Paint THE ULTIMATE WATERCOLOR fall trees - PLUS quality time in my garden with dogs, sheep and hens!

hi everyone Diane here welcome to my studio hope everyone's well and ready for another adventure in art um today I'm going to create a kind of spray painted background with some lovely vibrant colors and then I'm going to um paint a tree on top of that and we're going to see how that's going to work out hoping it's going to be a fairly um easy but uh quite dramatic sort of painting should be a bit of fun and and um I've got a palette here that's got some paint in it that's left over from another painting that I did recently and I thought to myself I think I'll use that up and then of course what happens is you realize you haven't got got quite enough so I'm going to have to top it up anyway um but what I'm using I'm using a Michael Harding but I think anything would do um for example Paul Rubin or any of the Chinese paints qu chow chow chow May and um light wish or uh any of them any of them all be fine um so what I'm going to do I'm putting out some quinacridone gold and this is AO orange beny midone own know and um lizar and Crimson I think there's probably enough of that there oh or is that concon Rose I think that's concon Rose so I put lizar and Crimson out here because I want it to be be a bit on the um reddish side and we'll need some yellow as well yellow is not in that box I've got a little bit of yellow there AO yellow whoops luckily that's dryit of AO yellow there and um just wondering about the greens this is um m screen excuse me um so I'll put a bit more of that out and in a minute I'm going to mix water into these Wells that's Peril green that's very strong I won't put any more out there for the minute um so having done that what we'll do is we'll spray water into all of these there are quicker ways of transferring water into your paint one of them would be to use a water dropper or you can use a big brush um whatever makes the most sense for you it's actually quite hard on the wrist to do it like this you could also even you know what you could just tip some water in there couldn't you duh that's probably the easiest way of all have a little jug of it or something like that so now I'm going to I won't use that brush cuz that's a good brush I'll use a cheap brush to do this mixing part and what I'm going to do is just mix the paint into the water so that we have a nice rich um liquid paint because we're going to be putting this on in a with a toothbrush so we just get the most of that paint off the side on the side there wipe it off on my towel rinse it out in one of my jars of water and go to the next one this is the quac Crone gold whoops it's just gone to visit the yellow and get that all nice and liquidy in there and scrape the bottom a bit scrape the bottom of the barrel so get most of that off wipe it off on my towel rinse it out and we put a little bit more of this one in didn't we so we'll do the same thing there this is a bit repetitive so I hope you're not bored clean that have to make sure you clean the brush in between these brushes that I this brush I'm using here is a a cheap one from I think it was free with a set of paints that I was sent so it doesn't matter if I kind of smoosh down quite hard to mix the the paint into the water this is one of the for for for this kind of painting this is one of the good reasons for having tube paints rather than pan paints so you know most people want both kinds in their Armory I think and then there's this one I'll just wake this one up and there we go I think that's it's probably good enough for now you okay I'm just looking for a book oh right on on rubab yeah so I've put some brown paper underneath my uh working paper here this is I've taken the cover off of that but this is a sheet of a a block of Med uh cold press 140 lb watercolor paper um uh this is the larger size which is can never remember these numbers 12 by9 and what we're going to do is we're going to start with maybe I'll start with this softer brush here this is a brand new toothbrush that came free with a flight that my husband did um and we're going to pick up the lightest color and I'm going to use my hands and I'm going to get in a mess but um I'm just going to spray and as as you might um imagine this is kind of like a poor man's airbrush kind of thing so I'm just going to go with the yellow over the whole of the paper and we're going to say time to sit down and we'll keep building up layers using this technique it's actually easier to stand and I might try the other brush it might be better no that's too hard I think that one might have come to the end of its useful days if we get a variation of size of um spatter that's quite a good thing somebody made a comment on one of my videos a little while ago saying why do people people put spatter on their paintings I don't see the great watercolorists doing that and that kind of prompted me to think hey that's bit of a cheek because it's not true actually um plenty of great watercolorists whatever that means um use spatter and various other techniques on their paintings and anyway so now we'll go into the orange and we'll start building up that shows up a lot more orange always does show up a lot more then yellow so what we'll do is we'll concentrate the darkness down the bottom so we'll make sure we get plenty of this color down here and a little bit over there perhaps whoops that went all over the table never mind okay and now we'll move to the quinacridone Rose and put some of that in I'm try and keep the center a little bit um lighter here and now this is the lizin Crimson I think um and yeah now I think I might switch to some green probably should have cleaned that brush to do the green so I'll just do that let's have this moss green I have very little idea what this is going to turn out like I might say very little I put some big blobs now I don't know what I'm going to do next at this moment in time and this is a very dark green well I don't know if I'm ever going to get my hands clean so having done that um I'm think thinking what I might do this is very experimental is take this long brush which is a uh sword liner and let's see whether we can draw some trees through the paint through the wet paint we just randomly allow these branches to grow it's quite interesting we could flick some grasses or something like that down here and then perhaps we can put another tree um coming up from here perhaps we make the trunk a bit thicker down the bottom and then maybe we can put some landscape in in the background just drawing through through all of our spatter maybe we'll pick up some of this do that we've mixed down here and we can lay that in it doesn't have any desire to dry so it's still working okay maybe we put some few more br branches you could carry on with branches think I'm going to lift a little bit of that out that seems a little bit over the top there which is definitely a possibility and then you can if that doesn't sort of match anymore you can always um do it somewhere else so you've got another option maybe we'll just dab a little bit along there like that and then you could of course just pick up some more let's see what do we want the darkest color preps just put a few few more dots in there and if we feel that this ought to be darker too maybe it should we can just bring in some more of this perene green and you can of course lift out as well if you want to make it a bit lighter in places or to lift out the paint so that you can come in with a darker darker one so I think it's a good idea to have a few quite strong darks down here going over not next to but over and it's going to be quite interesting to see how this dries and you're probably thinking my goodness that's a dreadful mess but I don't know I don't know I don't think it is a dreadful mess this is experiments and we don't want to go too far I think possibly might be enough and I think I'm going to let that dry and see what we've got and if we feel that we need to put in a few lights um we can always come in with some um white gouache if it needs it once it's dry but for the minute I'm going to let that dry I might even take it off of its brown paper so that we can take a better look that's what we've done okay well we'll see how that dries out okay so this is now completely dry and I've got a couple of things I want to do to it um in the meantime I did take a photograph of this at this stage and then I made it into black and white and that way by looking at the Black and White Version I can tell whether or not I've got enough contrast in other words whether my tonality is correct and it brings up um issues that you may or may not be able to see when you're looking at the color version so it's actually quite a handy thing to do any photo that you take on your phone you can go to the option of um putting a filter on and it can choose black and white so it's very easy to do now um and one of the things it highlighted was something that I had noticed um was wrong which is this bit here where this treat trunk goes over the background there that needs to be darker because you need some counter change counter change is the difference between light and dark and so what I need to do is just quickly mix up some some dark um Brown which would be conone Gold Plus or you could use burnt sienna plus um perene green and then I'm just going to darken that bit of the tree trunk there okay um so that solves that little bit of a problem of um and it doesn't matter if it's not quite the same color as other parts of the tree trunk because that's that's fine um so there's that and then I can make that a bit wider there too just a bit I think maybe a little bit darker you play around you know it all depends how much effort you want to put into these things and then I thought H actually this little blob here this little like a bird and what I need to do is I need to put some birds on these branches to make it look more alive so I cut out some little bits of um this is actually pieces of leaf um I just picked up a a few Dead Leaves and I cut some random shapes and I'm going to arrange them on here so that I can see I haven't even bothered to make them the shape of birds um I'm just going to arrange them on here so that I can see where would be the best places to put my birds okay so we're going to have a couple of quite small ones up the top there like that and I'll make them all that kind of shape and then I just need to sort of move them around and decide where I feel the best positions are yeah and this is a very important thing to do really because um once you done it you've done it and if you've done it wrong or you feel as if you've done it wrong then you've done it wrong and that's all there is to it so um yeah I'm going to take some burnt sienna and I'm going to paint a bird here and make that a little bit bigger it kind of went a bit wrong and um I'm going to put one over here I'm going put one here and we'll give this one a tail we make it into a little birdy person and uh put one over here perhaps and maybe put one here so now we have a few birds in our trees and I think that's probably pretty pretty much done and just one last thing is to put back in the grasses here at the bottom where I I think I blotted it out a little bit maybe I blotted it a bit too much cuz when that dried the uh the grasses looked as if they were kind of a bit too pale or not broken in the right places so that that will do fine you could add a little bit more spatter at this point if you wanted to you could add some gouache if you wanted to to lighten up some areas but actually I think it's probably okay so I'm going to leave it like that and if you wanted to lighten it anywhere it would be around here but I I think probably we're better off just leaving it and uh yeah so I'll let you go hope you enjoyed that and give it a try it's a lot of fun spray painting why not and uh yeah I'll see you again soon so I'll say bye-bye for now everybody take care happy painting bye for now bye-bye everyone