How to Paint a Red Cardinal in Watercolor - full tutorial real-time with free sketch download

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. Hope everyone's well. Welcome to my studio today and we're going to do a painting today of a red cardinal on a boke background, a boke background. I wish I could speak Japanese, I'd get it right then. Boke or something like that, boke. So let's just ring the bell and get started. Now this is a background that I've already prepared ready to do the boke on but I'm going to show you how I did this first and it's quite a simple background actually. So I'm going to be using four, three different shades of blue for this background, possibly four maybe. I might use this one as well and I've got them in my little dishes like that so I'm just going to move those out of the way while I go to my painting here and as you can see it's a fairly random background and once that's dry then what we'll do is we'll do the boke effect and then once that's dry we will paint the bird. So first things first, I always like to start by wetting the paper when I'm doing a wet in wet background with a spray bottle of water rather than brushing water all over it. It's much quicker and it stresses the paper out less. Now here I've got a sheet of watercolour paper which is pre-stretched, that means I've wetted the whole sheet on both sides and then I've taped it down to a board. This is a quite thick piece of fibre board of some sort, it doesn't bend and I have then used craft paper tape which is sticky on the back to stick it down then I wait for it to dry and when it dries it comes with a lovely tension, it has a wonderful tight surface then that you can paint on easily. So I'll just make sure that everything, oh I've got some yellow on that brush, it doesn't matter that will disappear, I'll just get rid of that and now the water has more or less soaked in and it's more or less over the whole paper so I'll try cleaning out that brush a bit. Now there's lots of different ways you can put the paint on for this, the more random the better. This is ultramarine blue, this is phthalo blue, this is cobalt blue and this is, it says it's ultramarine and this is french ultramarine. Okay so they're slightly different but not much, you don't need both. Okay so the design I'm going to be doing is I'm going to do a red cardinal on some holly so that area we're going to want it to be reasonably light anyway, so the middle. So I'll start on the outside edges and I'm just going to drop paint in with lots of water, the three or four different colours that I've got, plenty of water, make sure the whole paper is covered. If you use the brush, the big brush, this is a size 24 I think, this is a very very cheap round nylon brush by a company called Artix, I'm sure they're Chinese, I got it from the Chinese shop in Maraira in Spain on the Costa Blanca a few years ago now but I haven't used it much because it was trapped in our apartment down there during the worst of the pandemic or the beginning, the first time, the first lockdown and I've only just got my belongings back so this is about three years old but not been used. Most of that time it was ridiculously inexpensive and seems pretty good so it's not always necessary to spend a lot of money on brushes if you can get them from a Chinese shop or something like that. So that's my background, now you could add dabs of green, you could add dabs of red or whatever you want but to do the bocce you might as well more or less leave it one colour, maybe I'll just add some splashes of colour to give it a bit of texture, these will mostly disappear into the wet surface but that's what you want, you want it to be a little bit, oh it's quite hard work, you want it to be a little bit, thank you for that cats, just visited our litter box, okay so there we are and we'll just leave that to spread, do its thing and dry and when it's finished it will be, when it's dry, something like this. Now this one I did have a little bit of pink in, I added a little bit of pink so that's not necessary though, you don't need to do that and now here I've got my stencil, this is one by Staedtler, it's just a maths tool that people use for making circles quickly when they're doing design work, I don't think many people need that kind of thing anymore but they're still available and I'm just looking for a sponge, not sure which one's going to be best, there are different options for taking the paint out of the back of the background rather, you could use a regular washing up sponge, this is one here that I've used before, I think that's synthetic that one, but these are natural sponges, some people use a brush but I think that's quite hard on the paper so I tend to go for a sponge and I'll probably try all three or four of those to demonstrate to you how I do this. Now like I said we're going to put this design on top of this background, so this area here is where I'm going to put the colour of the bird so I'm going to want to get rid of a lot of the blue there so I will be taking that out so that the red shows through nicely, the rest of it, the blue doesn't matter because it's going to be where the green leaves are and obviously we've got the brown or whatever colour we paint the branch so I'm going to concentrate on getting most of the colour out here but also obviously going back into the background. So first things first, as I said this is where the bird's going to be so I'm not going to waste my time trying to get that out with surface, there's no need. If I can lift it, I've just had a sudden thought actually that there's a possibility, although it seems to be lifting, I might have done this background, I can't remember because I did it a little while ago, I might have done this background with Viviva colour sheets, it's possible and if so then it's going to be harder to get the colour to lift because that isn't really watercolour paint, Viviva, it's more like a dye and it's more permanent so yeah, but it is coming up to a certain extent, it doesn't have to come up completely. The other thing is as well, if by chance you find that your bocce circles won't lift then what's the matter Frankie, what's the matter? If you find that the circles won't lift properly then you can always try making circles with white paint, sorry about the sound effects. Yeah, so anyway, let's see if this is going to work, so we take our stencil and we wet the sponge and then we just rub away and lo and behold we have a circle and so that's that sponge, that's number one, Arthur, come on, behave, so let's try a nice big one, overlap, overlap the circles, it's the most important thing is to make sure that they, I think anyway, that they should overlap and some should be darker and some should be smaller, different sizes, so all these sponges are working, I think the first one probably made the cleanest lift, let's see what this one does, so I've, I'm just finishing off now with a few little ones, up here, it's nice to have, oopsie, nice to have a variety of shapes and sizes and I don't know where that red paint came from, anyway we'll soon be rid of that, I think I just was a bit careless how I put down my piece of paper there, yeah, sorry for the If you want more, once you've done the drawing, you can always put a few more in and so the next thing to do is to grab the hair dryer and give that a good whacking. Okay, so that's nice and dry now and here's my sketch which I did on tracing paper and if you did it on tracing paper or even if you didn't, it doesn't matter, if you did it on ordinary paper and you'd rather transfer your sketch rather than draw onto your background, you can use an ordinary pencil to give you a carbon effect, so this is a Derwent Rexel sketching pencil, we used to call them carpenter's pencils because they have a very strange flat lead like that which is actually rather good for covering a large area quickly, so I've just gone over the line that I'm going to transfer, then on the area that I've lightened a little bit I'm going to place him and then I'm going to use a hard pencil, 2H or something like that, to go over my line which we'll then be able to see underneath and this is a quick way, especially if you're going to do this drawing more than once, you really don't want to have to concentrate hard on doing it again and again and again, so once you've got it the way you want it, you can transfer it like this, that should be there and then if you want you can just, oh I forgot his mask, that's always an important thing to get that in the right place, if you want you can just paint over those lines that you've just transferred on but you may want to make them a little bit darker, little feet, okay then the next step is the holly, if you want to download this sketch I will put it up on the website you can pop over there and they're free and we do have a tip box there so you can, if you want, make a donation but I do want to stress that you don't have to make a donation and you don't need to in order to download the sketches because some people seem to have got the wrong idea. We really appreciate your help so your donations are absolutely crucial to the running of the channel, I mean for example just the other day I had to order paper and to spend 150 euros on, the same as dollars, on paper, it's not cheap these days, now admittedly that will last quite a long time so that's great and I've got plenty of paints, I'm using up my stock that I've had for years which otherwise would have just sat in a drawer and as you can see this wants to be as random as you can possibly get away with, I don't believe in making things geometrically perfect or in any way perfect, personally, and when you see how I'm going to paint these you'll see what I mean, so you might not be able to see that but I can, just about, so I'm going to go over that in pencil off camera rather than keep you watching and getting bored. So there we are now, it's all sketched out and I'm going to start adding some quinacridone gold which is this colour here to start bringing the greens out that we're going to create as we paint over the blue, so we'll start with yellow and I'm going to make it really loose and you can see how you get different shades of blue, green underneath because of the blue underneath, sorry I sounded a bit garbled but you know what I mean, and then into that I'm going to drop a loose mix of green leaving some areas a bit lighter than others and we'll let that run, see what happens and then I'll probably do the berries and start off with cadmium red and just leave a little light area for the highlight, you can make that white later with some white gouache if you want, you could make it a slightly different colour for each group of berries if you want, make them a little bit more orangey, again we're going to keep them quite loose, probably a good idea to have the ones nearest to the bird a slightly orangey tone like this because the bird is more of a red isn't it, so and then a little bit of shadow, so pick up some, and this is alizarin crimson, just pick up some alizarin crimson and just sort of do little half moons of shadow around the bottoms of these berries that you've just painted and let that run, just keep it really loose, I've got a few up here as well but we're just not going to make a big deal of those, we'll keep them really really loose, then we might use the, if I can find it, you can hear it there, it's there somewhere, the metal glass pen and we can draw the veins of the holly into the damp paint, I've done this a few times before, what happens as you do this is you get a slightly darker line as the paint goes into the scraped area and I will sharpen this all up later a little bit once it's dried, we don't really know what it's going to do yet, so for the branch I don't myself personally much like brown branches so I usually do them in a kind of grey and I mix the grey from cobalt blue and red and then we'll drop a little bit more archer grey in the bottom, same colour, just more slightly more intense and we're going to look at the areas which are darkest on the holly and then just drop some more of that grey in and let that run too and we'll let that dry, I'm just going to add some quinacridone yellow now to sharpen up some of the points of the holly leaves before I leave them to dry, you're going to get a nice lot of variety in your leaves because you've got the blue underneath, if you do the process, if you do try this process, it's a good idea to use a very good quality paper such as arches because it's asking a lot of the paper to withstand the scrubbing out and so on and the result if you use something like sketching paper or one of the cheap watercolour papers that are around at the moment you won't be very happy with the result probably as I always change what I'm doing as I go along so you have to kind of go with the flow with me I don't ever do what I set out to do and I'm thinking at this point that I'm probably going to use some pen and ink on this I like pen and ink and I often use it as you notice but it's up to you as you judge when you're painting if you want to paint like a real artist I was talking to my daughter about this yesterday we were having a chat about what it is what does it mean to be an artist and I said I don't think I'm not entirely sure that even after painting most of my life I can really with my hand on my heart say that I am actually and I don't think I am I would say that I'm a an illustrator perhaps certainly not professional one though I've never done it for a living a teacher perhaps of art or of creativity perhaps I certainly wouldn't call myself a fine artist no way but I've taught painting to children in school when I was a teacher and I've taught other subjects too so I suppose primarily that's what I am but I don't want to be never wanted to be a teacher although I was for a while because I had to do something to keep the wolf from the door I think it's very hard being a teacher nowadays it used to be quite as bad as it is now oh god knows what it's like at school with all the troubles with covid and everything I can't imagine I'm so glad I'm not doing that anymore I have a daughter no I don't I have my one of my nephew's wife was a teacher and she's just decided to give it up because I think she wanted to start a family but she's probably sensible get out of school you can see the leaves gradually taking a little bit more form so I'm just kind of adding shadow and this one needs to dry before I can do much more to it and I might end up not doing pen and ink at the end it just depends how it turns out it definitely needs to dry now so we're going to think about the bird and I have to admit I'm using quinacridone gold on the breast I have to admit I've never actually seen and I'm using quinacridone gold on the beak I've never seen one in real life um so I'm working from photos and we're going to get a somewhat muted red here of course unless we used um what do you call it uh gouache we're bound to get a certain amount of the blue showing through but I'm not sure that it matters if we do it right oops that does um oh I mustn't forget I do need some black what I'll do first is the eye like that and I'll let that dry I can do the little bit down below and then let's try adding some of this red I'm mixing cadmium red which is this one and alizarin crimson which is that one cadmium is more of an orangey red and the alizarin is more of a bluey red so you really want a mixture of both I think and the tail yes the tail and this back wing here and then um yeah let's just put a little bit more the orangey colour here and you can see that that's pretty much covering the blue I think and now we'll probably go back to the mask and I'll try and leave a little white if my hand won't shake a little white line just at the top of his eye like that keep that free then we'll bring this down a little bit break that line and then I assume these birds have got a fairly reddish brown beak and put a little bit more colour in there and hopefully the black will bleed a little bit in and his feet are probably brownish just draw those in sketchily like that and then it's time to let it dry and come back and see what it looks like after lunch when it's dry okay so this is all nice and dry now so I'm just going to come in with a little bit of bright red just to emphasize redness around the breast area chest and shoulders here and maybe one or two little flecks of brighter red in the headdress there and we'll smooth that out a little bit and then this is Winsor violet and I'm just going to add just one or two little there one or two little shadowy bits and pieces where you might imagine that there would be a little bit of shadow and yeah don't forget that if you make a mistake you can lift it out and I'm just going to put a little bit more gold in the chest there and then what was I going to do next um oh sit down I think and then we want a little bit now I'm putting a mixture of white and that's to say uh Winsor & Newton designers gouache white gouache there to just lighten the top of the beak a little bit but and it looks terribly white to start with but it dries much lighter it really does it you can see it fading as we speak so that will not be as dark as that once it's dried and then I'm going to go get some more black a lot of times when you get towards the end of a painting the um the finishing details which make all the difference are very very very tiny so not particularly dramatic okay I think that's probably enough enough black you might want to play around with it a bit more once it's dry and then I'm going to put in some snow I've got some more of the Winsor & Newton designers gouache here and I'm just going to plonk some of that in along the branch um just to indicate a little bit of snow and then using the same paint but a different brush grab my um riggery type thing and I'm just going to spatter in the snow and then a bit of perhaps a bit of blue as well maybe and then maybe maybe a few sharp I'm not going to do anything with the pen I'm going to use this very um expressive and loose brush which is the the opposite really of a pen which is much more controlled but this I don't know this is quite fun to use this brush just a few spiky lines to sort of um capture the idea of holly which is spiky maybe one or two dots of purple down here and then remember we said at the beginning that it might be a good idea to put some white highlights on the berries we can go in and do that I can kind of represent either a touch of snow that's landed on them or else just the highlights in the light maybe we'll just make the highlight in his eye a tiny bit bigger and a bit of snow on the edges of some of these leaves maybe a little bit of shadow on that snow there you could go on like that forever um I just want to a tiny bit of darkening there underneath the tail so then what I have to do is wait for that to dry and rub out any of the obvious pencil lines but once I've done that oh I don't think I meant I didn't mean that I didn't mean that to happen so I'll take that out okay so I've just got those couple of things to do so there's the final painting I hope you enjoyed watching me do that and give it a go yourself if you're interested in the bocce technique I do have another video doing bocce background for a couple of chickadees sitting on a branch which you might find interesting to similar kind of technique all together if you want the sketch just go along to download it from diananton.com and otherwise I hope that you will like the video and subscribe to the channel because that really helps us so that would be marvellous so I'll say goodbye for now and happy painting see you again soon bye bye everyone