with the color that is your pink pink is in a very less quantity as we want it more in a pistol shade that you are observing it over here towards the top area, I have added my purple shade into the coral color that was already existing going ahead and cleaning up my castle area. Now this castle area, I'm going to paint over it. And before I go ahead and paint it, I think the sky looks less dramatic. Let's go ahead and make it way more dramatic. How do you do that? Go ahead with some of your purple. Mix it in the peach color that you already have or the coral color, whichever you have selected, and then start adding these cloud like structures. These are majorly just simple brush strokes. You would see how I would add one or two dots here and there and extend it as we go on the side. I would do the similar process for even the top part of the cloud. I do not mix my paints in the same ratio every time. That's one of the reasons you will see that the clouds are of different values, shapes, sizes, et cetera. That's how I do like to keep it because clouds or painting, any kind of watercolor landscape which has cloud, scapes, et cetera, in it. Again, clouds is a part of nature and part of nature. Whatever you are going to paint needs to be simple, easy yet it should have that kind of beauty that the nature holds in itself. Keeping it random really makes a lot of difference to the whole of the painting. Not adding much of the darker value initially, and slowly spreading the darker value towards the bottom area. Towards the top area so that the drama increases. This A really makes up the whole of the painting. It, I think elevates the painting to another level. Though this is not a clouds class, and believe me, I am not teaching clouds in detail in this articular section, just that I missed it. I think throughout the whole of the series wanted to include it, at least in the one last painting that we are doing. Once I'm done with the purple, you will see that I add a bit of blue into the purple peach mix that we had. Then that blue with the ultra marine creates some more different value, which usually we do not get in any kind of simple color that you choose. That's one of the reasons I always say experiment with your colors, experiment with your shades. Do not just go ahead with whatever I am saying or I'm telling you. Just try your colors on a different and then go ahead with the final painting. I'm pretty happy how the sky has turned out and I'm not going to touch it anymore. I would let it dry and clean up the space of my castle a bit more. That part of the castle is majorly in snow and we have to show it in the white, whatever is available. You can see that my colors are not staining to a great extent, which is a very good thing or which is a very good news for anyone who is a watercolor artist. The better is the concentration of your color, or the less chaining is your color, the better would be the final outcome if you are planning to lift out your colors from a particular place. Secondly, if you are adding a lot of concentration in terms of adding more pigments and making it darker, then lifting out that particular area may become a bit more tougher. Whereas if you are having a very medium kind of values, which means that you have about. 60, 70% water, and 20 to 30% of your paints into it. I'm pretty sure about it that lifting the colors will be way more easium. Once we have lifted the colors, let's go ahead with the bottom area where we did spread water already, and now we are going ahead with our ultramarine color. Ultramarine has been my favorite color as you guys all know. So adding some more of it, you can already see that the paper is having two different shades or 23 different shades. Now, why I say 23 different shapes? The colors or the pigments do not stay at a single place and it's not even, they just move around and some of the spaces will have more of the blue, whereas some of the spaces will have less of blue. That is what is all about gratulating colors. But I love to use granulating colors to a great extent in my paintings. They look amazing even for florals. And I do tell one who is into watercolors to use a bit of granulation in their watercolor. Every watercolor pigment has got its own property. And if you do not use that beautiful property of their own into your watercolors, I'm not sure how you are going to unleash all the beauty that's there in this medium. This medium is vibrant, beautiful, quick to work with, easy to handle, and all the good qualities are also there in this medium. That's one of the reasons I love to work through this medium completely. Okay. By the way, I forgot to tell you that we have to add the darkest value first and it is my pain scray you can also go ahead with in Nico. Once that is done we are going with the darkest brown. You can have Vk Brown or CPA. I usually make some amount of my burn siena into the shade of pain scray and get a darkest value like the one you're observing over here. Let's add some more of our darker values. What happens is, once you add the darkest of the values, they will move a bit, which means that they may become bloom as the paper is still wet. And you are working with the wetness of the paper right now. There is no particular shine on the paper because of which you will not see the colors moving. To a great extent, you should know exactly the water control. Now this is all about the water control, which I have been telling you about. Water control has more to do with the wetness of the paper, which means that you should not have oodles of water on top of your paper, but you should have the correct amount, which does allow your colors to move only to one particular extent. That means it is not moving a lot, Whereas it is not concentrated only to a specific area so that they become dry patches or they are just dry marks. The painting that you do is always a combination of your dry as well as we both the techniques. It is wet on dry and wet on wet that we use. But initially when you are just applying the colors are covering the whole of the space. It is wet on wet, which you will experience in most of the paintings. Let's start working on our castle area. I'm going ahead with the darkest value of brown. It is a mix of my bon Sienna and some amount of paint spray. And then adding it towards the bottom part of the top roof area. You can see I'm going with my thinnest brush as of now. Then I may switch the brush to size three or size two. As we progress with the broader areas, it's important to highlight some of the darker values here so that the shape looks more organic and it just looks like it is a snow covered castle roof area. Rather than just making it look like that, as simply not adding anything on top of it. Yes, I would add a bit of lines here and there and I'm breaking the lines at few of the intervals. You can see I do not want to add it everywhere. Going with my burn, Sienna burn. Siena is one of my favorite colors again for the winter season. And then just adding it and taking it towards the middle of the castle, once that parts done, would go ahead and add some more of the burn. Sienna. As we complete the middle part. And then we are going with our darkest value you can absorb. This is again a mix of your burn Siena and some amount of paints, gray or indigo, whatever you have. And then again, adding burn Siena towards the bottom medium. I'm not going to show any reflections, I mean to say any shadows and hence we can go ahead and leave it just by adding some amount of lighter values towards the right and some of the Garcer values towards the left, but not showing exactly the darker or the lighter shadows is what I have in my mind. Adding the windows, it is more of wet on wet. And hence, you can just go ahead with your darkest value and add it as simple, simple lines. You will see that the colors will start moving to some extent. And then add the same colors for the other windows that we have on the castle. Adding more of my colors, darker values towards the left area, and then letting it dry. After this, I'm not going to touch it to a great extent or I will not keep touching it everywhere. I will leave it and then go towards the bottom area and add some more of the marks and dots here and there. This is again with the darkest value. Once that part is done, we have to go ahead with the background mountain or the hilly area. This is again the same color that is there on the sky. I'm trying to reflect the same color towards the hilly area portion as it is also covered with snow. Adding some more of my Naples yellow over here and then the blue on the left. I will keep my backgrounds lighter than my foregrounds, which is one of the reasons you will see that there will be only a few of the darker batches coming in for the background. And more of the darker batches, or whatever we have, is majorly to do with the foreground areas going ahead and adding some more drops of paints here and there as you can observe. And once this part is done, we will go ahead and add some of our lines. Now these lines are majorly the dry plants that we usually observe when we are in any snowy landscape area or any of the areas which have these dry plants. Majorly, because there is no a leaf anymore on the plant and there is only some of the dry lines which are existing at this point, I will keep on adding these dry plants to some more extent because this is quite a meditative process. And I'm pretty happy with how it helps me to concentrate. It relieves me from a lot of stress. It also allows me to just have fun with my brush of the lines. I, some of the lines I just made straight. You can have as much fun with your brush as much as you want. There's a lot more opportunity when you continue to do simple thing again and again and again. You can play with your brushes, the tip of your brush. Understand your brush in a better way and be comfortable with your brushes. This is something that I have allowed myself to soak in the time that it needs to be comfortable with any brush that I use. Because every brush is very different. And with time, of course, there is a lot of wear and tear in your brushes that I have observed. Always, always try your brushes before you work on a funnel painting. That's something which I always, always say, do wash it at regular intervals with the help of the soap. Let it try, and never leave your brush in water. That's something which I always, always truly say to everyone who is working with watercolors. You should not dip your brush in the water for a longer period of time. What happens? It's completely spoils your brush, which we really, really do not want for any of our brushes. All the brushes are expensive and hence we should take care of them as much as possible. Once this part is done, I would allow this painting to try off completely and then add anything more if needed. Be just the way you observe by I'm adding some more lines, some more plants, something or the other detail I keep adding. It's time to have a look at all the key takeaways from this final painting and then move on to our conclusion part. Sharing my learnings with you don't run after perfection, because watercolors is only about pure enjoyment. It's not about fantastic painting. Enjoy, whatever you do that will make the final painting come your way very easy. Don't leave your painting midway. Try to complete it. Failure is a part of the process, so keep enjoying the process and keep rocking with watercolors.