Hopefully you’re a little more excited about this than the sad bunnies on my note paper.

First up, sketch your basic outline.

Keep the details around the face fine.

While the hair out the back is long and flowing.

The most important part of paintings like this is the colouring. Think about colours that work well together. My favourite combination is bright blue/green/pink/purple.

I decided to go with the blue and green for the girl and then pink and purple for the sky. I like to start with the face details because if I don’t get that right then there’s no point doing the rest of the painting. Each line and area is a combination of the two colours.

The technique is simple, lay down a thick-ish line of water.

Drop on the two colours and move them with the paint brush until you’re happy.

While the face outlines dry I moved on to the fabric. I find it easier to do the outlines first then move on to the shadows etc once it’s dry using the lines as a guide.

Moving on, the hair is next. Large sections of hair first making sure to keep it so it looks flowing.

Swoosh!

Use your colours to indicate the texture and folds of the fabric. Keep an eye on where you’re placing each colour eg. use the darker blue for areas in shadow.

Overlapping the hair layers once they are dry creates even more layers.

The face and skin is shaded very minimally.

Now let it all dry.

Once it’s totally dry, erase any of the pencil which is still showing through.

Now to paint the background,we don’t want to get any of the pink/purple on the greens so cover the edges with masking fluid.

Cover the entire background with water.

And then drip the colour on.

More water and more colour.

You can see the water pooling and the paper beginning to buckle. So long as the water isn’t a danger to the other colours don’t worry about it. Water makes cool patterns as it dries.

Once it dries it will look something like this:

Now remove all of the resist from the edges.

All done!

I left a gap around the edges for aesthetic reasons but you can paint resist directly on top of the green/blue if you want to keep it nice and close.

So let’s have a look at all of the details!

With techniques like this, the paint and the water are really doing most of the work so all you need are basic drawing skills.

Textured paper really brings out water colour.

So there you have it! I hope you enjoyed this walk/paint through 😀 Let me know what you paint, I can’t wait to see!

So before we work on techniques, let’s learn about the basic timeline of a painting. Every artist has a different way of doing things but this is mine.

1. Sketch out a picture.

2. Ink the picture using a fine black pen.

3. Do a basic wash with light colours. A wash is what it’s called when you do one very thin coat with a base colour to work on.

4.  Add shadows using a darker tone.

5. Once it’s dry, add highlights using a white gel pen.

Done!

So really what I’m saying is that basic shading consists of a base colour, shadow and highlight. Blend those colours together and you’re set. Just make sure that you keep in mind where the light source in your drawing is and shade according to that.

There are different ways to achieve shading as well. Below you can see a rose which has been shaded using different techniques.

Block shading is a technique where there is no blending of the shading at all, the colours are just painted on and left. This gives a cartoonish effect.

Blended shading is what the name suggests, where the shading is blended together.

It’s much easier to blend colours together smoothly when they are wet on wet paper. Have a look at at the picture below, there is a splotch of blue and of red and then water between them.

Using a clean brush with a little water on it brush the two colours together and swirl them to mix.

It is much easier to blend seamlessly on wet paper than it is with dry.

A combination of block and blended shading works really well on areas such as hair.

To achieve that, use a blended shading technique while it’s wet and then add block shading when it’s dry.

You can really play with things like colour once you get comfortable with shading.

For example here is a regular line drawing…

And here is a shaded version…

Practice is the most important part of this. It takes a while but when you’ve done enough drawings you can get a feel for things. It sounds really cliche but it’s very true! The more you practice drawing things the more it becomes muscle memory. Look at the world around you and look at where the light hits things, shading and colouring is a skill which is completely separate from drawing to learn so don’t be discouraged and practice both of them separately and together!

I hope you found this helpful and I can’t wait to see what you guys paint!

Our painting is going to be a very basic landscape of some trees on a river at sunset.

So let’s get started! We will roughly sketch things before we begin painting. To begin with, decide where your horizon line is and draw a line there. I did mine 1/3rd from the bottom of the page.

Now roughly outline the trees. You don’t need to do things in too much detail, just a rough guide.

Now we will begin painting the trees with a wash. A wash is when you paint an entire area with a thin wet coat of colour.

So give the entire area of the trees a wash with light green.

Drying time is important. If you do the next coat before it’s totally dry they will bleed together.

Paint the reflections of the trees in the lake with a light green wash too. They should be the same shape as the trees but upside down.

Once those sections are dry it’s time to work on the sunset. Cover the entire sky area with water and then paint a line of yellow at the horizon.

Mix in a line of pink and make sure you have enough water for them to smoosh together.

Continue the gradient up to purple and blue.

Continue the blue up to the top of the paper.

Repeat the same wash of sky down into the river backwards for the reflection. Water makes things appear distorted so make the gradient of colours much shorter.

You should have something like this…

Now let’s build on the trees. Use a more vibrant mix of the light green and begin with tiny strokes to make triangular pine tree shapes. You don’t need to colour each entire tree in, just little brush strokes will do.

Build the trees up slowly, there is no “undo” in water colours!

Continue building and consider as you paint where the light would be coming from. The only light in this scene comes from the sunset so the side of the trees which is nearer to the edges of the paper will be darker.

Don’t forget to paint in some more detail to the reflections as well. You don’t want a large amount of tiny strokes like on the actual trees, just some spotchy areas to represent shade in the water ripples.

And remember that on the other side, the light is coming from a different direction.

Once that’s dry we will add in some highlights with a bright yellow. This matches the colour of the sunset. You can also continue the sunset gradient in the tree highlights for a very good look.

So to paint the highlights, add some small strokes of yellow on the tops and sides of the trees closest to the sunset.

Make sure to do the other side as well and add splotches to the reflections to match.

Now begin to add the shadows. Start with a darker shade of green.

I really like to use burnt sienna as a shadow colour because it gives a more realistic and deeper tone than black does. I almost never use actual black for shading.

Now the trees are done, it’s time to layer some cloud coverage on the skyline. I like to layer some with each of the gradient colours.

And that’s about it for the painting part.

So over here you have smooshy reflections…

Very thin and fairly undefined layers of cloud coverage…

And smooth water…

If you want you can add in more details using a white gel pen.

And there you go! It’s a simple landscape that you can build on to make something awesome!

These are the basic steps that I use for most of my paintings, you can take the techniques and use them for just about anything.

Yay for completing a full painting! Hope you guys found something useful in this and let me know how you go painting your own landscapes!

Screw forward thinking, resist/masking fuild is awesome!

Basically resist/masking fluid is a slightly gummy paste which you paint on, then you can paint colours over the top and carefully remove it to see the white paper underneath.

You can use it in a number of ways. Here are 4 of them!

Top left: Mask out entire heart

Top right: Mask out the area around heart to make a sharp edge

Bottom left: Mask out little spots on the heart

Bottom right: Mask out an entire heart on a painted area

Shake up your fluid. I tends to form a skin over the top so you want to make sure it’s a good thin consistency before you paint.

It’s a good idea to have a dedicated brush for working with masking fluid because it tends to be a pain in the arse to clean up and you don’t want to ruin good watercolour brushes.

Begin by masking off the larger areas like the neck. You can see what happens if you use unmixed masking fluid below, it’s lumpy and harder to work with so make sure you mix it well!

I suggest that you thinly outline the area that you want to paint in and then fill in the middles.

If you make a mistake don’t just wipe it off. Wait for it to dry and then gently peel it off and repaint that area.

Any areas you want coloured leave blank.

It can be really difficult to see what you’re doing when painting white on white so I suggest angling your paper while sitting near a window. Leave it to dry very thoroughly before you start painting.

The painting technique we’re going to use for the rest is basically adding a lot of water and then dripping colour on to it.

So soak  the paper with a coat of water. I suggest when doing paintings this wet you should remove the paper from your sketch book and put it on a board so you don’t ruin pages underneath. For this kind of painting you really need to use a heavy grade of paper.

Once your paper is nice and wet, begin by dripping your first colour. I like to start around where the masking is so I can actually see what I’m doing for the rest of it.

Add in a second colour and keep dripping water as you go to keep things wet and easy to move.

Keep layering water and paint.

You can see just how much water is used in these kind of paintings.

Make sure to concentrate on important details like the eyes and pay close attention to the colours there.

Now leave the entire thing to dry very thoroughly. Even if it seems dry I would suggest leaving it over night or else you risk tearing when you remove the resist.

Once it is dry gently peel the edge of the fluid and slowly peel it up. If you can’t find the edge, you can VERY gently use a pin to hook it and then pull up with your fingers.

It should have kind of the consistency of latex eyelash glue. Be super careful around the edges.

Taadaa!

To do this kind of painting you do need to be able to think ahead and almost do things backwards, you need a clear vision of how the picture is going to look in your mind before you begin.

You can see that the lines around the resist are very sharp and clean.

So there you go, now go and paint something fun!

Hopefully you have a decent grasp of how masking fluid works now! Let me know if you have any questions 😀 I’m really enjoying writing this series now, I hope you are all enjoying reading them.

The bottom two of the options involve sprinkling salt on the wet paper/paint and allowing it to dry. It sucks up water and moves the paint around making really interesting shapes:

Each of the colours you have will react different to the water so make sure you give each one a try and experiment.

So from this point on, assume that I’m doing everything with dry paper and a wet brush unless I say otherwise. It’s the most common way to paint ^_^

So let’s look at mixing colours together now. If you’re starting out, you probably don’t have many colours in your kit yet. It’s actually good to start out with only a few colours because it teaches you to mix your own! Even some established artists prefer to have a limited palette and mix their own colours.

So here is a basic colour mixing chart. The primary colours are in the middle: blue, red and yellow. The secondary colours are between them: purple, green and orange.

Use this as a basic chart eg. blue+red=purple.

Load your brush with colour and gently dip it into the water on the paper, this will leave behind colour swirls.

Like this…

You can watch the pigment interact with the water from the side.

Now add another colour so the pigments mix.

Now allow it to dry completely. As it dries, the pigment will be pulled to the edges of the shape and make awesome patterns.

You can play with this even more if you are adventurous! Try painting a spot of colour then when it’s half dry, put a few drops of water in the middle and watch the pigment move around.

Below you can see how that turns out as well as how layering water with more paint in it works.

These kinds of tiny details just look awesome!

Layering is really important in watercolour because the pigments are transparent.

So there are some of the basic techniques you will need to start painting! I hope you guys found that helpful, let me know if you have any questions that I can help with and we’ll move on to some more techniques and full paintings soon! Next we’ll be learning about shading, so excited for that one!