How to Paint a Pine Cone in Watercolor - fun easy step by step real time tutorial for everyone

Hi everyone and welcome. I'm Diane and my passion is painting and creating in my studio. Every day I share a video with you on YouTube in which I paint and create all sorts of nature inspired pictures. I also share loads of tips on how to make the most of your painting journey, interrupted fairly frequently by our family of dogs, cats, chickens and sheep. So welcome on board, click subscribe and turn on notifications and let's learn to paint watercolour. So today I'm going to have a go at painting a pine cone. This is a photo of a white pine cone and we're going to do a very loose version of this which is going to involve basically scribbling in the lights and then the darks for the cone and then just indicating some of the needles on the actual branches very lightly. So just to make a sketch really, just to get started with pine cones because they are quite tricky really. There's lots of different ways of painting them and I'm going to try to show you various different ways of doing this and so I thought we would start with a loose one and then perhaps do some that are a little bit more structured. But anyway the loose ones I think look better in any case so let's do that. So the colours I'm going to be using are sepia which is a very dark brown, quinacridone gold because why not, permanent rose which is going to be to a certain extent mixed with the quinacridone to make a kind of brownish colour, burnt sienna and for the needles I'm going to use olive green but I will be mixing that with quinacridone to give a more warm colour and so, excuse me, there we are and so I'm going to put that to one side. We'll need a pencil just a quick sketch and I'm going to use my bamboo pen if you can call it that for the needles and a rigger from Zen Art for the spatter which is obligatory at the end. Other than that I'm going to use, guess what, my water brush just because it's don't tell anyone but it's easier once you get the hang of it it is. Anyway never mind if you don't want to use a water brush don't worry I will not send in the brush police, you are permitted and what I use is either Zen Art, this is the Black Tulip set and the information about these brushes is on the website or on the blog if you go and have a look at the website you'll find that there's a blog entry for every day that we do a video. I'm going to add grey hairs to my locks if I carry on like this but anyway for the moment we are able to do that and I also use these draw well brushes from Japan which I get from their direct so that's also information in the description below I think you'll find. Today this morning I've been trying to remind myself how to do autumnal things and here we have a little sketch in my Viviva sketchbook which has got really nice paper in it I don't know what it is they won't tell me they say it's 100% cotton it might very well be. Last few days I've been doing a few odds and ends this is a moose or it was called a reindeer I don't know if it's a reindeer it looks like a moose to me but anyway it's a moose deer. I might do something like that for a Christmas card a bit later on maybe thinking about little cutesy kind of description type houses in in the mountains with pines and bunny rabbits and so that's something very early on in the in the what do you call it creative process that is and then this morning I've done this and this is roughly what we're going to do next so put that away. I've got a piece of paper here which is stretched so if you don't know how to stretch paper take a look at the video that's about and that will show you that it's not beyond the skills of anyone and it's really worthwhile doing I do like painting in sketchbooks too but at the end of the day when I come back to stretched paper I must admit I like that I appreciate that. So we're going to just draw in a branch like this as far as I can tell from we don't have white pines here but I'm surrounded by pines but not these ones not these what would you call them super elegant actually because they have this amazing shape the long slim pine cone and then these elegant long needles we don't we have short stubby ones here in Brittany everything in Brittany is short and stubby the cats have got super short legs so short that their stomachs practically touch the ground and the Bretons well um yes least said soonest mended the average height of the average French person is by I think five foot ten male over the whole of France in Brittany the average height is about five foot three I feel huge here I'm five foot three and this is the only place I've ever lived where I feel like a giant it's ridiculous anyway I'm just drawing basically the outline I'm not going to draw in the scales I'm just drawing in the outline so that we get the shape roughly right and so that's that and then we're going to have a little twiggy bit coming down here and a slightly bigger twiggy bit come down here and then I'm going to put the needles here I hope I've left myself enough space now one way of doing this is to to do the painting is to paint the outside edges of the scales light and if you've got this kind where's it gone here we are uh this kind this is a short fat stubby one this and you can see it's interesting this because when you look at a pine cone properly and something I rarely do but I did today you can see the ends of the scales are light and then going in it's dark so one way of drawing this is to like this I'll show you first of all draw the light bits I nicked this off the internet draw the light bits like that and then fill in the dark bits like that and then fill in even more dark bits and lo and behold it stands out like that so that's a good way to do it that's not what I'm going to do today so there we are and the um the pine the needles are going to come out like this and go down like that I hope so that's pine cone can go and sit over there we'll come back to you later um right the brush let's make sure I've got water in it yes I have got enough water in it uh so I'm going to mix up a kind of light golden brown using quinacridone gold and burnt sienna and the colour isn't really that important it doesn't really matter exactly what um and then I'm going to um kind of reference material here I'm going to basically do a sort of and well you can see what I'm doing maybe I might add a little bit of pink so we forget all about the fact that it's a regular kind of structure with a very geometric pattern to it and all the rest of it which it is forget all about that and just plonk in some colour and leave gaps that's the key leave plenty of gaps and then while it's still wet come in and drop dark darks like this sort of into that light colour but but sometimes out this is sepia and then just let that run for a bit and um then you might want to do the branch so I've got sepia with burnt sienna and I'm just going to do a very broken trying to make it as broken there's a very strong tendency in all of us to make everything neat and tidy except for my bedroom of course um but don't try to try to let it jump around a bit it's very hard to do that I don't know why I suppose some people are better at it than others but I do find that difficult I always want to join up all the and then where you did the darks come back again with some more dark perhaps a bit thicker perhaps a bit richer just go over the same places maybe add a little bit of pink see how that's dried so faint it's just crazy I don't know why so I don't know why and I don't even want to talk about I must get some of those core paints and see if they're any better at holding their colour now we don't want to go on and on and on about this too much I think I might want to add a little bit of black in there too so I go to my black or Payne's grey doesn't matter and just put some of that in because if this acts true to form and continues to lighten up as it dries then my shadowy areas are going to disappear okay I said we'd have a little twiggy bit there too didn't I all right so I have to leave that to dry a bit and so then I'm going to um do the needles and I've got some olive green here and I've excuse me I have um mixed up a little puddle of it like that so I'm just putting my little dish like that so that I've got somewhere I can dip my pen into and then so I'm going to do that with this bamboo pen and then I'm just going to do it like this they're pretty straight so I'm having to make a bit of effort not to bend them and these ones over here like long this is one of those things where you can just do as many as you feel like you don't not limited because to be quite honest the average pine tree is covered in these but sometimes a little bit of white space is a good thing so make sure you don't overdo it I suppose and um it seems to be drying okay just add a little bit more in the centre there near to the twig where it's coming out there's a woman I don't know who what her name is um on she's on youtube and she does absolutely amazing white pine cones that look absolutely realistic you look at them and you think it's a photo it's amazing I can't do that this is all I can do um so then I'm going to take my rigger which is my long hair brush and I'm going to um try to avoid spraying myself and I'm going to spatter I find it works best when I spatter towards myself which is why I say try and avoid getting it on me um but also you can go in the opposite direction too so that was green and then do the yellow that way because if you come towards you you get a kind of um oval sort of dot if you go away from you you get more of a round dot like that okay so I'm going to put a few black spatters on the cone and then I'm going to wait for that to dry and see whether it's a complete mess or whether it's halfway worth doing anything with so I have to rub out the pencil marks so we'll see what happens when that's dry so the painting's dry now and I'm just going to come in with um a little bit of white gouache just to put in a few little highlights there you might want to think about that as being a touch of snow or something like that and you can do that as much as you want so just to I don't know make it look a bit more realistic and then that's just white gouache and then you could you might want to just darken down the um the pine needles a little bit you might want to just put in one or two extra darker lines there doesn't need very much okay so that's pretty much it you could put in a bit of background a bit more green in the back or you could put some blue um you can play around as much as you like with the the white just to give more shape I've sharpened up the edges here a little bit too with the um with the dark brown just because sometimes you can just give a little oh that's not dark enough a little dark edge can make the shape a little bit better but uh fiddle around as much as you like and I think that's uh that I think we can call done so that's the final painting I hope you enjoyed watching me do that and you give it a try it's something that you can incorporate into all sorts of paintings obviously as we're going into autumn and Christmas and so on and so forth if you did enjoy that please like and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and don't forget to turn on notifications so that you get notified when a new video goes up which is pretty much every day if you want the sketch of this go to dianeanton.com where you'll find the sketch plus lots of others all the videos that we've done over the last few months they've all got sketches there plus we've got the sketch bundles and also the first of our series of colouring books which you can download and you'll see all about that over there if you have subscribed to the channel you get the colouring book for free and that's made available to you also to download so you might want to look into that if you are interested in supporting us that would be great we've also got the shop and you'll see the the mugs that we've got underneath this video that's where they come up in the merchandise shelf as they call it the merch shelf you can tell no one ever says anything because have you tried pronouncing merch shelf if you're english um anyway so there's that and of course there's the facebook group and everything else and i'm running out of steam so i'm going to say bye bye for now and i will see you again tomorrow and i hope you have a lovely evening and um hugs from all of us including little sleepy arthur so bye for now everybody bye