Watercolor Winter Cardinal

1. Introduction: Hello, and welcome to my watercolor winter cardinal class. In this class, I will be demonstrating how I painted this cardinal using some exciting watercolor techniques. Wet into wet is the first technique I'll be talking about. And as we move through the painting, we'll be letting our various layers dry and we'll be adding some detail on top. I'll show you how I painted this background and how I mixed up my colors so that it looks cohesive. For the class project, you'll be painting your very own cardinal painting, and I absolutely love to see your work, please share it with the class when you're done, if you used a variation of these colors, I would love to see that too. 2. Supplies: So let's talk about the supplies I used for this watercolor cardinal. I also want to share with you that I did attempt to paint it the first time, and I didn't like my result. So here is just a reminder that it's okay if your painting doesn't work out the way you want it to. You can see here there were just some things I didn't really like about it, and I'm sure I could fix them or maybe fix this hard edge that's starting to form. But I thought I want to start over and work on another one, and so that's what I did over here. I've been painting for years and years, and I still have paintings that just aren't working out the way I planned. And so I do start over. Sometimes I work on the other side of my paper. I do use arches, cold pressed paper. That's my go to watercolor paper. For finished paintings. However, when I'm practicing, I definitely use cheaper paper because I'm frugal. So I have some recommendations if you're looking for some more inexpensive paper to practice on. I use Canson and whatever I can find at the craft or art store. So as far as brushes go, I'll be using a handful of different round brushes. I do have a number 12 that I think is helpful for doing larger areas of wet into wet painting. So you'll see me use this number 12 by Princeton. I really like these neptune brushes, but any sort of large round will work. It's just to pre wet the bird's body, and then you'll see me drop in color. I also use it for the background, and that way I can quickly add color without it drying too fast. That's why I like using a bigger brush for larger areas. And then I use a handful of smaller brushes. I do have a number six. I do like these silver black velvet. They are expensive, but I find myself using them quite a bit. The reason why I like them is they have ultra fine point when they're wet, so you can get super fine details. Although I did use an even smaller brush for some of these feathering details. I have a number four round that also comes to a nice point. And several other synthetic brushes that I don't have here at the moment, but they were just cheap inexpensive brushes that I got from the craft store. As far as colors go, I tried to keep a limited palette, and you'll see throughout a lot of my paintings, I don't like to work with tons of colors, so you'll never see me working with, like, ten colors at a time. Although never say never, maybe I will. I tend to mix all my colors, so I rarely paint straight from the tube. For my red, I used Windsor red, and I don't have the tube available, but a similar red you could use would be a cadmium red, although it's very bright. So I did tone it down a bit with some naples yellow, which is a warm yellow, or you could also use yellow ochre. That would be a nice warm yellow. It just brings it down a notch. It makes it a little bit more of an earthy color. As far as my blues, you'll see in the bird, I've got some of these plum colors in the shadowing, and that's because I mixed up. My winds are red with some cobalt blue and a little touch of my yellow. So when you use red, yellow, and blue, in general, when you mix them all together, you'll get a very neutral gray. And if you mix them all in a saturated mixture, you'll get a pretty dark gray or even almost black. I also used ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. And I use those two mix together to get a pretty dark color that I used in the eye and some of the darker detailing in the wings and the branch. And if you don't have burnt sienna, you can use burnt umber, raw umber will work, too, or Vandyke brown, any sort of a medium to dark brown will work. And ultramarine blue is a good blue that mixes into a nice deep gray when you mix it with burnt sienna or burnt umber. And so that's pretty much what I used. I did use some of that burnt sienna in the branch, and my background is that kind of purply grayish color, which is just a mixture of cobalt blue. My winds are red, and I do have a touch of my yellow in there just to create that kind of soft gray. Let's see what else? I did talk about paper. Arches paper is what I recommend. I think the important thing is, if you don't have arches, there's other great brands out there, too, like fabriano get something that is 100% cotton. That's important because some papers are made with a cotton and wood pulp mixture, and it just doesn't result in even washes. At least that's what I've found. And so try and find something that's 100% cotton and 140 pounds. That'll help your papers stay flat. I also used a pencil, and you'll see that I do have a traceable outline of the cardinal if that helps you because I'll be focusing on watercolor techniques rather than anatomy of a bird. I could do a whole other class on that. But for this particular class, I just wanted to get right to painting. So if you like, I have a traceable outline that you can use and a reference painting available, too. So as you work through this class, I have a video that talks about water control. And it's important because we'll be using wet into wet painting techniques when we do the body and the wing. And so it's just helpful to have an idea of what your brush might look like when you're using these different watercolor techniques. So hopefully you find that helpful, and let's get to painting. 3. How wet should your brush be for wet into wet?: Of the trickiest things about watercolor is learning water control. What do I mean by this? The unique thing about watercolor is its fluid nature compared to acrylic or oil painting. We use water to dilute the paint to make lighter colors and values, and use less water to make the paint more concentrated and richer in value. So one of the questions I get from my students quite a bit is when you're working in the wet into wet technique, how do you know how much water should be on your brush? By controlling the amount of water on our brush, we can then control how far the paint spreads while using the wet into wet technique. How I make a puddle of paint on my palette. I like to make the puddle not too light. A medium consistency or darker value will work best. I take a look at my brush. If there's enough paint on my brush, it will hold its shape and be somewhat full. I can then drop in color into a pre wet area on my paper and watch how it spreads. If my brush is too saturated and full of water and paint, it will push out the existing paint on the paper, creating a bloom. Sometimes this is intentional and it can produce some really wonderful effects. But sometimes it's not intentional and you can remove the excess water by dabbing your brush on your paper towel or letting a drop slide down your water container. Keep in mind that time is also a factor in watercolor. As the paint starts to dry on your paper and you try to drop in more color, it will create some hard edges and blooms. The paint you drop in will push out the pigments on your paper that aren't quite dry yet. Also, if there is a section of your painting that is still wet and you accidentally touch it with your brush, the paint will bleed into the area also. I do this intentionally in many of my floral paintings to create some fantastic soft blends of color on my paper. And then to really pack a punch, I drop in some very concentrated dark paint into the centers of my flowers. I use a smaller brush to drop in the color since a larger brush might add too much water and make the dark paint spread too far. Now, if there isn't enough paint and water on your brush, it will look like this. You might be able to bend the body of the brush, and it won't hold its shape as well. When you try to drop in color into a pre wet area, it won't work as well. Instead, your brush may actually soak up the wet paint that's already on the paper. I like to call this type of brush a thirsty brush because it acts like a sponge, it's slightly damp but not saturated. And the watercolor molecules on the paper adhere to the brush and get soaked up into its fibers. It's a great way to soften hard edges, soak up excess water or paint, create rays of light or highlights within your painting. You'll get the hang of water control the more you paint. It's a skill that develops through muscle memory and continued practice. 4. First Layer, Wet into wet: Watercolor artists in this tutorial, I will show you how I painted this cardinal. At first, I started using a wet into wet technique to paint the first layer. I'll show you how I mixed up these different colors and how I painted a gorgeous background. The entire video is just over 20 minutes long, and I'll show you the supplies and the colors I used, as well as some alternatives in the notes section of this tutorial. Also, if you like, I do have a downloadable, traceable outline of this cardinal, which I think helps a lot of students because we want to get right to painting right away. So I just recommend lightly tracing the outline of the bird and the branch onto some cold pressed watercolor paper, and then we can begin. To begin, I'm just going to pre wet part of the cardinal's body, and you'll see that I'm going to leave the area right around the eye dry and you'll see why in just a minute here. I'm just using some clear water and a soft brush and just lightly covering the wing, the belly, and part of the head. The key here is just to make sure you don't have water pooling. You want it to just make the paper slightly damp, and this way, you can drop in color and you'll get a nice soft effect. So I'm just going to soak up any areas that look like there's too much water, and now I'm going to start painting in my bird. I've got a mixture of Windsor red and some naples yellow, which is a nice, warm, sort of an orangy yellow, and I'm just going to lightly apply it to the belly sliding down. And I'm thinking about where my highlights will be. Where are the areas that I want to be a little bit lighter. And in those spots, I'm just going to leave it white. You'll see me. Sometimes I touch up edges or soften edges with a thirsty brush, and I'll also be pulling out some tiny little feathers with my smaller pointed round. Now, going back in with my number 12, I'm going to create a darker, richer area here and I'm lightly adding some texture to the wings. I'm going around that eye Keep in mind that this first layer is not going to be super detailed. It's just to give an overall soft base layer to the cardinal. Now I'm going to mix up a more purply red using cobalt blue and Windsor red. It gives it more of a maroon violet look for the shadowing. I'm just going to drop it in here under the wing just to give it a bit of a shadow. It's important not to dip your brush back in your water at this stage. You do not want to have a brush that's super wet. Otherwise, it'll just push the paint that's already on the paper away, and you'll get these uneven blooms. I'll add this color a little bit into the wing, and on the sides of the head, you'll see I just softly make suggestions of feathers in the wing. And then with that one stroke, I'll be defining that shadow beneath the wing. And you can see with the wing, when you look at a cardinal's wing or even any bird's wing, you'll have layers of feathers. So you'll have some feathers that move in one direction, then you'll have another row of feathers that might overlap in the opposite direction. So I'm just making that suggestion here with my paint brush. Now, in order to mix up this really dark color, since cardinals have that dark mask around the eye and the beak area, I've got a mixture of my three primaries, so I have my Windsor red, touch of that naples yellow, and then cobalt blue, or you can use an ultramarine blue, which I do use later to give a bit of a darker color. And that gives you a nice black, but it's not black from the tube. It's a black that you create by mixing these three primaries. And if you add more water, you'll get a lighter gray. Now, you can see it's pretty saturated here. Now, I'm using that same mixture with my smaller brush, and I'm just giving the wing some definition and some feathers, some more definition here, some shadow. Now, most of the bird's body is still damp, so I'm able to just lightly put in color and it'll softly fade. But I have to be careful not to add too much water at this time, because otherwise, I will get hard edges and blooms. 5. Adding Depth and Shadow: Now, part of the bird's head is already beginning to dry, so you can see how I can layer on some of that darker red paint, and now I have to fade it into that background with a thirsty brush. So I'm taking a very fine thin brush here and just creating these little short strokes to suggest the crown on the top of the Cardinal's head. My red mixture is more saturated, so that just means I have less water, more paint ratio, and I'm using that to create more intense color on the top of the head. Now, I'm going to stop right here before I keep painting because the rest of the bird's body is still drying, so I want to make sure it dries completely. Now I'm going to add in that eyeball, and this is why I left the eye area white, and this is so that I can get some nice crisp detail between the eye and the outer edges. At this stage of the painting, the bird's body is still damp and I want it to dry completely before I add that second layer. So what I'm going to do next is just paint in the tail beneath the branch. And I apologize that I don't have it in the full frame of video, but you can kind of get the idea that the tail is just a few brushstrokes that go up into the body. This time I'm not pre wedding. You can see how I take some wet paint and I drag it across the paper, and I have a few areas where you can see that texture of the cold pressed paper coming through. That's a take on the dry brush technique. It's where you take your brush and instead of painting more vertically, you hold it on an angle and you drag it across the paper, and it skips over some of that texture leaving a beautiful textured appearance. So I've got a mixture of my Windsor red and cobalt blue, giving a nice, deep, purply red. You can also use ultramarine. I did use that in this video as well. It gives it a deeper, darker appearance. And I'm just touching in some areas behind that. Now the branch is white, but soon I will be painting it in. I'm just creating a bit of shadowing. So now that our first layer is completely dry, we can add in that beak and our background. So again, I'm using naples yellow with just a touch of my red, and it gives it a nice darker bottom half of the beak. And then I'm going to paint in the top half with just a more dilute version of that same mixture. And you'll see that I left a little bit of a space of white dry paper where the bottom of the beak is. And then I'm touching in some of my darker shadow mixture just beneath that crisp white area. And that just gives it the look of a shadow, of an overlap. It really helps to use a small pointed brush at this stage, like a number six or a number four. I'm going back in with my number four, and I'm just adding some teeny, tiny little feather, some texture detail right under the beak. You'll also notice that I left a highlight in the beak on the top. That's just dry white paper. 6. Painting the Background: I'm going to start painting in this branch now, and I'm using a mixture of burnt sienna and a lot of water to give it sort of a fluid textured appearance, and I will be dropping in some of my mixture of cobalt blue with Windsor red, sort of that purply gray mixture. That will help give it some shadow, and it will help tie in with my cardinal since the colors are similar. I skipped over where the feet are, and this is just because I I have room to make decisions on how I want my feet to look. And you can see I'm just dropping in a bit more brown in some areas to give the branch more of that natural look. Now here we've got that sort of gray mixture with cobalt blue and Windsor red, popping that in into a few areas might start adding some of the detail in the feet just to help it tie in a little bit with the branch. And I'm just making sure that I add more shadowing to the bottom of the branch. So always keep in mind where your light source is coming from. And if you don't like something, you can always fade it out a little bit. I'm at the point now where I think I'm going to start putting in my background, and the background is really quite simple. It's just cobalt blue, a very watery mixture of cobalt blue, a bit of that Windsor red, and a touch of that yellow. It can be yellow ochre or naples yellow, just to give a nice, gray, hazy blue color. And it helps to use a bigger brush here. I'm using a number 12. Keep in mind my bird is dry, so that really helps. And you can use this mixture to define areas of your bird. So the top of my bird's wing is a highlight, and so I'm using my background, a darker background to really make that highlight stand out. Then I'm using a thirsty brush, which is just a brush that has all the paint removed, and it's just a damp brush. And this just helps you fade any areas that are too hard. As you can see that's what I'm doing here. I'm lifting color, I'm softening some of those hard edges. We can add a bit of that background over here, too. I do leave some areas of white paper. It's just my personal taste, but I think it helps give a nice kind of atmospheric look. So now that the background is still damp, it would be a good time to add in a branch. So I've got a brown mixture here, and I'm just going to put in a branch right behind that one that the bird is sitting on. And you can see where the paint is still damp, you get these nice soft edges and where it's slightly dry, you've got more of those harder edges. Now, I'm thinking, should I add more? And I think I'm gonna leave it as is. I might add one more on the bottom, but I don't want to overdo it. I think I'll touch in some shadowing on the stick on the branch that the Cardinal's sitting on. Okay, I think this is funny. I didn't realize I do this, but I sort of act out what I'm gonna do before I paint, so you can see me here kind of imagining where my branches will go and what they'll look like in my head. And every time I go, no, no. Well, let's put one right here. There, call it done. Alright, I'm gonna stop there. I don't want to overwork this painting. I think it's good. 7. Final Details: Now, watercolor always dries lighter, so I thought the bird needed just a little bit more detail. So I'm going to mix up some puddles. I've got a mix of my Windsor red with touches of that yellow and then some more of a plum shadowing with that cobalt blue and Windsor red. Then I'm going to add my burnt sienna and ultramarine into a really dark puddle over on the bottom right. And I'm just going to add a bit more detail, some richer color into the wings using a smaller brush here, a number six, I just add some feathers moving diagonally and then touching in some of that shadow color. I'm going to make sure that the bottom of the wing is fairly dark. This will show a shadow even better. Then I'm going to use a thirsty brush and soften that edge. And then add that mixture of black that I made. Thirsty brush. So a thirsty brush is just a damp brush, and you use it like a sponge to sort of soften areas. Then I'll define these other feathers up here. Now, they look a bit harsh. Those are hard edges. So I will soften them. I will blend them together with those other feathers. Here's my thirsty brush where I just soften some of those hard edges. And here, I've decided to merge those two feather areas together. I think it will just look better. So I'm adding in a bit of that darker maroon color to join them together. Then I'm going to add just a bit more my red to the upper part of the wing, softening that upper edge with the thirsty brush. Now, I tend to soften areas where the light hits that gives it more of a lighter reflective look like a highlight. Then I add just a touch of that darker color near the bottom edge. Now, since I added more color, some richer value into the wing, I need to do the same thing into the head. So I'm going to grab that bright red. Again, it's mixed with just a touch of that. You can either use yellow ochre or naples yellow, just a warm natural yellow. And I will be softening this. You can see here. Again, I just want to repeat because some people might not be familiar with thirsty brush. It's a brush that doesn't have any color on it. It's just damp with water, and you use it just to soften any sort of hard lines. Adding that deeper red around the eye, and then a little bit here and there into the wing. You can also use that thirsty brush to soak up or pick up any blobs of paint that you don't want on your paper. I'm just going to add two quick brush strokes into the tail here with that deeper red, that rich bold red color and a bit of that shadow color. Now, I decided that the belly of the bird needed to have a bit more color, some deeper values. So I'm pre wedding the belly, just the belly. And now I can drop in some of my dark shadows, some more saturated red the reason why I pre wet this area is because I wanted to have sort of a nice, soft blending of the colors, so they merge together, nice and smooth. So I've got that red. I did leave a little bit of a white highlight in the center of the belly there, and now I'm adding in that shadow color, that plum color just beneath the wing. See how it softly fades into that red. That's what's nice about using this wet into wet technique. Then I'm going to clean up the edges around the bird with a thirsty brush. That's just a damp brush, going around the outside of the belly here, just sort of lightly tickling it, soaking up any sort of paint or hard lines that might be forming. There we go. And as always, it brings me so much joy to see your watercolor paintings. So if you feel like it, please share them with me on Instagram or email or wherever you like. 8. Closing Thoughts: Well, now that we've wrapped up our watercolor cardinal class, I really hope you've enjoyed this lesson, and please upload a photo of your finished painting into the project section of this class. And if you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out or leave a review. I love hearing feedback from you and I love helping you learn watercolor.