 Welcome to Monet Café and this part two lesson in watercolor basics and this lesson will create a landscape painting using only three colors. So get ready to learn and have some fun and if you haven't subscribed already I hope you will to keep more free tutorials coming your way. Because I share so many pastel tutorials many don't know that I'm very much of a watercolor painting fan. These are some of my watercolor paintings that I've done over the years and these are some watercolor sketches. I love the practicality of watercolor. So that's why I'm bringing more watercolor lessons to Monet Café and these will be some of the future videos that I'll be creating and yes I've even have a request for some watercolor portraits and you guys probably know I happen to love this guy. Welcome artists to Monet Café. I'm excited to bring you part two in some watercolor lessons. Part one was very basic. Part two we're actually going to be creating a landscape painting a landscape in watercolor with only three colors. I'm keeping this very basic because first of all I'm not a professional watercolor artist. I just love it and I've been doing it for years mostly in combination with pastel painting. I have a lot of pastel art instruction on this channel but we have so many of you who are more interested in watercolor and it happens to be a medium that I really love as well. So I have had years of painting in watercolor so I thought I'd give you guys some tips. Go back and see part one if you want to learn just more about color mixing some of the advantages of watercolor. So today we're going to talk about the dos and don'ts of watercolor while we create this landscape painting. So I'm excited. Let's get started. Alright let's first talk about supplies. We're of course going to need some watercolor paper. Today I'm going to be working on arches 100% cotton cold pressed watercolor paper 140 pound. This is what's called a watercolor block. It's actually a big block of watercolor bound together. I'll explain why I have these marked off in a minute. It's bound with like glue along the edges so it keeps the paper nice and flat. When you're done it's got a little break here where you can put a like a butter knife really would work. You put it here and you kind of get your paper off that way. But I want to stress for the paper use whatever you have. And thank you to some of you who commented that the paper that I used in video one it's just a cancer watercolor paper. I should have stressed it's good to practice on it's not the best or the most professional paper. But it's fine if that's what you have and that's what you can use for today's lesson that's fine. But if you ever want to step it up 100% cotton paper is a better paper. Thanks to those who made that comment. Also too for the paints you're going to need three colors. Okay. I don't care what kind of watercolor you have. This is to get you kind of a little bit of experience with watercolor and you can buy the more expensive products later if you want. I'm using tube watercolor paint and I'm using the three primary colors. Go back and see video one if you want a little example of color mixing and some of the other things about the three primary colors. Now I'm using my favorite blue and red for an example or an exercise such as this which isn't the traditional ultramarine blue and Alizarin crimson. I'm using Prussian blue and Quinacridone red. I really like this red better and Indian yellow. So these are my three primary colors that I'll be using and as you'll see we can really get a decent amount of colors from just those three. You probably remember all this from like you know even grade school and I've already put my watercolors in the little plastic palette here that I have just a really cheap plastic palette. So again use what you have. This will allow for me to do some little bit of color mixing in here. We'll also need some watercolor brushes. Once again use what you have but I'm going to show you what I'll be using. I like my Artbin brush holder. I have a lot of this stuff on my Amazon shop and I stress this a lot. I share my Amazon shop in the link in every video so you can find things. You don't necessarily have to buy them there. I recommend you check around find the best price but at least you can find the things. This Artbin is on there. This paper may be on there but lots of the other things I talk about in my videos. So I'll be using and I recommend I'll talk about this more using the biggest brush you can. I've got my paper marked off into two. I'm going to do one the right way and one the wrong way which will hopefully help you. So I'm going to use some of my bigger brushes probably even this big brush from the Princeton Art & Brush Company. This is just a round brush. This one is size and on my glasses on 16 a biggie. So I'll probably use a combination. I'm going to use round brushes. A lot of times I use flat brushes. Again whatever you have but try to use the biggest brush and I'll talk more about the reasoning for that in a little while. Okay and for the reference image I'm using a photo that I took when my husband and I were in a park in the area where we live and I just love the simplicity of it and I thought this would be a really neat simple landscape to do. Let's keep it easy especially for a beginner series of lessons. So it's got a simple tree. You know some grasses, a road and a sky. It doesn't get easier than that. So we're going to use this and I will provide my patrons you will get an access to this photo in your post on the patreon page. Alright so let me get started. I'm going to show you some of the do's and don'ts of watercolor and you can paint a landscape with only three colors. Alright it's going to be fun. Oh and two other things that I forgot to mention you'll need. Of course some water. I like the ceramic dish I have because it's kind of big and I don't have to change my water as often and you will need some paper towels. I use these just to control the water flow. I'm using a piece of willow charcoal to do the sketch just so you guys can see it. If I used a light pencil you probably wouldn't be able to see the sketch so and I might just kind of lightly brush it off a little bit before I start the water color. I'm speeding up the sketch portion just to keep the length of the video down a little bit and I'm using again my willow charcoal darker than I normally would so that you guys can see it and I'm actually going to be erasing it a bit when I'm done just to give me a little bit of a ghost image to go by but this way you could see it. It doesn't get more simple than this. This is a pretty simple landscape. Okay let's talk about tip number one. This is light enough like a little ghost image for me to see and I may move my tree. I think I need to move my trees over a little bit but water is your friend. Okay what do I mean by that? I used to be so stingy with water when I first started that I would paint it. I'm going to do the wrong wrong way over here. First we know we're going to maybe have a sky that's kind of blue. That's obviously what the reference photo is so I'm getting some water on my brush. I'm going to grab some blue and I'm make a nice little puddle of blue here. Okay now for this one the wrong way. I'm purposely not adding a lot of water to this and you're going to see what happens. Now Arches paper is a little textured anyway which I like but it's going to give me a very dry brush effect which is great for some aspects or painting techniques but for this case we really kind of wanted a nice wash for a sky and you see why if you don't use enough water you don't get the right effect. And here is another tip. I typically like to work the whole similar to how I paint with pastels. I know sometimes you do have to block things off like I'm doing here in this painting but the tendency sometimes is to paint like a paint by number and I like the painting to be harmonious so often I will actually do a little value study wash with different values of watercolor of even the same color to begin with and it really connects the painting and gives it more harmony rather than segmenting it in this way. And here is another tip. Let the colors mix themselves. I am purposely now mixing some blue and yellow to make a green or a greenish blue and it's going to be these background trees here. Now I mixed the heck out of it so it just made one color and I'll show you in the next example of what happens when you allow them to mix themselves on the paper actually. It's so much more interesting. And now I'm moving on to the green grasses and I'm doing the same thing I just mentioned. I just mixed up a green obviously using blue and yellow with a little bit more yellow to get my green and I'm just still not using a lot of water. You see how laborious this is for me to even get it down. Again I like this dry brush style a lot not for this particular painting though so keep in mind that waters your friend and also sometimes letting your colors mix themselves is a good idea. Now I just went ahead and added a little bit of shadowy to the sides of the road there and now let's go ahead and add in another color for the road. I decided some of those shadows were a little cooler, a little bit of a warm lavender so I'm just giving some energetic gestural marks. Again I'm purposely trying to do things the wrong way and sometimes it's kind of hard and this actually did work out okay for a block in stage for a painting but still there are things I've done here that are not really great for watercolor painting. Now I'm going to add that little shadow that's being cast from the tree. I'm purposely trying to get it a little too dark and I can't stress enough that one of the key tips I'm giving in watercolor painting is to work light to dark. I'm purposely trying to get that tree darker at the initial stages and so far I have the green in the field. Its value is okay but now I'm going to purposely mix up some dark green and I'm going to go ahead and add some of this to the field and I'm just going to cover it with a coating of a darker value green. Now what I'm doing is I'm going ahead and putting it even in the background portions of the field. Now if I was doing this with pastel painting this wouldn't be such a no-no because I can work typically dark to light with pastel painting. I could go back and glaze a lighter value over the background field. With watercolor however once I lay these values down other than some little tweaks you can do sometimes by applying water and brushing things off you're pretty stuck with this dark color without the flexibility to lighten up the distant field. So again I cannot stress enough that that's one of the most important tips is to work light to dark. Another tip is to not be afraid to paint outside the lines. This is not like when we were young and we were told in our coloring books, stay inside the lines. Whoever invented that rule. I think paintings look so much more alive and free and more true to nature if we're not afraid to paint outside the lines and be a little bit fluid and nondescript with our edges. And before moving on to the better way to approach watercolor painting I thought I'd share with you. I do have a video here on YouTube. I'll share a link to it hopefully right a clickable link right in the top corner of this and also in the description of this video which better demonstrates many of these principles about watercolor that I'm sharing. You can probably see in this first example of many in this video how I've worked the whole. I didn't start in one little teeny area. I basically did kind of a wash or a value study letting water be my friend. I'm letting the water play and drip and not having a thick concentration of water to paint. I also used a strategy of working light to dark being careful not to get too dark too soon and I am painting outside the lines as you can see which I think creates a painting that is free and flowing and not too stiff and tight. I also painted a little gestural and fun duck and here's an example of letting the colors mix themselves. I put the yellow down added little dots of orange and just let it blend into each other and this was a lot of fun. So check out that video if you'd like a little bit more on seeing these tips in action. Alright for this one let's go ahead and let the water be our friend. I've rinsed my brush out. I'm going to go ahead and do basically like a value study for this painting and get this water. This is called wet on wet. I'm putting water down first getting the paper wet and I'm going to attempt to let water be my friend and to work the hole. First I'm just going to focus on the sky and the tree just so I don't run out of time. Watercolor too there's a timing thing. You got to time things right when they dry and it might sound complicated at first but it's just one of those things that you get better the more you do it and it becomes just second nature just natural. I'm not saying I'm super natural at it yet but I'm getting there. Alright so I'm going to make the sky blue kind of like the sky and I already put my water down alright we got the water down. I got a nice pretty blue here. This pretty pretty prussian blue get enough. Let's see sometimes I test my colors too. That's probably good because I have water down already and I'm turning my brush on its side okay. I know that skies typically are darker in the upper horizon or upper level of the sky more so than they are lower so I probably need a little more water. Let water be my friend I'm mixing up a little more okay and it'll gradually just make this wash and it's okay if I go right over that tree. Okay and you do get better too about knowing the consistency of water to paint mixing it up too. Okay let's get it and if it feels like it's too much you can just go back up to the top of the sky and it will start to blend down again. Okay so now let's do an example of letting the colors mix themselves. I think I want to add a little lavender in the upper sky and we'll just let that the paper is already wet so I'm going to grab some of the blue. I'll mix it right here again and a little bit of the red. You get better too about trying not to contaminate your colors by just getting a little teeny weeny bit okay. So there's kind of a little bit of a purplish blue. My dog is barking outside and I did mix those up but let's see what would happen if I just put the red on. You know how I was saying let the colors mix themselves. Let's put a little red just up here. Yeah see see how it's mixing itself. I didn't even have to mix it with the blue. Now this is pretty red but it will start to mix itself on the paper gradually. I don't have to over mix this and usually skies get cooler in the upper heavens but in this case we're just going to leave it a nice purple up there. Okay and it gives some interest to this side. It's kind of heavily weighted with this tree here. Okay gotta get my dog. All right now the next thing of course still is working light to dark. Oh I gotta get this tree in. I forgot I wet the tree already. So we're gonna get the little value study in here. I'm just gonna let this tree be kind of blue right now and I'm gonna let it working light to dark because when you do a wash it does two things. It gives you kind of an impressionistic feel and it allows it to stay light. Okay so this is staying nice and light right now. All right now I mentioned too about working the hole. That's step number three I think. So I know right now that I don't want to wet around this right here, this tree here because if I touch it it's gonna disturb the edge of the tree here. So I'm gonna try to get this background group of trees in back here. Once again now I'm working the hole. It doesn't matter if I touch it a little bit there. It needs to be a little darker and I'm not doing a wet on wet for these trees back here. So let's just get some of these trees in. I'm keeping a really painterly feel back here and they're kind of blending in with the water that I wet in the sky up there. Okay. Okay see how loose and painterly that is? And I'm just gonna leave that there. It might drip down in a minute but it actually the gravity is working in the favor because the bottom of the tree is darker anyway. All right so timing of drawing this I can probably now do this background field here. I might let it dry a little longer. I think I'll let it dry just a little bit or I'll shoot it with the blow dryer. How about that? All right now I did kind of like using this pink peachy lavender color in the road. So let me go ahead and let's get kind of a technique here where I put a little bit of water down like a wet on wet technique and we get that kind of center portion of the road in here. I'll leave a little bit of white and I'm gonna use mix up again kind of some of the red and some of the blue and I am gonna mix this one. I might try later to let the colors mix themselves on the palette but for this one I'm gonna go ahead and mix it. Okay we're starting to get that little pink color. You see that? I think I need a little bit more of this and you just keep mixing this until you get the right color. In a minute I'll show you how to let them mix on the palette. Getting close. Little teeny bits of blue. Getting close. Now it's gonna get lighter as I put it down. There's that's good. Okay it's gonna get lighter as I put it down because I already put the water there. Sometimes too it's hard to see where the water is where you put it. It's a little dark so I'm gonna add more water and I always like test it like that. Just give it a little test. That's better. Okay that's a little dark too but I'm gonna lighten it up with the water. Water is your friend. You can just use that water to your advantage and it's going to dry lighter. Alright this is getting dry now. I blew that up there didn't I? And this is an example of a bloom. What I should have done on this one. When I did the blow dryer up on this it pushed some of the water back up in there. When your paint gets a or your paper gets in between wet and dry and you add more water it creates a little bloom and an inconsistency in color. Sometimes you can use that in your favor. In this case it's not that bad because this tree is gonna get darker. Okay so we've got this in here. Now let's talk about letting colors mix on the palette. Alright I'm gonna get I am gonna get a little bit of this green here though. Gonna make me a green and I'm gonna make it cooler rather than too warm because I'm gonna put it in this distant backfield. It has more blue than yellow. Maybe even a little more blue. Yeah there we go. And I want it real watery. Okay this one I did mix on here. Okay so let's go ahead and get this in. Let's test it. Test it down here. It's a little dark. I'll put a little water in. I'm gonna use a different brush and I'm gonna get me some water in back here. Alright so I could have mixed it up like that. Let's try not mixing it up like that. Let me put some blue down. Then I'll add a little yellow on top of it. Okay now let's let the yellow. We're gonna get a teeny little bit of yellow here. Okay mixed it right in there with that. Now we're gonna let it become a green right here on the palette. Okay see how that's more interesting than if I had mixed it within a one little well. Okay a little bit more interesting color there than just something like that. Alright so let's go ahead and do the same thing in this big area here. I'm gonna do the same thing here. Now I'm gonna look too is is there anything I want to keep light. Really it's just this road and you know the sky pretty much. This is gonna get much darker okay but the grass is is pretty dark. Now this my water already had a little green in it but that's okay. Sometimes I'll do a wet-on-wet technique where I actually have a little color in it because it helps me to to see where I'm putting it. Alright now I'm gonna kind of do a dry technique here. Now this is one of the greens that I did already mix. It's so much less interesting. You know I can already see I don't like that. So let me get a little bit more here. I leave the paper kind of dry. Alright now we're gonna let the color see kind of your wet-on-wet doesn't always have to be so smooth. It's usually better to do that in a sky or in distant things. So let's leave this a little textural and chunky there. Now let's talk about again same strategy. We're going to let the color do the mixing on the paper which is cool. It's just cool. Okay so here we go. I don't want to get too dark back here. We kind of test it right here. No that's good. I can do that. I'm doing this. Where can it go in? A little bit more blue. This can gradually get a little darker as we start getting closer. Well that's really dark but that's okay. This is where some of the darker grasses really are. So that's really cool. Right pretty cool. Kind of comes around the corner there. Now let me add a little more water and you're like blue grasses. Why are you making blue grasses? But it's okay because I do have to still get that shadow because I'm going to let the color do the mixing on the paper. I already had a little bit of that green down but go ahead and get a little bit of this in here too. Okay all right so now let's add some yellow on top of that and it'll make a much more interesting green. You see the difference so far? Now I know it looks a little weird right now because this tree I don't have dark enough but that's back to point number two. We're going to work light to dark. I'm going to add some purple in this tree. We can always go darker. We cannot go lighter. Now this tree is kind of a lot of water in my brush. I don't want so much water in my brush right now so well let's kind of do the same thing on the tree. Let's let the colors mix themselves. This time let's add red first okay. I know I'm going to add some purple to this tree so let's add some of this red kind of on this side here. I didn't like kind of the shape of this tree. Like I said it was kind of like a heart. What is this type of tree called? I love how I can ask you guys or I can make a comment in my videos and I get so many good answers for me. All you guys know your stuff in some places so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to give it a little bit of this blue, a little water, a little more blue than red here so I just dusted that in there. Dusted. I'm so used to pastel lingo because now what I'm going to do is right there I'm going to add a little bit of yellow to that and it's going to make the green that is it's a green but it's not a real light green. It's kind of a dark green so I'm making this and I'm going to preserve the light with this green right in here. It doesn't look green yet but it will. Okay that's going to be the lightest green in the tree. There's a little bit of it over in here okay. So at this point I'm already about 30 minutes into this video so in an attempt to keep it a little bit shorter for upload I'm speeding it up and I'm going to talk to you again about the five tips that I recommended. One is to work the whole and avoid painting like a paint by number and this is the same recommendation that I give for pastel painting. I feel it really does give a lot more harmony and congruency to your painting. Point number two which you can see what's happening right now. Work light to dark. You can always go darker with watercolor but you can't really get that beautiful luminous light color or value of the paper back again once you go too dark. I probably got a little too dark with this tree but you know that's just back to my point. Keep it lighter before going darker. Now these little shadows that I'm working on with the road it's the same thing. I'm not going too dark too quickly. These are the lightest parts of the shadow and once it dries I will later come back and add some darker shadow areas especially in the foreground to generate interest and focal point there and soon you will also see me doing the same thing to this bank of grasses in the foreground. Remember watercolor dries lighter. You see much lighter this looks now than some of my original applications so I can come back once it's dry and add some of those shadowy darker values. So that's probably the biggest of all these tips is to work light to dark with watercolor and just take your time with that. Don't feel like you have to get those darkest values in right away. Once again kind of got that tree a little dark. The right side of the tree was the darker side. The sun is coming in this image from the left and you know I've got my little shadow across the road but I'm going to eventually kind of subdue that a little bit too and now I can work a few strokes on top of these lighter grasses to give the indication of individual blades of grass even though I don't want to get too carried away with this. You know I lean towards impressionism and I don't like to get too overly detailed with things but just to give suggestions and indications. So now I'm giving a little more shadow to the road and just playing and having fun but I hope you're already able to see some of the differences in the two approaches. While the one on the right would have been a great block in for a pastel painting because we can typically work dark to light with pastel, it's not so great for beginning a watercolor painting. The values are too dark too soon and it's a little, I don't know, a little chunky whereas I like to try to embrace the element of watercolor which is to let that water play, have fun, let the colors be light and luminous. And now I'm going to do a little trick that many watercolor artists do. I'm going to create a little bit of paint here that I can tap in the foreground to give a little bit of texture almost like little pebbles or little twigs and things. And sometimes just so you know if you don't want it to get in an area like the sky it's a good idea to cover up the area you don't want it to go to. So I'm still playing around with this having some fun. And even though some of these tips it may seem like a lot when you're first getting started but it's like anything. It's all brand new. And so if you just try to do some little sample pieces that's why I tried to keep this like a little simple landscape then it's just practice. You don't feel so bad. You're gonna have some mistakes. Everybody does. You're gonna have paintings you throw away. But those are all just steps to becoming a better artist. I decided to darken up the road a little bit there. So I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. I hope you learned something and I hope you'll keep playing with watercolor. I know I will. Oh here I'm getting even more crazy. You see how you can just keep gradually working the whole. And if you work light to dark you've got a lot more flexibility than if you paint like I did on the right hand side there. So keep these tips in mind. Use whatever you have. You don't have to use the products that I have. I know sometimes it's best to play. It's like you always say when your child's interested in a pony you don't go buy them the most expensive thoroughbred or whatever. We start simple a lot of times with these things and gradually build up. So if you do create from this video and you want to share it with the world or anyone on your social media platforms I would love it if you would tag me on Instagram. It's at Susan Jenkins artist on Facebook. It's the art of Susan Jenkins and of course in our Monet Cafe art group on Facebook. Also if you're a patron of mine you know you get a little bit of extra instruction and also you get the opportunity to share in our homework album and I love seeing your work and giving you comments on that. And don't worry pastel artist. I'll have plenty of other pastel instruction coming along with more watercolor. I have a little bunny series I'll be introducing soon. So I hope you enjoy all of the different ways that we can paint with different mediums. Never forgetting to enjoy the creative experience. Alright guys that's it. Hope you enjoyed and happy painting.