Don’t MISS out on these unique Watercolor tips, choosing brushes, salt backgrounds & my little hen…

this is a Rendon that looks as if it's all green but I've just been collecting some leaves underneath it and a few that are growing on it cuz they're such beautiful colors and I'll show you those in a minute in the studio when I'm back but I did want to show you this this is Mrs little white so Mrs little white is a rescue hen and she was practically killed when the barn opposite us was um almost blown down more or less destroyed in the hurricane in October last year and um she was soaking wet and really hungry and I was sure she was going to die so in the end we managed to catch her and we brought her back to our place and we introduced her to our half a dozen hens and she settled in really well after a little while and um now She lays us one beautiful white egg almost every day and she has to go and do it somewhere special in a corner like this I think she thinks that this way we won't find it but she's wrong um very independent little him so we're very proud of about Mrs little white anyway to get back to the matter in hand I'm now back in the studio and today we're going to do some Leaf paintings um but we're going to do it something like this this is my trial effort and we're going to do an interesting background uh which is easier than it looks and then we're going to paint some leaves and berries over the top and I'm going to use these um High what are they not hranger um reded endrin leaves as a good example um if you look at the colors each one of these would make a lovely um palette you remember we did this the other day where we looked very closely at something and we did the colors from it and you might even be able to match up one that you've already got like this one for example I did this from the spa that I've got in the garden but it could almost match this this has got pink in it and quinacridone gold and burnt sienna burnt umber um little bit of uh what I would suppose this would be um uh sepia and on the back we've got um different colors we've got something like Naples yellow perhaps little Touch of Green there in the middle in this vein all sorts of colors on here and I think probably most of them are in this example so so that one's nice and then this one is another one from the same plant all of these are this one's still got lots of green in it so that's that's actually almost exactly this yeah so so you can figure out what colors you want to use from looking very closely at your example and I think it's really quite important actually to um use something as a model for you to paint from it's not it's no good just painting out of your head you can paint out of your head if you want of course you can I wouldn't even dream of trying to stop anybody but if you want to um learn how to mix colors and how to create a particular thing you're going to have to have something to work from I think now um I'm going to be using for my paints today I'm going to be using my uh Michael Harding paints but any paints would do and um here I've got um kaco in purple this is black um I've got alarin Crimson some people have problem pronouncing that word it's alarin alizarin Crimson uh kodone Rose I've got um uh AO orange here burnt sienna um quinacridone gold and here we've got um AO yellow and I've got a few other colors here I've got um this is um these are neutrals from um various sources this is hine and this is Daniel Smith um I always forget the name of that one um buff titanium this is um this is this is this is this is this one Shan brilliant and this is soft white that's from Michael Harden this is hine this is Daniel Smith um and so that's the colors I'm planning on using I do also have here van djk Brown this one here um which we probably will use it that's very similar to cpia I think I've got cpia somewhere if I feel I need it but I probably you won't use that because what I'm hoping to do is to make a nice bright background and um then do some texturizing on it using um water and salt so I probably want a bigger brush than this one I used this one for my small trial one so let me find a bigger one doesn't have to be a flat this is a flat half inch flat um could use a flat could use a bigger one maybe I will perhaps um could use a round something like this would work fine or you could use a mop brush um maybe I'll use the mop because for the background you don't need any shape you don't need to um you want to just basically cover cover the paper so maybe we'll use this mop brush this is one from my um set that I made with craft mode but you can get others as well this one is um by isab Bay this is a squirrel brush um that holds a heck of a lot of water and they come in different sizes I've got a smaller one somewhere um I tell you who does make them now at a reasonable price cuz isabe are very expensive being French I think they're special um can I get this out yes Paul rubben this is by this is a quill brush designed to imitate the French version here I've still got my thing on my wrist it's getting hot um yeah they sent they sent me these to show to you and they're quite nice I think that would probably work pretty well this is obviously far too big for this job so get rid of that but I don't know maybe I'll use that maybe I'll use that or maybe they sent me a bigger one didn't they was this one bigger yeah okay so let's get that one out I think these are actually quite reasonably priced they don't seem to have a very consistent method of wrapping them at the moment but I suppose that doesn't [Music] matter okay chat amongst yourselves while I try and get this out I hadn't thought about using this until now I would not probably not put this back inside this container because I think it would frustrate me but I am easily frustrated right so this is a size six Paul rubben um we'll see how it goes so what I'm going to do what I did in order to do this was um I started with quinacridone gold as I so often do and I'm painting wet on dry but we will will be using plenty of water if I don't like this brush I will uh change but I'm just going to put increasingly strong colors randomly going across the page oops there's a hair it might be one of mine it doesn't matter how you do this but I've gone from Krone to Orange to Rose and now we'll pick up a bit of a lizin crimson and we're just dropping it in with plenty of water we don't need to worry about having too much water lizin Crimson with um Krone gold makes a lovely Rusty color so that's nice and I might pop down to the burnt sienna here which is a little bit a little bit darker just a bit so as you can see we're just basically popping in all the autumn colors that we might want to see and it's probably a good idea when you're doing this to um sort of start light get darker and then perhaps end up a little bit lighter again so I'll go back to the quinacridone down here you could even put some yellow in if you wanted to i' got this yellow here so we won't play around with it too much just get rid of the little bits where I didn't put any paint we don't want it so that we've got any particular pattern this is supposed to be more or less random so that will be fine I think and then what I'm going to do next is I'm going to drop some water on so I'll rinse off my brush and because I haven't used this one before I'll just try that out I think those droplets are going to be a bit on the big side so I won't use that for this perhaps I'll just use an ordinary r let me see try that again yeah that's a bit better so what I'm going to do just wet my brush and drop droplets of water all over now when the water hits the paper it pushes the paint pigments particles away so you get a pattern so we'll put a fair amount of that on hoping that the dots will be reasonably small and we're not achieving we're not going to we're not aiming for anything specific just a good texture then I'll take my coarse salt and take a little handful of that and then sprinkle that all over now if you're impatient like me you'll probably want to use the hair dryer on this and there's no reason why you shouldn't but you might want to leave it for a few minutes first to um do its thing what happens is the salt absorbs because uh salt is hydrophilic it attracts water to it so it sucks up the water from around it and then when it dries after it's dried you'll find that it leaves little kind of patterns all over the paper so we'll let that do its thing you can see where the salt's landed it's already starting to suck up the water so we'll probably let that get on with its job for a bit and um I'll talk a little bit about what we're going to do next when that's dry um which you know you could easily do this before lunch and leave it over lunchtime and then come back finish it off with the hair dryer and brush the salt off and then start to do the second um layer of paint so anyway so that's what we have at the moment and that's what I had here Dr is a bit lighter than it is when it's wet as you can see um and then what I'm going to do is just a very simple design and I'm going to use the same colors plus some purple when you add purple this kind of purple gr acridone purple to any of these Reds um you get different shades of brown these Browns I didn't use Brown on the top I just used the Krone um gold the burnt not the burnt sienna Krone gold Krone Rose mixed with purple to get these shades of brown and then I just very Loosely put those on then I used um I think I used I'm not sure if I used the quinacridone rose or the alizarin Crimson but you could use either for the berries and then the Shadows under the berries I did with qu acone purple so I'm a I'm a very big fan of Krone colors because they are transparent and so they allow the color to be brilliant really and also they let the color underneath shine through which means that you get another dimension to your painting so um oh yeah so when this is dry what we will do what you you could do is put a a line for TW TG draw your Twigs on here however you want to do it I tend to be a bit boring with mine they always end up much the same um but you can probably have more original ideas and you'll just then attach leaves not real leaves um we'll draw leaves um onto our Twigs so it's nice actually to have real ones but once this is dry you'll be able to sort of even play around with the real ones that you've got and think to yourself oh I wonder if I could do something you know like this or or whatever and it might get you started so I'm going to have to leave that to dry as I said cuz if I put the haird dryer on it it might not work all that well okay so this is dry and now I'm just going to collect up the salt has a funny feel to it doesn't it salt I'm just looking for my brush I have a brush here somewhere and I do I do I do somewhere somewhere somewhere oh well I'll use oh here it is it's funny how that happens isn't it you give up and then suddenly it arrives so we'll just brush all the salt into the middle you probably could reuse the salt to be quite honest um I don't think it loses its AB ility to suck up water but um so we'll just collect that all together put it in a saucer and then just to check who've got it all off that's it doesn't matter if a few bits get left on but now we can see that we have a lovely texture for a background it's absolutely gorgeous I really quite like that so [Music] um I have in front of me a i an iPad with one of my paintings on it from before this one was entitled how to paint easy Autumn or fall leaves and berries with gold and ink and this was done 2 years ago almost exactly uh September it was end of September 2022 so I'm going to use this just as inspiration to give me a few ideas about how to do this one well it won't be the same um you might want to have a look at that video if uh if you're interested now I need a brush that has a fine enough point on it so this draww brush probably will be okay I don't like brushes that don't come to a point um so I think this one will be okay and then I'm going to just basically paint on a nice um stem you know a stalk a few of them and then we'll add leaves to that and this is not something I haven't done before before or to put it in another way this is something I have done before um but uh it's very relaxing and easy and you don't need to you know worry about anything don't have to worry about perspective don't have to worry about drawing there's no drawing involved in this one so I'm just using Krone gold and a bit of um ver Sienna I think that is and then we'll just paint some lovely loose leaf shapes this this color here is orange AO orange that's really nice different manufacturers give their paints different names so for example I think AO orange sometimes is called transparent orange you can look that up I think um schinka for example have a color called transparent orange which might be AO might be the same let's have an azarin Crimson Leaf cuz sometimes on trees certain kinds of trees you get very very strongly red don't you very strong red leaves and then on the other hand sometimes they go very Brown so we can have a variety so this is like our main twig and you can see that you can see the background through the leaves and I wanted that to be the case and then I'm going to pick up some vany Brown which is a darker a darker brown and um I think I'll put one here in the dark color I think I want to make that a bit darker still so I'll pick up some some purple mix that with the brown and that will make the leaves even darker and I could just make my life easier by going for a very small brush just to drag down the stems the stalks of the leaves I can do it with the point of this brush I could do but um sometimes it's a good idea to make your own life easier isn't it um yeah so now I'm going to put in the background take another one up here like this and then I think I'll go for a bit of purpley color here let's turn this around it doesn't matter if your leaves go off the paper like this one and we can put our stems in and something else that you can do is you can just drop a blob of paint at the bottom of your leaf and let that bleed up and that will give you back runs and all sorts of things like that and you can do that on these ones too if you want can just not necessarily on all of them but on some of them you could take a much darker color of course it's starting to dry but that doesn't matter you just add a bit more water and you get a various a very varied um set of colors like that me just take that out a little bit okay and then we could put some independent some separate ones if we wanted to and this is an example of purple over orange cuz I'm just picking up lilac here and it goes Brown straight away there's no way out of that could leave those one separate they don't have to be fixed to anything we can put some veins in later and we could go up the top here have a branch coming in from up here and um there is this one trick that we often use um whereby we take a sharp object like for example a feather and into the wet paint we draw a line and that scrapes away the paint and gives us an indication of a vein and sometimes if it's very wet still you get um a darker line and if it's drying you get a lighter line like that and you can do that on all of them if you want sometimes if you've got a little blob of paint there and you do that you'll get a painty line so that works really quite well saves you having to do it with a brush so that one used for a feather and I think I'm going to um do my berries now and I think I might do some of them in a dark purple which I'm going to add a bit of black to so they're like Elder berries and rather than having the bright red and putting a dark like I did on this one we had the bright red and then I put Dark Shadow because I'm going to do these ones in Black I'm going to put just I'm going to leave a little bit of light so do the opposite yeah and don't worry about making them too uh regular you can make them more convincing looking you just miss part of the berry off that's the best way to do it so they can be quite uneven and put one or two more up here okay and then what next [Music] um probably best thing to do here at the moment is to let it dry and we could come in with some gold or um something like that if we feel we need it or we could bring in another Branch over the top of this so that we get yet another layer of um color but I will have to dry it off first so it often happens that you get to this stage in the painting and you think I don't know what to do next I don't know what to where to put things now I don't know what to do so if you feel that way I think that one of the things that is useful is to try to cut out pieces of colored paper or in this case leaf and construct something so that you can tell because this is my answer to not having a very good visual imagination I do not have a very good visual imagination so therefore I struggle very hard very badly with knowing what things are going to look like when I do it some people don't have that problem right but I think actually probably more people do than we are aware of so that's too long too hard too too tough too thick so we'll just cut that and I'm just going to try out I've made some leaves here I'm going to try out some positions for leaves and it's a bit fiddly but I think it's worth it because you can tell straight away whether or not it's going to be a good idea to put some more leaves up here for example is that going to work you can you know change the the color of them by using different leaves and cutting different shapes out and yeah I mean you see what I mean do I want more up there could it take it I think it could um we could take some really dark ones we can try really dark ones down here for example so if you're like me and you struggle with knowing what things are going to look like once you've done it done something you can do this kind of thing and then what I will do what I would do definitely when I'm happy with what I've done I'll take a photograph on my camera and then I can take the pieces off of the painting and paint them on I like that you see I wouldn't have thought of that but that just kind of happened and do we want to put more down here with this I think this is this is for me quite a revel because as I say I've spent my whole life struggling with not being able to imagine what things are going to look like when I change them I could never imagine what an item of clothing was going to look like on me for example my mother didn't have that problem at all she was very good at putting together outfits but uh not me hopeless so that means you know you don't you don't enjoy shopping you don't enjoy fashion and things like that so much because you can't have that picture in your mind of what you're going to look like when you've got that dress on and and so on so apparently there are quite a lot of us out there who [Music] are um suffering from this thing and then I'm going to just do a couple more round berries and see whether I want to put any more up there these leaves are quite soft they don't uh break when I try to cut them if they were very dry they might not behave themselves but they're being quite quite amable so yeah I think I probably do and I probably want that one to be a bit smaller can you hear the DS in the distance you see I've added a couple of little dark ones down here and immediately I can see that that looks better now I can see it and it was better down there too it was better down there than it was and I probably want a berry or a tiny one in there yeah that's very exciting actually to suddenly realize um that you can solve a problem and I can see also now that I need to put a little bit more in the way of um veins on those ones in fact they should be a little bit darker so I'm going to take a photograph and um then I'll take these things off and I will paint them in okay so I've taken a photo of this which is here the color is not brilliant but it gives me a record of where I've put the different things and I've also sent it to my iPad so I can see the colors on the screen in front of me too but this is this is definitely a useful record um and I'm going to put that in front of me as well I've got one of these disc easel on my desk now which is very handy because it means I can look at a reference sort of up in front of me um whilst I'm painting which really really helps um okay so I'm a bit sad I'm going to have to take these off of here but I can see what it's going to look like now and um let me do them one by one how about that why don't I just do them one by one and um we'll do this one first and we there we've got um I would say that's pretty much van djk Brown so we'll pick up some vanik brown and we'll put in a nice dark brown leaf it's called a Fantasia a Fantasia that's what it is and this one going to add some black to it and make it darker and then the next one is more yellowish so we will go with something like quinacridone gold mixed with a bit of buff titanium put that there and then because that doesn't show up very well we'll darken it with some dots of and light brown so that's the first one it's exciting isn't it okay then we have another one up here like very similar so same kind of color same kind of arrangement and then this one is going to be a bit trickier but uh I think I'll just just go for it so we want some nice Rusty Brown there and the Krone gold is perfect for this maybe we add a little bit of yellow to it but we need it to be reasonably strong otherwise it won't show up and we go back to our burnt sienna here and I think the important thing is that it should be reasonably dark and this one down here and then another one here okay and now um we need our two berries here and down here again dark can overlap a little bit those of you who don't suffer from a fantasy will probably be thinking to yourselves what is the matter with this woman why can't you just see what it's going to look like but those of you who do and there are more of us than people want to admit and I think um there is a genetic Factor but also um something to do with using computers a little bit too much as well um okay so I'm going to try to put in a few veins not with that brush though I need more more pointy brush than that this is a brand new one should be good up here I think we want something no darker than that and this one and this one and I did want to put one whoops do that and I think really we've come towards the end of our journey for the day it is getting close to lunchtime so that's that then um what was I going to say yes so that's a good way of deciding whether or not to add more to to your less we've got some falling leaves here we've got some sort of spraying out a little bit down there I wouldn't have been able to do that without the help of my little cutouts and once you get to this point you could still say maybe I need maybe I need still more you know maybe it would be a good idea to put a couple more up here I think that looks good and a couple more here and you can go on and build up your painting without making any terrible mistakes I wonder how many famous artists um had a Fantasia I wonder or maybe in order to become a really good artist that's something that you you can't afford to be suffering from but we have the technology now could couldn't do that before could we you couldn't just take a photograph of your work and have it there ready to be copied and it's just not it wasn't possible so for all of the disadvantages that there are and there are many there are some advant vages too is that a Robin I have to ask Merlin who it is that's singing outside right I'm going to stop now hope you enjoyed that um don't forget to like And subscribe do do put a like put a comment underneath the video if you possibly can and visit us on patreon please and perhaps become a member um and uh cuz we do special videos on their exclusive content for you each month so I won't go on and on about that I'm going to leave this now and uh hopefully you enjoyed it and have a go yourself this Autumn so I'll let you go and I'll see you again very very soon bye for now everybody bye-bye silly she thinks I'm going to feel her egg quite right I think she thought she was going to get away with it hiding it there