Feather Drawing — Feather Painting
By: Drawing For Kids Blog
Tags: Drawing, Watercolor Painting, Watercolor Drawing, Watercolor, Painting

Do you need new watercolor painting ideas? Tell me in the comments section.

Because in today’s article, I will show you how to create different sceneries with a few simple and fun techniques that you can use in your watercolor painting to make your art look more interesting like the Drawing for kids blog. We’re gonna start out with the first technique to create depth in a forest scenery. Start off by applying a little bit of water to your watercolor paper and then distribute it evenly but make sure you don’t use too much water. Since I wanted to create summer scenery in a forest, I decided to use green watercolor and mix it with a little bit of cool yellow to make the green slightly more vibrant, but you can use any color you like, of course.

I also mixed it with a lot of water to make the color lighter, and then I applied all around the edges of the square while keeping the center very, very light. If you have too much paint on your brush, just rinse it off and blend out the rest of the color with a damp brush.

First Feather Drawing

From here, you can start building up the intensity the same way. It’s just important to start with a very light layer and then add more and more color on top. Otherwise, it will be more difficult to add depth later if it’s too dark in the early stages. Now if you notice that you get pools of color because you used way too much paint and Sketching skills, or water like in my case, that the paper starts buckling, simply use a tissue paper or a dry brush to soak it up.

While the paint is still wet, add a little bit of yellow watercolor to the center for the sun in the background and then blend it into the light green color. Here it’s important to work rather quickly and to make sure that you don’t use too much water or otherwise the wet paint will run into the dry areas and create these backgrounds that look like cauliflowers. But if that still happens, don’t worry. Just blend it completely into the green colors so you kind of wake up the paint again. All right, this is how it looks so far.

Second Feather Drawing

While this is drying, I’m going to show you how you can use the same technique but for underwater scenery. Load up your brush with the blue color of your choice and then distribute the paint all around the paper. So once you create the blue frame, blend out the color into the center with a clean wet brush to make the color lighter and lighter toward the center. If you use too much paint and the center is too dark, just use tissue paper again and soak up some of the paint, and then you can blend out the rest with a clean damp brush.

Now the difference here to the first painting is that the scenery is underwater, so instead of using another color in the center, you want to load up your brush with blue paint again and then you want to start building up the color, starting from the edges. To apply the paint to the corners Drawing for kids and then lightly blend it towards the center in a circular motion. And with the rest of the paint on your brush, create a few lines that kind of create a spiral towards the center.

If you want to keep the outer edges dark and the more and more you move to the center, the lighter the color should become. This way you create this depth and also the light reflections that you get underwater. Again, it’s important that you work rather quickly so the moisture on the paper is even and you don’t get any patches later.

Third Feather Drawing

Now for the third painting, we are going to create a very simple mountain scenery using the layering technique that we’re going to use in the other paintings, as well. So here you only need one color of your choice and then mix it with a ton of water so the color is very, very light. And then pick up the paint with your brush and then start outlining the shape of the mountains right underneath the edge of your paper.

Once you create the outline, you want to blend out this line without using any additional paint towards the bottom of the paper, and then let it dry. So you get a very light color on top that becomes almost invisible towards the bottom. These are going to be mountains that are far, far away. In the third painting, I just kept adding more rows of mountains, making them darker and darker. All right, let’s move on to the third painting while this is drying like a line drawing.

Now here you also want to use a darker version of the previous color and then repeat the steps. Outline the shapes of the mountains but slightly below the first row, and then blend out the line towards the bottom. The lighter the color is right below the mountain, the more of a misty effect you create. So you don’t want to just paint over the whole paper like we just did with the trees in the first painting. We really want to make sure the top part of the mountain is just a dark line, which we then blend out to make the paint almost invisible below.

Fourth Feather Drawing

In the fourth painting, we’re going to combine both techniques. We are going to create the sunset in the background and later mountains, trees, and anything that we want. Now here I used yellow and red to create this orangey sunset, but you can use any color you like. You just want to make the center light and the outside darker. Also, instead of creating a full circle like in the first painting, you want to do it the same as with the mountains and blend out the rest of the paint starting from the center towards the bottom.

So we only see the sun on the upper part of the painting. Now the most important part of all those techniques is patience, so make sure the paper is completely dry when you add another layer. You can use a hairdryer for that. I do that all the time. And then we can start building up our little paintings. Now, to create depth in the first painting, load up your brush with the same color you used for the background. In this case like a cartoon drawing, I used my lime green type of color but make it slightly darker, just a little bit. And then paint a tree silhouette on top.

So here I outlined some shapes. Some are taller, some are wider, but make sure you keep the center relatively free so the sun doesn’t get lost. Just add a few trees below it and let it dry again. In the ocean scenery, we are going to do the same but we’re going to create the light reflections instead. So here I used the same color again, just slightly darker, and then I started painting triangles with the wider part at the edges that become smaller and lighter towards the center. You can create them in any size.

I painted some wider, some were just thin lines. Just making sure I created this type of star or sunray shape with the paint becoming almost invisible towards the center. Since I also wanted to make the ocean look a little bit deeper, I added the same blue color, just a little bit darker, to the edges and blended it into the rest. Do the same in the fourth painting like the third painting and let everything completely dry.

Fifth Feather drawing

Now from here, we can finally start finishing up the paintings. If you’ve seen my video about how to paint with just one color, you might know how this works. So basically, the more rows you add to your painting, the darker and darker the color becomes when you move closer and closer to the viewer. Load up your brush with the same color again, just use more paint than water to make it look darker, and then apply another layer on top.

Now here you can experiment again with different shapes, heights, and how you place everything into your painting. You can keep the center rather free or if you want, you can also, of course, place trees right at the center to make everything look more mysterious like you really want to know what’s there behind the trees. Where does the path lead you? Just make sure to let the layers dry completely because otherwise, you get patches or the lines will look fuzzy, so just be patient or use the hairdryer. I use a hairdryer all the time during my process because honestly, I don’t want to wait for ages for everything to dry, so it saves you a lot of time.

Since this technique is all about layering, it’s not only important to make sure the paint underneath is completely dry but also that your watercolors are transparent because if it’s opaque or it has a ton of fillers and it looks rather chalky, you might not get the same results because, as you see, the layers are built on each other and depend on each other Planet Drawing.

Sixth Feather Drawing

For the ocean scenery, you can add people swimming around the light spot or add dolphins, fish, or anything else you like. To emphasize how deep the water is, I made some fish very tiny around the center and then added some bigger fish and dolphins around the edges that swim towards the light. I did something similar in the super old video about watercolors for beginners, but there I used a different technique and I think you can use both, even in one painting. And for the fourth painting, I just combined everything and played around with different colors. I added blues, reds, and greens to just experiment. I was just so fascinated by building up the layers and how colors looked underneath another color, so it was really fun.

The earliest examples are a great exercise to get familiar with the layering and the glazing technique because you don’t have to create a super detailed or advanced type of painting. You can just physically create random shapes and layer them on top of each other and bam, you get something really cool. I just wanted to show you guys these very simple ideas that you can incorporate into your art. I really hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it helpful. I can’t wait to see what you will use in your art and how it will turn out. Thank you so much for watching, have a wonderful day, and I will see you in my next video. Bye!

Source: Cool Drawing idea