 Hi there, I'm Sandy Olnok, artist and paper crafter here on YouTube, and today I have a rather long video about making watercolor tree swings, and they're starting with the watercolor tree stamp set from Art Impressions. As you can see, it's got a couple of different kinds of tree trunks and some individual little pine trees. I'm going to be using these markers from Zig. They are the Twin Tip markers, Art and Graphic Twin Tip, and these are the colors I'll be using. They will be linked in the description down below, and I'm going to use the same colors in all of the cards. I'm using some Arches Cold Press watercolor paper, coloring directly onto the stamp using the markers. This one is the mid-brown color, and then taking my silver brush, this is going to be the silver eight round in the black velvet line. It has a nice point to it, so I'm just letting the water, just plain water, soften out some of these edges, and trying not to get too heavy with it, but just letting some of that water blend things out, just ever so slightly. On an extra block, I'm going to put all the colors that I want to use in my tree. That's a way to use a palette. You could also just pull out your watercolor set and do the same kind of a thing with similar colors. This color is called Olive Green, and I'm going to use it for the outside edges because a tree is going to be lit by the sun, so it's going to have the top and the outside edges are going to be the lightest. That's where the light is going to hit. Notice that I've got lots of water in my brush, so my color is going to be really light. The texture I'm creating by dancing the brush all around the edges, and I'm trying to leave some white spots in there because with watercolor, a lot of times we try to get too heavy. We try to make it look like Copic Marker, but really watercolor is about those lost and found edges, some that are soft, some that are hard, and leaving some of that air in something like a tree, especially. If you look at a tree, you're going to see that there are some areas where you see blue sky right through it, so you're going to see in between leaves. I want to create another area where I have sort of an area curving toward the front as well. I don't want it all to fall into solid color in the center. That's where I put that olive green right there in the middle. Then I'm taking a little marine green and blending into some of this. There's some areas that are still wet, so depending on how fast you paint, if there are areas that are still wet, you're going to be able to blend the colors. I'll show you some other techniques for keeping things a little wetter if you like a more blended look, and mixing those two colors together a little bit to create a secondary green color. This marine green is more of a blue, but I love it for something like a loose watercolor tree. It just adds a lot more life to it than just trying to add regular old greens to it. The greens that are in the graphic twin set are not all that great. They're not very natural looking. I guess a lot of the colors in the ZIG collections, both in clean color and in these, are not particularly on the natural side, and I like to make things look very natural. One of the things I learned from one of my watercolor teachers is that when you're coloring something like trees, putting a little bit of an orange color in there is good. Now, I'm using a color that they call brown for lack of better name, I guess, but it's more of a burnt sienna type of color. You could use an actual bold orange, but something like a brown is going to give you a little more natural of a look. I'm going to keep just adding more and more colors to this. If I go slowly and I let some of this dry, I can put layers with more hard edges all over the tree. The secret to making a tree look very natural is to not make it look even. Trees don't grow in any kind of a way that is symmetrical. That's just not in the way nature works. But I'm adding some darker colors down here, even some black, because I want to create that undercarriage of the tree, that place where all those deep shadows are. And when you're trying to do a summer tree like this with a beautiful tree swing under it, you want to make that tree look really inviting and make it look really cool underneath. But notice how when I stopped that dark area and then there's that lighter color right above it, it looks like that's coming out toward you a little bit. So the more I deepen that color underneath, it's going to pull those front leaves toward the viewer and make it look more dimensional. So that's that's the area that I want to work on more and add more to. But I'll do that as I go, sometimes in wet on wet layers and sometimes not. But for the moment, I'm going to try to let it dry a little bit and add some ground underneath. Now, a lot of people, when I've done Art Impressions Watercolor classes, try to fill in the whole ground with color and, you know, go all the way out to the edges and then fill in to the bottom. You don't need to do that. Just a little tiny bit right under the tree and let it water out into white. And you do that by adding extra water around the edges where you want to blend it to white and lots of water. I mean, like drippy, soppy water. Don't be afraid of it, especially on this Arches Cold Press Paper because it's going to still give you that nice edges, those nice, that nice texture to it and let it be nice and soft. If you were to fill that all in, it's going to anchor that image way too much at the bottom. You want the focus to be up at the top, up in that tree. So I decided I wanted to try to put some more of that black underneath and start really darkening in those shadow areas. But I was struggling a little bit because you can see the watercolor is still moving. It's still very wet in there. And I wanted to add a lot more hard color in there. And by hard, I guess I mean, yeah, I would call it thicker paint if I was using watercolor, but I want to use more solid color in there. So I thought I'm going to move on and work on my tree swing for a little bit. Make a tree swing nice and tiny and it'll make your tree look really big. And I'm just painting a circle and I'm not even worried about it being even. This is a watercolor painting. So don't stress out and feel like you have to draw it in there with pencil first in order to paint it. Just paint a circle. And then you can drop more color in there. I dropped a little bit of that marine green in. I'll drop in a little tiny bit more of the black. And then I started working on some of the areas of the tree that were drier because you can see I'm getting a harder edge now. And then I'm in control of where I put the water to soften it out. And it gives me a darker color if I paint over an area that's dry already. So if you're you're looking for stronger color, that's one way to to work on that. Because this as long as it's wet, everything's going to still melt into it and soften out the color and the edges and everything. But also notice that my shadow areas that I'm adding in here are not in a consistent place. They're not, you know, they're not symmetrical to each other. And I'm going to change the color up a little bit. So I mixed a darker green so I can make it make some darker green shadows and not have them all be that heavy black. But if you look at a tree, pull up some pictures of big old oak trees on Google or on your backyard, excuse me and do your own tree. Look at the way the clumps are on the tree and they're not going to be even. And it's nice to just kind of follow nature and let it be uneven. Let those different areas catch the light and catch the shadow. And the more nice deep shadow you're going to add underneath of that tree, the more inviting it's going to be on your card. Now, as this color dried, it turned a little more purpley, which I really even liked more and was really fun to watch these colors change. That's one of the things about water coloring with markers. A lot of times, depending on the brand, you're going to get different colors once something's completely dry than when it was wet. And that's sometimes I don't like that. And other times I find it a delightful surprise. But again, you could do the same thing with this stamp set and use your markers to do the tree trunk and then grab your water color set in order to create the rest of the scene, especially if you're going to do some really nice ones that you want people to keep. The color in the markers is eventually going to fade. But if you use something like I like to use my Daniel Smith watercolors, those are going to stay longer. You're not going to end up with them fading. So if somebody is going to get a little piece of artwork like this, it might be nice to to do it in something that won't fade. So this little tree branch, you saw the funky shape that it was. I added another branch to it. You could also turn it upside down and make the part that's at the top, make that the trunk and make the rest of this branches. But I decided I wanted to make some some kind of gnarly roots down here and some nice dark shadows underneath and then use my water to soften that edge out. And then I'm going to make a big loose tree. I'm using my number eight brush still. So I'm having a little trouble getting wide enough. I would really like to use my number 12 here, but I thought I'm going to see because I know a lot of you guys don't want to buy a second brush. The number 12 would be really great for this. And I'm just making large, swooshy swashies of color. And notice that I'm not just having it stop at the top of the tree trunk. I'm letting it go down, down underneath. And then I'm just going to keep adding more colors to it in the same blobs. Now, the way you make these kind of strokes with a brush is to lay the brush down completely and really let the color flood out of it. With the last one, I did more with the tip and I was letting it dance across the surface. And around the edges of some of this, I wanted to add just a little bit of that kind of same kind of detail, but not a ton of it. So you'll notice as I go, I kind of keep mixing all the colors together. And then eventually as I get out to the edges, I'm going to let just a few of them be detailed. But the rest of this, it's all still soppy wet so I can still just slather color in there and let it bleed and and be soft. And then give the tree just a little bit more detail around some of the edges. I wanted to put some nice deep black under here and create that shadow underneath because that's what's going to make a tree inviting. And my big old vine maple out back is always calling to me in the summer to put my little lawn chair underneath of it. I don't have I don't have any branches that are high enough that I'd have room for a tree swing, but I would love to. It would be nice. But I at least do get to put my my lawn chair out there and watch the puppies play and then just enjoy the shade because a nice big tree with a huge canopy and lots of thick leaves really does make a difference on a hot summer day. On these outside edges, there were some that I got a little bit too harsh with the edge. So I decided to add a little bit of water to to soften them and then I let it dry so that I can dry completely so I could then go in with this really dark black because I wanted the deep shadow to be really in there. You could mix that with a little bit of green if you don't like the look of black. But I wanted that really super dark shadow and I'm painting around the tree trunk and those those branches. So the more contrast I put in here, notice like that little highlight on the tree trunk is actually starting to pop out. So it's it's becoming more visible because of the contrast. And you know me, I love my contrast. So for me, it's important to kind of sometimes wait until something's completely dry like this so I could really add that detail in that that really strong black contrast. And I'm adding just a little tiny bit of it, moving around the rest of the tree, but I'm keeping most of it centered right around my my little swing to keep the attention there and adding just a little tiny bit here and there and then using water to soften it out. So use your water to to keep things from being too hard edge because you depending on what kind of a look you're going for, if you want it really soft and light, then keep your keep your your tiny details to particular areas and don't stress out about making it everywhere. But look how nice that is. You could put out any kind of sentiment on a card like this, but you can just leave it playing as well. And then write a note inside the card and make it a thinking of you card. So this time I'm going to use the smaller tree and adapt it. If you have a tree that you're trying to do, like say your grandmother had an old oak tree, you could make this one look like her oak tree. So I'm taking the brush nib of the pen and adding to it. So I'm adding some extra branches so that there's something for the kids to climb on and making the tree trunk a little bit more sturdy, a little wider. And you could also if you end up stamping it and it's crooked. This is a good thing to do when it's crooked because yeah, these are not clear stamps. You can't see exactly where you're stabbing them. And sometimes you just need to fix it. You can fix them easily with marker. Now, this one, I wanted to see how light and bright I could get it. How much of a summer feel could I really get? So I got out a little mini-mister with water in it. And so as I was painting, I started doing a little spritz here and there. I spritzed the paper first and that didn't seem to do much for me. I was hoping to just get the color to travel along. But this is marker. Marker doesn't work like watercolor. If I was using watercolor and did a spritz and dropped color in, that would shoot out into the water. But watercolor marker does not travel the same kind of a way. So you need to kind of move it. And I'm just going to keep doing little spritzes here and there, especially along that top area to keep it really light. And you could do that with your brush and just letting it be really bright. But the spritz of water seems to really lighten it and soften it even more because I want more of these colors as I put them in here to continue to be soft in that upper area. And draw all the attention down to the swing that I'm going to put in here in that deep dark shadow. So again, going in with that little bit of marine green to to pull that bluish color in. And I'm notice that I'm kind of doing a culmination stroke this time. The first time I did a little bit of dancing with more of the tip. This time I'm dancing with the full side of the brush in order to make those little kind of almost sea marks. But those seas are going to blend together because I've got so much water, just take some time for them to blend. And then I'm also going to add other colors to it in order to to kind of pull the tree together a little bit more. Add a little more of the olive green in it and drop in some of the other colors. And as I get deeper with the colors to the colors that are already light are going to start looking lighter in comparison. So when you start putting in some deep, rich colors, that tends to happen more. And notice here, I also I throw all my colors on this little palette, but I'm just grabbing all of them and mixing them all together. I'm scribbling them separately. But then with my brush, just make one green out of all of them. And notice I can create a green using blue and brown and green together and create a whole different kind of green. And then at the bottom, I allow just a little bit of that detail, that that little danced sharp edge detail to start to happen. And then I put the shadow kind of going off to one side. It's going to tell the viewer that they want to sit on the left side of that tree. That's where the the sun is going to be shaded the most. It's going to be the coolest spot in the summertime to sit under there. Next up is the swing. And I thought instead of doing a round tire swing, which I know some people might be a feared of trying, which I just make a little seat for your swing and then pull two little lines down to it to make the ropes or whatever kind of chains are going to be hanging down there, holding the swing up. But look at how beautiful it is when all that detail is only in that one area down at the bottom. And the top is just all melted out and mushy. All those colors just are kind of blended together. You could even spray it a little bit more if it's not blending out softly enough, spray it on top. Watercolor marker doesn't tend to rewet all that well once you've done this much to it, but you could spritz it a little bit more. But mine is coming out really great and really loving the look of this and the softness of it. That's really drawing the attention down to the swing and the shadow. And I love the shadow just off to one side. Really made a difference on this one. And each one of the cards has a green layer of paper underneath of it. And then I put them on card stock that is craft colored for the card base. So this is part of a blog hop. My friend Ardeth is celebrating a thousand followers on her YouTube channel. So I'm going to try to put a YouTube playlist here once everybody has their videos live, but I will at least link you in the description down below to her channel. They can also pick up all of the links over on my blog as well as stills and that sort of thing. And I will see you guys later, have a really wonderful day. And I hope you go make make a watercolor tree yourself.