Rural Evergreen Sunset Painting Process

Hello everyone and welcome! My name is Noelle and for this video I'll be painting a nice tree sunset watercolor piece. You might be wondering why I decided to show myself mixing paint in a palette that already had paint in it. Well, this painting was directly inspired by my previous painting seen in my watercolor forest process video. I had a fair amount of paint left in my palette after painting it so I thought, hey, why don't I just do the same thing but bigger? So I did. After I mixed my colors I began this piece by wetting the paper with clear water, applying paint onto the paper, and quickly realizing that I was using the wrong brush for this task. I usually don't paint on surfaces as large as this 9 by 12 inch watercolor block so I don't have a lot of experience painting a wash at this scale. I want to get used to painting larger and this was great practice. Similarly to my previous painting, my goal for the sky wasn't to make a super smooth gradient. I want it soft and streakier to mimic clouds. Painting the sky was really fun because of the size and cool shapes I was making this step required some bravery but that also made it more exciting for me. On several occasions during this process I found myself painting, lifting, and repainting some areas. When the paper is wet, the paint will continue to spread until it dries. In areas where I wanted dark clouds, my brush strokes would spread and fade out more than I liked and I had to repeatedly paint over it to make it darker. Also if you want to know what art supplies I'm using for this piece, everything is listed in the description below. Here I'd like to transition from painting the sky to painting the trees. Now because I'll be painting a lot of dark trees, I must mix a lot of paint in order to achieve that. I mostly use the colors Prussian Blue from Ngram and Rose Matter and Permanent Rose from Mission Gold to make a dark purple. I might have mixed in a little orange as well. It's always helpful to make some swatches since it's sometimes difficult to tell what the color looks like in the palette. Trees are always difficult for me to paint and I usually avoid them, however I am comfortable with painting the silhouettes of evergreens. Part of this is because they have a more predictable pattern compared to deciduous trees in my opinion, but also because I live in western Washington where evergreen trees are everywhere, including right outside my window. Since this piece was partially painted on a whim, I decided to paint in some power lines at the end. Power lines can be quite intimidating to paint, especially large ones. The best advice I can give for painting them is to use thin brushes like script liners and riggers that are made to hold a decent amount of paint and stay thin, perfect for painting wires. I used a Zenart size 2 rigger and a silver black velvet size 1 script brush. Once my painting was complete, I removed the piece from the watercolor block by inserting a palette knife into the gap and slicing the glue along the edge. I hope you enjoyed watching this process. For art supplies I use and recommend, you can visit my Amazon storefront linked below where I'll receive a commission from items purchased following the link. You can find me on my social media, I am most active on my Instagram. Thank you so much for watching and make it a great day.