How to Paint a Watercolor - Whimsical Houses on a Hill - Easy Real-Time Tutorial for Beginners

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 to enjoy. So welcome on board, click subscribe and turn on notifications and let's learn to paint watercolour. Today we're going to do a painting which is a fun thing with absolutely no experience required. So if you're an absolute beginner and you don't know what to paint try to practice with your paints and brushes and everything. You could give this one a go because really you can't go wrong. I'm going to be using my set, my brand new set at this point in time of Kuretake watercolour pans here. I'm probably going to paint using a number seven or number eleven round brush from Drawwell. Ordinary golden, they're called golden nylon, so therefore synthetic brushes from Japan, very inexpensive brushes. I'm using a piece of, from this block of paper. This is a block, it's glued all the way around, all four sides are glued so it turns the sheets of paper into a block. You cannot separate them, okay. If you can separate them except at one end then that's called a pad. Etcher made a mistake when they printed this because they wrote on the front watercolour pad but when you go to buy this online they describe it as a block so they realised their mistake at some point in time. At one edge in the corner you'll find that it's not glued and it's there that you can slide in a knife and that's, or one of those bone folders, you know those plastic things, or a table knife, something that you have that's not too sharp and then you can slit all the way around to remove the sheet of paper. The reason why this is a great idea if you have these blocks is because it stops the paper from warping and cockling when you're painting on it. Now this, for this painting I'm not going to use the whole space and I'm not bothered about these spatters of paint that I've got on here somehow or other. I want to do it this size so I'm just going to lightly draw around my initial sketch. This is the painting that I did the other day and demonstrated and then I realised that the phone had rung during the time I was recording and so it switched the camera off and I had recorded nothing. So to draw this little piece, a good idea when you're doing any landscape is to put the horizon line in first and you never want to put the horizon, unless you're doing a specific type of painting that requires it, don't put the horizon line in the middle. It tends to make the whole thing look a little bit, well dull really. So either a third of the way down or a third of the way up and because this is a two-dimensional slice landscape with absolutely no perspective, no perspective deliberately, it is a 2D painting so we're going to put the horizon here and we're going to think snake. So that's the horizon. You can alter it later if you want but that just gives you a starting point and then we're going to put some more wavy lines across here and these are going to be our different layers of the landscape. So the idea was this one was going to be like a river or a lake, then you have a strip of grass, then maybe a ploughed field or something like that and a road and so on and so forth and then up here we've got, I did have a nice wavy line there so I don't know whether I'll use that or not but you'll see as we go on how this works and then I'm putting on my I'm five years old today hat and I'm going to draw a house the way I did I expect when I was five, something like that, trying to be as carefree as possible and not worrying about straight lines or anything else. So we'll do this one here, a nice tall chimney and absolutely no care about perspective and then here I'm going to put a tree and another tree, just put them however you want them and so that's your focal point there and if you want to you can put, like all good children do, the sun in the corner up there, if you want to you can put another tree growing up here as well. This is all very stylized and and happy-go-lucky. Now this is an adventure for me too, I'm going to be using this Kuretake set which is so far unexplored and so I really do need a test sheet here so I'll just pop a piece of paper here just so I don't pick up sky blue pink when I want just plain old sky blue. So I think we'll start with this colour for the sky, I'm going to try to keep, shall I put a sun there or not? I think I'll put it on top so I'll paint the sky first and then maybe I'll put the sun in later. So I'm going to use, whoops, that's strong, I'm going to use a couple of blues as I go across here and just bring the paint down roughly around your houses because the good thing about these paints, according to the manufacturers, these Kuretake Gansai Tambi pans are able to be opaque if you use them with minimal water so we'll bear that in mind because that means when we come in with our details we'll be able to go over what we did in the first layer and cover up any mistakes. So I'm just popping that in as a total experiment to see how it works wet in wet from point of view of looking like clouds or something. Okay so now the first layer I did the first time around in a kind of Naples yellow so I'm looking for a colour that looks like Naples yellow here. Last time I did them with, what did I do, what did I use? I think I just used a mixture of traditional paints. Kuretake have been around a long time, they've been, I think they were founded at the beginning of last century so they're not new kids on the block. They know what they're doing and they make ink, you know, Chinese, Japanese calligraphic ink. So as I go down I'm sort of changing it up a little bit so I'm going to go right down to the bottom now and come up to meet the beige so I'm going to be looking at watery effects down here. I want the sea, this is the water and we will put some fish on top of here at some point. So use pretty colours. Somebody left a comment on a painting that I read this morning and she said, and I so agree with this, she said, I used to paint, I used to do real art or I don't know what, I can't remember what word she used but the implication was that she used to do, you know, proper pictures. I did too, I used to paint large oils and important watercolours or landscapes. It was supposed to look like real landscapes and she said, I find it, I realise now I found it draining and I thought, oh my god, yes. I used to dread, I used to dread coming into the studio to paint. I used to think I must paint but what good is that? What you want to feel is I want to paint, not I've got a painting I need to finish. I'm so glad that I've left that behind and I left it behind because of the channel, because I needed to do things that were fun for you guys and I found a new style and just a new way, a new way of painting, a way of painting where it doesn't matter and the process is the thing that counts. Enjoying the way the paint flows on the paper, not caring if somebody else likes it or doesn't and just keeping going. Oh, another person said and this I also agree with but she didn't quite understand me because I said that I had read somewhere somebody, I think it was a happy painter, had said if you don't like your painting keep going because it might turn out in the end and I didn't necessarily mean that you should keep going in that particular session. You are allowed to go to the bathroom. What I meant was that you shouldn't abandon it or you don't need to abandon it. If you don't, if it doesn't work out quite right, don't abandon it. Just push it to the limit because you'll learn something even if you end up and it's still you don't like it. It doesn't matter if you like it or not. Nobody cares. The painting doesn't give a damn whether or not you like it. I've been trying to do that all my life, not care whether or not people like me but paintings automatically, they don't care whether or not you like them. They just sit there being painted and so push it, push it to the limit and then you can still throw it away but you will have had fun doing that thing. Okay so now that's the first layer and those colors are nice and fresh. I've been mixing some of them as I've gone along just completely at random and they are not arguing with one another. They're all sitting there looking nice and harmonious. It's not going to be anything like my original and that's a good thing. So now I'm going to paint the little house. I'm going to, I think, change the color. I'm not going to do it in the brownish color that I had it in before. What shall I use? Maybe green because there's no green up the top here so I don't know. Green might not be a good color for a house but on the other hand it might be. So we just roughly, roughly paint that in and then we're going to do the roof in, I'm hoping for a grey. I don't know if there's a grey in this set but if you want to mix grey you can't be bothered to search for it. Any three colors, a green, a red and a yellow or a blue, a red and a yellow. If you mix them in certain proportions that will give you a grey because grey is neutral. It's the neutralized color which you get when you add three colors together. There we are and now I'm going to do the roof of this one in a nice red and every time I do this I think of Canada and I think of the red tin roofs that they had in Canmore. I don't know why. I don't know why. I don't know why I think of that. Not I don't know why the roofs are red but I don't know what I think of that. It's strange isn't it? Isn't it funny? Then the trees are not going to have an awful lot about them which means tree. I'm just going to fairly opaquely, I'm going to come in with some, using this paint now with much less water and in a sort of opaque way because I want to try that out and just brushing in a random selection of colors. I'm going to start again on this one and then yellow perhaps, some red maybe. This is not quite so opaque as that one but well yeah these colors are just like gouache really. If you don't have any gouache you don't need it. You can buy one of these sets. You never know where your painting is going to go when you start with this principle in mind so we'll just bring down the trunks by dragging down some water and let that run. Now that band is pretty much dry so I'm going to try to find a nice dark brown, chestnut brown, that's nice and I'm going to just take the point of my brush and just outline up here because this is the kind of painting that it is. Now I have no idea what that is and then on this one we're going to do thick and thin because that's something you need to practice so pressing and lifting and this one too. I don't know what color that is. That's a nice dark green. Mix that with some brown and get a very solid Winsor green type of color and then on the riverbank again dark green coming down here to draw the barrier there between the fish which will be in here and so on. So then now we want some darker areas. I need a palette to mix on. I'm going to move that for a sec. So just dropping in some neutrals in a kind of design. We're going to use pen work on top of this. Someone said the original version of this which we did a short of looked like a hamburger. I'm sure that wasn't, that was a man, I'm sure it wasn't meant to be a compliment but if that's what it makes him think of and I can only assume that like my husband, way to his heart is via his stomach. Never was a truer word said in my family. And now we're getting very close to the point in time when we are going to need to use a pen which means it will have to dry. Okay time to let it dry because the paper is definitely suffering from over application of water I think. So I just quickly dried that off with the hair dryer and now I'm going to use a pigma micron 0.5 millimeter nibbed archival ink, won't run hopefully, pen and probably a smaller one as well to start doing some of the pen work on this. And I think I'll start at the top and go around the houses so to speak. So this paper is fine but it's very absorbent and you can only work on it for a certain length of time before you have to stop and let it dry. So that's okay but it's worth knowing it starts to bleed a lot it seems, it does definitely seem to start to bleed. It doesn't help with the desired result. Okay so I'm just literally inking in the windows and doors like that and I'll go, this ink is not supposed to run so if I want to come in afterwards once it's dry with another shade of red to change the tonality of that a little bit then I can hopefully do that without it running. I hope so. Okay our trees are getting their definite outlines. Right and then right down the bottom here we're going to put in some fish which I'll probably paint gold color. I'm just doing them very stylized like that and we'll come in with some gold pen in a second. Then up here in the distance let's put some pebbles maybe up here that we can then after we've done these and this just looks nice we can color them in a little bit if we want quite like spirals. Somebody said in one of the comments that they were symbolic and I'm sure they are and we can put some dots and this is to me anyway symbolic of our field around us at the moment because we are experiencing the worst drought that Britannia has ever had. So this is like my house and these are the trees. I'm worried about some of our trees because some of our tall pines starting to look a little bit unhappy. So we'll start the next step of this and I'm just going to emphasize some of the greens here just putting some lines in on top of some of these lines just to add a little bit. I'm not going to use paint at this point because you could do but this will dry a little bit quicker so I just want to get rid of some of those fuzzy lines which have occurred as a result of the paper causing the paint to bleed and I don't know why because last time I used this pad it didn't happen like that. So I don't know if you notice that sometimes things happen nowadays that didn't happen time before when you did it it's very strange. Okay so here in the middle on this second level down what I want to do is to draw some outlines of flowers and what I'm going to do these are kind of just three petaled simple flowers so just draw the stem first and then two leaves then the bottom bit of the flower and then the petals on top. You don't have to do them like this but this is one way of doing it you might want five of those and then you just bring the petals up you don't have to put the one in the back if you don't want so we could and we could have more flower more leaves down the bottom if you want you can make them bigger if you want you can do anything you like but this is this is to indicate the presence of a flower garden I just go all the way along here like this and then what I did in the original was I just came back with my gold paint pen you could do it with paint I just colored in the flowers you could do them in any color and if your pen runs out like mine is about to then you might have to turn yes I knew that was going to happen it's one of those days again these days happen frequently um okay so never fear Kuretake is here I need to find a small brush like this one as I mentioned before the um the gold paints they do take a little while to wake up but because I used them yesterday and the day before that little time will be less long than the time it would have taken if I hadn't used them a couple of days ago for example when I used them the first time about a week ago it did take quite a while before I managed to get them to spring into life and it's probably better to be honest to use paint rather than pen but but it doesn't really matter and one or the other will do while I'm working on them I'll probably pop down the bottom of the painting you can't be quite so accurate or at least you could be but you'd have to take forever so we'll say that what we wanted was a loose look and we're going to come down here and we'll paint the fish as well goldfish just go over their eyes we don't need to worry about that put the eyes back in afterwards if you haven't got the gold pen that makes it a little bit more difficult to do things like lines gold lines and spirals and things you can't really do that you could if you had gold ink I suppose which I think I've got somewhere tucked away I think I do have some gold ink somewhere probably won't be quite so what's the word um well it certainly isn't as easy to handle I mean if I was going to be putting spirals in with a very small brush I probably would need a smaller brush than this I don't think I'm going to be able to do that so let's just put some dots and you can draw a fairly fine line so you know what do they say needs must where the devil drives you run out of gold pen and you learn how to control brush a bit better and on this part down here I wanted to have some nice gold circles different sizes there we are and then the idea was there were going to be some um some green leaves so I don't know whether I'm going to do them shall I do them with so this is another way of doing flowers just make some circles and then give them stems and leaves and I'm just using a mixture of dark green I think that one is sap green deep from Kuretake mixed with um that is indian red this one I think is it wait a minute let me check I've done my obediently done my little swatch that colour is indian red yes so indian red and sap green deep or even deen greep will give you a nice dark green sort of semi-opaque so you can paint nicely over whatever it is that's underneath there we are so there's those and we could continue to embellish those by we could have um a darker gold we could come into this one here and think of something illuminating to say while I'm trying to make this paint work there we go so that should be a darker gold so we can just put a centre in there like that there we are and perhaps perhaps we'll give the fish some scales and then maybe since we're down here again perhaps we'll just do a few wavy lines like this to give the indication that this is actually water and um seems a shame to waste so we'll come in here at the bottom of these flowers with this darker gold and we'll paint this I think they're called sepals or sepals aren't they the bits that go underneath there on the flower there we are and I think we'll come up here and these stones also imagine that we lived on a planet where there was so much gold I remember having this imaginary idea when I was a kid so much gold lying around on the streets but nobody needed it and it was wouldn't it be beautiful if the world was covered with gold and nobody needed to keep digging it up and turning it into ugly jewellery because there was so much nobody wanted it but there was all this wonderful pure unrusting beautiful gold and you could make everything out of gold it would last forever because it wouldn't rust imagine wouldn't it be a different world and nobody would go fighting over it might fight over something else but they wouldn't fight over that okay right so I think probably I need to grab my black pen again for a little while and I'm going to put some tiles on this roof like that and I think what it's missing probably is a little bit of white I'm going to make the window frames white if you um if you get one of these sigma white gel pens remember that um it works best when you don't press too hard on the original I had a white fence but then I had a darker line at the top there and I'm not going to do that and in fact I'm not going to use very much of the white at all actually I don't think it needs it I will put the eyes of the fish in and some little smiles oh yeah I just thought I'm going to put some golden fruit in this tree golden apples and um I think let me see let me see when I finish this I must go and order another gold pen because sometimes you just need the gold pen but I'm glad it ran out because otherwise I wouldn't have ended up doing it like this and this has been quite good okay so a little bit more brown here I think what I want to do is some stalks of wheat or sweet corn like this anything so this is because this is kind of like a field so we have different kinds of so maybe this is a kind of harvest festival sort of thing so we'll have these seeds of food that wasn't me that's my dog people will be laughing at you Lottie so there we are I think that's probably enough to be going on with oh I forgot the sun let's put the sun up here oh yes and there's one other thing too I'll just put the sun peeking around the corner and then I'm going to take a good brushful of gold paint and try to paint around the outside edge whoops it doesn't have to be dead straight if in fact if anything it doesn't want to be dead straight just try and keep it more or less the same thickness all the way up last line if you want it straight really straight then probably the best thing to do is use a ruler I didn't really want it straight I can't say I really wanted to smudge down there but never mind we'll just take that off a little bit of extra water and if your paper is anything half decent you'll be able to get terribly impressed with my sun I think it needs to be a bit bigger not terribly impressed with my son either but anyway that's another story right well there we are that's the end of that hope you enjoyed that give it a try something different test out your paints like I have these kuretake ones and I wouldn't uh I wouldn't try to persuade you not to buy those if you ever wanted to get a set of those they're so I'll let you go and I'll see you again soon bye now everybody bye now