How to Paint a Chickadee on Magnolia Flowers for Beginners | Step by Step Watercolor Tutorial

Hi everyone and welcome. I'm Diane and my passion is painting and creating nature-inspired watercolours in my studio which are easy for you to do too. I share all my paintings with you on YouTube and on our website dianeanton.com you can find free downloadable sketches for all the videos to help you make the most of your painting journey. And if you'd like a little bit more we also have channel memberships with loads of perks for you So welcome on board, click subscribe and turn on notifications and let's learn to paint watercolour. Hi everyone, Diane here, welcome to my channel. Although I've been putting up videos a couple of times a week over the last two three weeks I haven't actually done any painting for that long because I've had to go to England as I think I told you I was going to do and I did all the videos in advance because I knew I wasn't going to be able to get into the right mindset to be able to do very much in the way of painting. I do find that I need clear space around me in my head before I can actually get started on anything and so today is the first day and today is Sunday, Palm Sunday and today is the first day that I've actually managed to find some time to start picking up a brush again. I've got a very stinky dog at my feet he's just let me know he's still there. Now I'm going to do a little bit of warm-up first before I start painting this magnolia with a chickadee perched on it and I'm going to show you what I'm going to do. I just thought I'd do this. This is the palette that I normally work on that I left when I went away two weeks ago. It's not got very much paint on it at all but that's fine because what I'm going to do, I'm going to take this Tintoretto brush which I got as a gift from Agallo paints in Italy and I'm going to use some of the colours that are on this palette. I'm just going to wet them and make them into a kind of random, totally random, I'm all very fond of random colour and then I'm going to use that to sketch and what I've got here is a photo, believe it or not I took this photo, well I didn't, the camera did, and it's a photo of the magnolia tree which was just coming into flower outside the house. You can see it from my bedroom window and from the kitchen where I was staying in Canterbury and Canterbury in England is the most amazing place for magnolias, they're absolutely spectacular ones and I think Tamsin when she makes this video will put some pictures of the ones that we saw in Canterbury and the weather was absolutely incredible so all these amazing flowers were coming out and just like the place was covered in floral snow it was just amazing. So this, I found this quite inspiring because what happened, the camera has made this into something that wasn't really there but it's made these branches very dark and all very graphic so I just think as a warm-up I'm going to just try to capture some of that graphic graphicness or whatever and the dogs have started barking now so I've got a stinky one at my feet and noisy ones outside, I don't know. If I start rambling about stuff that you're not interested in, which I might, turn the volume off then and don't listen to me because everybody likes the sound of their own voice but nobody else does on the whole. You have to be a pretty good speaker to be able to capture the interest, I think, and the attention of people. Anyway, so yes, what was I saying? We've had a very unfortunate thing has happened here in France and that's one of the reasons why I haven't been able to do much in the way of painting. We've had an outbreak very close to where we live of avian flu and the other day we were just starting to work on our front fence we need to repair. We had it replaced a little while ago but it was a not very good job and it's basically rotted, well it hasn't rotted, the paint's all flaking off. So anyway, we were out the front of the house trying to do something with this aforesaid fence and suddenly someone drew up in a car and it was the mayor of our local village and he informed us in no uncertain terms that if we didn't lock away our chickens and keep them from roaming, he said, you've been seen to have chickens outside and don't you know that we're in a lockdown? Don't you know? And so he said, no we have been away and we don't know. How long has it been in lockdown? So he said, oh since 2016. So we said, what? So first we've heard of it and he said, oh you have to get all your birds in otherwise you'll be fined and you'll be you'll be sent to prison and then you'll be guillotined or locked up forever and we'll take all your money away from you and you'll never see the light of day again. So we said, oh okay, all right then, well since you say in such a polite way that we have to do these things, these things of which you speak shall be done. So we have to keep our birds under netting, under netting, yes. So the last week or so we've been trying to figure out how this strange thing may be done and yeah, I'm losing, I'm losing the will to live to be honest. So not only have we had Brexit and the pandemic, now we've got avian flu. So I'm, as I said, I'm doing this to loosen up and just to get the feel of painting and rambling and all the rest of it. For any of you who don't understand English humour, which is most people and people don't find me funny, I don't seriously mean that we have to be guillotined but on Facebook, YouTube probably won't like it but I don't care. To be honest, I'm getting a bit fed up with it in general. Life I mean, not YouTube, God forbid, God forbid. It's Palm Sunday today, talking about God and while we were in Canterbury, we went to the Cathedral which is a nice place to visit. It used to be nicer but it's still not bad and saw the Dean of Canterbury. One or two of you will know what I'm talking about. He does YouTube too. The Dean of Canterbury Cathedral is a YouTuber. Isn't that amazing? So this is, yes, as I said, right, so that's enough of that. That gives me an idea of what I'm going to do next. Okay, so before we carry on with the real painting, I just wanted to talk a little bit about palettes. Palettes as in the sense of the things upon which you mix your paint rather than the paints that you have in a box. A lot of people have asked me where I get these little dishes from and I can't tell you because it's a secret. Well, it's not a secret actually, I don't know. Somebody gave them to me and I don't know where he got them from. They look to me as if they were handmade by a potter and they're from Germany so it's a complete mystery. You can buy something similar but they're quite expensive. You can get them on Amazon. You can also get little round plastic ones used for things like dips for Chinese food. Anyway, another alternative which I came across the other day is this palette. This is a mixing tray. I think it's also for food. I think originally this is a Chinese dish for things like wabasaki, soy thingy, what's it? All that. I don't know about Chinese food but I think that's right or Japanese or something oriental and you have them in the little compartments but it was sold as a palette and I think it works quite well. You can get that on Amazon and I'll put a link in the description below and on the blog on my website at dianeanton.com. So these are the colors I'm going to use. This is going to be and I would probably also put this in these. This is the way I would do it normally in here but I'm going to try this out as a different technique to try to help you deal with the issue that some people have raised. This is cobalt blue. I prefer working with tubes because the paint is more fluid, haha, and I find that that is more conducive to my style. And this is quinacridone gold. So what we have here is three primary colors basically, although they're not pure primaries. Well, they are actually. Alizarin crimson and cobalt blue certainly are, and quinacridone gold is definitely a yellow. Every painting needs those three primaries in it and don't take any notice of anyone who says that you don't need. I believe you do, so whatever. That's Payne's grey and I'll need a little bit of that for the chickadee. I don't believe in rules in painting either but I do think that, and I think you can mix most of the colors you want, but if you haven't got the three primaries you're not going to get very far with that job. They don't have to be cobalt blue, alizarin crimson and quinacridone gold. They can be any yellow, any blue, any red, and an earth color such as Payne's grey or burnt umber perhaps or, I don't know, a dark color of some kind because, well, you'll see as we go along. Anyway, here I have my drawing. I will put the sketch of this on the website for you to download free of charge. And what was I going to say? So I did this using my light box and if you have a light box too that you will also find quite handy. This is my light box, I'll put a link to that also in the description. It's $30 I think I paid for it plus an inordinate amount of shipping because I'm in France but you won't have to deal with that. So there we are. Now I have to choose what brush I'm going to use. I'm not a brush fetishist, just a second, I am not a brush fetishist. I have a lot of brushes. As you can see I don't use any of them. There's a few more over here. These are the ones I mostly use and I don't believe in making a fuss about brushes. So I shall choose something that I'm familiar with. This is a Drawwell number 11 round and I'm going to use that. It's my sketch material, I'll put that over there. This is my paints and my palette. And let's get started. So pink for the flowers. Oh, I should show you the sketch I did at this point. It's dry now. This is just, what's the word? Just my imagination running away with me. Wasn't that Diana Ross? I'm going to just dab in some pink for these flowers. This is a bud. I'm working on a piece of etival canson, that's Clairefontaine. And I'm going to, I haven't, I haven't fixed my paper down, I forgot. I'm just going to do these really wet. I don't, I haven't started this off with any particular process in mind. I might, I might use some pen and ink. It depends how well it goes. If it doesn't go well, I will. If it goes well, I won't. We'll see. So those are the flowers. And the branches are kind of grey, grey brown, aren't they? So we will need to achieve that. We want some yellow, some blue and some pink. And then I'm going to change that colour a little bit. The flowers have a kind of greyish, I think more blue, I think we need more blue, papery kind of thing. And then we have some, actually, I'll come back to those because we have some bright green leaves coming out, but these things are bluish. Paint wants to go green. Everyone wants to do their paintings loose, don't they? I was looking at something on YouTube the other day called Neurographic Arts. Anyone heard of that? And I was thinking I might have a go at it because I think it could be quite useful as an antidote to the world, which is, anyone else? Alarmed? Worried? Concerned? Anxious? I know I am. I'm not going to pretend. No. So I need to paint it out, you know? I should say, actually, I'm going to ramble again a bit. I used to live in Canterbury and it meant a lot to me because it was the place where my children went to school and I trained to be a teacher there. And lots of emotional things happened while I was living there. And so, yeah, it's the one place in the world where I have, and I have to go back there for this dentist and I wish he'd retire, then I'd have to go somewhere else and stop tormenting myself. But I come away from there feeling really that the world has not become a better place. I've got to shut up. I've got to shut up. I've got to shut up. So I'm coming in with a second layer of colour to hopefully cause something pleasant to occur. And soon we're going to let it dry. Well, about now, actually. I'm going to let it dry. I'm going to try to do something with this bird. I'm really worried about our chickens. Well, I mean, we can't keep them indoors. We can't. But they've destroyed eight, I think, million birds in France in the last couple of, I don't know, last few weeks. And I think what's really upset me is that some people seem to think it's not really happening and it doesn't affect them. I don't know. I suppose people are just kind of running out of emotional fuel. There's only so much you can, there is only so much that we can bear before we kind of shut down and say enough. I'm going to grab a fine brush to do the feet, legs, grey, light grey, one leg and then feet, eye, beak. And now we let it dry. OK, so the first stage of drying is done. And so I'm just going to continue to come in with a few darks. So I've mixed up some darks using the cobble blue and the alizarin crimson to give me a dark purpley colour. And then I'm just not going to do too much, but just dropping in a few shadowy points, just very broken up, not consistent in any way, but just broken up lines to give some sort of shape, indicate things like veins in the leaves and shadows at the base of the flower and stuff like that, but not in any way accurate, so to speak, just kind of making a pattern. This is something that I've learnt over the years, that the best paintings usually aren't, to my mind anyway, aren't realistic. They are patterns. I like to think of them as patterns. And that seems to me to be just purely my personal feeling. And then you have to try to remind yourself that it has to dry and when it's dry, it'll look a little bit different. So I'm going to stop now before I make a terrible mistake I can't do anything about. I'm going to let that dry and then I'll show you the finished, well, I'll show you it when it's finished. So we just pop in a couple of bright pink dots here and there, just to indicate that. And I'm going to stop and I'm going to go and make dinner. So there we are, one chickadee sketch on a, I've just noticed something's not quite right, on a branch of magnolia. His leg, his foot is a bit sketchy, a bit too sketchy. Here we are. Okay, I hope you enjoyed that. And if you did, give us a like and subscribe and turn on notifications and pop along over to diananton.com to pick up your free sketch, if you would like to have some help with the drawing, and then go ahead and interpret it in your own way, using your own combination of colours. Like I said, this was cobalt blue, alizarin crimson and quinacridone gold, a bit of Payne's grey, but you can choose any red, yellow and blue. And so there we go. I'll see you again soon, everybody. Bye for now. Bye-bye.