Matthew Palmer | FANtastic Techniques with Fan Brushes | SAA Archives

Hi there folks, my name is Matthew Palmer and I'd like to introduce to you these brushes called the Matthew Palmer's Fantastic Brushes. These are a set of three small, medium and large brush designed for creating beautiful special effects from gorgeous trees, animal fur, flowing water to anything that involves beautiful texture. Let's get started. First of all I'd like to use the medium size Fantastic Brush and paint a beautifully realistic palm tree. Let's get started. Clean the brush, wipe off the excess water. These are natural hair brushes so it's good to clean the excess water first. And then in the palette I've got various colours. Most of these are my natural range of colours. I'm going to take some natural brown and mix it into the palette. Now natural brown is a great colour for trees and trunks and branches. Give the brush a bit of a stipple and you can see how the brush goes all nice and spiky. Once you've done that it's not a bad idea to give it a bit of a tap on tissue. With it being natural it holds a lot of colour. Take the brush with the fan facing almost flat to the paper and go straight up to get a fairly clean line. Palm trees tend to lean. Brush to one side. You can rotate the brush to get different effects so you get that gorgeous texture. Now also as I'm doing this I'm thinking to myself this would work lovely for silver birch trees as well. So I'll pop that on there. It's catching the light from one side. If you hold the brush almost vertical you can sort of tap down one side to create an edge. Again wider at the bottom. The tops of palm trees tend to have a lot of mass so what we'll do is we'll put some little horizontal strokes at the top here and a few stipples around just to create an effect of the massive the old fronds that kind of thing. Clean the brush really well. Get all that colour out of it. Again wipe on the side and then what we'll do is we'll take some natural green. Natural green being the darker of the two greens in the range. Fairly strong. Mix it into the brush. Again a bit of a stipple and again just a little bit of a tap on the tissue. Notice how the brush you can see here has gone lovely and spiky. This brush contains a mixture of special hairs that will instantly make the brush go random. Different heights of hair as well work great. First of all take the brush and put a line across and then brush down and it's really simple for creating this lovely effect. Now we'll bring it over here and then we'll continue to add as many or as few. Look how simple you can create individual textured fronds. Beautiful. Some smaller ones here and then I'm just going to rotate the board slightly and pop some smaller ones and literally working upside down. Work kind of towards you if it makes it easier for you and turn it the right way and we can see with a simple brush across here and a few little spiky lines for grasses we've created a very quick but super effective pottery. So let me show you how to paint a very simple summer tree, a full sort of bloom summer tree. We're talking classic oak trees, that kind of thing, using the large brush from the set of three. Again clean the brush, wipe off that excess water on the side. Let's use this brush in an interesting way. Let's work with two colours. Here I've got two greens. These are natural green and natural green light. Now on one side of the brush I can pick up the lighter green and on the opposite side I can pick up the darker green. So we basically have a brush made up of two colours and you can see instantly it works well. Let's almost lay the brush flat to the paper. The beautiful curve and the random heights of the hairs, each brush is different, gives gorgeous texture. Lay it flat and literally look at that beautiful rock from side to side and then because the larger brush is the widest of all of them, give it a stipple in the palette so it all goes nice and spiky. We can see here how the brush has gone lovely and open and it's got this random effect happening. Then we can just put a few little stipples around. So you can use it as a stippling brush as well and it's just a nice way of creating just a simple but really effective tree. How quick was that painted? You know because painting summer trees or any trees, if you change the colours to orange and brown you've got an autumnal tree. Beautiful. So that's the main canopy. Now to add life to this tree I'm just going to pick up a normal round brush and this particular one is a size 4. I've got some natural brown here. I'm going to mix it with some grey so I'm making the colour a little bit darker and then what we'll do with this is we'll paint in the sort of central trunk of the tree and then we'll take it up but I want to leave it. I want to paint it just in a few areas so almost creating that central main trunk and then we can branch out literally and I can bring in a few branches just weaving the way in here. Put as much time as you like into painting this tree. Obviously in a full bloom summer tree you don't see a huge amount of branches but a few is always advisable because it just adds life to the tree and then even grabbing something like a palette knife or even just a plastic card, the corner would work nice. You can actually scrape off a few. It makes a beautiful sound but also lets you scrape off a few finer branches. You can almost extend from the ends where you've just used the knife. That's got to be a record for one of the quickest summer trees of all time but as soon as you put the branches on the tree comes alive. It's alive and you can just bring in as many or as few of those beautiful fine branches as you feel. Dead effective yeah. Now what I want to do is pick up that brush which has still got some green on just making sure and then again I can just pop a very simple bit of landscape here and instant tree. Let me show you how to add those super fine branches to the ends of those winter trees. People often paint winter trees like this which look as though they're not quite still there. They look almost like a dead tree so it needs to be brought to life and using these brushes you can very simply add life and that beautiful soft glaze to those winter trees. It really makes a big difference. So we've got the three brushes. I want to use the small one here nice and clean. Tap off the excess water. Here I've got a bit of a brown and grey mix which is actually the same colour I've just used to painting those branches. Diluting the colour down quite a lot and then important thing to do is get some kitchen paper and really dry off that brush. Really make it go all nice and spiky and then literally take the brush and lightly stroke it in either direction. I can see it's very fine and dry. A bit more colour there and it's giving that beautiful individual glaze to the end of the tree. It's made up of thousands of little hairs. You can see how the brush has got those wonderful individual lengths and that's what makes the brush special and with it being natural every brush is different which is great. So it adds the final bit of life to any winter tree very easily as well. The more you use the brush the more you can imagine all the different techniques you can apply with the brush. If I pick up the large brush, use the same colour, make it a touch stronger with natural brown or some kind of a brown mix, give it a stipple. Again always tap off the excess and then just very gently give it a bit tap because I always think just a few last leaf that's left off from the autumn always adds a bit of life and again just imagine that to be a huge tree, beautiful. One of my favourite style of trees is those beautiful pine or cedar trees. I spend a lot of time teaching painting holidays in the Lake District and Cumbria and it's such a wonderful tree. It really shines out against the mass of you know sort of standard kind of oak or classic trees but people do find them difficult to paint. These brushes make it so much easier. Let me show you how effective and simple it is to paint them. Let's take some masking tape here and just remove the stickiness by doing this with your fingers. Lay this horizontally or wherever you want to position the trees. Press it down just the top edge using the small or any size of these fantastic brushes. It depends how big you want the tree to be. Let's use a little bit of water. Always wipe off the excess. Take some natural green or a nice dark green which we've got here. Coat the brush. Now if you coat the brush forward and back it makes the brush nice and neat and clean. We can see that here. We can use this brush almost to paint in the beautiful straight line. Let's do a couple of these. I just want to show you how simple these actually are. Put the line in. Then if you give the brush a bit of a stipple it's always good to have a bit of kitchen paper just to tap off that excess and then you can see you've got a spiky brush. Now just look at this. You can turn the brush over. It'll give you different lengths, different styles. Keep picking up a bit more colour as you need to. So this is the small brush. Do the same on this side as well. Try and make it slimmer at the top. Nice and wide at the base. Then a simple case of just turning the board in a different direction. We can then do the opposite side. It just works a treat. Having that central line first really makes the tree symmetrical. Which pine cedar trees are. Turn that back the right way. I always think as well a lovely thing to do on these trees. You just use the sharp edge at the top and just pop a few little final little taps around just to give it a bit extra life. It's best on larger ones but if we take the masking tape away here we can see what a lovely effect and what a simple and so easy to do. Beautiful pine trees. So I want to show you how to paint a simple and effective reflection. Reflections always cause people trouble in watercolour or any medium. So I've painted this set of trees using the medium fantastic brush for doing the trees and the small for doing the beautiful pine tree. Left that to dry. I did put masking tape across there to keep the line crisp. Reflections. How do you paint simple reflections? Well we're going to use first of all the medium fantastic brush. I'm going to get some water on it and basically wet the area. Because wetting to wet is a great way of doing reflections. The paint just goes on softer. With these being natural brushes they do hold a lot of water. So it's lovely for wetting areas. Now you can see already that because I've slightly touched the edge of the background trees it's starting to bleed. You can see that little bit of a creep that adds to it. So let that do its thing. Now obviously there's no sky on this little demonstration. So I'm going to pick up the small brush for this. I'm going to use the brush in two ways. Water. Wipe off that excess and then we'll put some natural green light on one side and some natural green which is the darker one on the other side. So again a bit like how I painted the single tree on the earlier step. Or should I say earlier demonstration. We've got the two colours. A bit of a tap on tissue and literally take that brush. I'm sort of leaning to one side here. I'm going to pull it down and look how you get that gorgeous effect of two tone. Let the paint just spread. Think about the heights. I love our watercolour or acrylic just spreads against the damp paper there. Beautiful. You see downward reflections really do give life. Then over the top of the downward reflection you add horizontal ripples which we'll do shortly. Beautiful. But I love how that brush contains two colours because of the special lengths. The different lengths in the hair kind of holds the colour in place. Clean the brush really well. Give it a dry. Using just the darker colour. Natural green or any dark green. Nice and thick for that one. I'm just going to pop a bit of grey with that. Make it darker but you could just use the green by itself. And then we're going to do the reflection of the tall pine tree. Again bring it down. Now because it's a wide brush. It's about an inch wide at the top. The small one. That's perfect for doing the base. How do we get it slimmer? Just rotate the brush. Let the paint spread. And just every so often pop in a few extra. Especially right up to the water's edge. Allow the paint to soften and it gives you those individual lines which instantly give depth to water. A stunning effect and a very simple way of painting reflections. Let's just give that a quick dry and then let's put some ripples. Some movement over the top once it's dry. Nice and dry. I want to pick up the large fantastic. Clean the brush and we're going to take some blue. So this is natural blue. Any kind of clean blue would work for this. And I'm just going to pop some grey with it to make the blue a little bit darker. Stipple the brush. Bit of a tap on tissue. You can see how the brush has gone all nice and spiky. I love how it's a random brush every time you drop it in the palette. It's a good idea to wipe off the excess on the side sometimes as well. And then very easily paint horizontal lines across which just gives surface to water. So we can do this across here. As you go further back clean the brush out. Dilute the colour. Make sure you wipe it on the tissue. Just add a few more of those horizontal lines. So you just get a lighter version of the same and it's a way of blending it back. So it kind of gives a surface. What's interesting is it's slightly lifted off some of the green which makes it even more effective because a few lighter lines really gives that beautiful effect of water. So a simple but really really effective demo there folks to show you how easy it is to paint reflections. Downward reflections. Horizontal ripples. You've cracked it. So I just want to show you how to paint water or sea. A close up of the ocean. Rolling waves and splashing water against the rocks. I'm going to use some white paint here and squirt it into the palette. This one is an opaque white. Very similar to natural white or some kind of opaque colour. Using the small fantastic brush. Clean brush. A little bit of water. Get into the habit of wiping off that excess on the side. Mix that into the white. A little bit of water is advisable. Not a huge amount. It's always a tricky balance getting the right amount of water into the brush and then basically what we do is we can see here but a beautiful brush with white paint on it. A bit of a tap on tissue works well because that will make the bristles go nice and open. Now let's paint a horizontal line across the top first of all because a clean edge and then just ever so gently. Look at this. Absolutely stunning every single time. It's great isn't it? Instant rolling waves. Let's do another one. Let's put one higher up shall we? So straight line across the top. It's all to do with the individual hairs and the different lengths of the hair that makes this brush very special. Okay now great love that. So let's just clean that brush and then what I'll do is I'll pick up the larger brush here and I'll just give it a bit of a clean. Pick up lots of white. Really get it in the brush. This shows that you can use these brushes with oils and acrylics as well because I'm using this paint very thick. A little tiny bit of water is required. Again a nice tap on tissue. Now if you look at that brush you can see it's gone very random. Look at it. Love it. And then what we'll do is we'll just pop some. Sort of rotate the brush. Imagine the splash of a wave as it meets a rock. Now there's no rock there at the minute but there will be. We'll clean the brush. We're rockless. What we'll do is we'll pick up a size six brush here and I'm just going to quickly grab some natural grey or some kind of dark colour mixed with natural brown. So a nice strong colour there. And then we'll just put the rock in front of the white paint here. Fill it in at this point. Pop in a few little bits around and then just very quickly clean the brush. Pick up a touch more of the colour just to add some reflection of the rock. And then if you've got a palette knife or even a plastic card in the rock you can actually scrape off a little bit of texture into the rock. So I'm just using a palette knife but you can use just the corner of a plastic card for this. It will work just as well. And that will create texture to the rock. Now once that's had a few seconds to dry I'll show you how you can very simply put the little veins of water that just creep over the top of the rock. So I picked up the small fantastic and I'm stippling it in the white paint. Just a bit of water. Again we can see that nice individual. And it's a nice thing just to add a few more little splashes if you need to. But you always get a little bit of water just creeps over the top of the rock. And it's always difficult to make it look random but with this brush of course it's really easy. And of course a few splashes around the foreground here as well. It can just add a lovely bit of life to your seascapes. So using the fantastic brushes you can achieve a beautiful random grass and flower effect. Let me show you how to do this. If I take some masking tape. Just remove the stickiness from the tape. Pop that down. And then using any of the brushes. Let's use the large one for this. Clean the brush. Wipe off that excess water. And then let's take some natural green. That's the darker one. I'll mix it with a lighter green so we get a mixture of both colours here. So a nice a nice sort of average green. Let's give it a stipple. Because if you stipple the brush. Remember it goes into this beautiful random spiky edge. And that's what makes this brush special. And makes it stand out against a normal fan brush. Because the width, the special hair, the various heights of bristle. And so simple. And look at that beautiful way of creating tall grasses. Less paint on the brush. Will give you more individuals. And then if you turn the brush on the side. You can even put like you know little bits of foliage. Little bits of nettles. If you want to call them that I suppose. But a really effective way of creating simple random grasses. Which is great. Now if we clean that brush really well. Get all the green out of it. And if we take some red. I've got some natural red here. Or you could use a brighter red. And what we'll do with this. Is we'll give it a tap on the tissue first. So we've got a little bit on the brush. Again all spiky. And pop in some little bits of little bits of rose bay willow herb. Creeping up at the side of the road. Beautiful. So so versatile. Now if I take the tape off. You can see what you've got. If you've got any massive colour. Just get your fingernail in it. Give it a scratch. That'll give individual grasses. So I just want to show you how to add life to your animal portraits. It's always interesting teaching workshops on painting animals. It's one of our passions is painting portraits of animals, birds etc. But how do you get this lovely random effect. Like on this snow leopard of fur or hair. Well it's a difficult thing for a lot of people to do is get random. These brushes do random extremely well. This picture is a great example. So what's missing from this watercolour here is just a little bit of extra whiskers and a bit of light and maybe a couple of darker hairs. So decide on which brush works for you. I want to use the small fantastic brush here. And I've got some white paint. This is natural white or opaque white. But any kind of strong white whether it be acrylic or gouache would work great for this. Then the brush. Mix it in to the white. Now just wipe off that excess on the side. You don't want a huge amount of colour and a bit of a stipple. And instantly we've got a brush that's got random hairs. Perfect. Let's add some light hairs to this. Now what I want to do is go for the ear. Pop in just how effective that does. Right on the edges of an animal portrait you can add most realistic hair you could imagine. Trying to achieve this with a standard round brush is very difficult. And of course if we're talking about whiskers we'd use a different brush. We'd go for the medium brush. Make sure that's nice and clean. Mix it into the white. Give it a stipple. And then hold the brush right near the tip. Have a practice run first and then just do. Look how amazing that is. Now I'm just going to rotate the board around and do the opposite side. It's always better with me being right handed working away from me makes makes more sense. And of course as you know cats and you know big cats and dogs and rabbits and all these animals have those little fine whiskers. Now of course it's not just about painting white. Use any colour. And on this one I'll take some natural grey. Some kind of dark colour. Give it a stipple. Always give it a tap on tissue with it being a natural brush. The markings in the likes of a tiger or a leopard can be quite a difficult thing to do. Well with this brush and this strong grey very easily I can add as many or as few spots. And because of the nature of the random hairs again it just instantly gives an effect of the stripes. Now of course we could always use this to add some fine hairs in the same way that you do grasses. Such a lovely brush to work with. There you go. So simple whiskers but super realistic and of course the markings and the fur. Think of this brush as a fur brush, a water brush, a tree brush, a sky brush. So versatile the Fantastics. So we can see here we've got some beautiful examples of animal paintings from birds through to domestic and of course wild. And we can see that I've used the Fantastic brushes for creating the feather effects, the fur, the hair and the whiskers. So let's take all of those techniques and put them into one large watercolour scene. I want to paint for you a beautiful summer sky maybe with a hint of rain and then some gorgeous trees, pine trees, reflections and a beautiful flowing waterfall. Let's get started. I've sketched in on a quarter imperial sheet of watercolour paper. This is a notched surface paper which is like a middle grain, not rough not smooth. 140 pound in weight as well. I'm going to take some masking tape first and very gently just remove the stickiness, wipe some moisture from the brow, pop it down here and this will allow me to protect this area of the landscape and the top of the water. Bring it up here and then make sure it's stuck down at the top. That's all that matters really. My first job is to paint in the sky. Now I'm not going to fill the paper, I want to do a vignette, soft faded edges. So taking the large Fantastic brush, just using water, basically I'm just going to wet the top section. It's a nice brush for doing sky because it's got a huge coverage and with it being natural hair it puts the paint on really, really quickly, holds a lot of water. Just sort of bob the head, make sure you've not missed any bits. A couple of coats of water is normally enough for this. Straight in to a very pale orange. Now here we've got some natural orange and take some of this, very light and I'm just going to add a little bit of warmth to the base of the sky. You see I'm very cautious with the amount of colour there. Bring it in, bring it down and just let it become part of the picture. So easy because of the natural hair. Clean the brush, wipe off that excess. Let's take some natural blue or some kind of a bright blue. This one is natural blue. Again a little wipe on the side does actually help. So a simple sky but very effective, bring that in. Let it mix down towards the orange. Now if you change the direction from horizontal to vertical, yeah you know what I mean, sort of change the way the brush goes in. Let it become part of the sky. Super. And then what I'll do is I'll pick up the smaller brushes and I want to add a bit of dark cloud to show you how you can be versatile with your skies. This colour here is natural grey. You don't want to be too strong. Wipe on the side, bit of a tap on the tissue. Let's put some clouds in. Great for painting clouds this brush because of the curve it makes it make a really effective twist. So a dark cloud coming in and then you can sort of almost do a horizontal line. Look at that beautiful cloud instantly works a treat. Let's do another one coming down here. Almost overlapping you could say. In an evening you often see these beautiful sort of silhouetted clouds. Clean the brush, give it a wipe on the tissue. Then once that's damp you can just ever so gently soften away any hard bits at the ends that you don't want to. Even at the bottom of the cloud give it a bit of a soften. But then if I pick up some of that grey, stipple it. Notice the stipple. Move into a clean mixing area. Very little paint on the brush. Look how spiky that is. Beautiful. What we'll do here is bring in a little bit of falling rain because of the random nature, the natural haze of the brush. Some distant rain on its way in. Love that. Really, really effective. Let's give that a good dry and then folks we'll paint some trees. That's nice and dry folks. I've used a hairdryer to give that a blast. Obviously being careful not to get too close to the water. Using the medium, fantastic brush at this point. We're going to give it a wipe in the water pot and then wipe on the side. Let's get the two-tone green. Let's get the light green on one side. Natural green light that is. And then on the dark side, the dark side, we use the natural green which is of course a much stronger green. So if you look at the brush, bring it over here, you can see it's got two-tone on it. This is the medium, fantastic. We're going to lay the brush down and I'm going to twist. I'm going to rock, a beautiful rock. Put some music on and rock out with your fantastic. Bring it across. Think about the shape. Keep picking the colours up. Make sure you hit the colour on the right side of course and then just lay it flat, keeping the light side on one side. And look how effective it is for painting distant trees but of course not just for distant trees, you can do larger trees with the larger brush of course. You can almost do each tree individually because it gives natural shadows. People have this problem, you know, how do you paint the dark side of a tree? Well there you go, load this special brush which has got special hair that is designed for the job, works the tree. Then what we'll do, I want to pick up the large version of the fantastic, give it a clean tap and then kind of mix the two greens together. I'm going to give it a stipple because this one's got the most hair and it goes very bushy, it goes to a bushy brush. And then what we'll do, we'll bring that in and we'll do some little gentle taps just here and there. It doesn't matter if the paper's dry or damp at this point. Just pop a few extra little bits. You don't want a huge amount because these are kind of mid-ground, semi-distance, so just a little bit is quite effective. It gives you a chance to refine the shape a little bit and also make sure you've got plenty of darkness around the bottom where it sits on that tape. If I actually go straight in some grey at this point, quite strong look, and then we'll go for some darkness around the base. Stipple the darkness in, really important thing to do. Fab. And then I'm just going to simply clean that brush really well on the tissue there. And then I just want to basically tap the end here. Because I'm doing it in the style of a vignette, I want it just to disappear off on the side of the painting. It just helps that effect. And if you look back at your picture, any bits that you missed the little spots on, you can revisit it of course. But that's a great way of doing that. Let's use the small brush now and use a very dark mixture of natural green. In fact, we'll do it over the top of the grey here. Natural green, which is the dark green with grey. Nice strong colour. And then let's paint in a couple of tall trees to give variation. So we'll pop in the line coming down for the sort of central trunk if you like. I'm going to do another one just here as well. And then brush out from that central line. Do this one as well. The easiest pine trees. Now if I turn this round this way, same on this side as well. You can see how simple it is. A few little taps at the top just give a little bit of extra life. With it being an evening because I've in the orange in the sky, it's nice to use darker colours there. That's addictive. I'm just going to make sure that things are nice and dark around the base here before I remove the masking tape. Now really this one's the third tree. I'm going to do a tall one just here. Pushing the boat out here. No expense spared on this one folks. Let's bring another one. A monster tree. Huge tree. Again that little rotation. If you want to put any more time refining, then of course you can do little taps in these trees. Now hanging around here, I've got a palette knife. You could use the corner of a card. It's nice just to scrape off a few little branches. Very incidental things just in the background there. And then even in the trees, I've kind of got the light coming in from the left here. You could actually scrape off some lighter lines within the trees, the pine trees. Especially where they overlap one another at the bottom there. You don't want too much. That was a little bit and then followed by little flicks going up. It's even just a little flick from the base. It's enough to tell people that you've painted in quite a detailed area of trees. Now the stage where people come unstuck of course is taking the tape off. So very steady, pull it down away from the trees and hopefully you've got a nice clean edge. Using a hairdryer to heat this up will reduce the risk of it to ripping but that's given me a distant scene already. And we can see even if that was the picture, you've got a beautiful watercolour using these brushes. Let's give it a good dry folks. Let's paint in the water next. Using the medium brush and just some water here. I just want to dampen down very loosely the area where the water is. Being a little bit cautious to go right up to the edge but not too close that you don't want to wash away anything and stop in where the waterfall begins because the water above a waterfall is normally pretty relaxed and then of course it crashes over and you get all that activity. So we can do the best of both here. That's got a nice damp area. I'll use the small brush for this and I'll start off by picking up some of the orange that was used. Filling the palette for the sky and just dropping some of that orange. It just helps to give balance to the picture of course. Clean brush. Got the blue. Bring the blue right along the edge of the waterfall here. Let it just fade in and then actually if I stip all the brush I can start to do the... Look how effective that is. Just dragging the beautiful individual hairs of the brush really make flowing water work a treat. Another one here. There's like a couple of rows of waterfall. Now that's just the starting point of that but it's nice to get a gentle transition from what's above to down here. There we go. So we'll just stop at that point for this. We'll come back to the piece at the top. Okay let's use the small brush and let's pick up the lighter side. The light green on one side and then the darker green on the other side. So we've basically got a brush that's made up of two colours. You can see that here. The lighter green obviously stands out more. Basically going in and just dropping down. Making sure that you get the dark side to match the dark side of the trees and so on. So it's giving it like a two-tone effect. Bring it across in the centre and then continue just where the water is. It doesn't matter if you overlap the background or sorry the banking. That's all part of the effect but it's lovely how it picks the dark up. You can see straight away how it gives that effect. Really nice really special effect folks that one. Now let's pick up this colour here which was the colour that we used for doing the pine trees. Pick that up on the brush. Still there and we're going to go in. I'm going to be a little more angled with the brush here because I don't want to go straight in with a strong colour because some of these trees are small. So I can use just the edge or even just do it on a slight angle and then little bits of dark just every so often. There we go. Now that would finish where the waterfall kicks in. So if I clean the brush and take some kitchen paper and squeeze it pretty much dry. I can now use that brush just to go in and just refine. Just tidy up basically. Make sure we're happy with how the reflection is starting to look. Obviously it will only go as far as the waterfall and even just pick up a little bit more of that colour on the tissue. Just lets you go in and just be 100% definite that you really are nice and dark up to that edge. Beautiful. So already we've got another scene. Let's look at the bottom section. Back to the medium brush. Nice and clean with the water and let's wet the bottom section here. Get all that nice and damp down here. Let's just take a little hint of the orange. Very little to be honest but a little hint of it would be quite nice just to give a little bit of warmth to the water as it were. Clean that brush out. Go for the blue. Now I can make the brush by stippling it go spiky which means we can do more individual lines. You wouldn't really get much reflection here with it being a moving waterfall but right next to those edges, next to the banking, picking up the small brush with the two colours on, greens, you could just drop a little bit in because we're going to paint in the banking. It just helps to give a slight reflection. Like I say you wouldn't really see much because the water is so active there. The dark green is going to also come in just on the edge. Of course all this is done while the paper is wet and again we'll give that time to dry and then we'll come back to it and start to put the banking in and detail. Let's carry on by painting in some shadows in the waterfall. A small brush with some natural grey or something similar to natural grey. It's mixed with some primary colours this rather than Payne's grey so a much nicer colour to work with. I'm just going to give it a bit of a stipple on some tissue to make the brush go spiky of course and then we're going to start to bring in more movement lines to the waterfall. So almost going from a horizontal into a drop so it's really easy to get horizontal lines out of a brush like this and then below we can do some horizontal lines. You can either go horizontally with the brush or vertically with the brush and vice versa. Great for doing ripples in water. So when you pick the paint up to make the brush go spiky stipple it and that's the best way of creating that nice open random hair brush. Now if I come back to the large brush here make sure there's no green on it and pick up some of that grey and really stipple it even on some tissue. You can pop some little little spots through all the sort of froth that gathers around the base and we can use that brush to create some more individual reflections or ripples rather than reflections. It's like putting the surface on the water. Perfect now that needs a good bit of time to dry and then we can start to do white. We're going white into the water to the flowing water we're going to put some light in there and just put all those nice finishing touches including the banking. So to paint in the banking I'm going to use a normal brush a size 10 and we've got some natural grey here we've got the natural green it's the darker green and we've got the natural green the light green as well. So using all those three colours I can go in with this this large brush here and we can paint in a dark edge with the grey. Make sure you come down the side of the waterfall here and make sure you get plenty of dark along the edge you can even just slightly go along the top edge of the waterfall as well it helps to give the impression of a few rocks that are sticking out and get that nice curve. So that's the grey then we'll go straight into the darker green which works just above it can be quite loose with how the brush goes on here quite random and then the lighter green comes in of course which makes all the difference that really brightens the thing up. So the basic rule here is nice light green at the top dark grey gradually getting lighter as it moves towards the top. Now what I'll do here is clean the brush wipe it on tissue and just go in and just drag that colour so it's nice and light so smoothing out making sure you get right to those edges and at the same time that's keeping the paint fresh and that's a good thing because here I've got a plastic card I'm going to take this and scrape off the flat edge impression of the rocky banking. I want to practice this technique but it works really well for giving shape to bankings up and over. Notice I keep wiping it through my fingers every time I do this because that is just giving me a little bit less chance of it spreading the colour too far. Really effective now just while things are a bit damp the grey that was used on that area I'm just going to pop some on the brush this is a smaller brush of six and just reflect a little bit of the edge it helps to sit it down also at the same time it allows you to go in and make sure that things are nice and dark along that edge just somehow helps it all to sit down also make sure things are really quite dark in the actual area that goes right up to the edge of the waterfall. Down here I can reflect the waterfall the curve very loosely done nothing too major for that and then let's just repeat that on the other side exactly the same just going the other way got the grey first of course make sure that's nice and strong size 10 brush now as you get towards the waterfall you really can spend time following that curve can you see that nice bit of movement there across the top of this bit of waterfall and you can decide how much or little of that you want to show in the picture. Once you get a curve you can always put like two steps almost like a wheel or a nice nice bit of flowing water bring that back up into the area and then into the darker green of course that was the second colour working just above not a huge amount of the darker green but certainly get some in there and then the best bit for me is getting that beautiful natural green light which really adds life to the area get it all blending together clean brush through the tissue now this was a couple of taps on the tissue which is perfect for ensuring you've just got the right amount of water because it allows me to go in and just refine make sure the paint's all blended and it helps to maintain that nice sort of vignette effect and at the same time as I mentioned on the other on the opposite side it's allowing us to create the effect of paint being fresh which is what you need when you're using a plastic card so again we'll go up from here just going to wipe over the fingers go up from the water edge and then almost back horizontally trying to avoid just using the corner try and be more on the flat of the card but if you point your finger to the corner you're putting weight against that area which is why the effect works so well so it's starting to bounce up nice let's use that six brush again just to replicate the opposite side do the horizontal lines and again you can almost reflect where the waterfall is catching in that water and then it's worth just using this gray just to make sure that you've got a very nice dark edge some of these areas beautiful it's also worth just using that brush just to pop in a few extra little downward movements into the waterfall more individuals the mass of course was done with the super fantastic brushes super fantastic brushes that's a good one and then just ensure that things are nice and nice and dark along those tree lines let's just come back to the medium fantastic brush and let's just pick up some of the gray that we've just been using give it a good squash and then just any little bits of extra splashes you want to add and any final horizontal lines and really my final job is to take some white paint pop it in the palette this one is an opaque white so it could be acrylic or gouache natural white in this case medium brush mix it into the white tiny bit of water of course not too much because the white disappears but don't put too much water with it remove the excess on the tissue because it's quite easy to pick up too much white give it a stipple so you've got that nice spiky bush again and i just want to bring in a little bit of being very delicate here just bring in some nice light movement into the waterfall you can even slightly work over the edge if i just turn this round for a split second here with a very clean line there while using the the brush you can just bring in a few individual lines flowing over that edge which really works well actually because it it sort of breaks away from the definite edge that you've got and you can do some horizontals at the top and then down into the water just to get varied heights really a few stipples of white froth bubbling water and then if you're careful why not just put a little bit of light in the water over some of those dark areas a lovely way to wrap up a watercolor is bringing a bit of white and using the right white of course look how look how nice you can get these little individual little drips we say little drips little drips of water and just lightly skimming the surface of the paper just puts the all-important bit of light into it it's quite addictive but as always you've got to know when to stop so i'm just adding a few more little lighter spots of the froth around the bottom just make it all nice and bubbly it really does add that nice little finishing touch and the perfect tool for doing it of course is the medium fantastic brush so addictive and so enjoyable to use there you go folks a beautiful flowing waterfall river landscape scene so there you go folks that was a look at how to use these beautiful set of three fantastic Matthew Palmer watercolor brushes so so versatile everything from animal fur grasses flowing water you can paint flowers beautiful trees gorgeous skies have fun and enjoy using these with any artistic medium