Watercolor lakeside dock painting for beginners » How to paint a summer lake landscape STEP BY STEP

Hello my friends and welcome back to another watercolor tutorial. Today we are painting a lake scene with a walkout deck. As usual I forgot to really think this through how I'm going to start it. So let's stall by trying to pick out my paintbrush. We'll do the background first obviously. So I don't have my borders taped this time. I do have my piece of paper in portrait position. Usually I tape them but this time I wanted to go for like a full look. So we're gonna do kind of a bluish yellow wash. So I'm taking this muted blue on my paintbrush and we're gonna have kind of a bit at the top here. It's gonna fade a bit into yellow. I'll add the yellow afterwards but basically just covering most of this in blue. So if you have a mop brush it's probably better to use the mop brush. But I'm just covering this whole thing. The bottom we want it to be darker, more pigmented. I'm gonna take a bit of navy blue and add that down here as well. It's really tricky because I don't have anything to hold. Okay so that's probably not sufficient. That's probably good. Now I'm gonna add some yellow. The problem is that I have like a little bit of blue washed into my paintbrush so when I pick up the yellow it sort of turns green. And we want a very muted yellow. So take the most muted yellow that you have and I'm gonna just be plopping it down mostly in the sky area and I'm rinsing my brush in between each reapplication and reloading of paint so that it doesn't turn green. So we're gonna have a horizon line somewhere here which is why you want a reflection of the yellow. That's probably... See it's already turning green up here but what are you gonna do? I am going to let this dry. That's what I'm gonna do. Oh it's spilling out the side here. Yikes. I wanted to make this a little bit darker but maybe I'll do it afterwards because we're gonna have a deck going out here. Yeah I'll probably just... No I'm gonna try and make it darker now. So I'm gonna pick up black and blue. So I am going to let this dry now with a blow dryer. So I'm hoping that this is dry. Ah the bottom keeps wetting. There we go. Okay what are we gonna do now? So I'm instead of... I think I'm gonna do the little walkout deck thing first. So there's a few ways you can go about it. You can freehand it or you can pencil it in first. And I'm gonna pencil it in. So I want my horizon line first of all. Maybe I should do that first. It's gonna be about here going all the way across and my deck is gonna come out to about here and so it's gonna go... So I'm just penciling in the little planks and obviously they're gonna be closer together as you get farther out. Now I'm gonna try my best to make this look good because it's gonna be a variety of colors. Orange, brown, tan. So I'm gonna start maybe... Maybe tan would be the... Can I decide what color to start with? Let's do the brown and then we'll go from there. So the easiest thing might be to paint the whole thing one color and then just layer after that. But I'm not gonna go for the easiest route. I'm gonna try to do these individually and they're not gonna be super precise the planks. They're just gonna be... So I should have added some tan in there and some orange and whatnot before it has a chance to dry. So So, since the last time I painted, which was a week ago, I finally convinced my husband to be okay with adding a rustic country house, not even a country house, but like a traditional island to our kitchen, obviously. But I want to make it myself because finding that sort of thing on Marketplace has proved to be not possible, because I've been regularly keeping an eye out. I haven't been checking every day, but every few weeks I take a look and see what's out there. But I guess it's super in right now, that style, so maybe I don't check often enough and when people post, they get taken off the market very quickly. So I decided that I was going to make my own, and then I can make it the style that I want, though it won't look as authentic and natural as obviously if you were to buy an antique one. But I'm going to try nonetheless, and so I bought some of the materials yesterday. I really wanted to make it yesterday, but Rona did not have the turned legs in stock, so I had to order them. So they should come in in two days, so by next week when I'm painting my next round of tutorials, it should already be completed. And so I was super excited about this island endeavor that I'm embarking on, and then today we went to a friend's house for lunch, and I've been like very briefly to their house before, just dropping something off, but this time we spent a couple of hours there. And I noticed how calm I felt, and I realized it was because their house just feels so warm. Not in temperature, but I guess inherently that comes with feeling warm, but it just it felt so cozy. And I then thought about my own house, and I realized my own house feels very, I don't want to say hospital-y, and I never thought this way before, but when I compared the two houses and feeling our house with their house, I was like, our house is very white, and even though all my furniture is wood, like natural wood and dark, so it kind of adds to that rustic cozy feeling, it's their place feels like a like a home cottage, where they have these beautiful wood ceilings, and everything's kind of wood. The floor is wood, and it's just a very nice color. And so I'm like, ah, how do I make my home feel warmer? And I just don't know how I would achieve that. I did, when we were building this house, I desperately to achieve like a warm, cozier look. I wanted so bad to install a brick wall in the kitchen, because that would have taken away with some of that white feeling, if that makes any sense. But there was just no place for it, because we have giant windows everywhere. So there was no place for a naturally looking brick wall, so I never did it. Now I'm wondering, what could I do to make this more, more natural, more cozy? So I have to, I do have to think about this. But in the meantime, my little kitchen island will have to do the excitement from that. I love building my own stuff, building my own furniture. I made our coffee table from scratch. That was an expensive coffee table, because I purchased the wood from this place about 40 minutes away. And it was, and it's hard wood. So like the material is so expensive. It doesn't look that great. Like I thought it looked great at the beginning. But now, I guess the more I've gotten used to it, the more I'm like, ah, I could have done a few things differently. But I also found my favorite thing that I think I've done is our kitchen table. I got it second hand on Marketplace for $50. And it's a, it's a solid wood, gorgeous table. I think the reason it was being sold for so low and why nobody wanted it is because the top was super worn out. And so I just sanded the heck out of it. So that it was like it I stripped it of its stain and its polish. I restained it in the color I wanted, and then put a new clear coat. And it looks it's my favorite thing in my house, I think, or at least one of the favorite things. Um, sorry, I got a little distracted there. Um, I think it's pretty obvious what I'm doing here. But I will just go over it super quick. I took a dark brown or basically black mixed with brown, and I was just bordering the edges and kind of hashing, hashing, hatching, hatcheting. What's the word I'm looking for? Basically just adding a bunch of horizontal lines super close together to make the edges of this wood look worn, or the planks. Obviously, this isn't wood. But that's what I attempted to do. Now we can probably make this look weathered by just running water across it, and then it'll sort of blend. But the issue with that is you run the risk of cauliflowering, so thought of that midway through. So let me just... I'm just wetting the entire surface of this deck evenly so that it doesn't cauliflower. And in turn, it sort of blends some of the harsher colors together and makes it look a little more natural. I don't really like how that looks, to be honest. I think I'm going to take some white watercolor here and try and lighten some of these planks. This gives it a little bit more of a weathered look. Okay, enough with this deck, although I am tempted to also paint a little like a rod coming out here. Um, so I'm gonna paint a bunch of grasses here on either side of this deck in a moment. I wanted this blue to be a lot darker so it would have been easier to paint the grasses because it would have already had a dark background, but obviously that didn't happen very well. There's two ways we can go about that. We either just pretend that, well, we just paint the grasses over top, or we can re-wet the whole thing, add more darkness here. And I am really tempted to do that, to be honest, because then we can also do our horizon a lot more naturally. I need to think about this. Let me just paint this horizon first and see if we can spread it out naturally. So I'm gonna take black and basically just run it across, but then I want this to turn into a pigmented blue, something like that. And then I'm going to take a round brush, like a large round brush, and drag this out. And I'm re-wetting the entire top so that it spreads naturally upwards. So that looks pretty nifty. Now we can do the same for the bottom for the reflection, and I am a little bit tempted to do that because then we can add, like I said, that dark blue here. But then this would have had to be completely dry, which it is not. So I don't know what to do. I should have waited for that to completely dry. Let's see. I'm just gonna try and re-wet it like that and leaving the deck. Hopefully that won't compromise the deck. So I have my reflection there, but it has really washed this out. So let me see if I can just add a bit more pigment up top here, something like that. And then we can add our pigment here. So I'm gonna take a navy blue mixed with black and just plop that on the sides of the deck. And you can even add some green if you dare, because reeds are often green, right? Okay, so I'm gonna see if I can encourage this to dry evenly. So this isn't turning out how I had envisioned, if I'm being frank. I'm gonna just redo, oh man, this horizon line because, I don't know, it just kind of turned blobby. So okay, so I'm gonna take navy blue mixed with black now and do some of these grasses that I was talking about. So I'm gonna try and go just go in these horizontal zigzags almost in an abstract sort of way. Okay, so that is fine, I think, the way that it is. Something is really missing for me here. I don't know, this whole situation, it dried in a way, I don't think I can, now it's for sure going to cauliflower. It already sort of started. I don't know, I don't know what to do about this. I think I'm just gonna take some silver and add it to these grassy strands and that'll give this painting a little bit of contrast from all the darkness. Maybe I overdid it there a little too much with the silver. I'm gonna leave it at that. I don't like this very much. I don't know where I can improve, like something up here has to be improved, but I can't figure out what. It's just very dark and gloomy and not in the way that I wanted. I'm almost thinking if I can add some grassy strands, just like overlapping and coming up, but I think that might be too much. So yeah, I'm just gonna cut my losses and call it a day. Thank you guys for watching this one. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye!