Monochromatic Landscape Live Demo: Watercolor Painting for Beginners

In this video I'm going to show you how to create a monochromatic landscape painting. So first I practiced my watercolor techniques and creating five different values using one color of paint and then I chose a landscape that I want to paint. So I have my picture here and I'm going to refer to this reference when beginning to draw my landscape on my watercolor paper and I'm going to refer to it when I paint using my five different values. Okay so let's get started by drawing a horizon line. So I'm going to make my horizon line be right about in the center area of the paper. The horizon line is where the land or the mountains here are is meeting the water. You can also think of it as like where the sky meets the land but in this case what I'm referring to is this horizontal line across the page. Draw that in there first. Okay then I'm going to draw in, I'm going to start by working at the top and work my way down, so I'm going to draw in this line of mountains here. I'm not going to worry too much about it being exactly like what I see in the picture but I am going to kind of use it to help myself. I might make some areas be a little taller though and just enlarge this mountain here. Okay now next I'm going to I'm going to begin this reflection in the water. So one thing to notice about a reflection is that it's going to be a symmetrical or mirror image of what you see above. So if you changed anything, if you made yours different than you saw in the picture, then you're going to want to mirror your drawing like that. So it's a mirror image, it should have symmetry. Okay next I'm going to draw this line here to show the silhouette of the rocks that are in the foreground. So I'm going to start with my line. I'm going to have I'm going to have this be a lot lower than I see here just because I don't want so much dark black but I am going to have it start up above my horizon line and it's going to come rocky. Okay and then the last thing that I just want to draw in subtly is I just want to show where I'm going to put trees and I'm going to keep these pine trees in the same area. I'm going to kind of show that there's going to be some here. I think I will have them cross over the mountains there just to make it look like they're much closer like that and same here. I'll do one here and I don't want to do the same amount as what I have over here so I do kind of like the idea of having just two there and having more over here. Okay and there'll be a bit of a reflection from these trees as well so if I want to have some of these trees cross over the mountains more that could actually be fun to give me some interesting reflection so I can pull those then there too. Let's add a little bit of the reflection past the mountains below. See right there just for that one that's crossing the mountain line. One more thing I'll draw in is I'll just show that there is this whole section here that is a little darker. This land is thicker here so above my horizon line. I'm just kind of showing how tall this little land area is going to be. Okay next step is I'm going to label the different parts of my picture with the value that they're going to be painted. So let's start by looking at the darkest values first. This area in here is clearly the darkest value so that's going to be a value number one. Number one for both sides in here. Okay let's look at the second darkest area value number two. That's going to be the space throughout the center where the land this area of land is meeting the water so it's going to be a two a two. Okay and the trees will be twos as well. Next let's look at what is going to be a three. So the area that's going to be value number three is going to be the top of the mountain. So the top of the mountain is going to start darker like a three. Same for the reflection down here. The top of the mountain in the reflection is going to be a three and then it's going to fade lighter so it's going to come from a three down to a four. In fact I think the very very tippy top of the mountain might be even darker than a three. Okay so we're going to be using a fade or value or value fade technique for that. The area below the reflection here is going to be our next value lighter which will be a four. Four for all of this area here and then let's look at our sky. Okay so our sky is very light in this picture and I think for fun what I'd like to do is add a rising or setting sun and I'm going to put it so that it's not going to be touching any of the trees. I'm going to have it right here. Instead of just having the entire sky being a five, I'm going to have it be slightly darker around the sun for contrast so it's going to be about a four around the sun and then the sun itself I'm going to make a five and I'm going to have the very top of the sky also be a five so those will be the lightest areas. All right so now let's get started painting. So to begin painting I'm going to start by painting my lightest values first and those are my fives. Now when I paint something light like a five, four, or even a three, I'm going to want to erase the numbers before painting those spaces. The numbers are here to help me recognize and remember which values I'm using. So my five will be the sun and the top of the sky. All right so I'm going to take my wet paint brush, grab a little bit of my paint and I am using black for this so a little bit, a little bit of the black only. I'm going to mix in a lot of water and my water is clean. I dumped my dirty water from before so it's very clean. Okay and so this would be very very light, a very light gray. All right next I'm going to go to my fours. Now I have a four right here and I'd like to get that painted right away so that I can have the value fade from this lighter value to slightly darker but at the same time I want to be careful since I have a lighter value here in for the sun and I know because of doing the wet on wet technique before I know that if this area of the paper is wet and if I paint with a different value and it touches it that that color is going to bleed in. So I'm going to just hold off a minute before I do that part and instead of starting right away there I'm going to find another four that I can work on. I have a four right here and I have a four here too. I'm going to do this one because it's not touching anything else. Erase my four here and I'm going to just add a little bit of paint from here, a little black into my lid and I'm going to add plenty of water to this. Now I want to make sure I make enough of this value that I don't have to keep making more again because I kind of have a large area to do with four here here and the top of the sky too. So let's make a pretty large batch. I'll stir it up and I'm going to test this out before I start using it. So I'm going to take any excess off my brush and then try it out here. That looks pretty good. It could be possibly slightly darker so let's grab just a tiny more paint. That's pretty good. Okay so I'm going to go ahead and grab a whole bunch, load up my brush here because I have this whole area down here to paint in. This is the entire area underneath the reflection. Anytime you're painting if you have to go over your pencil lines a little bit that's perfectly fine because remember you're starting with your lightest value so you're always going to be getting a little bit darker so the darker that goes on top later will always cover up anything. Now I'm going to move on to painting my other fours. I'm going to go ahead and do this one next in the mountain. I can see from my picture this is going to be kind of like a foggy looking area in here as well. I didn't mark this before but I should have, I should do this as a four too. So I'm going to grab some, I'm actually going to start with with that putting a little bit of the four value down here. Right and now I'm going to use the same four right up here. Anything I'm going to get a little bit lighter to start not darker. Go kind of right through the trees a bit because I just want to make sure that I cover everything. Get my eraser bits off too. Better make up some more of this so a little tiny bit of black that kind of was a lot. Make sure I get plenty of water in here. You better test this out. Well as I go I do need to get darker anyways as I go up my mountains because I'm going to be going from a four up to a three and possibly even getting a little darker than a three being more like a two by the very top of my mountain. So if it's a little darker that's okay. Yeah that's kind of a good thing. Okay and while this is wet I'm gonna go right on into painting the three at the top. So I'm gonna just go in again. Oh so it's nice and dark at the top there. That's more like a two. I'm gonna spread that color out more though so I am kind of getting it right away. Nice and dark up there. We're gonna just bring that. See this is like a fade. Okay we're feeding from the darker down to the lighter. My paintbrush is awfully wet right now so I'm gonna actually dry it and just smooth that over as well. About to erase my three there. Luckily this value is dark enough it's gonna cover up the pencil but just make sure with your lighter values that you do get those erased because once you paint over them then you can't erase the pencil. It's amazing how that happens but the paint just locks it in. I'm just trying to make this a nice smooth fade there. Now if you feel like it ever gets too dark and you want to take some away you can blot with your paper towel. So if you want just like that if it ever gets too dark do a little blotting. That can look really nice. You could do that on purpose to create more of a foggy kind of look. Give it a little bit of that you know far away atmospheric perspective. So I still know that I need to bring in that four value in the sky here around the sun but I'm gonna have to wait again on that because I can't go into this area right now because the mountain is wet so I'm just gonna hold off on that. I also can't do my trees in here or this land formation either. What I could do though since this area is dry is I could do my three value in here and start darker with three and blend that into the four here. Start this color first yes a tiny bit dark a little bit of water. I'll start you know what just in case let's get rid of that number just in case. Start a little darker right at the top there because that's where I'd want the darkest value and roll. So just a little bit of water right here and so instead of adding more color I'm just adding some water just to help blend just a slightly damp brush. Okay and I'm gonna try to actually lift a tiny bit of color right there from the edge because I think it's gonna look even better if I have a little more contrast like this is that fog reflecting. Also gonna get a little darker along the edge. Now this is a reflection of water so if you want to show some brush strokes and you know like give it a give it some horizontal lines. All this area down here is water so that would be perfectly fine in fact you could do that in this area here too and if you just add some strokes with your paint brush on top of an area that's been painted just with water to see where I hit that part though it started to bring it bring that value out. We don't want that but you can add just some subtle changes so that the area of the water looks different than the land. Okay I think this I think the mountains are drying up now we can bounce on up here and work on the sky. So originally we wanted this area of the sky to be one step darker just for some contrast so originally we had four marked here so we've got to make up a nice light gray again. Now if we can't get a light gray here because we already have so much black here we can always just bring some over and then add more water to that that's an option so let's let's see what we need to do. Let's test this out it might be good. What I'm going to try doing is using some of the darker color right here around my circle. Try to be careful here so that I keep that nice shape. I'm just keeping it a little bit darker right around the sun for contrast. Anytime you start to get any pooling happening with the paint use your paper towel. All right so that's doing what I want so again I just want this to be kind of subtle just a little bit a little bit darker in this area around the sun. It's subtle because I don't want I don't want the sky dark I still want the sky in general to be light. Okay so remember with watercolor paint you're gonna see some effects from the water that you don't really want to try to control too much like you're gonna see things happen as it dries and that that's what's beautiful about this medium so don't don't think that you are doing something wrong because you're seeing some subtle changes in value or you're seeing some some textured effects that's perfectly normal and that's something that many watercolor artists embrace. All right so we're now ready to do our two darkest values our twos and our ones and we're going to begin right in here with our two. So our two is a pretty dark okay so we're gonna add plenty of black here into our palette. Let's see if we can get a nice yeah there we go okay so we got a nice deep color here for our two and I'm just going to come straight across here all the way through show this and again this area is dry so I don't have to worry about that and I do want to be careful as I work because I am going to be bringing some of these trees up over into the sky a bit so I don't want to touch that too soon so let's just slowly start adding some more of our second value here and getting into the area where we're going to have our trees. We can just start by just putting a line where they're going to be that's what I like to do to plan them out especially with a tree like this and evergreen it's straight up and down some bumpiness doesn't have to be straight all right so let's start start drawing some trees so I'm beginning just with lines for where they're going to be okay I'm going to grab some paint on my brush and so for these short ones I'm just going to kind of just kind of wiggle my brush side to side here I just want to kind of show a little texture that's going to be another tree now so it's kind of like a skinny triangle shape but we don't want it to be too perfect so I'm just going to give it a little texture let's try let's touch it I think a little wiggle side to side okay let's do this one now I'll have this one oh no it's not quite dry enough there so I've got to be very careful I'm not gonna do any more there yet you do not want to have that bleed out and be too much of a focal point I'm just looking at my reference but I'm also not worried about it being exactly like it either because the tree's a little different it doesn't have to be exactly like those trees to be a nice tree still not quite ready there well while we're waiting for that top area to dry something that that I notice that I'd like to do something with is I notice that it's a little darker down here I'd like to add just a tiny bit darkness here with that two value and same up here too I want to be slightly darker I want to go crazy with this though I don't want to I don't want to look like an outline so I'm just going to clean and dry my brush and just kind of blend that in so let's try this again over here I got a little darker there than I planned on I grabbed some directly from the paint set just to help make sure that you know it worked that's in a pretty important spot in my picture I didn't want to have that be bleeding out okay let's look here now on the reflection of the trees so I'm going to be using some of that same value here that same number two if anything maybe I'll lighten it a little bit make it a little bit more like a three for these reflections nope that's a little dark this should be underneath right underneath where you have a tree like a nice mirror edge I want to still keep it lighter up here though so I'm just going to really do this down in this area still nice and smooth if possible all right I'm almost finished now okay now I am ready for my one number one value remember it's going to be very very dark so for this I'll be pulling directly from my paint set and what what you'll want to do for this is since you're going to be using a darker value you're probably going to want to put something underneath your paper so that you don't get paint all over your workspace I will go ahead and grab this scrap I have here and just put that under like so I've seen one thing that's bugging me though right in here okay now for my one so I really want to take this directly from here and first I just want to go right up against a really nice rugged outline because this is this is like a rock formation the big rocks here so I want to go right up against it and I don't want to worry about it being again exactly like my picture that's not important my paint should be flowing still off of my brush even though I am using a darker value so I want to make sure that my brush is nice and wet so it's the paint should not feel sticky it should not be skipping as I'm applying it it should just be like just a dark value I don't have to erase the number because this is going to cover it right up come out a little further than I originally planned be up a little bit further too your water is going to be getting really dark now it's another reason why it's so important to start with your light values first because it's really hard to create light values if you don't have clean water just a little bit of extra contrast okay last thing I want to do I want to add in a little tree here I'm inspired by what I see there in my picture and so using a dry brush I'm going to just paint a little tree start with the line I'm just going to draw just like two quick branches now I'm not going to try to paint exactly what I see instead I'm just going to represent this tree just some marks just different sizes okay so I'm not trying to paint actual shapes of leaves I'm just letting my paintbrush illusion show texture here like maybe there's some growing of course you can add more if you want to change up and add some other things into your foreground and silhouette that would be okay and I think at this point well I hope this video helps you understand how to create a beautiful watercolor painting using just one color a monochromatic color scheme from a reference of your choice thanks for watching bye