Improve Your Watercolor Painting with Tiny Details! (World Watercolor Month Day 6)

Hey friends, welcome to day six of our World Watercolor Month practice. I'm so happy to have you here. I'm already having so much fun. For today's practice. We're going to be working on tiny details using our beach scene from yesterday. So let's jump in and get started. Okay friends. Welcome to day six of our World Watercolor Month practice yesterday. We did this fun dual color gradient moving a dark blue into a lighter blue into a lighter sand yellowish color into a darker yellowish sand color. So we have the base for our beach scene. Now today we are going to be adding some wet on dry. These are how you add the details wet on wet is when you add wet paint to a wet surface. You get those really kind of out of focus blurry explosions of color and edges. It's a really great way to build these soft edges. Now when you want to do more defined lines and details, this is where wet on dry comes into play. So I am going to be using a smaller size to round brush today because we're going to be creating some waves and also some little palm trees on the sand. You could always go as far as you know, adding, you know umbrellas and people on the beach, whatever you'd like. I'm going to keep it a little bit on the easier side today. I'm also going to show you how to add just a little bit of waves with some of the dark blue and blend it out and we'll get more into blending later. So you're going to need a smaller brush today. I have my size to round brush from my travel set collection, which is available on craftmo. And then today I'm also going to be using this dr. Ph Martin's bleed proof white ink. This is a white opaque paint that reactivates with water. It's kind of like a gouache, but if you have white gouache, maybe if you don't have any of that, maybe like a white acrylic or a white gel pen that could also work, but I really do love this stuff for a lot of my watercolor paintings. Okay. So first let's start by adding the white to our water. So I'm going to open it up. It comes in a little jar like this. Mine was fully dried out the other day. I've totally forgot to put the lid on and I left it the whole weekend. I was so mad at myself, but I added water mix it up and it's perfectly fine. So I'm going to take some of this paint. I actually like to put it in the lid and it's really nice and opaque. Actually, there's a bunch of the lid here and maybe a bit too much. And I'm just going to do these kind of I'm going to put my brush on its side and I'm going to do this kind of like little waves crashing at the shore. So I'm just kind of dragging my brush. This also touches on a little bit of wet on dry or no, sorry, a little bit of dry brush. So dry brushes when you don't use a lot of water on your brush and you get this more textured kind of dry little I don't know textured brush strokes. So see how it's kind of there's like holes here. It's not a smooth wash across you're getting these little dry textures, which is actually great for waves. So I'm using a thicker amount of paint and I didn't add water. I had I added water originally to my brush, but I don't think it's not dripping with water. It's not like super wet or anything, but this really helps to get some fun wave textures and I'm just dragging it across like that and it looks like it's crashing on the beach. I'm going to add a little bit of it water to there my brush. Oh my gosh. I can talk today. I promise I'm going to add another little bit of a wave here. It's a little bit smoother. You can even do like little extra kind of curves and stuff, but you want it like this textured holy kind of these lines like they're I don't even know how to explain it. Clearly my brain is just gone like so. Okay, we don't need to do a ton just a bit. Okay like that and then I'm going to let that wait. Hold on. I do want a little bit more here though. You have like a bit of the darker shadow from some of those lines we did yesterday. Just want to kind of come up to some of these darker bits. You can do like little curves like, you know, like the little transparent kind of water lines or there's like a little bits of foam at the end. You can just kind of draw these little curvy bits like that if you'd like. Okay there. Okay. So now I am going to I'm going to let that dry. We'll do a little bit of shading on that after I'm going to do some palm trees along here and just some greenery. So I'm going to start with I have this like olive green here, which I really love and I'm going to do some palm trees, but I'm going to just start with some I have lots of white on my brush. I'm going to start with some foliage to begin with. So I'm just going to take my brush and just do it would be better if I left that tape on but I just love when you take the tape off just so I can go over top of it if I need to. You know what? I'm going to use my size 8 brush for this because I want a little bit of texture. So I'm going to break up the bristles on my brush a bit and I'm going to go like this. So it's like there's some bushes. These aren't palm trees yet. These are just bushes. I'm going in with a dark green. So it looks like there's foliage over here. This also helps to create some texture. You do a little bit over here. This is just our first layer there. I might add a little bit of yellow just for a little bit of highlight like sun. I don't know a little bit of brightness and some of that foliage and then we can add some shadow in there after and I'm just tapping my brush really the bristles are like so beat up, but you won't ruin your brush this way. I promise see the way the bristles look you just wash your brush roll it on your paper towel like this and shape it back and it's perfectly fine. Okay. Now I'm going to grab my size 2 brush. I'm going to do some palm trees. Okay, so for the palm trees from up above start by doing this like little circle for a point and then I'm just going to do like almost like a star shape but have them kind of curved a little bit. These are like the palm leaves. I'm going to add a little bit of like yellow to my green. Just to make it a little bit brighter of a color and I'm just going to do these little flicks coming out from each line. So it looks like there's palm trees on the beach. You're just using the tip of your brush to go on either side of the palm leaves those lines that we did like that and it looks like a bird's-eye view of the palm trees. Okay, you do a couple more doesn't have to be symmetrical or anything. Okay, but try and curve some of those lines. You don't want them sticking straight out and you can do as many as you like. So a little dot there line line line line just a little guideline and to get these really fine brush strokes. You want to use this light the lightest amount of pressure you can using just the tip of your brush. So one other thing to know when you're layering colors over top of another color, you need to kind of guess like there's a little bit of color theory, right? Because I'm layering green on top of yellow which green is made up of yellow. So it's not really going to alter the color of the palm trees all that much but say I'm layering green on top of red. We're going to get a little bit more into color theory later, but red sits across from green on the color wheel. If you layer these transparent colors over top of each other, you're going to get a brown. So knowing what colors make what when you are layering because again, it's a transparent medium watercolor. You see through it most of the time unless you use a really dark value. It can really make a difference of the color that it turns out to be. So just keep that in mind when layering. Okay, so I'm just going to do a couple more palm trees. Like this and then I'm going to let it dry. Okay. So once it's fully dry, we can add just some final details. So now that we have some waves crashing up against the water. I'm just going to take a really light little bit of our blue that we used for the ocean and I'm just going to add just a tiny bit underneath some of these crashing waves. It just makes them pop out a little bit more. I'm using just a little bit and just kind of skimming it over. I'm going to wash off my brush and I'm just going to blend it out. Blending it out just means that you're just touching the edge. So it's a softer edge and it's not as harsh but see how it really kind of helps make those waves pop a bit more. Now the same thing for the sand. I'm going to take that sand color and I'm going to add a little bit of shadow underneath these white areas again, wash off my brush, dry it a bit, touch the edge with my clean damp brush and it just blends it out. So it's a lot softer, but it adds a little bit more shadow to it and depth. I'm going to use a little bit of a darker brown, not trying to find the brown I want just slightly because it's a shadow, right? Wash it, dry it off and just touch it gently to blend it out. So it's not so harsh. And then finally here we have a lighter value. Well, not really a value. I use a lighter green for these palm trees. I used yellow mixed with my olive green to make them on the lighter side. Now, I just want to add some depth. I'm going to add some darker green to add a little bit of shadow so you can add little just like little lines in some of the palm trees, maybe the closest to like the center of the palm trees just for a little bit of shading a little bit of that palm kind of line work. So it looks like there's some shading in there in between the palm leaves and then I'm going to grab that brush again, my size eight that we used before. I'm going to break up that those bristles again with a darker color and that I'm just going to tap that in and that's going to create my goodness a darker value and a darker like shadow within the foliage here and it just adds variety, right? Contrast. That's what we're looking for. And then when you're done the darker part you can take the tape off and I might just take a little bit of this white the bleed proof white add it to my lighter green just for a little bit of highlight on some of the palm tree leaves just so it looks like there's a little bit of lightness like that. Not a lot just a tiny tiny little bit just adds a little bit more of a different lighter value to it. And there we go. There is our detail on our beach scene. Thank you all so much for watching. I really hope you enjoyed it and I hope you learned something and I will see you tomorrow for day 7.