How to Paint a Fall Scenery with only ONE Color // Monochromatic Watercolor // Art Journal Thursday

Hey guys, welcome back to a brand new episode of Art Journal Thursday, where we get creative every single Thursday here on this channel. This time it's going to be a little bit different because I decided to make this series into seasons. And this season will have nine episodes where we will experiment and try new techniques and ways how to paint with watercolors, gouache, and acrylic paint. And in this video, we're going to paint monochromatic to not only simplify the painting process, but also to learn more about how to work with different shades and compositions. So let's go. So what does monochrome or monochromatic painting mean? To create a monochromatic painting, you only need one color. For example, red and blue are different colors, but dark blue and light blue are not. These are just values of the same color, light, middle, and dark values. As I mentioned in my video about the difference between the different art mediums, depending on the amount of water you mix into your watercolor paint, the lighter or darker you can make the value of the specific color. So to create a monochromatic painting, I would suggest to pick one color and then just practice with it first. Since I wanted to paint a fall scenery, I decided to test out different brown shades to see what I can get out of them before I decide on one, but you can, of course, use any color of your choice. So first you can use just a tiny amount of water to activate the paint in your mixing palette and then apply it to the paper. And then you can use either a brush or a pipette and then add a few drops of water into the paint. Now here I added two or three drops each time to make the value lighter and lighter. Don't worry if you don't have watercolors in tubes, I will cover the pans in the actual painting later. As you can see, the more water I add to the paint, the lighter it gets. You can create these charts for multiple colors to see how the other values look because sometimes similar colors look almost the same when they are dark, but once you add lots of water, you can discover that some colors have certain undertones such as red, blue, or more yellow. But since in watercolors you usually work from light to dark, let's create the same chart but this time from light to dark. Here I used a different brown color and added just a tiny amount of paint into my mixing palette and then added a ton of water to create a light value. And to make the value darker and darker, you can now load up the brush with a little bit of paint and then add it to the water mixture. From here, just repeat the steps. Add more and more paint into the mixture and add it to your chart. After some time, you will get the feel for how much or how little water you need to create the desired value. For my painting, I decided to go for a more gold brown color because I wanted to have a color that has a more yellow and red undertone because I wanted to capture this warm golden light of the fall season. Here I used watercolor in a pen and created a chart first just to experiment and to just get the feel for the paint. I loaded up the brush with water, a little bit of paint, and then added it to the mixing palette. And then I added a lot of water to the palette to create a light value. From here, I repeat the same steps as shown in the beginning. I added more and more paint to the same mixture to create some more lighter values, but also to create the middle and the darker values. With this exercise, you don't need to be super accurate with the amount of paint or water you add. It's just to get the feel for how much or how little paint or water you should use to create the desired value. By painting monochromatic, you not only learn about the different values, but you also learn about the contrast between them. So depending on how dark or how light the value of a certain color is can determine if the object will just fade into the background and become rather unimportant or if it will stand out and become the focus of the whole composition. For my painting, I wanted to put the focus onto the contrast between the dark foreground and the bright background to really emphasize the brightness and the warmth of the golden sun. That's why I started off by mixing a very light value of brown color and by applying it to the whole page. This is going to be the base for the whole painting. Once this layer is dry, you can add a little bit more paint in the mixture to create a darker value. With this paint, we can now go ahead and add the first trees in the background. As you can see, the trees look really soft and subtle and that's what we want to achieve. We want to add more and more trees, one layer at a time and make them darker and darker while moving towards the front. If you want to create a very soft and misty forest, you can lightly blend out the lower part of the trees to just blend them into the background a little bit. And then repeat the steps. Add more paint into the mixture and create more trees in the foreground once the layer has dried. As you can see, the painting already looks more three-dimensional with the trees far, far away in the background with these few trees in front and the trees next to the street to the left. I think I overdid it a little bit and added too many trees in one place, but I just wanted to play around with this technique and just see how it looks. I think this is such a fun technique to practice different compositions and what values to use to make something stand out or disappear in the painting. Here you can see that the people in the lower part are rather dark and the contrast between the trees isn't that big, but between the lighter and the darker trees in the painting, there's a huge difference. So here I think you get the feeling that the people are coming from the darker part of the forest and move towards the sunset and maybe just the sun that looks through the dark forest and is very bright and warm. I could have still added a little bit more shadows here and there, but I think for the first practice, it isn't that bad and it was really fun to experiment with this technique. If you're going to recreate this painting or use this technique, don't forget to use the hashtag lookmaker so I can find it and feature it in one of my future videos. For more watercolor videos, you can check out the videos right here. Thank you so much for watching, guys. Have a wonderful day and I will see you soon. Bye.