Painting and Ideas for watercolor painting
By: Drawing For Kids Blog
Tags: Drawing, Ideas, Sketch, Watercolor, Painting

Hey, so happy to see you here to how to Painting and Ideas for watercolor painting.

Have you ever wondered how to make your watercolor painting look more two-dimensional so it looks more interesting?

Because In today’s video I’m going to show you a fun technique you can try out that does exactly that. I’ll walk you through step by step while using two different examples. And by the way, if you’re completely new to watercolors, or just simply have questions about it, I create a free guide to watercolor supplies where I talk about everything that you need to know about watercolor paint, paper, and brushes, so, you can instantly get better at your art. You can find more of this in the Cool Drawing Idea.

To make sure you don’t add too much water to your painting, you can use tissue paper or a paper towel to soak up some of the excess water from your brush. Now, to create depth I went ahead and used my ochre color from the beginning and applied it right to the edges around the circled and blended it slightly into the yellow colors. You just want to create this transition between super light in the center and make dark colors around the edges. I find this wet on wet technique works the best on 100% cotton paper because it’s so sturdy and it just simply can handle the water so much better than regular watercolor paper, made out of cellulose. Again, if you want to learn more about it, make sure to download the free guide that I made just for you.

Here I’m going to use another shade of brown so I have a little bit of a contrast. So load up your brush with paint and draw a thin line upwards where you simply dab your brush to the sides to create these little dots to create the shapes in the leaf. And continue that with a few more leaves. Here it’s important again that the paper and the paint are still wet, so you want to work quickly. If the paper is already too dry, the paint will just sit on top without blending in. Next, I use even more of the brown color and repeated the steps. This time you want to create another row, but this time a lot shorter. So, start at the very bottom and paint the lines upwards, while changing up their height again. So, I added some very thin lines, some that are a little bit thicker, and make sure that they all have different heights. I also sometimes just dab on some paint to create subtle leaves that look through with the background. You also want to leave out some areas so you don’t simply color everything darker. The other row should still look through. And to make it look more interesting, you can also make the leaves look in different directions.

Next, I use red paint and mixed a little bit of yellow, so it turns into orange and then blended it upwards, starting slightly below the yellow color. Now, this going to be the base for the sunset. Clean your brush, dab off the excess water, and start adding another layer of yellow paint, the same way to intensify the color. As you can see, I now have a very bright yellow on top that turns into orange. Now we can work in even redder to intensify everything again. Here I started at the center and I blended the red color by moving upwards into the yellow color. Again, you want to make sure you don’t add too much water with your brush. So, dab it off on a piece of tissue paper so you have more paint than water on your brush.

Now to create the sun that’s actually setting, we’re going to use an easy trick. For that you only need a piece of tissue paper to use to cover the end of a pen that should be flat. Or you can also use a small coin. And then wrap the end of the pen or the coin with the tissue paper. Now, you only have to press it down above the purple paint to soak up the wet paint and then you will reveal the white paper below, once you remove it. I also use my clean, damp brush to lightly blend out the edges. This way we get this glory effect around the sun. All right, now for the lower part of the painting, I’m going to use a very bright mixture of green-colored paint and apply it to the white space. Here we’re going to paint another wheat field, but this time it’s going to be green. And then I mixed a slightly darker version of that green, using a little bit more blue, and repeated the same steps as in the first painting. I simply added different lines here and there, making sure they’ll look in different directions. I also apply them around the horizon and in the field itself. I also apply a little bit of yellow paint on top just to create the yellow crops, growing from these green leaves.

Next, I mixed an even darker green and applied it to the lower part of the painting to create even more depth. Again, don’t freak out, everything should just blend into each other. And to make sure you don’t create a pool of paint, always dab off excess water on a tissue paper. Here I add the green lines to create shadows around the crops leaning towards the right, but of course, you can paint it however you like. Also, as you can see, since the sky is already dryer than the field you’re currently working on, the wet paint started to push away the dry paint. This is one of the versions of the typical cauliflower effect or background. This is why it’s important to work quickly and keep the paper wet. I just took way too long to paint the field and it went back to the horizon, so the water kind of buildup. But don’t panic if that happens to you, you can always blend it out later. All right, while this is drying let’s go back to the first painting. As you can see, since we painted wet on wet, everything we worked on looks rather blurry. And that’s exactly what we wanted.

Repeat the steps with a few more leaves here and there. To make everything look a little bit more delicate, I also used tissue paper to soak up some of the paint, but only in a few areas, so some lines are still darker than the rest. From here you can really play around and add even lighter or darker lines, whenever you feel like it’s a little too empty. But you don’t want to add too much or you’ll cover everything that we just worked so hard on. All right, let’s move on to the second painting.

The first thing I did, I painted the circle yellow, and so the sun doesn’t look so white. And then I blend out the weird, hard edge upwards and downwards so everything is slightly more seamless again. And to make sure that the backgrounds won’t happen again, I use the glazing technique to add a thin layer of yellow paint to the lower half of the painting and to also make the green look a little bit warmer. And because I reactivate the paint a little bit, I could use that to add more details to the sky to create clouds and its shadows. And now we can add a few more details and you’re done. This time I used an even darker shade of my brown color and added a few more leaves here and there to create another row in the field. And repeat the same with the second painting.

Here I painted different types of leaves and branches. And to make everything look slightly more magical, I also used white gouache and sprinkled it all over the painting to create this white shimmer. And if you want, you can also mix the white gouache with your watercolors to make them opaque. Here I did that with my green and yellow color and created a few highlights in the field. And this is how it looks. Don’t forget to download your free guide about watercolor supplies, using the link down below. And for more ideas on what you can paint to improve your art, check out the videos right here. I really hope it was helpful, thank you so much for watching, have a wonderful day and I will see you in the next video. Bye.