Winter Barn Scene in Watercolors

1. Intro: Winter Barn Scene in Watercolor: Hello, and welcome to my home studio. I'm Emily, and in today's Skillshare class, our goal is to relax and have fun while painting with watercolors. In this tutorial, I'm going to cover a lot of different watercolor techniques. You'll start by learning how to paint a sky and a tree line using wet on wet techniques. We'll then take a peek on how to paint snow as well as a fence using wet on dry. We'll also use some specific techniques such as dry brushing and splatter as to how you can enhance your piece. And then at last, we'll take a peek at painting a barn. We'll look at dropping in color, wet on wet, as well as lifting in order to create kind of a weathered barn look. Now, as with all of my videos, you're more than welcome to use the exact same color palette that I have here. There's a description below on the colors that I used. Or you're also able to add your own colors to make this project unique to you. As always, there is a traceable template included in this tutorial for you to either trace or print the barn directly onto your watercolor paper. 2. Supplies Needed: Alright, so let's talk supplies for painting this winter barn scene using watercolors. So the first thing that's important to talk about is your paper. I am using Arches brand, 400 pound paper, sorry, 140 pound paper, and I am using cold pressed paper. I did cut this piece down to eight by ten. However, if you are wanting to frame it, I would suggest cutting it slightly larger than eight by ten so that your edge can can come right up to a mat if you are choosing to mat it. To tape it down, I'm using green frog tape. You can also use painter's tape. Or washy tape, I do prefer painter's tape, though. I'm taping it down to a plastic corrugated board. However, you can also tape it down to your desk. You can tape it down to an artboard or to a really flat piece of wood, however you want your paper, wherever you're gonna be painting. As far as the brushes that I'm using throughout the tutorial, the large wash brush that I'm using is a silver limited Atelier, golden talcun quill. A large wash brush can work. Then for my medium size brushes, I am using black velvet, round number six or round number four, just depends on kind of the size, and I use these interchangeably sometimes. And then you'll need a fineer detail brush. I'm using a four times zero brush. However, a size zero brush will work. Whatever smaller brush you will use for the barn. Next, you're going to need a paper towel or some sort of cloth. You'll notice in my video, I am using a palette like this. My colors already in my palette but the colors that I'm using are all Daniel Smith. You can also find the names of the colors in the supplies list below. Um for the sky, I'm using all of these colors. So around the edge, I'm using indigo. I also added just a little hint of Cerlean blue. And then for the tree line, I dropped in mostly indigo with undersea green, carbazoviolet, a little bit of quin gold, also quin burnt orange, and then a little hint of that anthraquinoid red. For the fence and the shadows, I used pretty much solely the indigo and the Quinn burnt orange. And then for my barn, I was using mainly anthraquinoid red, along with indigo. And then I use usually two cups of water as I'm painting so that I always have fresh water. Now that you have your supplies together, let's get started to paint. 3. Painting the Sky: Wet-on-Wet: So the first step in my winter barn painting is I'm going to need to tape it down to either my desk or to some sort of hard board. So I'm using a corrugated plastic board that I cut up. I found it in a poster size from Michael's, and then I just cut them down to size, some for my eight by ten paintings, some for my five by seven paintings. And then I'm using some green frog tape to tape all around on all four sides since I am going to be painting up to the edge of the painting. And I'm just trying my best to have an even edge all around my painting of about an eighth of an inch. So before I start painting on my final piece, I'm going to just kind of do a little practice test of some of the colors that I might want to use for my sky and my tree line. So I'm taking a scrap sheet of paper. This can be a student grade piece of paper. I'm using a student grade piece of Blick art paper. And I wet the entire paper with water, and now I'm using just some different colors from my palette and dotting them along the bottom edge of the wet section. And I'm just noticing how these colors are mixing. I'm um trying to decide really which colors I want to use and which colors I don't want to use. So when I was thinking about this painting in my head, I wanted the background of this painting of this piece to be a little moodier. And I wanted the red barn to be the main color that would stand out. But I did also want to use a few highlight colors in the tree line so that it wasn't just indigo and a dark green. So I'm trying to add some colors that I think would go along well with the undersea green and indigo that I know I'm going to use, just to see which colors blend well and how much of that color to use. So the colors so far that I've tested out in this test strip that you're seen on the video, aside from that indigo and the undersea green, I also dropped in a little bit of quinocradone gold, and followed by some Carbisol violet, little halo blue. I tested what my shadow violet might look like. Most of these are Daniel Smith colors. I also tested out a quinocradone burnt orange. And now for the sky line, I'm testing out what it would look like with an indigo along the top. And then I also know that I want to add some little pieces of grass and for sure, some shadow. And so I'm going to test out what some shadow would look like with a little bit of indigo. And so here is what an indigo shadow would look like with a little bit of quinacridone burnt orange as grasses. So this has really allowed me to test out colors. I'm adding a little bit of red, and to finalize the color template that I want to use. All right, so now I have my final piece. Now, this is printed on Arches cold pressed paper. That's 130 grams. If you are using a different type of paper or a different brand of paper, your dry times might be different than mine. So this first step with the sky, I need to do the whole sky section and the tree line all well this top part is wet. So I have to do it all in one take. Depending on the paper that you're using, you might need to work slightly faster if your paper dries a little bit faster, but that's why I'm using a cold pressed paper to keep it a little bit wetter. So right now I'm using a mop brush to paint using clean water all around my barn and in the sky section. I'm taking a lot of time here to make sure that I'm getting the water right up to the edge of the barn. If you need to switch to a smaller brush, do that. After you paint the skyline, you won't really be able to go back and fix this section if you, for example, don't have your color coming all the way up to the edge of the barn. So it's really important that you take the time now to really edge along that barn really well. As you can see, I had a little bit of color left on my smaller brush. That's okay. I'm not too concerned. I'm going to be adding some color anyways. And then you'll notice that I'm going to take my wash brush again and I'm going to go back to the section that I already wet and I'm going to re wet it again. Now, how wet do we want this section? We want it pretty wet. We don't want it to be pooling anywhere, though. So I'm making sure that if I were to lift up my paper, I wouldn't have drips coming down, but I am wetting it enough and going over it enough so that the paper I give the paper time to soak up that water. Once I think I have a good enough amount of water on my paper, I'm going in first with indigo along the top of the skyline. And then I'm adding a little bit of that quinocradone burnt orange just to give it a little bit of a glow in the sky. And as you can see, I'm I'm wetting my brush. I'm getting color on it, but then I'm using my brush and I'm getting a little bit of the color out on my palette. That's important. Instead of just grabbing the color and putting it directly onto the water, I do need to mix it around first on my palette so that I don't get too opaque of a color. Now, I also grabbed a little bit of Cerlean blue to add to the center of the sky. If you don't have that at home, you can also use ath blue. Then as the color is dissipating in the sky, I'm adding a little bit more of that indigo to the very top of my sky. So now I need to work a little quickly, so I'm going to let that set. And before it dries, I need to paint the tree line. So I'm going to start by adding some indigo along the base of this tree line. Now, you notice that I didn't mix the indigo with any water. I'm just using whatever water was already on my brush. And the reason I have to do this is to keep that pigment along the tree line at the base. If I have too much water in my brush at this step, the indigo is going to be bleeding way too far up. So you notice that after I clean my brush, I might tap it on my paper towel. That's going to release some of that liquid so that I have mostly pigment on my brush. That's really important to keep the tree line in place. I'm going to switch colors and use a few accent colors here and there. So the first orange that I used was that quinocradone burnt orange. Once again, I cleaned my brush. I dried it on my paper towel, and then I switched to use a little bit of carbazyl violet to add just a little hint of color. I cleaned my brush, tapped it on my paper towel, and then I used a little bit of red. Now, I am you can add a little bit of water to these colors to help them bloom a little bit more if they're staying too tight to the tree line, but just be very, very careful and cautious. If you use too much water, obviously, you're going to push that tree line too far into the skyline. I am adding a little bit of undersea green to the tree line as well, just to give it a little bit of a browny green um, in the background. Then I'm going back to the areas that I already painted and I'm just blending however I see fit. I want these colors to just blend effortlessly. Then before I let it all dry, I'm going to go back with more indigo. As you can see, I'm making some vertical lines across the tree line. I'm trying to represent some some shapes of pine trees. And so it's starting to dry a little bit, so my pigment isn't going to run as much as it did in the beginning. And so this is a great stage of dry time to add a few little details. I'm going to add just a little bit of color above the barn, making sure to kind of outline the barn a little bit. That's going to help our barns to kind of peek through the tree line. And then I'm going to clean up my tree line by lifting wherever I see fit. So I dried my brush and I'm using a dry brush just like an eraser to lift up wherever the color might have gone too far. Now, I'm choosing to just very lightly splatter, a little bit of indigo. Even in sometimes your paint water might be dark enough to do this, as well. Since my sky is still very wet, I can splatter a little bit and have it just be reminiscent of snow. Of course, though, this is an optional step. If you really like the sky how it is, you don't need to splatter at all. 4. Painting the Fence: Wet-on-Dry: So the next step is to start working on the foreground. Now, I can't work on the barn yet because the sky is still drying. And so if I were to try working on the barn, the red of the barn is going to seep into the sky. I'm going to work on a little fence in the foreground. I'm deciding to make my fence diagonal coming from the right side of the barn through the foreground. So I like to always practice this first because I'm not using a reference photo at all. I'm just kind of doing this off my memory and making up this landscape. So once again, I'm taking a practice sheet of paper. It's student grade. So it's not I decided to continue the indigo into the foreground. Using similar colors in both the background and the foreground are going to help tie them together. So for the fence, I watered down a little bit of indigo, and I started painting a train track shape, so two lines two diagonal parallel lines for the cross beams. And then I'm painting the fence posts with that same indigo. I did take a little bit of indigo directly from my pan, so it's a little bit more opaque. And I just drew on the edges of those fence posts to kind of outline them a little bit. And now I'm adding a little quinacridone burnt orange so I am going to practice this fence again and I'm going to take into consideration now a little bit of perspective. As I get my water down indigo, I'm going to paint my parallel lines. I'm going to start a little bit thinner towards the upper right hand corner, since that's going to be the furthest away. And then I'm going to press my brush down as I come towards the foreground. Also towards the upper right hand corner in the back. It's going to be a little closer together those lines are. And as I come to the foreground to the forefront, I'm going to widen those lines just a little bit. Now the most important thing to remember while making this fence is that even though these two parallel lines are coming at a diagonal, my posts need to be perpendicular. After I finish outlining these diagonal posts with a little bit of indigo, I'm going to go back and paint my vertical posts. Okay. Once again, after I finish with the watery indigo as the post, I'm going to come back and just dip my brush into the indigo without watering it down. I'm going to paint along one edge of that post. If you can see I'm painting along the left edge of the post. That's going to just give it a little bit of a shadow on that left side. You can do this on the right side. It doesn't really matter. Then I'm also using more of that opaque indigo along the tops of the post and along the base of the post. Now, I'm also testing out what it might look like to lift up a little bit of pigment from the posts that are furthest away because I want to give into the perspective a little bit more. And so when objects are further away, they tend to be a little bit hazier instead of so well defined. So now that I lifted up a little bit of that pigment, now I'm going to go on and test out some shadows and what that might look like for each individual post. I'm using indigo water down. I might also add a little bit of thalo blue or a brighter blue, like a Prussian blue, something that is a little bit more brighter than the indigo. And I'm using really quick snaps of my wrist from the post outwards to create these elongated shadows. I'll go back and I'll drop in a little bit of indigo at the base so that it can spread and bleed out a little bit. Now, the quickness of this brush stroke is the most important part, continue to practice this until it looks right to you. I'm also making sure that these shadows are perpendicular to my posts. I don't want there to be any sort of obtuse or acute angle. It has to be 90 degree perpendicular. While those shadows are still wet, I'm playing around with adding a little bit of grasses to some of the posts, allowing that quinacridone burnt orange to just blend in to the shadow a little bit. I think it's helpful to work while all of these components are still wet so that they can all bleed together a little bit. Then I'm testing out what it might look like to add some grasses that aren't quinacridone burnt orange. Here I'm testing out some undersea green to see if I like that. And then I'll test out what a few other shadows might look like on the opposite side of the fence. I do want to add some shadows there, not a ton, but I do need to break up that whiteness a little bit. Now that I've practiced, I feel like I'm ready for my final piece. You are more than welcome to practice that fence multiple times. You can also change the color of the fence. You can add more browns to the fence, more blues, more purples. You can make it your own here. But I'm ready to work on my final piece. Once again, I'm using that watered down indigo. I have a medium transparency with this watered down indigo, and I'm going to make those parallel lines first and then the posts. I'm going to continue letting this video play at normal speed. So you're watching me paint in real time. I did not speed this up at all. So if you're trying to figure out how fast you need to paint to do this all while it's still wet, this is a pretty good speed, and you might have even a little bit more time before things dry. So now that I'm done with my watered down posts, now I'm going to go back with some indigo that I'm not watering down. I'm grabbing that indigo directly from the paint there and from my well. I'm edging along one side of the post, as well as along the top of the post and along the base of the post. Remember, at this point, you can always add a little highlight color. I'm using water down coracodone burnt gold. I did add quite a bit of water to my brush along with that color. I'm going to just add a little bit of browns to my posts just to give it a little bit more of a wood feeling. Then this is optional as well, but remember we can dab our fence posts that are further away to lift up a little bit of that color so that it's not so dark and it'll make it look like it's a little further away. 5. Adding Shadows in the Snow: All right, so I'm ready for the shadows on my post. Remember, I'm going to be using the edge of my brush, not the tip of my brush. I don't have my brush perpendicular here. Using the edge of my brush, I'm going to pull out some quick flicks of the wrist. Now, because I'm painting on a cold press paper, you're going to notice more texture than on your practice sheet potentially. And so it all depends on what you like. I like that textured look so if you don't like the textured look, you can add more of that liquid to your brush. A more water down brush is going to give you a little less texture. But I like this texture dry brush look. And then once again, I'll drop in more indigo directly at the base of these posts, allowing that to bleed into the shadows. So this is the point that we can add any grasses that we want to add. I'm starting with some quinacridone burnt orange directly from my well, I noticed that there wasn't enough liquid in that. I added a little bit more liquid. I increase the amount of liquid until I get the consistency that I want. If there's too much liquid on your brush, you're going to have grasses that are really thick and so you want just the right amount of liquid so that you can get a fine wisp of grass coming out of these posts. For the shadows on the left hand side, I'm using some of the leftovers of the pigments that I have been mixing. There's a little bit of that quinacridone burnt orange along with indigo and I'm using those. I'm keeping my shadows parallel to the other shadows on the right hand side. I have all my shadows on the same plane and it's a vertical or it's a horizontal plane, going left to right. That's important so that your shadows all look like they're coming from the same light source. While my shadows are still wet, I'm going to pull a little bit more grasses out of those shadows, and then I can also drop in any indigo or any accent color, whether it's purple or red, you can play around if you want to add a little extra color to these shadows. Then I decided that it's looking a little bit too perfect for me. I'm going to add some splatter on top of the fence here. I'm using indigo and water down indigo, and I have my brush. I'm just hitting my brush on top of my left hand, and that's creating a splatter that goes where I want it to go. I'm adding this splatter on top of the fence to create a little bit of movement to the fence area. It also is going to look like snow. It gives it more of an outdoor ambience, if you will. It's totally optional for a step, but I think it adds a lot to the painting, especially if you didn't splatter a lot in the sky. Lastly, I can see that there's a big white space on the upper left hand corner of my paper, so I want to tone that down a little bit. I'm grabbing actually, it's just the dirty cup water and I'm grabbing my larger wash brush. I'm trying to leave a little bit of white of the paper just at the top edge where that tree line is, but I'm adding a little bit of shadow underneath. This is just going to connect the the foreground to the tree line. Then while it's wet, of course, I can add in whatever colors I want to to accent that snow. The last step is I'm going to take that wash brush and I'm actually just going to use the wet wash brush to scrub out some of the fencing. I'm going to go up to that upper right hand corner of the fence, and I'm going to see what it looks like just if I scrub out a little of that section there. I'm just trying to blur it a little bit more so it looks like it's further in the distance. 6. Painting the Red Barn: Alright, so we've made it to the barn scene, the actual painting of the barn. So we've let the sky dry a little bit. I already touched it and made sure that it's more or less dry so I'm not getting any pigment off of my thumb. And we're going to start by painting the red panels of the barn. Now, I mixed a Daniel Smith anthraquinoid red, and I mixed it in that kind of puddle of dirty indigo water just to tone down the red a little bit. I might add I might drop in a more brilliant red, but that first base layer that I'm painting, I do want a little bit more muted. Right now, I'm painting wet on dry. So my paper is dry and I have my wet brush. I did not wet the barn first. I just want a nice even wash all around these windows and around the door. Then I can drop in some other colors after I have this first layer. So now I'm going to drop in some colors. I'm not going to wet the colors. I'm using my brush just how much water is on my brush and I'm going to dab it into that red and use a little bit more opaque red, more condensed red along the top of that barn. Then I'll just dip my brush into the indigo. I don't have a wet brush. My brush is fairly dry. It's not completely dry, but I'm not re wetting it at all. That's important to keep that indigo in place. If you're noticing the indigo spreading too much, tap it on your paper towel to release some of that liquid. I'm painting some vertical lines of indigo, and that's going to just create a little bit of contrast from all of the horizontal lines that we have in the piece. But it's also going to make the barn wood look like slats of wood instead of just one solid plane. Sometimes even I make mistakes I put some indigo where I didn't want it. I washed up my brush, I dried it, and now I'm using a dry brush to lift pigment from the in between these indigo slates. I'm creating almost a weathered look now for this paneling. Of course, as I start painting the siding, I notice that it's really not bright enough red for me. Before it dries too much, just going to add in a little bit more red there, and then I'll continue doing the same thing with the side paneling. Once again, I'm painting the wet undry I'm painting a water down red as my first layer. And then once I have that while it's still wet, I'll make these vertical lines using indigo. Now, I know that you see me using a round size four brush here, but you are more than welcome to use a smaller brush, around size two, round size one, round size zero. Whatever round brush you are most comfortable with, I just get so used to using one or two sizes of brushes and then controlling the amount of liquid that's in each brush. You'll notice that I'm continuing to use the round size four. Then you also notice me going back to that front panel. As it starts to dry, the way that the paint dries changes how it looks. I'm just correcting as the paint is drying. What you just saw me do, I dried my brush off, and then I continued to lift a little bit of color up. So I'm constantly looking back at what I already did to kind of see if I need to make any changes. And here I went over a little bit of the white window sill and just used paper towel and the end of my brush to kind of dab it off. Make sure to always paint with a paper towel, and that's going to help to keep your it's going to act like you're eraser to keep sections clean. So now that I have my red paneling, now I can work on my windows. I'm going to paint the insides of my windows using either a very concentrated indigo or a black. So I'm starting once again with that first panel just to make sure that I'm working in sections that have already dried. And as you can see, I got frustrated using my number four brush. I switched to a smaller size brush for the rest of the windows. And I'm not mixing any of this color with water. I'm just using a wet brush and taking the color directly from the well there. Now, if this step is a little bit too challenging for you to do, since it is a pretty small space, you can also think about using a black micron pen to color in the windows. Sometimes it's easier to use a pen versus your paintbrush. This is the only section of painting this piece that I'm going to speed up only because I'm doing the same tedious step over and over again, just painting these dark black spaces. And then the last thing to note for this section is if you do end up getting some black over the white window pane edge, leave it and don't try to fix it while that black paint is still wet. All you're going to do is smear it a little bit more. What I would suggest is waiting until it's dry and then you can come in with a clean, wet brush and try to scrub that area clean. Or if that's not possible, I also use white gel pens quite often in my pieces. And so I would have no problem when it's dry, adding a little bit of white gelpen around the white window panes. Then when I'm painting this side, I know it's not a garage, I don't know what to call it for barns. But when I'm painting this side garage area, I'm not leaving any of the whites to shine through. There's really no frame along that section. 7. Adding Snow Shadows on the Roof and Final Details: Alright, so we're back to normal speed. So this is normal regular speed of me painting. So we're going to start painting some of the shadows along the roof. So we're remembering that our light source is coming from the left hand side since our shadows on our fence posts are on the right. So I'm going to try to keep my shadows, especially near these windows on the roof. I'm going to keep them on the right hand side, and I'm using the same shadow colors as I did for my fence. So a very watered down indigo. You can also add, especially in the roof, I'm going to be adding just a little hint of red into this shadow as well after I have the base of this water down indigo. And then just like with my fence posts, while these shadows are still wet, I'll grab just a little bit of indigo that's a little bit more opaque and I'll drop it in that, that, that near the right hand side of both the garage and then these windows. So at this point in the painting, I'm noticing that the whites of my trims of my windows are looking very, very bright in comparison to the rest of the piece. So I'm just going to take a wet brush and I'm going to just blend those edges a little bit. And what that's going to do is it's just going to dirty the window sills, that white frames just a little bit. I just don't want them quite as white in comparison to the snow. I want them a little bit more dingy and dirty since it is a barn. And then at this point of the painting, you can take a peek at your barn again, see if you want to add any extra vertical lines using a red, just to add a little extra crisp hard edge details since the first lines that we did were all wet on wet. Depending on how yours looks, you can always add a few of these extra lines just to give some crisp details. Then I'm going to add just a little bit of red to the shadow on top of the barn. I'm just adding a really watered down red to certain sections just to blend in that red of the barn with the rest of the piece. Then the very last step, I'm taking a fineer brush. This is still around size four, but I'm using a medium transparency indigo, and I am painting a hard edged line along the tree line. As you can see, sometimes I'm having my brush up to touch the tree line. Sometimes I'm leaving a little sliver of white along the tree line there. Your line doesn't have to be perfectly straight. I'm also lining underneath the barn. All I'm doing is I'm adding a little crispness to the foreground. Since when we did the tree line, we did do wet on wet. And so I do want to add a little bit of a harder edge there. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this ertorial, please follow me on social media, check out my website, and make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel.