How to paint clear water with watercolors and acrylic markers 💧

Hi everyone, this is Nia and today I'm going to be painting the scene with clear water and some fish drifting by. It's not too complex to paint but sadly during the process I've overworked and overthink the process. But let me try to salvage the steps because I do love the texture of the water. Here are a couple of rough trials. The large one was actually a fail in the beginning but I ended up liking the water texture so I decided to give this another go. You can mask the edges but I'm just going to sketch out the frame like a loose sketch. This actually helps me mentally to not get too intimidated in the beginning. It's just a mental thing but I realized if the paper is prepped correctly or neatly I feel a bit more pressure especially when I film to get things down perfectly somehow even though it almost never happens. But recently I tried this and it helped out quite a bit. On the left here is the image which inspired me to paint this. It's a photo I took in one of my trips and I like the way the light hits the fern and the little leaves and also the clear water at the back as well. It's not an image that I referred to when I was painting but rather this is what sparked the idea to paint this composition and in the end as I paint it just evolved on its own. You can see as I'm sketching the position of the ferns are completely different. This is because I didn't have it right next to me when I was sketching but that's the only part that I'm going to draw out since the rest will be textures of water and also whatever vegetation there was on the right corner. And since the ferns are going to be the lightest area of the painting it's much easier to mask them off. I'm just using a masking fluid here so when I paint the water texture later I can just paint over it without being too careful to paint around these tiny little leaves. I'm using a silicone brush to apply the masking fluid by the way. I just find that I have more control this way. I also decided to add some lines for grass textures just very small ones. I was hoping that this would help me to visualize lighter areas on these spots so it won't look like a flat surface. However I think I was applying them a bit too thickly so it ended up looking like dots. I would prefer the lines to be much thinner than this. But next let's go over the colors I'll be using for this painting. Firstly this is Vermilion by Holbein, Indigo by Schmincke, Sap Green by Holbein, Permanent Yellow Deep by Holbein, Permanent Green No. 1 by Holbein, and Azure Blue by White Knight. For the water textures I'm going to be using my acrylic markers. The B9 is a really really really light blue and No. 1 is just pure white. If you don't have acrylic markers you can also paint on the textures with gouache. I'm also going to add little flowers using these two colors which is violet and yellow. But it's up to you whether you want to do this or not with your gouache because I ended up overworking my painting because of these. So just a heads up in case you want to paint along to this, be very careful when you're adding the final details. My masking fluid is completely dry now so I'm going to start painting over them. I'm going to start with the green rays and here I'm using a mix of Permanent Yellow Deep and Permanent Green. I'm going to paint around the edges for the lighter areas and also on top of these small mask areas where I mentioned before I wanted to create like a grassy texture. After applying the light colors I'm going to move on to a darker green and I'm just adding Sap Green and Indigo into the mixture. If I want the color to be darker I would increase the Indigo in the ratio. By the way I'm also using quite a large brush so I can cover a larger area. However I realized since I don't use this brush a lot, in fact this is the second time I've used this, I didn't really realize that the consistency is much lighter when I use a large brush compared to a small one because it does hold more water. So there's a tendency of loading my brush with more water instead of pigment so I was finding it a little bit difficult to get the darker colors since I am using a lighter consistency. However I feel like this has its benefit because when the paint dries and I've mixed all the different colors together because of the water content, the colors mingle with each other very nicely creating a nice variation. I want the corners to be very dark so here I added a lot more Indigo. As you can see the color is a bit more blue compared to the warmer areas at the top. Here I decided to add a bit of warmth, some browns which is from the same mixture with added Vermilion. Next I'm going to paint the base color of the water. I'm going to use a very thin consistency of Azure Blue and I'm just going to cover everything that I haven't painted yet. While the surface is still damp I'm going to mix up a green. This is the same color with added Permanent Yellow Deep and I'm just going to paint some ovals to represent some rocks underneath the water. Sometimes I also like to add a little bit of color variation by turning this into a warm green or something closer to brown by adding some Vermilion as well. Now I'm going to add some darker blues. This is from a mix of Indigo with Azure Blue and I'm going to paint them around the mask areas. This is to indicate some land underneath the water but I'm still using a fairly light consistency. I'm also going to use this color to paint around the rocks that I previously painted to suggest some shadows in between them. I want to introduce more warmth so at the top left corner I've decided to add a touch of Vermilion. This huge area is very wet so I decided to make the process quicker by using a hair dryer so I can paint right on top and I can continuously increase the values and details. I really like the texture that I've made here on the first layer however I feel like it's not dark enough which is why I decided to layer more colors on top. I also added more Vermilion in the mixture so the darker values are a bit warmer. However, I do prefer to do a limited layering for this area. I feel like the more texture it has the more our eyes are attracted to it and I'm trying to actually stir away from giving too much attention in that area. This isn't something that I realized when I was painting but it's a conclusion that I made after completing this painting. For the water though I'm just going to slowly build layer by layer. As you can see I'm still using a fairly thin consistency and I also want to add shadows underneath the masked areas. I was trying to build more contrast and I feel like this isn't something that I did enough of in the first couple of layers which end up making part of the problem towards the end after I finish painting those ferns because it didn't have enough contrast from the value. So if you were to paint along to this I would definitely suggest for you to establish enough contrast and the value right in the beginning. In this layer for the water though I tried to play it a little bit with the texture but after finishing off a layer I felt like everything was too wet again so I decided to dry it off completely before adding more definition especially in this rocky area on the left. With a thin consistency I start to play with the flow of the water creating some small ripples. I'm using a thin consistency so I can just blur it out if I don't end up liking the movement but once I'm sure I'm going to redefine them further. After doing a little bit more ripples I wasn't sure what was going on here so I went in with a clean damp brush to blur out some of the lines. After increasing the saturation of the overall water I decided to increase the value on this corner so this is from a mix of indigo with a bit of vermilion but I still used a fairly thin consistency. I thought that this would just be a fun addition so I added some line textures using this brush. I think at the end of this though it kind of got buried within the layers but it's something that I would prefer to preserve if I were to paint this again. I feel like the value is getting close to what I want them to be so I'm going to enhance the shadows in between them. This is from a mix of indigo and sap green. With the same color I'm going to start extending some of the lines and start to add more ripples especially on the left corner and I'm also going to do this at the bottom left corner. I feel like the bottom is in more of a shadowy area which is why I use a slightly thicker consistency and you can see the value is much darker. I'm also going to add some ripples on the right hand side and this will somewhat start to open up the diagonal composition. At this point I was quite happy with how the water reflections look so after everything completely dries I decided to take off the masked areas. However, I did realize after doing this that the area underneath those masked areas were not dark enough. This is something that I mentioned earlier but now you can see after applying the colors the values of those colors and the background looks a bit too similar which in turn didn't make any significant difference whereas my intention before was to make these ferns look like they're in direct sunlight. This is something that I was trying to salvage at the end and I ended up overworking it so please be mindful of this. I was thinking maybe I should have also used a much lighter consistency but this mixture here is from Permanent Green with Permanent Yellow Deep. As for some of the grassy areas I decided to make the green a bit more dominant so I just decided to use more Permanent Green in the ratio and for the darker areas I've added a touch of Sap Green as well. Now to paint the stems I decided to use a smaller brush for this for more control and I just used a dark green. This is from Sap Green with Permanent Yellow Deep and a touch of Vermilion. This is where I start to want to salvage this area. The first thing that I did was to add an outline which I feel kind of helped redefine some of those leaves. I'm just using a dark green here from a mix of Indigo and Sap Green. I also feel if I darken these corners here this might then contrast the lighter area of the leaves but I just feel like I've used too thick of a consistency right in the very beginning so it's not something that I can trick by increasing the value of other areas. Here I also tried to darken the water trying to paint around the leaves. This is why I said earlier it's easier to keep the masking fluid on until you're very sure that the contrast will be enough. Underneath the ferns I just used pure Indigo and quite a thick consistency. You can see that the color is quite dark and because of this I need to rebalance the whole painting so I introduced it to the ripple textures as well. I also start to use a smaller brush so I can paint the ripples in a more detailed manner. As I'm doing this I want to follow some of the lines that I've already painted for the bottom layers just so everything connects together. As I get towards the center I'm using a much lighter consistency because the base is very light so I don't want the ripples to look too dark compared to everything else. At this point and this is when I see that nice diagonal empty space in the middle and I just thought it would be really nice to add some orange fish to act as focal point and it would also be a really nice contrast against the surrounding greens and blues. So I decided to sketch it in with pencil to make sure that I like the positioning and I also made the fish's curve to follow the movement of the water. Then once I'm done I just colored it in as a simple silhouette from a mix of permanent yellow deep and vermilion. I'm going to dry them off completely and since the water is very clear I decided to add some shadows right underneath the fish. Okay now I want to add the movement of the water and some sparkly ripples. To do this I'm going to use my acrylic markers. This is the lightest blue that I have in my set and I'm just going to follow the movement and the lines that I've painted earlier. I like to play with the weight of the lines depending on the curves. Some areas might be thicker whereas others might be much thinner. By the way for this part you can also use gouache. You can use a slightly thinner consistency of white gouache or use a color that is mixed with a touch of blue. I like to also add in some shorter dashed lines or some tiny circles or dots and I feel like this adds to the sparkly feel of the water. To give that extra glow from the sparkle I like to add some white highlights at the center of some of the ripples by using just pure white. With this I also like to add some additional dots and tiny ovals in some areas but much less compared to the light blue that I used before. For some additional color here I added some purple flowers by just creating dots but I'm also going to add some yellow ones after this. This is where I went overboard, just a few dots and I overdid it. So just be very mindful of this as you're painting because I feel like this is more than enough already. I tried to counter it by adding the yellow flowers as well but I feel because the acrylic markers are so opaque this in the end flattened the surface. I also tried to use some white to add highlights to some of the ferns in direct sunlight and I also added a little bit of yellow because in the end the white kind of just took out all of the details that I painted earlier and this is when it hit me that if I kept going I'm going to ruin it and I decided to take the saturation away from some of the bright flowers by layering some dark green on top from indigo and sap green. Then I added a couple of leaves in that dark spot to break the large dark spot and stopped before I feel the need to repaint this one. In the end I actually really like this painting and composition even though it ended up being very different from the original picture but some days are just those days where it's hard to stop yourself from adding fun colors and details and I hope I'm not alone with this. Let me know your thoughts and experiences in the comments. Are you the type to stop too early or go overboard like I did? But anyway I hope you still enjoyed watching this painting come to life. Like usual the list of tools as well as my social media links will be in the description box. Thank you so much for watching till the end and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye!