Learn to Paint Birch Trees & Evergreens in Watercolor

This is a synthetic, low Cornell, nice long tip. This is Hooker's Green and some Burnt Sienna, Windsor Blue, and some Neutral Tint. Hooker's with the Burnt Sienna, you get a nice dull green. So the branches are usually smooth on top, boughs hang down. I don't want them to be opposite one another. They kind of alternate. And then I also want to remember that there are boughs that are coming straight towards me and there are gaps. You can shift from warm to cool. So I'm pressing halfway down and I get this effect. Look at that, you get this great branchy, twiggy sort of effect. So it's okay to be kind of messy, doesn't have to be perfect. And then I'm going to try a different brush. We'll see what feels good. Here's the trunk. We're going to use Cobalt in the sky. Maybe I'll take a little Cobalt now and just do a little swoosh on the bottom. Now I'm going to try a rigger brush and see how I like that. And for my bigger rigger, here it is. That's my trunk to guide me. And so I'm kind of going in a zigzag here and it's kind of dilute because I want to drop in more colors. So with the rigger brush, I can use the tip and then I can also press down just like I did with the number 10. Let me try to make sure I have some sky holes in here. While this is wet, I'm going to drop in some, try a little Windsor blue here, which is very punchy. So maybe I'll mix it with some of the original color. And then while that's wet, I'll take a little Burnt Sienna, dilute it and drop that in. To mix with that blue. Ooh, see, now it's getting fun. Now I'm going to try dropping in a little Cue Gold and see what that looks like. Oh man, it just gets better and better. Oh, I like that. So you don't have to have boring color on the evergreen. I'm imagining this tree, maybe it's, they're not green at the bottom and they just have the branches sticking out, dead branches. That looks good too, I like that. Now I'll take a little of this Cobalt and just give a little swish here. I'm going to use this thinner masking tape to mask the birch trees. I'm going to do it in sections and I don't want the tree to be too straight. And the other thing I don't want is I don't want to use this straight edge of the masking tape. So what we're going to do is make it bend a little and then bend back so it's not too straight. So it's got crimps here. And then I'm going to immediately take the other piece. I'm going to overlap the straight edges. So we're not going to see any straight edge at all. And I want this one to be a little thinner. So I'm going to overlap it quite a bit and then just make sure I have this rough edge there. So that's the beginning of this tree. And I'm going to go all the way up and I'm going to taper it a little bit and have it get skinnier. Instead of using the cobalt for this neutral mix, I'm going to use a little ultramarine because it granulates and that might be nice for those trees in the distance. And the brush is a big blob of burnt sienna. And I have this hookers here. Get some Winsor blue and some neutral tint. I have all this in my mixing tray ready for action. Some more cobalt. Okay, so I'm going to take a big brush. Okay, clean water, wetting the paper. Oh, this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to stop right here, right at the hill because I want to put the trees in. I want them to be right on the ridge. Into the blue and applying it. My desk is tilted about 15 degrees or so. Best not to hope for perfection. I'm also going to squeeze out my brush. So it's a thirsty brush. I squeezed it out and I'm just going to slurp up where the paint has collected along the edge. Just want to touch it ever so slightly. So now I'm going into my brush mix of ultramarine and burnt sienna. And I'm going to just run along the edge of this hill. So I'm imagining the trees and they're so distant that their twigs just give this very soft effect. I think I'll just, see I made a little zigzag here. Oh, I like what's happening. The wetter the paper, the drier the brush. So I want to make sure I don't add too much because I'm going to start to get blooms. I'm just going to smooth out this edge here. I like that, that looks good. So I'm just, I'm not even going to touch it now. I'm just going to leave it. There's going to be an evergreen here. I'm not worried about what's happening right there. And I think what I'll do is I may now put a little tone on the snow in here in the foreground, like right, right here. This is, I'm just wetting it because I want to get the kind of the same effect as up there, but with a little more burnt sienna in it. This is supposed to be those weeds. I think I want them to be redder, more burnt sienna. See how beautifully soft that is? Okay, I don't want to get in too much detail there. All right, so we just have a little hillock that's defined by these weeds. And we're going to have more of that over here. So I'm just wetting with clean water. So these weeds are going to be in front of our evergreens. because these are in the foreground almost. And I think I actually, so I don't have a disaster. I'm going to blot the beads of paint that I've collected here. I'm going to dampen the top of these weeds so that when I get down to that, there'll be a soft transition from the evergreens to the weeds. And I'll do that over here too. Okay, so now into the color. I'm nervous. Don't be nervous. All right, first I'm doing a trunk that'll be underneath. So this is very wet, maybe a little too wet. And I'm going to warm this color up a little. So I'm alternating from using the tip and pushing down. I want it to be pretty solid behind these birch trees. So there'll be air holes, but I don't want it too airy because I want it to set off the birch trees. All right, so now onto my next tree. So sometimes I leave little gaps and just let the brain connect the dots. Oh, that's nice and dark. Oh, see here, I just pressed down. This started to dry and I just pressed down with my brush and I got a very nice serrated edge there. Now I'm going to change the color a little, a little warmer. I'm going to take my rigger. Just I'll slurp up some of this. I'm going to drop a little pure pigment in. This is a little Q gold and then a little Windsor blue. Okay, so now comes the exciting part, the great reveal. I'm going to start at the top and it's good to take the tape off at an angle rather than straight down and do it slowly. This is a little funky right there, but okay. All right, there we go. This was unfortunate here, but I'm not going to worry about it. This, I can even this out with a scrubby brush. So here's my stiff synthetic and I'll just tip it in some clean water. I have a tissue handy. I'm going to mix a neutral. I'm going to use the ultramarine and burnt sienna combo, but it's going to be very dilute, extremely dilute. So I'm thinking about the sun. What did we decide? Oh, it's coming this way. Yes. So the shadow is going to be over here. Okay, so these trees come down to here and then I'm going to use a little cobalt. My shadow is going to be blue. It's going to kind of disappear down here and then we're going to see it again and shadows are crisp edged close to their source and then the edges become very soft as they move away. I think I'll use the same color for this rock. All right, I'm going to take a small brush. I'll use ultramarine and burnt sienna again. I want this to be stronger because this is going to be for the markings on the tree. The markings on the tree sometimes look like eyes. So you have it like an eyelid and then an eye. You can do that and then you can have just some random marks and it's good to start out with more dilute markings and then drop in a stronger pigment. I'm going to try to do these fast otherwise they become kind of tedious. You just want to get the effect. This tree's farther away so I want the markings to be smaller and they're a little darker down at the base. This helps to anchor the tree. I'm going to put another shadow on the tree. It'll dilute some of the markings. I'm not going right to the edge. I'm staying closer to the middle now leaving it just a little rim on the right side and then a bigger space on the left. And actually I'm going to switch to my number 10 because I'm making too many strokes with the rigger brush. And I think I'll take this small brush and just soften the edge. I want this tree to have a lot of texture. This I can repair by putting something dark behind it. Oh that's this good. I could bring some of this down here. Okay I have to start stop niggling.