How to paint an Autumn Garland - Step by Step Realtime Watercolor Tutorial - Free Sketch Download

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 thought that we would do a wreath, an autumn wreath to celebrate the coming of the new season and so first of all I'm going to show you how I prepared this subject for you and just quickly look through my sketchbook. This is one that I made earlier and this is what your sketchbooks should look like if you're using a sketchbook to prepare for your painting sessions and so you can see that in here I've got all the preparatory work that I did for the last few weeks of sketches. Some of it's not so tidy, some of it's interesting, some of it isn't but anyway it is what it is and you might recognise some of these videos and some of these swatches and some of these things I haven't yet done and notes that I make and sketches that I do and so on and so forth. So if any of you want to see any of these ones actually worked up into a video like these trees for example, we did that one didn't we? Then do put something in the comments below, that's always a good way of communicating with me. These ones are much more recent, this is a doodle I did the other day while I was, I don't know what I was doing, talking I think and anyway so today this is the preparatory sketch that I've done. I'm going to make a circle, I'm going to put these different seasonal items in it, around it, in this circle and then we're going to have a caption in the middle and I thought that although it's probably a bit hackneyed, a bit you know worn out, there's the line from the poem by Keats, the season of mist and mellow fruitfulness, it's a lovely evocative especially if you happen to live in one of the parts of the world where you have lots of autumnal mists like we do here today, the sunrise was beautiful as it came up through the mist. Anyway so we're going to have things like acorns, oak leaves, beech leaves, beech mast, mushrooms, pumpkins, sycamore and I've labelled what I've put on here and then of course in order to draw these things you have to go to reference material, make sure you get it right because although everyone thinks they know what a beech mast looks like, they don't necessarily. Anyway I've got two books here which are really, really, really, really useful for people who want to paint nature and who want to get it right. This one is Food for Free by Richard Mabee, it's an old book, been around a long time. Somebody gave me this one because she bought it and when it came it was delivered bent so she didn't want it so she gave it to me. Beautiful photos in here, highly recommend get a secondhand copy of this book, you can probably get one for next to nothing. It was published in 1972 and this edition was 2012 so it's an old book but this was the colour version with loads of beautiful photos which are much easier to refer to than the internet because you can actually see them, touch them, you can almost be there, damsons and all sorts of sloans and lovely pictures in here and even better still at their back it's got a kind of visual index so if you say to yourself oh I'd like to draw some rowing berries you can turn to this page and it will show you the shape of the leaves, the way the berries hang on the branches and so on so you can get the simplified details there and that's really handy so I'm using that to check out what hazelnuts and sweet chestnuts and beech nuts look like because I'm going to put those in our painting today so we'll put that to one side now for the minute and I'll show you the other book that I use which is an even older book I got this secondhand it was five pounds I don't think I paid five pounds from a charity shop from a thrift shop and this is ancient very nearly as old as me older than Tamsin my daughter so first edition this is a first edition which is it might even be well if it was in good condition it would be worth something book of the British countryside published by the AA the automobile association in England in 1972 and this is also I mean I do love these old books they've got so much information in them it's incredible incredible so much that we've forgotten since we simplified it all down and put it online anyway this is an artistic rendition of a corner of the beechwood forest and it's got various animals and plants in it and so on and so forth so I'm using that as inspiration too and if I want to look anything up like the skeleton of a bird or the colours and shapes of butterflies this book is a marvellous reference so just a couple of ideas if you want to improve your access to real nature reference and get things right when you paint them this kind of book is very helpful so I will put the names of these in the description below the video in case you feel like going on a hunt I know in America you might think you wouldn't be able to get this but I bet you could I bet you could because I bet you anything you like a lot of English people who emigrated to Canada for example will have I think I got this in Canada to tell you the truth they would have taken these books with them and then when they die they go to charity shops so you can get them online you can go online and order these easily from some of those resellers and try to sell books before they get burnt because if they don't get sold they get burnt it's tragic really anyway put those one side for a minute this is the sketch I've done so far and my next step after having done this rough sketch is to transfer that onto a piece of paper okay so I'm back and I have here a piece of paper watercolor paper which we're going to use today and I've decided to go for a slightly bigger piece than my usual A4 this is a foot 12 inches by 15 I think yeah and that will give me a bit more space in order to be able to to do this painting and I'm going to first of all tape it down onto my board now I'm using masking tape here because I want it to be fairly firm and the washi tape is very pretty but it's not as sticky as this so just to be on the safe side and um what I do is I I have got a spare um tape dispenser and that had sellotape on it before and um so I've got spare one of those and I decided finally after many years of not doing this I decided that I would put a piece of sorry put a roll of masking tape on a dispenser because I'm using it so often and so that's what I did and that turned out to be really helpful so now that's nicely stuck down and I'm I had a couple of questions about this board that I use or about the boards that I use this is just a piece of plywood three-eighths of an inch plywood and get it from any lumber yard or a place that sells wood and just have it cut to size this is a good size this is um this is let me see the good size for your board would be 16 inches by 24 inches and then you can easily put a piece of paper this big on it um when you get it home just give it a quick um very very light sanding and then coat it with a very light uh coat of polyurethane varnish and that will be absolutely perfect I suggest you have two of these I've got a stack of them here because I'm always painting but you you need at least two and this will protect your table and you won't have to paint your tabletop as often as I do anyway so the first thing to do is to draw a circle so I've got my compass here so that I can draw the circle to the size that I want and I'm going to make it around the center and do a circle that goes to within about half an inch of the top and the bottom that's just a guideline really it's easier than going and finding a plate if you happen to have a pair of compasses handy it's an old set from school days or university days or whatever you'll notice that I have very few things that are actually new in my life um so now the next thing to do is to start to draw the design onto here so we go back to my reference drawing and then I'm going to start drawing that and I'm not going to make you watch me do that this time because it's probably going to take quite a while so I'll draw that and I'll come back as soon as it's drawn and then we'll go ahead and paint it so there we are there's the drawing done and I will be putting a copy of this up on the website for you if you want to download it a tracing that you can use um and in this wreath I have got a whole lot of different plants starting at the bottom here we've got some mushrooms of different sorts and a pumpkin and we've got a little mouse and a bird and then coming up here we've got sweet chestnuts elderberries um we have got um a bee and a butterfly and on this side we've got some oak leaves and some acorns and some hazelnuts and some beech here then we've got some um crab apples and we've got some damsons or slows either it looks like both and then a couple of wild cherries and we have a dragonfly followed up at the top by a little a few little hops which are something which is traditional to where I come from which is Kent in the UK so that's what they use to flavour beer um so that's a lovely early autumn um garland there with some of the fruits and I think I had some blackberries in there somewhere oh that's right blackberries are meant to be here I haven't drawn the blackberries but I will um okay so in order to do this painting I'm going to do it in watercolour to start with and I will either use my number seven draw well brush or and or I'll use my kira kira kira take um water brush then when it's done depending on how it turns out I may or may not use the glass pen to do a little bit of inking on top I did think about inking the whole thing first but I decided I would go for the painting in the first place and colours I've got a what for me is a fairly broad palette here I've got seven colours I'm not sure if I'll use all of these maybe maybe not but anyway what I have here um as being the most likely to be needed are cobalt blue quinacridone gold burnt sienna olive green winter violet alizarin crimson and sepia and I've also got my um viviva colour sheets here which I might use the saffron or the burnt sienna or the million for the pumpkin and the top of this mushroom here because those are lovely bright colours which even my beloved quinacridone gold can't actually emulate those particular bright shades so I'm not ashamed to say that I will use whatever I can lay my hands on in order to achieve the colour that I'm looking for so I'll just move these things a little bit out of the way for now and as well as all of that I've got my piece of toweling here that I can dry my brush on and I've got a sheet of paper just a spare sheet of rough paper to try colours out on as I go along oh and I should mention I did the drawing for this in a b-roll charisma colour a soft pencil it's a charisma graphite aquarelle that means that it will run slightly if um when when I put um the paint on but that will probably just add to the depth so I'm not too worried about that in fact that was a deliberate choice of mine um so there we are now in order to get this painting to work properly whenever you're doing something fairly big like this you want to probably start by laying in the brightest colours first and then the rest of it will fall into place behind that otherwise if you start with the leaves and and the smaller things when you put in something really bright like a pumpkin um that might throw the whole colour balance off a bit so that bearing that in mind I'm going to probably start um with some bright a bright colour I'm not quite sure which one yet um my uh colour sheets are starting to wear out so I'm getting to the point now where um I'm going to have to either get some more or um go back to my other colours so I'm going to start by putting in some um this is this is dusk or no this is vermilion I think no it's not it should be the vermilion is probably the best way to go so and then maybe we'll add a little bit of maybe chrome yellow is is what I need sort of blend in okay so that's that and then the other really bright thing is the top of the toadstool which is a nice red so I'm mixing alizarin crimson here with um chrome yellow and then I'm going to come in and just try and paint a little bit around the dots because I'm going to say that this this particular toadstool has got white spots on it so we'll just paint around those using a rough mixture of alizarin crimson and chrome yellow so just trying out blending actually the normal Winsor and Newton or Old Holland colours with these um colour sheets so those are the most vivid colours and then of course I did say that we were going to have some wild cherries up here so since I've got red on the brush I'll put those in and what else have we got that's red the apples are going to be a little bit more golden so I'm going to use quinacridone gold and a touch of red and maybe a touch of green as well we'll use um olive green just a little bit of green around there okay now what else have we got I think it's probably not a bad idea to do the fruit and so on oh these um toadstools down here are also on the red side so we'll put in their lids but their stalks their stems or whatever are going to be sort of brownie beige colour and then we've got two more mushrooms here and these ones are neutral in colour so sort of kind of brownie brownie pink so that's that so those are most of the bright colours um the other bright thing is the the blackberry up here which is sort of bright and I hadn't drawn it very well but I'll just come in and finish that off with lots of little circles one here and then the elderberry which is quite a dark this is you could say tedious so just lots of dots okay and um oh yes the damsons over here which are also purple like that and try and make a little bit of variety there by coming in with something a little bit darker damsons or slows I'm not sure which I would like those to be if they're slows they're smaller uh what else have we got that's got colour I think that's about it um okay so I'm going to come into the pumpkin and draw in some of its shadowy bits where the um what would you call those the segments I suppose sort of thing are and then with some dark green we will drop in the stem I want it quite as dark as that so I'm just going to lift a little bit out um now let's see um let's maybe start at the top here with the dragonfly and um let's just drop in some nice light light blue and then maybe a touch of violet for the second of the wings like that and then the bee we need some yellow for the body parts that are yellow and we'll let that dry and then we'll put the black in in a minute but um a little bit of orange at the bottom and let that bleed a little bit and then we have a butterfly up there so I think to sort of match the dragonfly we'll do the butterfly in in blue call this a blue butterfly and that can have a sort of dark blue body like that and when that's dry we'll put in the um the legs and antennae and things and I like it when if you put the body of your dragonfly in while it's still wet it will bleed out a little bit into the wings which looks kind of natural so that's a good thing okay so a little bit concerned that I might have made the pumpkin a little bit too bright so I'm just going to lift some of the out so you know this is a good thing to be able to do don't hesitate if you feel you might have overdone it always possible to lift paint out don't believe anyone who says that watercolor is difficult because you can't correct anything you can just a matter of doing it so that's much better right now we need to start thinking about some greens and I'm going to start at the top I think work down perhaps with my hops which are sort of yellowy green color like this and I'm just going to check my reference book to see what color the leaves of the hops are when they are in their fruiting 36 40 440 all right they're quite quite a bluish green when I grew up as a child living in Kent it was called the Garden of England Kent and there were hop fields and apple orchards and everything everywhere it was a beautiful place I think now most of the if not all of the hops have gone I think we import the hops for well I mean let's face it who makes beer anymore nobody really apart from my nephew who had a few years ago started a home brewery business you know one of those what do they call them bijou pubs they make their own beer but it's very small compared to what it used to be I lived in Fabersham for a while I don't know if any English people out there remember shepherd name the brewery I think it's still there but I don't suppose it's very important anymore I don't expect they get their hops from Poland or something okay so it's moving on moving on um acorns are brown so let's go for something like um burnt sienna the acorns down here and then a darker brown for the cup so we use sepia for that this is a fun painting because it's got lots of different colors in it and then I'm going to do burnt sienna also for these oak leaves but I'm going to add a little bit of purple as well and a little bit of sepia put some shadow in underneath those mushrooms once I've got the right color wait for that to dry and then we'll do the same there meanwhile this is dry so we'll put some shadow on that mushroom and then down below as well on these little legs and um so green some kind of green here for this beech leaf one here as well and here we've got a little nut first coat let that dry come in and give it some shape like we have here and we could use the pen without any ink just use the pen to draw in the lines and here on the cup each of the acorn cup has dots and this one is also and put a leaf in here so that's olive green plus a little bit of quinacridone gold I don't really like the way I did that so I'm going to take that out make that shorter correct that in a minute and I'm and then the brown tail and wing and we'll do his eye and his beak and his legs shortly let's put this veins in that leaf too over here we have a little mouse so burnt sienna his little face a little bit of gray a bit of pink for his ears and we let him dry too and we'll put in the details of his paws and things and we've got leaves here and this is um beech mast which has a sort of greeny brown casing around it and then the stem of the mushroom I guess is going to be just kind of beigey color and then this part is the gray underneath and we can draw in a few of the gills they'll just show very lightly and then now we're okay we have another beech leaf here let's make this one nice and golden touch of green oak leaves golden on the underneath and then into that we're going to paint other colors just to keep it all very varied maybe this one could be a little bit purpley burnt sienna and then the apple that's going to be a brighter green slightly brighter green for the leaves they're sort of smooth edged the apple leaves a little bit more and then these leaves here nice and simple just plain green keep that one simple cherry leaf thin jagged there and I'm not quite sure oh those I don't know what those ones are perhaps they're apple leaves as well they look like they could be and then these ones here let's have a few I forgot to draw them in but we'll have a few red berries there we could call this this would be rowan and probably the same on the other side here rowan berries and then we're getting there we are getting there these are blackberry leaves and they're always pretty brownish and jagged now we have the bee and that's where we're probably going to need a little bit of black for him so we just pop his black areas in like that and then we'll just drag up a little fraction of color into his wings like that and in a second I'll put in his feet okay so these are late blackberry flowers so to paint a white flower you just or pink you just very delicately just indicate a little bit of shadow and then in the middle of course yellow like that you want a little bit of green for the leaves behind and these are elderberries so we need some nice green leaves for them contrast with the purple of the leaves of the berries and then here we've got horse chestnut they're one of the more colorful leaves in England I think probably everywhere they have a lot of them in Spain don't they and the casing is usually green isn't it light green I think yes that was my phone speaking to me I'm not sure why I didn't ask him to inside of the horse chestnut the case is beige like that and then the chestnut itself of course is quite bright okay I'm going to grab my fine liner for the legs of the bird the robin and his beak and his eye and also for the antennae of the bee and his legs and the antennae of the butterfly and the dragonfly and then down here the mouse his nose whiskers his little paws what else have we got we've got the beach mast here okay I'm going to let that dry and then I'm going to rub out all the pencil and I'll be back in a second for the final finishing touches so that's the final painting I hope you've enjoyed watching me do that today I've just put a line from Keats in the center there to give you an idea of what it would look like with some kind of quotation or slogan in the middle something that you can adapt to use for lots of different purposes it would make a nice card or any other invitation something like that if you've got some kind of harvest festival going on it could be used for something along those lines anyway it's fun to do you can visit my website at dianeanton.com and download the sketch and you'll probably make a much better job of it than me so I will say goodbye for now I'll let you get on with the rest of your day have a lovely time painting and enjoy the evening and I'll say see you tomorrow bye everybody bye-bye