How to Paint a Cute Whimsical Sheep for Beginners | Easy Tutorial to Master Wet in Wet Watercolor

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 welcome to my studio Diane here hope everyone's well and happy and healthy. Today we're going to paint a sheep this is one of our sheep from our farm here well it could be we have Jacob's sheep here and this is kind of a little bit like one of ours called Dora. Okay so the paint I'm going to use for this today is Qor this I don't know if that's how you pronounce it Q-O-R and I've only got five colours of this this was a trial set that somebody kindly gave me and I've got Burnt Sienna which I'm going to use in combination with Ultramarine Blue to give me a nice soft brown like this and a darker brown like that from those two colours and then I'm going to use the yellow which is Hansa Yellow Light mixed with again the Ultramarine Blue to do the green and so that's how we're going to do this painting this is interesting paint because it spreads amazingly it's got a life of its own it goes sprawling so I have already done this painting twice so I'm going to put that one to one side and here's my tracing of the above painting and if you want the sketch which is already done already for you that will be going up online and that's free of charge for you from so first thing to do is to just wet the outline of the sheep and I'll go around her ears and around her eye and this is obviously very stylized a cartoon type of whimsical sort of sheep so we'll just do that and then I'm going to do this in stages but first of all I'm going to mix some Ultramarine Blue with some Burnt Sienna that's about right and then we're going to drop it and you can see what I mean about sprawling of course every sheep is going to be different in terms of the colour of their fleece so all I'm doing is not really painting this I'm allowing it to spread just guiding it onto the wet body of the sheep which I'd already wetted and I might want to just take the colour right up into those curly bits like that and then what I did on the one I already did I mixed up then some thicker much thicker darker brown and then just drop that in like that to give me her variation in the colour of her fleece just drop that in like that and then basically that's when you have to be brave and go away and let it do its thing so we'll just paint her ears as well there we are and then yet another little bit more blue in with the brown and we'll just pop her legs in nice and dark and you can see that Ultramarine plus Burnt Sienna and this works with any brand not just core will give you almost black and then because I've allowed it to touch we will get some spreading there into the fleece so now is the time to say goodbye for a few minutes while this spreads and does its thing so I'll be back shortly so while that's drying I'm just going to pick up a little bit of Ultramarine just mixed up there and I'm just going to indicate some clouds in the sky I don't want to do anything very exciting with that just leave that to a to blur a little bit a bit of sky and then I was going to say the bottom part of the painting I'm going to decorate it with some metallic colour and this is the Jean Hanes colours here this is the one that looks like this the Jean Hanes all that shimmers set and we'll probably use this colour here which is kind of coppery golden sort of colour there's also a silver and so we'll come in and do that at the end okay so I've let this dry a little bit and now if you've ever wondered what to do with an old pen that doesn't work anymore this is a Staedtler pigment liner that I have abused and it now has pretty much run out of ink so in order to give this young lady some fleece having let this dry a little bit I'm going to come in with the pen that doesn't work and I'm just going to do scribbly lines to indicate the texture of the fleece all over this sheep's fleece and we're just in some places where it's more dry it will go um I hardly see it at all it'll just be sort of a little bit visible but in other places where it's still wet you get dark lines so you get a mixture you get a mixture of light and dark and all you're doing is scratching into the paint and then at the end when you feel like it if you feel like it you can also add some gold or silver lines and for that I might use this pen here which is a hybrid gel that makes gold lines which we might want so that although that pen doesn't have any ink in it it does still have a use so she's coming along quite nicely and I can now think about doing the hills in the background so it's up to you what colour you use but it's quite a nice soft green if you just mix a little bit of Hansa yellow with ultramarine and the first one when I did that one I just went over the flower so I think I'm going to do the same I'm just going to paint over the flower and then into the background like that and I should put a little bit more colour in there keeping away from the legs because they're not quite dry yet and then you can either make the next one darker or lighter the next hill I mean or you could make it a bit more greyish maybe we'll do that this one because the flower isn't quite so detailed I'm going to try and paint around it oh I didn't mention we're using the paper it's Canson Clairefontaine paper and then we need a little bit more green for the foreground and it's up to you exactly what colours you use just use whatever whatever you feel so that's that now we have to wait for all of those things to dry and then when that's dry we'll be able to put the flowers in meanwhile I can take a pen this is 0.1 that should be okay and I'm going to draw around her ear around the other ear a little bit tricky and her nose and her eye and now when she's dry I'll give her some eyelashes but I'm not going to try to do that because it's super difficult to get my hand around it like that so I'm just going to now really I'm going to go and leave her to dry completely and then we'll come back and finish her off later okay so this is now completely dry it's the next day so I know it's completely dry it's been drying overnight and it's time now to do the final touches for this little painting and for that I've still got my Jean Haynes All That Shimmers set here if you don't have that colour from Jean you can obviously you could use this this set this is the Kuretake Starry Colours that would work equally as well these are all very good nice opaque shiny colours I've also got my my gold pen here which I'm going to use in a second as well I've tried to stick this down a little bit with some washi tape but the washi tape doesn't seem to be terribly keen on holding it down at the moment so I'll just excuse my arms it's a bit chilly this morning although it's going to get up to the high 70s at least today but at the moment it's a bit chilly in the studio so I've got my fleece on okay so what I'm going to do first I I'm just going to give her a couple of very tiny eyelashes there make her eye a little bit bigger like that and I'm just going to enhance make her nose a little bit darker and then you could draw in the outlines for the flowers first and then colour them in or you could do the outlines afterwards so it's a bit a bit tricky to decide I think I'll probably paint them first so what I'm going to do is we're going to paint a nice little gold flower here and the good thing about these paints is that they are opaque and so they go over the background that I painted in yesterday and you don't see the green through really there we are and this one here the tulip then I'm going to get some green um this is kind of greenish greenish gold mix up with a little bit of green it's gone a little bit wet I think I put a little bit too much water on there this morning and then I'm going to take a gold pen and just do a few squiggles on here to lighten that up a little bit a little bit more I might put a little bit on her ear like that and then I'm going to put some gold down here so give some texture to the ground some stones or whatever I think I might just outline this with this gold pen I was going to do it in black but I've changed my mind there we are then perhaps you might put a couple of little birds in the sky and I think that's pretty much it for now so there we are one cute little sheep enjoying the flowers and I hope you enjoyed watching me paint her and that you give her a go and don't forget there's loads more videos like this and landscapes and flowers and all sorts of other things on the channel and on our website diananton.com if you just pop on over there you can download for free sketches downloadable sketches which you can trace which will give you a head start with doing your own painting and as well on the website we've got mugs and prints for sale and if you want a souvenir and I write a blog about almost all of the paintings that I do which shows you what ingredients I've used and where you can get them from also you can visit our amazon shop where everything that I have in my studio is listed and you can have a look at that easily I'm just putting in some darker green here because that was a little bit too light and yeah anything that you buy from amazon if you go to it from one of our links then we get a small commission which I have to tell you about you get a small commitment we get a small commission at no extra cost to you so that helps us to keep the channel running and we're very grateful for that of course and finally don't forget we have channel membership which is not very expensive through youtube go to join when you're watching the video you can see a little button at the top says join go there and you'll find out what we offer so for a small monthly subscription charge which helps us keep the channel running you get some extra perks and we're thinking about starting a patreon soon and I'll let you know when our plans get into shape on that one but nothing is going to change here on youtube ever god willing so there we are I'll let you go now have fun painting enjoy this one I think it's really cute I've painted this several times and and I love this one so I'll say bye bye for now everybody bye bye for now bye