Step-by-Step Watercolor Ocean (Anyone Can Do This)

Hello friend, welcome to another Jenna Riney watercolor tutorial. We are going to be painting an ocean landscape. I'm using the Princeton Mottler brush. You guys know, if you've been following me on this channel for a while, that this is my go-to brush for backgrounds and big sweeping strokes for landscapes. So it's an inch and a half wide, washy brush shape and also is designed to hold a lot of water and pigment. So it's perfect for oceans and big areas where you need to cover with a lot of pigment and water. So I'm using a tea-ish consistency, so a lighter, more transparent consistency of Prussian blue. So lots of water and a little bit of Prussian blue for this light background of my ocean. And if you look at, I want you guys to become noticers, not just robotic tutorial followers. I'm not directing this dead or making this personal or anything, but notice how the light is hitting my paper. You can tell that there's no puddles. It's just a light glaze or a sheen of wet, thin color. So when you're doing this yourself, make sure that you're sweeping all the way from left to right or right to left, if you're left handed, back and forth to make sure that it's a smooth glaze or coverage of that thinner, lighter, more transparent color. Because if you're using too much water, you're going to have a few things happen. You're going to have cauliflowers, those hard lines that dry around big puddles of wet area. You're also going to, when you add your darker colors, it's not going to blend as easily. It's going to get blocked by those puddles. So you want to have a thin glaze of color as your base layer. And I'm just slowly adding more depth because I actually want my base layer to be a little bit darker. So I'm adding a little bit more Prussian blue as I go and thickening up that color a little bit. And we want to make sure to notice any areas where pigment or puddles are collecting so that it doesn't dry with a hard line. And now I'm going right into my sky. So my ocean is a little bit darker than my sky. We have a tea consistency for the sky of the same exact color, the Prussian blue color, and then I'm going over those edges where there's puddles happening. I'm just sweeping it in to mix it or blend it in so that it doesn't collect on the sides to create hard lines. And you'll also notice because I take my strokes all the way from edge to edge that there's no stoppage, like obvious streaks where there's a brush that stops in the middle of the ocean or the sky, it goes all the way across like sweeping waves. And now I have a thick, more creamy consistency of Prussian blue on my size six round brush and I'm dragging it in and out thin on the sides of the stroke and then thick in the middle of the stroke. And basically they are interlocking shapes. So if I have a wave on the edge, I'll go right below it and kind of interlock in between the waves that are forming. And because my base layer is still wet, we're getting that nice, you know, smooth gradient between dark and light. Our light base layer and our darker waves on top. If you want more detailed breakdown of how to paint waves, I have a few videos on this channel that you can check out, but I also have a book that recently came out about a year ago called Everyday Watercolor Seashores. It's available in local bookstores, libraries, Amazon, all the places. So make sure you check it out. It has tons of detailed breakdowns of how to paint waves, how to paint ocean scenes, and also sea creatures like starfish and jellyfish and lobster and fun stuff. So make sure to check it out if you haven't already. It's my third book in my Everyday Watercolor series of books. I have Everyday Watercolor, Everyday Watercolor Flowers, and now Everyday Watercolor Oceans. Seashores, not oceans. Same thing though. So now I'm mixing up an even darker blue to go over the mid-tone blue that I have, the thicker Prussian blue. I'm adding black to my Prussian blue now. Not too much because I don't want it to be a black, overpowered with black and burnt umber. And sorry, not adding to the waves. I'm thinking I'm going to be painting cliffs now. So that's going to clean up the edges of my ocean where there's a little bit of blurriness, a little bit of hard lines starting to form. We're just going to slap a thick consistency of this darker brown on top for some cliffs, making sure that my sky is dry so that it doesn't bleed and get fuzzy around the edges. I'm using a size 6 round brush and just bringing that down to the horizon line and a little bit overlapping as if we're on the coast. We're overlooking the coastline of Portugal or California. Places that are really near and dear to my heart since we are currently living in Portugal and I was born and raised in Southern California where it's crazy expensive to live. So here we are painting in some cliffs and we've got two little jutting out cliff moments. And I'm just, I keep adding pigment like brown and black to thicken it up and make it opaque so you don't see the water underneath the cliffs. And then I'll use the tip of the brush to add in maybe a little bit of detail on the cliffs, maybe there's some rocks, ploppity plop plop. Keeping my brush strokes really simple and try and challenge yourself to see how few, how few strokes you can do it in. The less strokes the better. So really get familiar with your brushes and how when you put pressure on them and they're on their side what it looks like versus when they're pointing straight up and down or they're on the side but you're pointing in a different direction etc etc. Now I'm going to add a little couple little palm trees, really thin, really small, just off in the distance to add more detail and to make things really pop against that sky. This is a really fun and simple way to get familiar with painting ocean scenes. So we've kept it really simple, we're basically just using two colors, prussian blue and burnt umber. Burnt umber does have a little bit of black but keeping it really simple, you're not adding in tons of detail, you're not getting too much depth in the ocean or in the sky or anything like that so it's pretty manageable. If you're new to painting ocean scenes this is a great place to start. I like to rotate my brush until I find the skinniest little hair sticking out because I'm too lazy to grab my size 2 brush or a fineliner brush so I just try to find the skinniest part of, this was a size 10 round brush and usually you have one side of the brush that is thinner. It's kind of like colored pencils, when you start to use them like you have an edge that's sharper than another side. Here though I decided to grab my size 2 brush because we needed it to be thinner for this tiny tree. I'm gonna add a couple more trees in here that are smaller, maybe a little bit more faded in the background. A great tutorial to follow for these baby trees if you want to get the shapes down is the Misty Jungle tutorial on my YouTube. It's also in my book Everyday Watercolor towards the end. If you're just getting started with watercolor I highly recommend grabbing my book Everyday Watercolor because it builds you gradually and slowly, works your way up to stuff like landscapes and really detailed landscapes. So you start with basic shapes and strokes and then we add a technique every single day or every single chapter. We add in a new technique or something else to practice on top of what we've already learned or practiced. So great way to gradually and slowly build technique upon technique if you're new to watercolor. I also have a companion course for all my Everyday Watercolor books called Everyday Watercolor Companion Course. It has video tutorials that go along with my book so if you're more of a visual learner or you need more video step-by-step detail it's really inexpensive and it's basically just a companion to my books, all three of them, and you don't need my books in order to take the course. So if you're more of a video person I highly recommend checking out Everyday Watercolor Companion Course. Now I'm just painting in some really faded and simple birdie shapes with my size 2 round brush. There's basically just a thin stroke and then a little thick stroke for the wing flap. Thin, thick. We don't want to overdo it with birds. I think it's a nice way to fill in the sky just a little bit. And that's that's the main techniques that you would use for painting water and painting an ocean scene is doing that wet and wet technique for your ocean, adding in your thicker color to your base layer with a round brush so you can get those tapered wave shapes, interlocking those shapes, kind of creating z shape patterns and interlocking them. I have more detailed breakdowns on how to paint water on this channel that I'll link to and you can find by searching videos on my channel and also in my book Everyday Watercolor Seashores and in the course Everyday Watercolor Companion Course. But this is a great way to start practicing ocean scenes or landscapes if you're new to them. I hope you enjoyed. I'm continuing to add these tiny little birds to just complete the painting and make it feel a little bit more complete for the scene. But I hope you enjoyed it and love practicing your oceans, love practicing your water, and I will see you in the next video.