WATERCOLOR WITH ME 🌊 Ocean Waves Painting Tutorial

Hey you guys, welcome back to my channel. So today I'm going to do a tutorial on this painting you just saw here. I'm going to be painting ocean waves in this tutorial and before I start I'm gonna just set the mood by taking out some of my favorite shells that I collected in Hawaii actually. I just wanted to kind of have something as a little source of inspiration and just kind of to set the tone of this painting. So first I'm going to go ahead and get out all these supplies that I'll be using. I'll have all these specific supplies linked below for you guys but basically I have a piece of watercolor paper, a clean bowl of water to clean off my brushes, a palette where I'll be putting all of my watercolor paints, and then I have my little cup of all of my paint brushes that I like to use. These are some of my favorites. I also am going to be using my Dr. Ph. Martin's bleed proof white paint and I'm also going to try out this masking fluid which usually I don't reach for masking fluid but I thought I'd try it out in this video. Then I'm going to reach for all of my watercolor tubes. I put them all in this cute little glass box that I got from Michael's recently and I thought it was the perfect way to just be able to see all of them and easily grab the ones I need. And then lastly I'm just going to use these drying pencils by Faber-Castell and that's pretty much it. So I'm going to first take some washi tape and just tape that watercolor paper down so it doesn't move around and then I'm going to take a circular candle holder, just take anything circular in your house, it could be a cup, whatever you can find really, and I'm just going to make that circle and that is where I'm going to kind of put the masking fluid around. Masking fluid is a great tool to use if you are trying to avoid getting paint on certain parts of the painting so in this case I thought it would be a great way to kind of make it so that I don't have to worry about staying inside the lines. So I just let that masking fluid completely dry and now I'm going to go in with a very very light wash of kind of like a purple, misty purple color. This is going to be kind of like the sky in our painting so we kind of want to put some little misty clouds in there and just add a little texture so that it kind of looks like a fog instead of one flat layer of color. While we're waiting for that to dry I'm going to take out my box of watercolors and take out the few colors that I'll be using in this painting. For this painting I'm going to be using my Payne's gray, my indigo color, and also a turquoise from Winsor and Newton and I'm also going to get my Utrecht hookers green out so those are the four colors that I'll be using in this painting. So to start out I just mixed some indigo with some turquoise and I'm starting out by drying some of the waves of this painting so I'm just going in with the first layer and trying to make sure that the waves look like they're moving. So I'm just doing tiny little strokes and I'm picking up different colors as I go so some areas might have a little bit more indigo and other areas might have a little bit more teal but we're going to build this up over time. The strategy that I kind of tried going into this painting was making sure that we do a ton of layers and that I also leave some white space as I'm going so you don't want to fill the whole thing in right away. We want a little bit of white space to capture the reflection in the water. So on top I'm trying to do a little bit more softer of edges and these are where the waves are going to be so for those crashing waves you kind of just want to make it look like hills almost and then I'm just adding some more detail to the bottom and bringing out those waves as I go. I'm also going to now put a little bit more water on my brush just to soften up the edges of the waves a little bit because you don't want super hard edges when you're doing waves. You want it to kind of fade out a little bit and have a bit of a softness to it. Now while it's still a little bit wet and it's not fully dry I'm just going to take some indigo and kind of darken up the edges and I'm also going to darken up certain places within the painting. I want this to primarily be a very deep kind of blue color because that's kind of what I think about when I think of the ocean is a deep blue with a little bit of teals in it so that's kind of what I'm adding to this part. Also if you notice the swiping motions that I do make sure to not hold the paintbrush super tightly you actually want a softer grip and this is kind of what makes the waves look a little bit more organic and natural. And notice the paintbrush that I'm using for this is a kind of flat headed paintbrush. This one is a smaller one but they both have kind of a flat edge which I found to be super helpful when drawing waves. So I'm now picking up a darker blue and I'm actually adding a little bit of the hooker's green into that. Before going into this part I let the first layer completely dry and now I'm just going into the second layer with a bit of a darker blue green color. I'm using the same kind of motions as before but I just want to make sure that I'm not covering the whole painting with this color. You want a little bit to show through from our first layer and you want it to kind of look reflective from that. Keep in mind I don't necessarily know exactly how waves are supposed to be painted. This is just how I decided to paint them and I just kind of learned these techniques from looking at some of my favorite artists who do ocean paintings and I just tried to kind of put those techniques into this one. So I definitely know there's a ton of room for improvement and I'm sure there's a ton of techniques that I haven't learned yet but I'll maybe learn in the future. So I definitely want to learn more and actually start doing a lot more ocean paintings because it's something that I've always really wanted to practice and try out. It's just very intimidating at first you know when you're trying to learn something completely different than anything you've done before but I'm just glad I tried it because the ocean is one of my favorite favorite places. So I'm just super glad that I can paint this painting that I feel like I have such a connection to. So I'm just finishing up darkening up the waves of my ocean and then I'm going to go in with a lighter wash of turquoise and I originally went in with this on the top to kind of make it look like there's more waves in the background but I ended up not liking it after a little bit of time so I actually ended up softening this up which you'll see in a second. So this is the point where I kind of realized that I didn't like the harsh edges on my waves and I wanted it to be more of a foggy or misty background so I actually ended up taking a bunch of water and softening this up and kind of bringing it outwards and so I'm just taking a bunch of water on my brush and I'm just making sure to kind of bring that color of turquoise upward and this kind of makes it so that you can't really see the background. It looks a little bit like there's fog in the background that's kind of out in the distance of the ocean. So now I'm just gonna let that second layer dry and I'm going to go in with my third layer. I'm just taking a lot of green and blue and mixing those together to make sort of a darker color and I'm just going to go in with that third layer putting another layer of detail onto the waves and this is going to be my last layer of color actually before I go in with my white paint. I'm just going in with a light hand for this part because we don't want to darken it up too much, we just want to add a little bit of ending detail to it. So I'm just going to add the last little bit of detail and then I'm going to take my bleed proof white paint and I'm going to add the waves and reflections onto my painting. So I want this one wave to look like it's kind of crashing into the ocean and I'm going in with kind of a sloppy hand when I'm doing the waves and then if I want to soften up those white kind of foamy waves I will just take some more water onto my brush and kind of disperse it outward and this is what that looks like. The white really adds another dimension to the painting and it brings out the points of the water that are moving more quickly and also it brings out reflections in the water so if you're having trouble kind of figuring out where to place those reflections or where to place those movements of the water I would definitely look up on the internet some photography of oceans and it'll kind of give you an idea of how the water moves and where the reflections should be placed. To be honest when I did it I didn't really think too much about it and I kind of wish that I spent more time sitting down and thinking where those reflections should be, where those waves should be, and those are definitely things that I want to kind of try to do in the future. So now I'm going to take kind of an older brush and I'm going to put a little tiny bit of the white paint on there and I'm going to actually add some kind of spraying of water from the waves crashing so I'm just taking that brush and dotting it onto there and I think it brings a nice layer of detail. So now my painting is completely done and I'm just going to take an eraser and erase the masking fluid from the outside of my painting and that leaves it with a nice crisp circle. I could have probably done a little bit better of job of putting on the masking fluid to make it more perfect but I actually think it worked really well and I'm so glad I tried out this ocean painting. I usually always put the paintings that I do in my bullet journal but this time I want to hang it up on my wall. I just got this hanging frame from World Market which I thought fit perfectly with this painting and I'm just super happy with how it turned out. I have this painting as a print in my shop if you guys are interested in checking that out or if you try this painting out for yourself definitely tag me in your photos because I love to see your guys' recreations. Alright thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video!