Watercolor with Me: Snowy Winter Landscape

1. Welcome!: Let's paint a snowy landscape. Hello everyone. Just a Cassandras here of color me creative art.com. Welcome to my lesson. Today, we're going to paint a snowy landscape together. I would love for you to paint along with me in this class is designed for you to be able to do that. So we'll start with the sky and snowy mountains as our background will add a middle ground of trees that are sort of a forest in the distance. And then we'll add a more prominent evergreen tree in the front. I'll even show you how to paint a little bunny silhouette in this class. As we paint this snowy landscape, we're going to practice our watercolors skills. We'll be doing wet on wet, went on dry, leaving the white of the paper, letting the color flow. We will discuss things like composition and how your eye moves around the paper all while enjoying a wonderful painting process of creating a snowy landscape. So what are you waiting for? Let's get started painting this lovely snowy landscape. Let's have some fun with watercolor and learn a lot along the way. I can't wait to see you in class. 2. Supplies: For years applies for this class. You need basic watercolors supplies plus a couple of extra. So you need 140 pound cold press watercolor paper, a variety of brushes. I'm using. Rather large brush and in-between hush and a rigor which has the long bristles, but you could use a fine line or in place of that, you may need a pencil if you want to draw in your snowy mountains or even your trees. And a pallet knife is useful for adding some snowy texture. You also need watercolour paint. A cloth to jars of honor, for cleaning your brush. And white Guam using him Graham whitewash. The brand doesn't matter so much, but you want some whitewashed or you could possibly use acrylic ink. But this white is helpful very much for a snow. Since we're painting a snowy day and hips. No, my fingers aren't really, it's Walsh. Okay. So let's get started. 3. Snowy Landscape - Sky and Mountains: Okay, let's get started with our main painting. Now the first step is to divide our paper into sections. We have background, the Middleground, and the foreground. So that's going to define the areas where we are going to be painting each thing in the background. We're going to sketch and paint a mountain, a snowy mountain, and the sky in the middle ground will do the trees, the background sheets, and then the foreground will do a foreground tree and some snow. I've lightly sketched in the idea of mountains. I'm not going for realistic, I just want the idea of mountains. And now I'm erasing the pencil line because I'm painting snow and I don't really want the line to show very much. So we'll start by painting wet and wet. So i'm applying clear water with my brush. Now turn my paper sideways just to make it easier for me. There's no real reason it has to be straight up even though we know it's the sky, right? So implying an even wash up water across the paper. I don't want puddles there, I just want a nice even layer. And so I'm looking at the water and seeing how much is there and spreading it out. And then following along the top edge of the mountains that I drew. So I'm going to be painting the sky and not the mountains right now. In my palette, I'm putting a very light mixture of ultramarine blue, peacock blue, and a little puddle of violet. Now these have lots of water and they're going to be making very light colors. And always when you're painting wet and wet, it's going to dry even lighter because you're adding the water that you've already put on your paper. So starting along the edge of the mountain that I drew and into that Wet Water as a layer. I'm adding my paint and I'm just picking up the different colors that I have prepared and I'm adding it. And if you see me taking my brush to the side, to my palette, I'm just picking up a little bit stronger version of the color to make my sky a little bit darker or brighter. And I'm not worried about making like specific clouds or anything like that. I'm just putting in a mixture of Color. And it will convey the idea of a sky with color and that there are some maybe clouds in the distance and that sort of thing. So it's not Barry and illustrate it. It's more of an abstract or impressionistic kind of sky that we're working on. I did also decide that I wanted to add some red violet into my sky. So I'm getting a mix of colors and I'm also going to add that peacock blue. And before I'm done, now keep in mind when you're painting wet in wet, you have to pay attention to how wet and dry your paper and your pain is becoming as long since wet you can keep adding that painting. But once it starts to dry and starts to look less shiny or not shiny at all. You can't really add more. You need to let it dry completely before you add another layer if you choose to do so. Now what I wanna do next is sort of connect the Milton's to my sky. Right now I just have a hardline everywhere the top of the mountains are. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to paint water onto Part of the mountain and then I'm going to touch into some of the edges. Now when I touch these edges and the water touches the paint that's already on the paper. There are two things that can happen. One is if I have a lot of water, it can push up into the sky area. And the other is that if I don't have too much water, that paint can flow down onto the mountain and connect to those and sort of act like color on the snow from the sky. If you find that when you put the water on the paper and you touch into the paint that's already there, that the water flows into your paint because you've gotten more water than you expected. You can always tip your paper, tilted just a little bit and let that flow back down and that will solve that problem. So on the right side of this, Milton, I am very carefully adding in super light shadow over here because I want it to be almost the white of the paper. And I'm quite sure that you can't really see the color that's in there. And at the same time, I'm drawing a little ridge That's going to be on top of the mountain. And the area that I just painted that's going to be the brightest side of this melted. Next, I'm preparing a really light shadow color. I'm mixing the purple with the blues to get a sort of gray purple. And I'm going to add that as a shadow just on the edge of that ridge, leaving a small white gap of the paper between where I painted the shadow and where I'm painting now. I'm also leaving a white gap between the sky and the top of the mountain. I'm painting very carefully and slowly as I'm painting that first shadow. But now I can just loosen up and blend all that together as I work my way down the mountain and I have captured the light on the top edges of that snow and it will be much more easy to see in the finished painting. Now you may be interested to know that as I'm painting this painting, I'm actually standing up. I don't wanna be too close to the painting and painting, I want to be able to stand back and take a look. And as I'm sitting back and taking a look, I want more color. And so I'm adding in that peacock blue in little bits and spaces where the sky is still wet. And also in the shadow on the mountain. Not only do I want more color, I want a little more contrast in that shadow area. So I mixed up a little bit more of that shadow color and I'm just dropping it into that wet area. Now. I started out painting these shadows, went on dry, but now it's a wet and wet process because I already have that wet paint there. So again, I'm paying attention to how much water, how dry the paper looks. I'd also want to add a more textured like contours, shadows around as you go down the mountains. So I added in a little bit more of you, more strokes of color and those are going to spread out and soften into that wet, nice mix that think this is looking pretty good here. I just want to get rid of that line at the bottom edge. So I'm just adding water there as well, just to soften that out and create some nice sought edges. As I'm continuing to look at this mountain and how it's developing. I decided I wanted a little bit of sunlight. So I have a really watery mix of a golden yellow and I'm going to add some tiny touches to the top of the mountain and a little bit in the sky. This'll just give a little hint of sunlight here and there, but it's not going to really show up a lot in the finished painting. I also want to soften out that area where I added the lights and the yellow into the sky and my sky was already starting to dry. So I did get a little bit of a blooming effect, but I'm okay with that. Let's let this dry and then we'll move on to working on our trees. 4. Snowy Landscape - Middle Ground Trees and Snow: Now that we finished the sky in our mountains, Let's move on to the middle ground or the middle 1 third that we sectioned off for our painting. And this is going to be for trees that are in the middle ground. So there's a forests between us and the mountains. And that's what we're going to be painting here. And again, we're going to continue with wet in wet technique here. So I'm reading the paper, I made sort of a wavy line across where you might were the forests hits the front for round, which is going to be snow, right? And I'm reading the paper or trying to wet it evenly, no pebbles again, we just want a nice even wetness. And then I'm going to mix a range of green colors. Saw him using indigo, I'm using Prussian blue, I'm using Van Dyke, Green, I'm using viridian, and I'm using also some sap green. So I have a really big variety of greens and a little bit of blues mixed in there because I want to create a nice just soft variety of free colors. These are like evergreen trees. So I have a mix of greens from light to dark basically. Now I consider painting these trees completely upside down, but honestly confused my brain a little bit. So I decided to go ahead and put my paper right-side-up. I can paint these trees just as easily with a term this way as the other wave may be a little bit more easily this way, but it was easier to wet the paper from the other direction. So you do what works for you in this case. And to get started on the trees, I just use the side of my brush and drops some color. In long tree is shapes into the wet area. I don't want to hard line at the bottom and I want to get a little bit of effects from adding water. They're kind of like I did with the mountains. And so I put a stroke of water across the bottom edge of the tree area and connected in places to the wet and wet area. And that color can flow out into that area as it wants to or the water can flow up into the color. Either way works for me. Now, just like the sky when we pay it wet and wet, we can just keep dropping colour in here as long as it's nice and wet and juicy and that's what I'm doing now. I'm putting, I started with a lighter color and now I'm going a little darker and I'll go a little darker and adding little bits of color. And you'll see some of it spreads out and softens and gives you that lovely, lovely, wet and wet effect. And it gives the idea that there's some trees way in the background. Now I want to add in what may be the ground area, and it doesn't really matter what color is. I just go with the screen that I'm using. I use a little dark version of it. So as I'm working, I'm getting a little darker and darker. And I'm also adding those darker areas. In. In smaller and smaller amounts. So they're taking up less space on the page, the dark areas. So it'll progress from light to a middle color to a darker color. Just to give a variety of depth and color in these background trees, I'm even going to add some little blue trees in just a minute just because it's fun and it's a painting. We can do what we want. This is a fantasy landscape. It's going to be snowy and fun when we're finished. And you can just play with it and enjoy and have fun and don't put so much pressure on yourself to make something perfect because, hey, nature isn't perfect and neither are we. And that's all okay. So for this section of the painting, I'm repeating the same process. I'm going to speed it up a little bit for you. But while you watch me paint, I want to share a little bit about the shape of the trees. So if you notice the trees are sort of triangular in shape and not everything is completely filled in. I'm dotting the paint. So I started with the vertical lines and then I get a little wider as I work my way to LA and I'm dotting the paint in there and letting it spread out in that wet and wet wash. And as I mentioned, I work a little bit darker and a little bit darker. So some of it looks like it goes into the background. Some of it comes forward a little bit and we have our mix and a variety of tree shapes. So as I'm serving, I'm going to let those trees start drawing a little bit and I'm going to pay attention to their wetness and how it's moving. Going to add a little bit of shadow in the snow, going down into the foreground of the painting. Now I'm using the same color but with a lot, lot more water. So there's barely any paint and then there's a lot of water. And I'm just adding shadows in places to add some contour to the snowy foreground. Now, I'm thinking about composition here and where your eye is going to travel across the painting. And so I made that sort of S shaped shadow that goes down to the bottom right, which will lead your eye into the painting once the painting is finished. As I said, I'm keeping an eye on our wet and wet wash of trees. And it's not to write yet is still quite wet. But it's not as shiny and wet as it was before. And so that means if I add some pain and now it's not going to move as much as it did when I first started adding. So I'm going to go in and add even more dark color here. And it's not going to, It's going to say, it's still going to spread out some, but just not as much. It's going to stay closer to where I put it. And it'll add a little bit more definition that we don't want a lot. Because again, these are the middle ground. There's still going to be sort of in the background and, and away from the viewer. But I do want a little bit more contrast and definition there. Now there are two things I want you to notice about what I'm painting now. First office here. Notice the hard edges at the top of this tree. That's because my paper is dry there. And I took advantage of that situation and added hard edges at that point. The next thing I want you to notice is the bloom effect along the base of the tree line. This was done by adding paint along the bottom to an already drying wash. So what I added was more wet memos already there and it created the bloom effect. If you look closely, you can see it happening right in this clip. Look at all those beautiful blooms. It really created a nice landscaping texture there and I really loved the effect. So you can do that or not, it's totally up to you, but it does show how important it is to pay attention to the wetness and dryness of your paper and your paint. Some working back and forth between the Middleground and foreground. And I saw a line on the paper that I just didn't really want there. So I'm adding some water but my water was dirty and 1000 oh no, what am I going to do? But I was able to blooded off with a tissue as you see, and it's sort of remove that a hard line and hard edge and it was all okay. So I was relieved. I was worried once I put that water down and it was dark. So now I'm using the end of a flat brush to create just a few more marks, just scratching into the paper a little bit. If your brush doesn't have that kind of point to the end, you could use like skewer, a palette knife, dip of a pallet knife, or something like that for that, or just skip that part altogether, completely up to you. Now I want to create a snowy texture idea. And so I'm just going to trip in and drop in some water drops and even some color drops. Now, again, because I'm adding more moisture to something that's already deriving. It's going to push the paint away and create plumbing effect. It's going to be across the trees. So you can see that happening right now. See the little white areas happening. That's where that lighter paint or water within and just pushed the paint and the pigment out of the way. So that's just another way you can use blooms and it creates the idea that there's snow and snow is falling. So I really like it. So once I've finished putting in some clear water drops and some lightly painted water drops. I'm going to then go forward and add white wash. I squeeze them fresh glass from the tube and I'm taking out a wet brush, adding a little bit of water to that guage to get it moving and to make it less opaque. And I'm just going to splatter right across ministries and actually pretty much over my mountains and everything like that over the sky because I want to have that falling snow feel and I'm also going to spotter. So more drops of water around that will also just have that slight hint of Guassian it. So it's going to give a like, a really light milky color like snow and the distance are transparency. Now remember the top of my painting is dry. The middle area with the trees is wet. So that washes kinda spread out a little bit and that wet area, but it'll be solid drops in the not MIT area. Now we'll let this dry completely and then we'll add our tree in the foreground. 5. Snowy Landscape - Foreground Tree: Now that our middle ground is dry, we can move on to painting our foreground tree. And I want to start by creating a Color series, which oil painters will do this sometimes, but I also do it with watercolor. And it's one of the reasons why I have this large palate. Because what I can do is create a gradation of light to dark, various colors, as you can see here in my palette, that I can dip into as I paint along. So I have a lighter and a medium and a darker and a very dark all in one big puddle spread out in a line. Once I have a lot of paint mix step, I'm going to sketch in very quick and loose where I want my tree. And I'm thinking about where am I goes from the top of the mountain down to the tree, down to the bottom following that S curve of the shadow. So now I just have a simple line as a reference of where I want to put my tree. And I'm going to start very small the top with a really light brush strokes and then sort of dance my brush from side, side, tapping it on the paper and creating that triangle shape of our ever for you. I'm working my way through the gradient, has paint starting with the lightest at the top and working my way down. And as I go down the tree and also getting more solid, I'm leaving less whitespace and creating more tree. If you I'm painting right over those background trees, right over what I painted before. I don't have to worry because I'm using a darker color and also because it's also just another kind of Green. I don't have to worry about any weird colors happening or anything that I don't want anything showing through. So I'm just doing some little swishing strokes, just some little dancing strokes and creating that triangle, leaving that whitespace, as I said, leaving some. And then I'll also go back and add in more dark as I go. Now I did switch to a smaller brush. And the reason I did that was because the other one that I've been using, it carries a ton of water and paint. And I don't need that much water and pain when I'm doing this. So I switched to a smaller brush. I could've continued, but I would have had to be more careful with lighter strokes. But this way I can really take advantage and make those sweeping, small-sized strokes that create the texture of the tree. You may notice that I'm giving a few dry brush effects and also that I have to go back to my palette more often to pick up paint. Once I get to the bottom of the tree, I'm just going to add some shadow just underneath the tree. And it's going to be essentially the same color. And not really too concerned about colors here. I just want my painting to be harmonious. And so this works for the shadow because the snows really going to reflect the colors that are above it. Now, I'm repeating the same process. I'm adding that dark the paint into the tree just like I did at the background, except this time it's not really wet in wet, although the tree is still wet, but I'm still working on mostly dry paper. I'm just going to add that dark in some places, leaving the lighter color to show through. Once I've completed that, I'm going to switch over to working on a little bit of grasses in the foreground. And so I have a little bit of green and a little bit of burnt sienna on my brush. And just going to do some super light strokes to paint in the texture of grass. I start at the base of where the tufts of grass would be and my stroke's move upward that way I have thinning strokes as I go. So they'll start a little bit thicker at the bottom. And when I flick the brush upward, makes a lighter, smaller stroke. You can switch to your rigour brush at this point, which is what I did because I can get some really nice thin lines and I created some little side strokes like little broken bits of grass. I also added just a little bit of water underneath the grass to create a little bit of a shadow. I put some on the other side as well. I'm trying to balance out this composition and this painting and keeper I moving around the painting by making things interesting. Not only using upward strokes, but also just tapping that brush, the tip of it or the side of it can also create some interesting grass like or We'd like strokes which are fun to make and they add interests in texture to your painting. Now I'm switching back to my larger brush, picking up that really watery and cool green and adding some shadows in and around my plants. And you know, I cannot resist a little bit as flattering some going to do that here is the perfect opportunity to add that into this painting where little bits of seeds in graphs are flowing and fine. So I'm going to speed up this video for you now because I'm just going to be repeating essentially the same process for that. Adding a little bit more to these layers, I'll add a little bit more into the trees. I'll add a little bit more to the grasses. So relax and enjoy the rest of this painting and I'll see you in the next lesson. Oh yeah, this painting is almost finished. Let's get to the final details. 6. Snowy Landscape - Final Details: Ok, my friends, let's wrap up this painting with a few final details. So squeeze some guage into a dish and I have my palette knife. And what I'm going to do is use that whitewash As a snow texture on my ever bring tree that's in the foreground of my painting. And I'm just basically developing it on with that palette knife in a super easy and don't stress yourself over exactly where the snowshoe go. Just have fun with it. Now it's up to you how much snow you put on this tree, but you don't want to cover all of the green that you've already painted. I'm just trying to put it where I imagined the edges of the branches would be some in the front of the tree that are coming toward me, some on the edges of the tree and just little like where the snow has piled up on the tree. Now you can see I've got out my fan brush, which is the best barrage, forest battering in my opinion. And I'm going to just create a snowfall with this and I'm using that same whitewash that I used on the tree, but I add a little bit more water to it to get it a little bit more watered down. So I'm tapping super lightly on my hand with the brush to get those ladders. If I tap a little harder, I can get a little bit larger. Like that. It's a little bit larger drops. But I wasn't really small drops right now. You can imagine that you're looking through falling snow, this lovely forest scene. So as repaying with watercolor were always observing our painting, were watching to see what's happening. We're watching to see how it's drying and how things are looking with composition and value in depth. And I decided I wanted more bits, a darker green on my tree. And so that's what I'm doing right now, just little small spots. And I also thought it would be fun to add in the sky colors by putting some of that on the snow. So that's what I'm doing, that where the snow will be reflecting the colors of the sky and using the violet, I'm using them. A red violet, a little bit, a little bit of blue, just adding that into the shadows of the snow to just sort of tie my painting all together. Notice when I'm painting on the snow, I'm using a very light values of color, lots of water, very little paint in that water. But it adds a really nice color to our painting. And more spidery snow. I'll speed this part of the video up for you. So one thing I wanted to really emphasize in this class is that with water color painting, there's always sort of a back and forth with the painting. It's often happens with other kinds of R2, but there's just a, an observing and a changing and going with the flow of the painting. Changing things up as you see the need to making things work. And so one thing I noticed in this painting in the mid ground trees were some hard edges. So all I did was I took a little bit of water and just blurred those edges out a little bit. Move that pigment around and got sort of made them fade more into the backgrounds. I also decided I wanted even more contrast with that tree that's in the front. And so again, I'm adding in more of that really dark green, but this time it's more of a yellow green. It's not the blue-gray that always using before. It's a yellow agreement that will add depth, but it will also bring forward that part of the tree because of the warmth of that paint. And because I'm going for that greater contrast, guess where I put those dark green colors right next to that very white snow. Anytime you put darker, darks, darks next to lights, you get even more. Your lights look lighter and your darks look darker. So that's just a little technique for a tip there. When you put your darks next to your lights, you get even more vibrancy and color and contrast from your paint. So sudden to paint a bunny. And what I did was I just looked up a bunny silhouette because I wanted my painting to tell a little bit of a story. And so I decided to paint a bunny and I found the backup, a buddy silhouette. Essentially it's the ears, the head, and the body. So all you have to do, really make it really simple. Tap your brush for IR, tap your brochure or an ear. Draw circle. Do you connect? And a little bit bigger body shape. And you have a button and then you can just put a shadow underneath. Let it blend in that to the landscape that'll be fine. Can make its ears a little longer if you want to practice that a little bit before you put it on your actual paper, before you put it on your painting or you can leave off the buddy totally up to you. We just want the idea. There's a button, our ideas, but you may not want that. So thats completely up to you. So I will admit it's a little scary adding this bunny, but remember you can just Emilia dry it off. You could also start with a little light wash to put it on there first and then add in more color. If you're a little nervous. I understand I was nervous too, but I thought I would just add just a little bit of perspective and a little bit of story like it's very curious, this snowy forest. And so I did want to add this little bunny. And I did do the ears just by tapping my brush to the head as a little circle and then the body. And now I'm just adding a little bit more paint, making my ears a little bit bigger and just refining the shape just a little. So I'm notice I'm using a really big brush. You can switch to a smaller brush if you want to. There's no problem with that, okay? So don't worry, if you need to switch to a smaller brush, that's perfectly fine. I just tend to stick with one or two brushes unless I need something specific. But that's just a personal choice, right? There are so many brushes and options for you. I also decided to add some little pockets where the bunny sort of hopping along in the same silhouetted color that I did for the bunny. I also decided I'm bringing a little bit of peak up, blue there, or the shadow around the bunny. That's one of our Skype colors and one that we did add into the snow as well. And it really does make a great shadow color in this case. And I didn't want that hard line, so I derived my brush and really just blended out what was there. And with that, we have completed our snowy landscape. 7. Project and Thank you!: Thank you so much for joining me for this watercolour paint along snowy landscape. I hope you've enjoyed the process and you've learned a lot along the way about wet and wet, wet and dry. Leaving the white of the paper composition, all the beautiful watercolor things. So for your project, just follow along, paint along with me and complete a snowy landscape. Painting. Years can be smaller, larger, more or less complex than mine, but just follow along and paint with me and enjoy the process. And don't forget to share your painting in the project section and be sure and leave a kind review. And if you don't follow me yet, then be sure and do that as well. So you'll know when all of my classes come out next.