Watercolor Sunset at the Pond | Only 5 Colors!

1. WATERCOLOR Sunset at the Pond Trailer: Hi, welcome to this tutorial on a sunset over a pond. This is going to be so much fun using five colors. That's right, five colors to do this piece. And all those starks that you're seeing in the preview here is going to be mixed up using just those five colors. I do not have a black, so' will be mixing it, and I'll show you how. So from the sketching all the way until the final completion with the signature, I'll show you step by step how to complete this piece. And I look forward to working with you and seeing your projects. All right. Let's go ahead and get this tutorial started. I'll see you in the next clip. 2. Materials: For this tutorial, you're going to need a block of watercolor paper. You'll need bum yellow, orange, crimson, a blue and a ultimarne blue. Brushes of various sizes. I have a 1 " and a half inch flat, a couple of rounds and a pencil. A spoon. This is what I used to transfer water to my palette. I have my palette here. You'll also need a jar of water. La, this is probably all that you'll need. However, if you feel like you need it, you can also get a ruler to help you make straight lines. That's all the supplies that you'll need. Go ahead and get your stuff out, and we will start painting. 3. Making the foundation | The Sketch: The next section, we're just going to sketch in a basic horizon line here. This is to a pond. This actually belongs to my aunt Marty. She has a wonderful pond with a whole bunch of, let's see, small mouth bass are in there, and then she has a whole bunch of ducks select to visit. It's just a beautiful pond. It's the shape of a kidney, a kidney beam, and the sunset was just so pretty. She posted this picture on Facebook. That's the reference you're seeing is a picture of my Aunt Marty's pond. There's a bunch of little trees and bushes on the side here. I know that the picture is a bit more complicated than the sketches I'm doing here. But the job of the artist is to simplify what we're seeing to get just the idea across. I'm not going for photorealism. I'm going for more of an impressionistic approach, and I want you guys to have fun with this, too. We're going for photo realism, a lot of times to get bogged down in those details, and it's not as fun anymore. 4. Mixing your Colors | Don't miss this step!: This is the part where we mix colors and do the sketch. Here's my spoon. I bet you're wondering what I use this for. Well, it's as simple as that to grab water with. Instead of going back and forth with my brush like I am here and ticking forever, I will instead use the spoon to get the exact amount that I want to transfer into my palette. That way, I can fill up each pallete well with one quick movement and that will be it. I don't have to go back and forth 1 million times. Use a spoon if you have one, and if you don't, dropper is also very convenient, but a spoon is free and cheap defined. That's what I like to use. I think I blot this up because I dropped a drop of water on here. Here we go. I'm going to grab my colors and get this palette ready to go. I have my yellow. For the yellow in here, I only need a little bit, but I will possibly use more. Just put your colors into the palette for each section and mix them up. Also, keep in mind, we're doing wet on wet techniques. You might also want to mix a little bit more paint to the water ratio than you think you might need. Whenever I mix my paints for my watercolor, I I try to make the consistency to be somewhat like whole milk. Anything less than that, the colors tend to get washed out. I always mix it to be about I always mix it to be somewhat of a whole milk consistency. Also, be careful of a lizard crimson. This is a very powerful color. You don't need too much for it to go a long way. Ultramarine blue is a fantastic color. You can see I use it a lot. Oh, I got a whole bunch of paint on me. Well, after I I do tend to use the ultramarine blue quite a bit. I actually had to go to the store and get more. Ultramarine blue is one of the most versatile blues. I use it in almost everything. That and also a bird's umber, but we won't be using bird umber today. Looks like I'll have a blue nail posh on a couple of my fingers for the rest of this course. Because I'm not going to get up and wash my hands. I'm just going to keep going. Let me clean this up real quick and we'll get started. When you are mixing your paints, you will always want to ush your paint brush into the palette. You want to make sure you hear that scrubbing noise because there could be globs of paint on your paint bristles. You won't know necessarily until you move your brush across your painting, and then you have streaks. So always mix for like 30 seconds. This is a very essential part of every single watercolor painting. If you don't get your colors right before you start and have the amount that you need, you might get halfway through doing a sky and realize, Oh, no, I don't have enough blue. You mix up more blue, and then by the time you get back to painting, your sky that you have that's already halfway there is already dry. And then you'll have this harsh line across your sky and that's not what you want. Here I'm testing my colors to make sure it's the vibrancy that I want. If it's not as dark as you see in the palette, then that means you need more paint. Add more paint to your palette if it's not enough. If you have a little too much water in your palette well, like I do here, you might actually want to move it over to another palette well because it might be too and splash over and create a mess. I am being a little bit messy here. I have a little too water in my well. I like to fill my wells about halfway up. That's usually a good amount because then you can stir and not have to worry about any spilling over like you just saw there. But, there's a little extra paint, another spot, or you can just soak it up. I don't want to confuse you guys, so I'm going to soak this up real quick. Always good to have a napkin to suck up those messy bits. Test your color. Is it the consistency that you want and if it is, then you can stop there, or I want it to be a little bit more vibrant, so I'm adding more paint to the water ratio. Always test out your color see. I still had it two full. I'm moving some over so I can mix freely. I was very excited for this tutorial because the colors are so much fun, and I'm mixing really fast, and you can see the excitement has gone to my palette where I'm being a little bit more messy. But that excitement hopefully gets across because I really enjoyed this painting, and I hope that you'll enjoy watching this whole thing and painting your own and sharing it, letting me see what you're up to, because I don't know if anybody has seen this thing. They could have watched it, but they may not share what they paint it. I think maybe half the students who take my courses actually post their work. It's sad because I really want to see what everyone's up to. And I can give pointers or I can admire or do the Oreo method like, Oh, here's what I liked, here's what can improve, and here's another thing I liked. I'm not really the harshest teacher in real life when I teach at college, but on skill share, you know, it's kind of the same thing. I take that same enjoyment here as I do in person. It's always fun to see what people do and how much they've learned. So that orange is pretty good, but I think I can do a little bit better. Again, I filled my wells to full during my demonstration here, so I moved some over to the well next to it. I'm mixing in more orange. It's a little difficult to see. It's very thick. I know it looks thick, but I promised you that's what you want. You also want to have enough water. There we go. I mixed enough paint. That's the difference there. I have more vibrancy by adding just a little bit more paint. Onward to my yellow color. This will be the last one that I mix up. Before moving on to the tutorial. I know that this is a pain to get through. I'm just showing you this all because this is so essential to getting painting with the vibrancy that you're looking for. That's why waterfller has a bad rap about being washed out. It's because people don't spend that 5 minutes. Literally, that's it. 5 minutes mixing your paint before they start. They're so excited to start painting that they forget, Oh, I need to have enough paint, I also need to have enough pigment to the water ratio in here. I'm going to say that a lot in this class. Because I've seen so many of my in person students not take that time, and then they have pastel looking paintings versus vibrant ones. 5. A Wash of color | Sunset and Pond: We are going to get our large brush. This is a Kolinski 1 " flat. Mimic Kolinski, I don't use the one, the actual fur. And get your brush saturated in water, and you're going to cover the entire painting with water. That's right. You're going to do a nice, beautiful sheen across the entire thing. Make sure to get every single corner. If you think you may have missed a portion of your painting with your water wash that you're doing right now. Then pick your piece up and move it around as if you're doing gold panting. Then you'll see that there's a, a shine from the lights above you. And if you don't see some of that paper shining at you and it looks matt, the matt is the paper that is still dry. You know to cover that with your paint brush with the water. It's going to take a second. I might speed it up for a second here. Preparing your surface is just as important as preparing your paint. Make sure that you lift it up, look around. Is there any dry spots? I have a little dry spot right here and cover it with the water. Make sure the entire surface is wet. Then once you do, we can get the painting started, but it's very important to get every single piece covered. All right. Here we go. I have my four inch, sorry. My number four round. I have my cadmium yellow. I go do a circle movement, and this is where the sun is going to go. Only some of this painting will be yellow. Most of it will be orange and blue and some of that red crimson. But just this small section where the sun is going to is going to be yellow. Now I'm adding in my orange. The reason why we have all of that paper covered in water for this wash is we're letting the water help us paint. It's letting the water do the work. So grab your orange and continue moving around. As you can see, I moved over to a half inch flat. I like using a half inch flat for sunsets and skies just because it's a really nice brush. You can do it with other brushes. You don't have to have a flat. You can do a mop brush. You can do a large round like a number ten or bigger. For the larger the surface, the bigger the brush I would recommend. So when I cover the whole painting, I had the 1 " flat. I moved to the 1 " flat because I realized even the half inch isn't quite big enough to cover the area that I wanted. So there we go. Don't worry about the blue changing the orange into green green actually does happen in sunset. You just don't typically think of it unless you train your eyes to see it. I remember the first time I saw green in a sunset, was with a painting by Kirk Randall. He's one of my art heroes. Although he does oil paintings, his paintings of sunsets included green in the sky. And that makes sense, right? When yellow and blue touch, they turn into green. The same thing happens in the sky. It's not just on the painting palette. So if you see that color green, it's actually a beautiful mixture. People love it, and those paintings tend to sell. You know, the buyers, they don't realize that they love it, they may not know what they're saying. But they know it looks right. As a painter, we don't think that works, but we sometimes forget to paint what we see and not what we think we see. Here I'm just going back and forth between a few different brushes. Number four with the yellow. I'm putting back in some of that yellow that was lost to that initial wash of orange. Now I'm putting it back in because I wanted a little bit more yellow in this piece. A little bit more here. And we will get to the lake part as well. We're not doing it in two sections. We're going to actually for my painting looks good. If you lift it up, you'll also be able to get the gravity of Earth to help you with the movement of the water and all the pigments and making sure they blend and be nice and smooth. Instead of doing big billowy clouds, we're doing misty looking clouds where they're not too thick, and that's why we're getting that even distribution of pigments. And there we go, I added back a little bit more of that yellow. Now, what's funny is that I'm having a art watercolor block. And for some reason, it's really warping and buckling on me, and it just keeps warping and buckling. Normally palettes art blocks like this don't do that. Anyway, I used my brush there to pull back some of my white back. Getting that sunspot back in there. I use my number four round to put back a little bit of that white closer to where the sun is supposed to be. All you have to do is wash your brush, pull off the water, and you can just touch that area. I'm going back in here with crimson, the water reflection, just so you know, the sunset will not be as tall as the sunset above the land will be because that's just how the photo looks. I'm trying to get as close to the photo color wise as I can. I'm not going for photo realism, again, we're going to be shortening that a little bit. Instead of just using that cobalt blue or whatever mid tone blue that you have, using that mid tone blue here, and then towards the bottom of the piece closer to where the viewer would be standing, I'm using that ultramarine blue to get that nice deep dark. You can see towards the edge, I already had my piece starting to dry up on me, so it's a good thing I got to it when I did. I'm just using my brush to push the paint around a bit, and now I'm going to pick it up and use gravity again to help me blend those colors, and it gets them to move around so those lines, those streaks are not as drastic. Just a little bit more blue there. When you hold it upside down, some of that blue moves away from the edge and you have to put it back. Again, use gravity to assist you with this. Gravity is your best friend as long as you have enough water in this particular case. This is a wet on wet technique for the entire thing that we've been doing. When you do went on wet techniques like this, it does take a while to dry, so I'm going to hold it like this for a little bit. You help encourage it to move around. But then this is the water doing the work for you at this point forward. This is letting the water spread that pigment for you. I'm going to take this outside and have it dry in the sun because it's going to take a long time for it to dry. I'll see you in a few minutes and we'll be back in just a bit. 6. Land and Reflections | Get that deep dark: This is the next section after the painting has dried. All right. Welcome back. Thank you for your patience. I know that having the painting dry is a very tough process. And sometimes people get impatient, they end up running their piece, but I promise that if you were to let the water do the work, put it outside to dry if you have to because sometimes if you're in a more humid environment like it was for me today, then it could take 20 minutes for it to dry or longer. So putting it outside in the sun will help it dry much faster. Some people also use a hair dryer to get their piece to dry quicker. Now, keep in mind if you have a hair dryer, that painting could move your pigments around if you're too wet. So let it dry a little bit first before you use your hair dry. All right. So let's see here. My painting is dry. Don't worry. I set my palette down on a dry painting, but I'm just going to show you some more of these colors up close. And get these colors to mix. I want to do a purple. I want to get a nice deep dark with a purple. Since I don't have black in my palette, I'm going to make something close to it. I'm going to mix three colors. It's going to be my ultramarine blue, my lizard crimson, and my cadmium orange. It's going to be like 95% the purple. And then just a tidbit of that orange to make it a little bit more muddy versus a pure purple. This way, it'll look a little bit more black versus a pure purple. Get your illsum crimson and keep mixing. And look at that. It's already so dark in my palette. But that's just ultramarine blue and my crimson. So if you would like that, if you like how it looks, that's what I would recommend using. If you would like it to be a tiny bit darker and a little bit less of the vibrant purple and more of a muddy purple, just use a little bit of that cadbum, and that should work. So also, remember, we're making this very thick. And this is something that I do all of the time. I mean, you're seeing right here, how often I am mixing my colors and testing out. Here we go. Test out. Look how black that looks. Amazing. Okay. Hopefully, you guys get something similar. If you're getting more of a gray or a light purple, then that means once again that you'll have to use more of that paint mixed into the mixture you have there. Or maybe you have too much water. So increase the amount of pigment to the water ratio. Okay? So once you have that tested out, test keep testing, keep adding paint until you get to that darkness level that you want. Test it on the side, don't do it on the painting. You can always do layers, but why not do it right on the first try on the painting versus trial number three or four or seven, because sometimes it takes that many layers if you don't have it dark enough in your palette. Close to the sun, we're going to use crimson because the sunlight is going to create a glare effect. That's what you tend to see in cameras, and that happens with our eyes too. Right here next to where the sun will be. Use crimson for that ground. The bank of the pond that right there. I'm scribbling, I'm scrubbing and I'm hearing a brush sound. If you hear something dry, that is a dry brush technique. I'm scraping my brush across to get that tree look in the branches and everything without having to dot every single leaf. Now I'm moving over from crimson to some of that blue, and it's mixing on the page into that purple, right? But now I'm moving over from a light purple to a dark. Look at that. Look at that. There we go. Now I'm moving it over and I'm continuing with this and pulling it up. I'm going to use two different brushes here. The one in my left is a half inch flat, and then the one in my right is a I think it's a six. It's a six round that I have there. It might be a five. But I'm just going back and forth in between a couple of different colors. I used the crimson, and then I used a black that I have there, and I have those two tones blending into each other to create a texture of a tree. Here we go. I'm just adding some more details. I had some orange, adding a few more highlights on the sides of those tree bush parts of the leaves. Because trees are rounded. They're not just flat. You want to create a illusion of the tree, being one giant bush, and the sunlight hitting it in different places. The further away it is from the sunlight, the darker, closer facing the sun, that's going to be the lighter orange area. Here we go. I have a couple of those taller trees right here. I think there's three of them. I'm going in between mixing a little bit of my blue and my crimson to make that purple. This is not the dark purple, this is the light one. Hopefully you mix up enough black for this section. I know that it can be difficult to guess how much paint you need. It's always better to make a little bit more than you think. I know that sometimes in my class, my students will create just enough to cover a third of what we've just did, and then they'll have to mix up more. Hopefully you mix up more than you think because then you can avoid that. All right, so I'm just filling in this whole section here. This is one giant section of trees are all kind of conglomerated together, and I have a relatively dry brush here, and that's how I'm able to create that effect. I'm scumbling. That's another word you can use. Scumbling my brush across, and on some of those areas, I'm dipping my brush back in to put it back where it needs to be and doing a wet and wet on the brushing areas I just did. Here I am scumbling again, doing these smaller brushes, smaller trees. You can kind of see the whole picture kind of coming into play now. So right now I'm just doing from the water up. This is the bank. This is the tree standing on the bank and the bushes. I have not done the reflection yet. Don't worry. We'll get to it, but we have to finish what is above before we can do the reflection. After all, we can't reflect anything unless we have something above it first. Make sure you do that groundwork first. Groundwork. All right. So I'm going to go in with my half inch flat, and I'm going with my reflection. I'm kind of just of moving my brush side to side. It's horizontal. To the piece. It's horizontal to that land, and I'm creating some ripple, some waves by doing some dotting motion. Now, with a flat, you can get a nice horizontal line, depending on how you're holding it. Practice this on the side first, if you're unsure. And if you can't get perfect ripples, don't worry about that. As long as we're kind of getting the idea of what is above it down below, it's okay. It does not have to be a perfect representation unless you want a clear, no wind pond. Just keep moving your brush side to side and continue moving it, so it's lighter in the middle towards where the sun is, and then it gets darker the further away. And side to side motions, the little dots with your brush. And we're so close. I mean, if you just keep doing a little bit more, we're so close to getting to where we need to be. Kind of blurring out the edges here because you kind of want your attention to be more in the middle of the painting and not the sides. So I kind of like if there's any highlights that are towards the edges of the piece, I like to kind of blur those out. Now, right near the water line, I'm going to go back in with a smaller brush. This is a number two, and I'm grabbing that dark black that we made, the purply black, and I'm putting it near the water's edge. This really helps emphasize the water line. Now, when you're doing the reflection of the tree trunks, you're going to want to do just vertical, perfectly vertical, not slanted to the side, but an almost perfect flip of what the tree looks like. It's basically just squiggly lines for those trees, tree trunks. I'm just going to add a couple more ripples in here, and then once these ripples are in, we're pretty much done. That's basically it. Go ahead and do a couple final touch ups and then F you are complete. Except for one last thing, you might want to put maybe a couple more details. I know that other than a couple of little details here and there, like maybe you want to add a couple of branches to the tree, you got to do your signature. So grab a very small brush or you can use a pencil or pen to make your signature before I'm doing my signature. I'm going back. Adding some more darks here forgot. I want more darks. Now, detail time. Just go ahead and add in a few more details wherever you feel like you need them. It doesn't take too much. You just need a little bit. When you're doing your signature on the piece and you think you're done, grow color that you think would stand out, I'm going to pick my crimson that will look the best on this particular piece near the edge. This is my number two pointed round. I like using this one for signatures because it holds just enough paint, but then it's thin enough that I can do signature. You can also use a pencil for this, but I'm going to use my brush because I've learned how to do a signature with it, and I've gotten pretty good at it. Again, if you are not confident with your brush signature skills, just go ahead and use a pen or a pencil, and that will work just fine. As far as the placement goes for your signature. I recommend that you have an inch up or maybe a half inch up because you also have to keep in mind if you're going to have this matted or in a frame. You don't want your matting to cover your signature halfway or all the way. Make sure you have your signature a little higher up than right next to the edge. Otherwise, you'll cover it up with a mat. All right. That is the painting. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope to see your work. I would love to see what colors you use. Did you use orange or was it mostly crimson? Did you use an all purple the sunset? Or did you kind of follow as closely as you could with the colors I provided here. So, yeah, thanks again for joining me, and I look forward to seeing your work in the project section. Have a wonderful time, and I will see you in the next video.