How to Achieve Watercolors that are Light and Fresh

Keep watercolors light. The easiest probably hack out there to get the results you want, and I'm going to show you exactly why and how. I'm going to do this real quick sketch. This is our horizon line. We have a big cloud here. We have a bunch of details, gray clouds coming from the right. We have our picture here, just so you can refer to it. Hopefully you see it well, and we will get started. So we already have this nice little blue here on my palette. So a bit of ultramarine, a bit of my cerulean, cobalt blue rather, and look, I'm just going to apply some of the paint here to the sky, kind of pausing it where the clouds are. Now remember, I don't care as much about the actual values I'm seeing. Right now we're almost practicing keeping it light. Now while I paint, I'll explain why this is huge. Why keeping it light makes your life so much easier. When you keep your watercolors light, you actually have so much more reaction time. You have so much more time to look at what's going on on the page and actually change it and shift it to match your vision, to match the feeling that the scene evokes in you, and just to make technical changes, to make fixes, corrections. It makes things so much easier. So I'm going to almost make a commitment to myself to keep this one light and see how that leads us down a path that is perhaps a little easier. So see, I'm using a bit of gray for the clouds here at the back, and watercolor dries of course lighter than it appears, which is actually good for us in this case because I'm just gonna kind of mix the color I'm seeing without obsessing too much over whether it's accurate or not. We do have this large kind of nice cloud here right in the middle. The rest I don't care as much about. In fact, there's a bit of a storm brewing here, so let's go a little stronger on the values. I can actually add a bit of carbozole violet here just for fun, a bit of red, a bit of yellow, whatever is bright on my palette, and kind of have these clouds attacking from the right. I'm gonna add a bit of yellow to it to neutralize, and you will see. And if you're struggling with your washes, if you feel like you're having a really hard time just achieving smooth washes, this is just a super simple hack to make life easier. And in fact, if you look at old masters, new masters, painters you look up to, you'll notice that it's quite misleading. You think the values are accurate, but especially with old masters, you'll see so many paintings and artworks that just don't really care about the values matching. It's just a tool. Values are a tool, and there's a tendency to obsess and worry about them being accurate. And you know what? I know it best, because I've been dealing with this thing for... I have been in the past dealing with this for years, really, until I was able to pretty much let go of that false notion, right? Now, everything I'm doing requires experience, of course, and understanding of how water and color and paint work. So it's okay if you're not getting the exact same result, of course. A lot of it comes with experience, but the mindset behind it of not worrying, just keeping things light and kind of trusting that it will work out, that's something you can start playing around with today, okay? You don't need anything special to just get started with it. You just test it out, okay? So I'm gonna leave some vague white areas for clouds, but for the most part, this area is, if you'll notice, a bit more just blue. In fact, I do see a bit of green in it, funny enough, reflecting almost from the ground, maybe, on the sky. I don't know, there's some interesting effects going on here, but to me, as long as I capture this main cloud, I'm good, okay? Just the main shape of the cloud. Now, in fact, we can break it off in some other spots, just to make it a little more varied and interesting. See? I like that. This is, in fact, part of it. You can just come back with some water and help make it a little lighter and lift if you want. You can lift these clouds or just come back with water, see? And the water, on their own, will lift, right? Now, the reason I can kind of take my time with it and revisit areas and whatever, just make changes, is that I'm using very wet paint. I'm not going to be concerned with the values matching accurately. I am not. Even if it hurts the sense of accuracy and realism, I'm just going to kind of let it go, okay? Just let it go. This one, you can go back to maybe obsessing over it a bit more in the next painting. So, let's take care of that horizon. It's kind of a bluish gray, but it's pretty gray. Maybe it has a bit of green to it, but we're going to start with a gray. Now, check it out. If you can get this wash, while the wash above it is still a little wet, there are some clear advantages to it. And look at what I'm doing. I'm not dabbing. I'm just moving my brush continuously over and across the paper. What this does, is it makes sure the colors don't leak too much or don't blend too much. It actually preserves that slightly soft edge that isn't too aggressive. Now, I'm going to do something fun here. Check it out. I'm going to add a thin blue strip of paint with a different brush because I want the paint that I have on this brush to stay. So, I'm going to add a bit of ultramarine and cobalt just to show, you know, there's something there even farther in the distance. So, let's make it a mountain or something like. See? Just gives it another layer of interest. And from this lower section of the dark trees in the background, look at what we're going to do. We're going to pivot straight into some greens. Okay, so keeping it light. So, this is a great green to get started with on the farthest details to keep them kind of not too strong. You want to leave room for stronger colors here at the front. And this is where, honestly, it just is about fun. This is where you can kind of experiment and play around with and revisit areas, you know. You can revisit areas and kind of patch them up and do wet and wet. But I think the overarching theme of colors here is the thing that actually matters. And if you can capture that in whatever form or style that, you know, speaks to you, that looks good to you, that's pretty much what this step is all about. There's a bit of green here, then there's a bit of yellow right to the side. Let me move this a bit right to the side here. I left this bit of area for the lighter patches that we're going to tackle in a moment. Let's crank down the volume on the green by going more French ultramarine, but crank up the volume on the yellow. Okay, so a bit more yellow this time. I'll kind of set up my shapes, go a bit more yellow. But you see, everything is relatively light. I know it looks a little dark, but if you look at it up close, it's not. Okay, the paint is still very wet. It looks much stronger than it will actually look in the final version. Now, adding a bit of red to your foliage is magic. If you haven't tried that before, it gives it these autumn kind of colors. It neutralizes the greens. A lot of the time when you feel like your paintings look a little amateurish or kind of they don't work, that's because you're going just with very strong greens that don't make sense, that aren't really there. Where in fact, most of the greens, so to speak, are gray and nuanced and they have red in them. And it's not that green is a hard color inherently, it's just that the landscape type of scene calls for a lot of the same color, and that's where a lot of people get caught. Okay, that's pretty much the reason behind why greens are challenging. It's not that greens are challenging, it's just that there's a lot of subject matter that kind of calls for greens, and a lot of them in one scene, and that's where a lot of people kind of mess it up. Okay, there aren't really that many scenes that call for just blue, unless you're looking at a skyscape, right? There aren't that many scenes that call for a ton of red, for example, or red variation, right? And if there were, then that's where people who don't yet have the understanding or control will mess up and paint things that are a little, let me close the door, that are a little too boring and kind of flat looking using reds that don't make sense, right? Now, this section here is where we're gonna go, you know, much, much brighter, lighter, yellower, greener, almost neon green. So I'm actually gonna start just quite strong, okay? And already you kind of get the feeling of fields and a landscape. Again, this is more about experimenting with the flow, right? I'm not even looking for a particular result here, but I wanna show you how I approach these kinds of washes. So I like to kind of get started with a yellow as the undertone for this area. And we do have this very strong, and I'll actually add a bit of phthalo here, this right here, this is quite strong, so let me kind of cover that up. And it will show later on. Now, I'm gonna slowly and gradually introduce a bit more of that phthalo blue into our yellow. And what this is gonna do is gently, it's gonna gently make this into more of a green. Because right now, see it's, and I'm not still going for the fields really, this is just, I'm using this stripped pattern just to, kind of striped pattern, just to apply the paint, just because that's, you know, randomly what I decided. It doesn't mean that's the details you're seeing just yet, okay? Just have that in mind. And so you see, it starts to tell the story of, okay, as we reach closer to this part, these areas are a little more green. Now, you could use this opportunity to just kind of go for the foreground foliage, a bit of everything really, a bit of strong greens and neutrals, and you can start kind of setting those up. I'm not a big fan necessarily of these, so what I'll do is probably limit them to some select spots, and way more gray, way more gray, way more gray, more black, more red, just to really neutralize those, because they're not our focal point. You don't want them to be too much of a focal point. So we'll do kind of this. I don't want this to be symmetrical, so we'll extend this area, and we'll kind of close off this area, and we're going to use pretty much the same technique, just a bit of green and yellow, and a very gentle touch to set up the fields, okay? This is where, you know, take your time, see if you can make it look natural and good looking, you know, but you see how we weren't really concerned with getting the right values or, you know, nailing down the exact kind of contrast of values, right? I don't care as much about that in this particular painting. What I care more about is can I capture the feel, and what this will do is it'll train a muscle in you that doesn't always rely on values to achieve the impression you're after, and that's actually quite important. You don't want to rely just on one little element. You want to gain a better understanding of all the different elements there are. Now, I want to do something fun here. I have some white on my palette, so I'm going to grab that, and with a bit of perhaps orange, just a bit of it, we'll kind of set up this winding road or, you know, whatever this is going through here, just to add a bit of, I don't necessarily want to add human-made elements here. It's just a bit of touch to give it, like, kind of break in between the different areas, right, to show. Maybe I'll even do, let me think about it. There's this, then I kind of like this thing here, so let's do that really in the distance and kind of weaken it like that, and if you do see a rooftop that kind of captures your attention, you can actually place it down. Now, I'm going to keep it orange because red is really a strong contrast with those greens, so maybe we'll try and kind of keep it a little more subtle, you know, so maybe a couple of these green supposed structures, not green, sorry, orange structures, and here's a fun part. Underneath them, just go back to the white, and you can almost hint at the actual building, see, and you really don't need much to do that. Now, it's going to dry darker because that's how opaque paint works, but if you want to preview how it's going to dark, just kind of dab it a bit, and you'll see how it kind of slowly disappears. Now, this is actually a good time to just add a couple of small touches to the trees in the background, so just with maybe a really thick paint and kind of a almost dry brush, see if we want to maybe enhance some of these trees, make them a little more obvious in some spots. You won't always want to do this, but for some, maybe. I love this. Look at this leak of paint. This is really nice looking right here, but now, if you actually want to make this more of a vibrant green, you can. I'm not going to do it this time because I don't feel like it's needed here, but, and by the way, these little flakes, I'm going to clean them off. I don't know where they came from, really. Probably had a piece of paper towel on my palette, so there we go. You can just, once this dries, glaze on top of it with something like a lemon yellow or something similar to that will make a big difference, or by the way, you can do the same kind of trick. If you want to add some green details to it, go back to our white paint, add just a bit of this yellow. Usually a yellow will be enough, and you can sort of, you know, if you see a very prominent field back then, you can sort of place that in, right? There's this interesting, I don't know, elongated field here, and there's a bit of that there, and it just adds a few touches of interest, but for the most part, you know, when you paint like this, just with no concern for the values necessarily, you find other means of producing interest in your paintings, and that's something huge that I'm currently working on, because I want my paintings to speak on multiple levels, on multiple aspects. Now, one thing I will add to this is make the colors the challenge, right? So challenge yourself, maybe do multiple versions of this one, but have the colors be a little more unique, right? Look at whatever you're seeing here, change it up, do another iteration where you kind of modify the colors, make them a little more of your own, and you'd be amazed at the things you can achieve. If you saw my Amish country, relatively recent one, painting that I did, it's exactly that, kind of breaking away from what I'm seeing in the picture, and just painting things the way I want it anyway. I hope that makes sense. Thank you so much for watching. If you want to learn how to paint like this, how to kind of let go and paint with more freedom, I show you a bunch of hacks, including kind of what we talked about here, different variations of it. Check out the Frustration-Free Watercolor course, I'm going to put the link below. And by the way, if you want to join the Watercolor Club, the Watercolor Breakthrough Club, I'm going to put a link for that in the description box below, too. If you want these kinds of demos, live painting demos on a weekly basis from me, that's where you do it, and you also get to join the community and a bunch of nice little bonuses and perks. So thank you so much. Lastly, I will say thank you to everyone who supports me over on Patreon, really, really appreciate it. If you want to receive credits at the end of the videos, head over there. You can put just one buck a month and you get your name to be displayed on the screen. So thank you, really appreciate it. We'll see you soon. Take care.