USE CONTRAST & COLOUR: Watercolour AUTUMN TREES PAINTING Ink & Watercolour Techniques FALL Landscape

Hello and welcome to Lois and Morgana Davidson Art, where we love to explore painting, drawing and our deep connection with nature. Today I'm going to be painting this autumnal demonstration with the autumn leaves, a flash of fire against the misty greys of this autumn, late autumn woodland. Today I've used Saunders Waterford Hot Press watercolour paper. It's got a lovely smooth surface. It's 11 inches by 15 inches or 28 by 38 centimetres and I've drawn this ink outline first with waterproof black fineliners. I've used a 0.3 millimetre nib and a brush pen to create different weights of line. I'm going to use an old small brush which I'm going to dampen and then rub some brush soap or ordinary hand soap will do into the bristles to protect it from masking fluid. I'm going to then mask out the autumn leaves, the last few that are remaining on the twigs here as you can see. So just using the point of the brush I'm dabbing on the masking fluid quite carefully. Masking fluid will protect the white of the paper and that means I can really freely experiment until I get that dark misty autumnal background that I'm looking to try to achieve and then I can use beautiful contrasting colours for my autumn leaves. And please feel free to take a screenshot of the line work if you want to refer to it for your own painting. Just before the demo I'm really excited to be able to share with you a sneak peek of Morgana and my new book which is coming out in the UK on the 14th of October, Flowers in Watercolour. There'll be more to come I'll show you inside the book in a few days and don't forget that my first book Landscapes in Watercolour is available to purchase from all good bookstores. There are a couple of links in the description below so take a look at that if you think you might be interested in some of these projects. I've set my board up today at a 20 degree angle and I'm going to create my grey background allowing colour to mix on the paper wet in wet. So I'm wetting the background all over using my large Princeton Aqua Elite Mottler brush. It's a one and a half inch Mottler and I'm going to layer up the colours that I think will give me a really nice grey starting with Raw Sienna and I shall swiftly follow this Raw Sienna with a light coating of Cerulean Blue and then Venetian Red. After that Indigo and then finish off with another coat of Cerulean Blue and hopefully I'll end up with a really interesting grey. So have given me a beautiful grey but there's some variation to that grey. I'm just smoothing it out a little bit more and I've laid my board flat because I just want the washes to stay where they are. I'm using a piece of tissue to wipe off the masking tape because I don't want any drops of paint or water there to run back into the wash and give me marks around the edge. Everything's still lovely and damp and so the next phase of the wash will consist of me using a clean damp brush to lift out a little colour from the trees and then I shall use that brush to drag a bit of the paint and a bit more Indigo into the background to give me some sort of distant tree textures and then I'll add more texture scraping through the damp paint with my palette knife to add more branches. These are Burnt Sienna followed by Yellow Ochre and then some Sepia. These will build up more colour, more texture. I want this to be really quite murky, very sort of gloomy so that the fiery leaves contrast beautifully against this gloomy background but it will lighten a little as it dries. I'm using a size 2 fan brush, a nice small fan brush, to deliver the spatter patterning droplets to the paper and these are spreading out a little because the wash is wet, giving me these lovely soft passages of paint. Here's a little fine ground table salt, just ordinary table salt. I'm going to sprinkle a little bit here and there, not too much, just to build up even more texture, maybe get a few little highlights but it's mostly just for texture and atmosphere. And that's the wet in wet background wash completely done. I know it looks a little bit muddled but I'm trying to set the scene for my darker trees and then of course my fiery autumn leaves. I now need to leave it to dry completely and here it is, nice and dry. I've brushed off any remaining salt crystals from the wash and now I'm going to work into these trees and darken them up. I'm going to be using my size 2 quill brush and a mixture of indigo, Payne's grey, sepia with some sap green just to give a hint of sort of lichen and moss growing on the trees. I'm going to let the colour and the value sort of wet blend on the page. I can lift a bit out if it gets too dark and I'll probably spatter in a little bit of texture wet in wet, just to try and get some subtle texture but nice values too. So I think I'm nearly there, I'm just building up a few more darks on the shadow side of this main foreground tree. I'm really pleased with the way the texture has been built up little by little. It's very subtle but I think it's going to give me that really nice backdrop for my beautiful bright autumn leaves. Dropping a little bit more yellow ochre, bright yellow ochre because it's quite opaque, into that tree trunk just to give the hint of those lichen colours. Then just a nice bit of dark spatter just to really sort of deepen up around the bottom of the painting a bit more. I've left it to dry completely, it's now bone dry and I'm using an adhesive eraser or rubber cement pick up to gently rub away my masking fluid. You can of course use a clean finger but we find that these adhesive erasers are really cheap to find online in sort of decorators supplies and incredibly good at safely removing masking fluid. So here's my leaf area and I've zoomed in, I'm using a small calligraphy brush but you can use any small round brush and what I'm going to do is paint over the leaves in little groups, first with clean water and then I'm going to drop orange and yellow ink into the damp leaves. The reason I'm using ink is because it really is lovely and bright and vibrant and that's just what I'm looking for to stand out against the background. These are Dr PH Martin's Bombay really pleased with the way this has turned out. It hasn't turned out quite as I had imagined it at the beginning but I think the good approach when you're experimenting with something new is to be fairly flexible, to go with the paint, to sort of follow your intuition if you see what I mean. If something sort of is working or if you think it needs something different don't be afraid to try and experiment like I have done here. I think what I'm most pleased about with this is the textures on the tree bark and the really bright colour contrasts where the complementary colours of yellow and orange stand out really beautifully against the bluish grey background. Well I hope you enjoyed this demo, if you did then please give us a thumbs up and why not consider subscribing to our channel if you haven't already and don't forget to check out the links in the description below for our Patreon pages where you can support us and also for my book. So I'll see you again soon. Take care and happy painting. Bye.