Watercolour LandscapesName: ______________________________

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Watercolour landscape https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB4V5vlvzTo

This is the painting we will be following. You can use colours you’d like, just be careful to adjust the lightness and greyness of those colours to create a sense of depth.

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These are some examples of how mountains are overlapping, and are lighter and greyer in the background with less detail than the ones in front. The bumps of the mountains in the back are smaller and closer together than the ones in the front.

Please follow the instructions for painting:

Preparation

Get a board. Make sure it is clean as any watercolour or stain will stain your paper.

Tape your paper down on the board all the way around Get some clean water and a clean foam brush or wide paintbrush Start at the top and paint across HORIZONTALLY your paper. Get more water on your

brush and paint in a second line of clean water overlapping your first row, HORIZONTALLY

Repeat this until your whole page is wet. Start again and wet your paper for a second time the same way, one row at a time.

Get your paint ready:

Make a puddle of blue paint for the sky (you don’t have to use blue, it could be another colour)

Make a puddle of pinky-purple or orange/pink for the sun rise/sunset Have a container of clean water and a clean brush ready Prepare a small bit of darker paint for the clouds

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Start painting the sky: (You are creating a graded wash)

Load up your brush with blue paint Paint a row at the very top of your paper, horizontally. Make sure there is a small bead

of colour at the bottom of the row you are painting as it helps to blend the rows together to have this extra paint.

Load the brush again and paint directly below this line, horizontally overlapping the first row a bit

Do not paint randomly

Then, do this again, this time load the brush with water so that you gradually dilute the blue and paint across the page. You are creating a graded wash.

As you move down the page there will be less and less blue.

Adding the sunrise/sunset

Leave a space between the blue and start to paint a line of pinky- orange paint horizontally.

Load your brush with pink and paint across the page parallel to the top of the paper. Load your brush again and paint ABOVE this line blending the first line of pink with the

second. Load again, this time with water as you are again making a graded wash and you are

blending it into the blue, overlapping the two colours, which at this point are very light. Get a CLEAN brush full of water (not drippy) and blend the pink into the blue

(HORIZONTALLY)

Clouds

You need to paint the clouds while the sky is skill wet.

Take some stronger blue/grey and use a smaller brush Paint a few squiggle lines into the wet sky Do not paint cartoon shapes, just little squiggles Then use a wet clean brush and blend the tops of the clouds into the sky a little bit.

Blend the clouds into the sky HORIZONTALLY.

Do not go back in and try to correct it as watercolour just gets messy and you can’t fix the problems by painting over wet areas

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Let it dry completely before painting the mountains.You can use a hair-dryer to speed up the process

Mountains (you can make the mountains other colours if you’d like)

Start with a light grey- blue (or almost any other grey and light colour). The farther back things are the greyer and less intense they are.

Paint across the page moving the brush in soft curves. The curves at the back are smaller than the ones at the front.

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Use clean water for the second line and blend the paint into the paper so there is not a hard strong line. You may need to add a bit more colour to blend the colour in.

Let it dry between each row of mountains.

Start again below this with the next range of mountains. These will be a bit darker and a slight bit bigger and some will block the mountains behind them.

Let it dry between each range of mountains

The mountains in the foreground:

Paint these mountains in the foreground at a sharper angle and have them start up just a tiny bit over half way up the page.

Use a darker colour in the front for the mountains that are the closest. Don’t use the black directly out of your watercolour pan as it often looks as if there is a

hole in your paper. Mix your own black with all of the three primary colours. You can make a black that has a bit of dark green or purple or brown. You can add a touch of black in the paint but don’t use pure black.

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Trees

You now want to add a silhouette of some trees in the front. Trees on mountains usually grow slightly slanted and often are not symmetrical (not the same on both sides of the trunk). Usually you will not see the entire trunk. Branches part of the way up will block the trunk. Don’t draw in the whole trunk of the tree. Only small bits will show between the branches. Use reference pictures to help you get the trees to look more realistic.

Start your branches painting from the trunk out to the tips of the branches so you don’t get heavy blobs of paint out at the tips of the trees. It will look better and more professional.

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Signing your work:

When you are finished and the painting is dry, sign your work at the bottom right. Do not sign on the border. The signature will be lost behind the matting when you frame your work. You need to sign in watercolour because you have used watercolour for the painting.

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