Work some MAGIC on your paper - what you need to know NOW about painting watercolors with me!

hi everyone and welcome to my channel I'm Diane and today we're going to paint an easy little watercolor landscape based on a photo taken somewhere in the US I'm going to be demonstrating mixing colors with my favorite Michael Harding paints I will be using a round brush for most of it plus a sword liner for the finishing touches and to help me paint the sky I'm going to use the unique feature of a table easel I have two of the me and table easel here to show you and even if you don't think you need need something like this I'm going to show you why I've decided to give one of them a permanent place on my desk so first we have the meden desk easel xhh3 with three drawers and then I'll be talking about the tabletop box easel with storage xbx 3 one of them is $54.95 and the other one is $29.95 but if you use the code applicable to our Meen account at Meen art.com you'll get an extra 10% off you'll find links to both of these in the description below so let's get started with the first of these two table easel I'm very pleased with this piece of equipment it's made of German Beachwood which has been hand sanded and beautifully put together all the joints are um proper strong professional joints um if I can turn it around to show you here we have um I'm not sure what the technical name of these types of joints are but I do know that they are um proper joints it's not just buted up together and screwed these are properly cut and machined and um it's very solid it weighs about6 this uh piece of equipment and it has uh basically it measures let me just see what it says the size of it is um it's about 5 in deep in this Dimension and it is 16 in Long in this Dimension and the other way from here to here is 11 in so these drawers are um there's two shallow ones there's one at the top here where I have put my brushes if I pull it all the way out you can see it's plenty big enough for the largest normal sized watercolor brush and um you can put other things in there as well obviously I've got some scissors some tape a pencil and some pens here at the other end it would hold a lot more than that so that's the sort of size that that is and the one below is the same size and you could put quite a lot of paint in there um tubes you can put and also holds these um kiraki palette things those boxes there which is quite convenient so I use those quite often and then the bottom one is a bit deeper and in there you could keep your paper and it's even deep enough to take a proper um tin of paints like this one here you could probably get even a larger one in there too actually let me see um one that was perhaps this kind of size yep that goes in there too so that's really good and on top here because it is an easel it has a support which just folds down like that this is where you would put your paper so you can see that when the stand is fully up uh like this on the top um Notch it's quite high and you've got two more three more choices of places to arrange that so that you can choose exactly what angle you're working at and you can put um larger pad of paper there as well that should work or if you like to work on a board you could probably use quite a big board there too um this is just a mixing palette but it's bigger than that paper and you would be able to put a board of about that size on there with a piece of paper attached to it and you could work quite happily in the sort of semi-reclining vertical position if that's the way you like to work um not everybody likes to paint watercolor on a vertical um surface but some people do so this is ideal if that's what you like to do um also it has it's very good quality because it does have um brass um Clips let me just get that in the view of the camera for each of the drawers independently there's a little clip doing this with my left hand so that then stops it from falling open and it has real leather handles which are very securely fixed onto the end of the box for carrying and I think this probably is made to last many generations I'm pretty sure that if you bought one of these you would be quite likely to be leaving it in your will to a beloved relative so highly recommend and um the price of that at the moment is $55 from their website it's probably also on Amazon and I'll put a link in the description below and uh of course you've got your discount code that you can use if if you order something from uh using our discount you get an extra discount on Meen um by going through one of our links so let's have a look at this easel from Meen which is a table easel and um it's a traditional table easel which opens up to reveal storage in the back here uh divided into uh five compartments this one here is big enough to take your biggest brush is so something like this would fit in there perfectly easily and then you can put tubes of paints or you can put a palette if you have a small palette that would fit in there if you have a bigger palette like for example something of this kind of size these ones here this fulls size palette will go here or you can put something like this from Meen uh kuraki would also go in in there as well uh you can get quite a lot of things in there so that's quite handy and the way this works is when it's closed and it has nice brass catches and a lovely leather handle and it's all very well made in certified German Beachwood when you use this on your desk you install it just simply by opening the catches which I just closed and lifting up towards you like that revealing the opening at the back where you've got your things stored um you tighten the screws which are on the inside here there are Wing nuts and you just tighten those and then that's firm and then you can lift this up and you can tighten it up again with a nut which is on the back here this one so we can pull that up tighten that up that is then firm and that holds your board your painting board in position on here I know that a lot of people don't like to paint uh vertically so one of the good things about this is that of course you can use it just on a very slight angle ideal for painting Skies so now I'm going to have a go at using this easel to do a painting and this is one situation where an easel which will be on a tilt on your desk is useful because if you're going to paint a sky which is what my project is right now um it's quite handy to have it angled up so that it will run down slowly um and give you a nice Blended sky so I've set that up and I know it looks as if it's moving away from you it's sloping away because it it kind of is and um I'm painting a little bit out of my comfort zone because I've got to reach around the camera um but that's okay I think we can probably manage it means that I'm at the end of my brush so to speak not at the end of my tether um but at the end of my brush and so I'm just wetting the paper now I am actually narating this as I'm doing it although I could have done it differently but anyway that's what I'm doing and I'm wetting the top 2/3 of the paper uh with clean water and I'm going to do that first of all and then give it a couple of seconds to soak in a little bit till the shine goes off of the paper and while that's happening I'm going to mix and I know you can't see the palette um because I just don't have the the width here but I'm going to just activate a little bit of um ultramarine blue this is a Cotman ultramarine so it's not a fancy one I'm just going to add tiny bit of phthalo blue to it to make it a little bit darker um but mostly ultramarine and then once I've done that I'm going to come back and I'm going to drop that in across the top of the paper and use plenty of water and Vary the intensity of the color as you go across and sort of break it up a little bit and then I'm going to add a little bit of burnt sienna to some of that blue to give me something of a gray like this so we have some clouds and we'll leave some white areas as well so it it can be just as random as you like we come back in with a bit more blue and try not to try too hard really is the thing don't try too hard and we just come down to near to the Horizon put a little bit more gray up here perhaps and it's all running really nicely going downwards and then I'm just going to take a little bit of um I've got a soft white here because I haven't got any um Naples yellow on my palette at the moment so I'm just going to pop some soft white in there so that will kind of absorb the color as it comes down and soften it again a little bit so and then we need to wait for it to dry so when I've got enough running happening once it's sort of run as far as I want it to then the best thing you can do for yourself then is to take it off the easel and let it sit flat and finish drying on the level so to speak and then I'll come back and do the next bit and I probably won't use the easel for that okay so that's dry and the next thing we're going to to do is um we can paint in some distant mountains so we need to just mix up a little bit of a kind of purplish kind of color so we'll have ultramarine and a little bit of burnt uh uh Umber and a little bit of quinacridone purple and that'll give us a soft grayish purplish grayish bluish kind of color and then we need to just kind of drop in some distant Hills along the back there we can let the paint run out as we go along that will give the impression of distance so that's our distant Hills and then then we're going to put um a little bit of brown underneath the mountains just to give us a kind of um definition to show where the distance is so light brown this is uh burnt Amber and we'll just drop that in all the way along there just using the tip of the brush and then we're going to put in a a strip of a kind of yellowy color so as if there was a sort of Wheat Field in the distance there so we'll pick up some some cadmium yellow maybe a bit of chacone gold we don't need very much paint because it's just a it's a field in the far distance so we'll just lay that down there just draw that across okay that's that so that's our distant Wheat Field if you like and you know this is this is meant to be this is from a photograph of an American landscape so it's kind of Big Wide Open Fields so now we're coming in with a light green greenish yellow yellowish green and we'll pop that across there like that and then the next field is going to be um in a darker green I think so we could use um the perene green this Michael Harding color it's a nice earthy green so we'll put that in here it's best to avoid doing lots of long stretched out Strokes it's best to um break them up a little bit as you go along and then we'll put in some slightly lighter green here and maybe that's be better if that was cut back a bit maybe here too perhaps that needs a little bit of waking up and then in the foreground uh let me see what have we got here I don't want that color hooker green perhaps with a bit of that and maybe we'll put bit more of the yellow brown in the foreground here perhaps I don't want the foreground to be too dark so but we could have plenty of dark on one side so I'm just literally making this up as I go along and then I'm going to put some burnt sienna here let that run nicely and maybe we'll put a bit of burn Sienna in here and I'm not going to mess with that I'm just going to let that sit actually I think I think that wants some acridone in it there that burnt sienna looks a bit pathetic washed out all right okay we'll let that sit and have a think about life and the meaning of it so that's dry and I'm going to switch to a slightly smaller brush now and I'm just going to pick up some nice dark very dark green I can use this perene green here and maybe put a little bit of um quinacridone gold in it to make make it a little bit more greenish rather than blackish and I'm going to then just try to drop in some distant trees in in kind of random places in the distance wish is where they would be if they were distant trees so we just put some sort of dots and dashes in at this point I discover I've got too much paint on my brush and uh just working along there to indicate a distant Forest don't make them too big because they wouldn't be all that big would they and um we can have a few somewhere else as well maybe maybe a few sort of bushy type of things here what you want to do is introduce a bit of contrast so you need some darks against the lights which is you know it's not actually all that easy but what we might do is put in a bit of little bit more dark here darken down that area here and then here we've got possibility for some more grasses and maybe just put a little bit darker at the bottom of this and here we can carry on with hopefully a bit of calligraphy I think I might try a smaller brush just let me find my my flicky brush this one I do I think I will try it out on a piece of paper first yeah you have to be quite sort of courageous about this because could all go very badly wrong but if we want some nice thin [Music] lines this is the way to do it and maybe we'll put a little bit of calligraphy in there these can come up a little bit higher probably a good idea if they kind of break the Horizon a little bit I'm sort of growing a tree here a bit of um what you call it dead wood just going to line that that's a little bit too dark B there and then we can go over there we are done it again that's it so I think we'll leave that like that and see what happens there and um probably call that done have a look at that in a minute when that's completely dry so there we are one landscape from a photog graph taken somewhere in America actually it's a bit invented really but you could imagine couldn't you so we'll leave that and say thanks very much for watching don't forget to like And subscribe turn on notifications and all the rest of it and I will see you again very very soon so bye for now everybody bye-bye