JUST 4 COLOURS! Abstract GRANULATION Techniques for Loose Watercolour Landscape Painting, Watercolor

Hello and welcome back to Lois and Morgana Davidson Art. It's Lois here and today I'm excited to share with you how I achieved this beautiful subtle granulation in this abstract winter landscape painted in watercolour. I've used a limited palette of four colours, three of them are familiar to me but one of them I've never tried before and I'm really excited to use it in conjunction with these other colours. I've teamed up with Jackman's Art Materials and will be using their finest professional watercolour paints in this painting and I'll be using Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, French Ultramarine Deep and the colour that I've not tried before is Oxide Black, otherwise known as Lunar Black. It's a very granulating colour and it's that that's given me these subtle beautiful effects in my painting that I'm so happy with. If you're interested in taking a look at these beautiful watercolours there's a link in the description below and if you see anything you like there's a 10% discount code there so use the link in the description and should you order anything I will make a small affiliate commission on your order so many thanks in advance for those of you that decide to select something from this wonderful art supply company. And instead of using a brush to start the painting off I'm using a flexible plastic store card and I've squeezed out a tiny blob of Burnt Umber, Burnt Sienna, French Ultramarine Deep and the secret granulating weapon Oxide Black onto my card, just the edge. Now I'm using a large wash brush, it's a Princeton Aquarelli Mottler brush, to wet my hot press watercolour paper which is nice and smooth. You can use cold press for this. My board's at an angle of about 20 degrees and the paper is attached to the board with ordinary decorator's masking tape. After wetting the paper all over with clean water you can see I'm simply dragging the paint loaded card, if you see what I mean, across the wet page and where it hits very wet parts of the paper the paint is beginning to diffuse but I can use the edge of the card and the sort of flat of the card to create different marks and then I can go in with my damp brush and just run it along the bottom of some of those applied thick areas of paint and because the board's at an angle of 20 degrees I get this gentle flow of paint down the page and where I've got quite a strong area of Oxide Black you can see it's beginning to granulate beautifully and of course there's the French Ultramarine Deep which is a naturally granulating colour as well and so the two together are giving me those beautiful marks. Using my large wash brush I've just dipped into a little bit of the paint that's left on the card and bringing down a very subtle sky with the threat of more snow to come. Horizontal brush strokes and graduating this gentle wash down towards the horizon line just gives me this beautiful subtle effect. These colours are working together so beautifully, I'm really really happy with them. If you try something like this try to leave plenty of space where nothing much is going on, that gives the painting room to breathe, it gives it a sense of perspective and also sort of calm still beauty. The area at the top where we have these distant trees or the impression of this sort of woodland on this hillside and then this far hill at the back with a couple of sort of field boundaries, snow-covered hedges suggested there, really works much better because less is definitely more in this case. I'm going to zoom in and show you some of these beautiful granulating effects that we're getting. They're so subtle and yet they are such an important part of the beauty of this style of painting to be able to get these sorts of effects. I'm really loving the way that Jackman's French Ultramarine Deep, Oxide Black, Burnt Umber and Burnt Sienna have played together so to speak on the page to create this really harmonious and tranquil scene. I don't think it needs very much doing to it at all, all I'm going to do really is take this pointed stick, you could use the end of a paintbrush and I'm going to scratch through the rich paint in the foreground just to pull up some sort of marks that give the impression of grasses just growing up, just breaking that line up a little bit and this helps to lead the eye into the rest of the painting in this sort of S or gentle sort of Z-shaped composition that we have going on here. I can step back, take a look at the scene and see if there's anything that I want to do to it but I'm quite happy with this so I'm going to leave it to dry. I'm going to remove the tape and have a look at it. As soon as you remove the tape you get that great reveal and it often can be a really surprising thing, you can think that the painting isn't that great and then you remove the tape and you're much happier with the way it looks because it sort of ends up looking a bit fresher, a bit cleaner as soon as you see it with this clean white border, almost as if it was framed and mounted. So I'm really really pleased with the finished painting and if we kind of zoom in and look at some of this suggested detail, there's a lot of strong contrast going on, there's the contrast between the granulation texture and the unpainted paper, between the soft smooth washes and the deep value areas of paint that suggest the hillside covered in different types and densities of trees, the very gentle marks that help to suggest the field boundaries, things like that and of course the sort of grasses peeping through the foreground hedgerow and deep shadow which lead the eye into the painting. You can of course try this painting out or something in this style with your own colours and your own brands of paint that you like to use but if you are interested in checking out Jackman's art materials then don't forget to follow the link below and take a look at the website and see what they've got and don't forget to use the discount code that's in the description too. Well many thanks for watching, if you enjoyed the video then please give us a thumbs up and maybe consider subscribing to our channel if you haven't already, it's free to do and it really does help with our reach and thank you so much to everybody who supports us on our Patreon channels, we really do appreciate you and we couldn't run this free to view YouTube channel without you and if you'd like to support the channel there are links in the description below to our Patreon channels and of course our watercolour painting books. Well that's about it from me today, all that remains is for me to wish you all the best, thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon. Take care and happy painting, bye.