6 minute watercolor peach tutorial

Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel. Today I'm going to show you how to paint some watercolor peaches. This is such an easy technique because watercolor has that blended look which looks just like peach skin and so it's a perfect thing to paint if you're new to watercolors. You will totally get this one I promise. So we're going to start with our lightest color which is a nice bright yellow and for the big round full peach I'm painting two kind of circular longish shapes but I'm leaving some white space in the middle just a tad to represent that line that goes down the front of the peach. I like to leave white space to reference those lines because it gives a more loose and abstract feel instead of having to paint the lines ourselves. So while this paint is still wet we're going to now drop in orange and red and all different kinds of colors whatever you want to drop in that is on your palette to give it that nice blended look that we can see on the skins of our peach. Really you can do this in any way that you want I just really wanted to make sure that I wasn't losing too much of the yellow but that also the red blended enough into the yellow that it didn't look weird and splotchy. So I'm using the peach that I have on my table as a reference and I can tell that while there is a lot of yellow there's still some orange so I'm dropping in some orange and I'm using my brush to kind of just mix things around until it looks good to me. You'll notice that some of the shapes and the lines look too clean and I didn't want it to look that way because peaches don't really look that way and so I am just kind of messing with how the lines are playing and smoothing certain things out until I was pleased with the overall look. And that is it for our full peach it's pretty straightforward and simple because we're letting the watercolor do the work which is awesome. So now we're going to move on to our half peach and you can see by our reference that it kind of dips down at the top and so we're going to mimic that by painting a heart shape. So at the top it's going to be a very distinct heart point and then it's going to come down into a rounded heart shape along the bottom. Now while everything is still wet I am rinsing my brush, drying it slightly, and I am picking up the paint out of the center of our half peach where that beautiful red color goes. Now the reason I'm using this paint pickup technique is because I want the center of our peach to be wet and I want it to be able to blend with the red that we're going to add and I want the red to also blend in with the yellow. So this allows us to have a wet center that will have that blending technique but we can remove some of that yellow color so that it's not yellow in the center and it leads more to the red color. So with that bright red color I am doing little line strokes and I'm making sure that the outside line strokes are touching the yellow so that it blends a little bit and then I'm keeping everything really nice and light within the white center. And then I'm taking that same red color and I'm outlining the entire peach to represent the skin of the peach and I don't mind if it blends in a little bit with the yellow color. I think that looks really nice. I think that's the beauty of peaches is they are not very distinct in their colors. All the reds and yellows and oranges blend together and so if it bleeds in that was totally fine with me but this one it didn't it was it was already getting dry and so it didn't bleed too much. But now we're going to the top of our little heart and we are going to start to fill it in and so I'm looking at my reference here and I'm noticing it's a little lumpy but it pretty much goes straight across and I'm doing that in a orangish red color to represent that peach skin showing through. I also dabbed in a little bit of orange color while everything was still wet but I did this only slightly and then I went in with that same bright red color and I added in more darker detail along the center of this peach and looking at my reference it was a lot darker in the very very center of this circle and darker as it got to the point of the heart and so that's where I focused a lot of the red color. My biggest tip is to just keep your strokes light and small because you can always go back in and add more color and darker color later. Now we're going to do the peach slice and this is my favorite part I think adding the little red fuzzies is the best thing ever. So it's a little bit of a moon shape one side is more flat right here and then the other side of the slice goes more curved in kind of where the tip of our heart is and I'm using that same erasing technique as earlier where I rinsed my brush and dry it a little bit to take some of the yellow color out because it was a little bit too yellow it was a little bit too wet and we're again using that same bright red color to outline the peach slice because it's representing the skin of the peach and we're bringing it along the top of that curved side because that represents the point at the top of the heart and that's where our little peach fuzzies are going to start. So for the peach fuzzies we're doing really short line strokes and we want those line strokes to connect with the yellow and blend because that's how it looks on the peach which is why it's perfect for watercolor because it naturally blends so just again keep your strokes light and short and have those little peach fuzzies stick out nice and tall. So now we're going to do some simple leaves and peach leaves are really long and you can see in this example I did not do a very long leaf and I didn't end up liking it I revisit it later and I don't end up liking it at all anyway but I make some really beautiful leaves on this right side so you can reference those but I do the two stroke method where I start with the tip of my brush and as I pull along to make the stroke I push down on the body of the brush and then come back to the tip for the end of the leaf and then I do that again on the other side leaving white space in the middle to make the vein of the leaf. I also did two different tones a brighter green and a darker green to represent the shadow because you can see on our reference to the left there are two different tones of green so I wanted to mimic that but let me know what you guys think. That was it! I think peaches are so easy and I hope you try this one out but I will see you all next time. Bye!