Paint With Me 🍂☕ Tiny Watercolor Fall Objects // Sketchbook Session

It's time for a cozy watercolor sketchbook session and I've prepared a variety of beautiful things for us to paint together. Starting with a pine cone. This one is probably the trickiest. I will show you how to use negative painting technique with some browns and blues to get all these details. And then we have an acorn and a chestnut, a tiny orange pumpkin, and of course a beautiful red cap mushroom. Thank you Squarespace for sponsoring this video. More on that later. I'm going to sketch the outlines starting with a pine cone and I've linked the exact photo references I used in the video description below so you can practice on your own time. As always I will post the demo and black and white outlines on my Patreon channel so you can use those as well. But it really helps to have some real references that you can observe and get a better sense of how this overall structure works. Basically we have a series of protruding scales so I started by outlining the overall shape and now I'm defining these smaller scales that cascade down. What we see is just the tips. The part that is visible to us gets bigger and bigger as I move down towards the tip of the pine cone. My advice here is to use a very hard pencil. Mine is 3H so my outline is quite light and you also may want to gently shade the areas between the scales so that they're visible when we cover everything with watercolor washes in just a minute. The acorn is much easier to sketch. It's basically two overlapping circles and what helps me here is to draw an imaginary line and axis in the center from the tip of the acorn to the stem and this way I will make sure that the left and the right hand sides are equal. I would also draw a few scales on the cap just so that I can follow those outlines later on with my brush. The pumpkin is a very unusual shape with a curved tail. I just want to make sure I also capture the light spots so I can paint those in stages and I'm not exactly following the reference, just sort of trying to capture the general silhouette. Now let's do the mushroom cap and the leg. I don't think I will outline any of the white spots here because I want to leave myself some room to improvise later on. I'm using my favorite Etcher sketchbook. It's called the Perfect Sketchbook and it's made out of 100% cotton paper, cold pressed. And the chestnut is just two circles, one inside the other, and I want to make sure the overall shape is quite irregular. Not a perfect sphere but sort of bumpy and wavy, maybe even a bit squished and with some extra volume on one side. So get your colors ready and let's get started on the pine cone. I'm starting here so I can work left to right to avoid smudges and because I have the benefit of editing this recording the way I like, I'm going to show you how I painted each object step by step so it's easier for you to follow the washes of color and focus on one thing at a time. The pine cone is the trickiest to paint in my opinion and we need to start just with a very light wash of warm brown. I'm going to use earth colors, yellow ochre or golden ochre and a bit of burnt sienna, a very watery mixture. If you think of a value scale it's around level two, maybe maximum three, just to give us a good foundation for what's to come. I would avoid adding any more color at this point because the paint is still wet and we need to come back in the second layer to add sharp details and definition using wet on dry method. So let's leave it to dry for now and work on the pine needles. The best colors for this part are probably warm earthy greens, for example olive green or sap green and you can also add some bluish greens. Here I'm using a size zero brush just gently dragging these lines out, not exactly following the reference, just the general direction of the needles. Now let's make sure everything is dry and come back for the second layer. This time I'm going to use pure burnt sienna, a little bit more saturated now so less water and more pigment on my palette, painting only the darkest areas. So basically everything but the tips of the scales. This is called negative painting technique and you can stick to your smallest brush here just outlining these small shapes, filling the negative space in between. I'm now working with medium values so somewhere between five or six and if burnt sienna looks a little bit too warm you can start adding a bit of darker color, doesn't really matter which one. I had some van dyke brown from Winsor & Newton. You can also add burnt umber or even ultramarine blue. In fact blue is what's going to help us reach the darkest shadows here but I don't want to do it just yet. I'm going to introduce it a little bit later in the third layer because I like to work slowly but you can already see just with two layers of color we're already starting to create some good definition on the pine cone and those areas under each scale are becoming much darker. Those smaller areas where I created some extra shading with my pencil when I was making an outline are really helping me identify the darker spots and as an extra tip for a more realistic effect you can gently blend your color with a clean damp brush but only on top of the scale so that way the shadows will appear much softer. We can also add a few extra lines of darker green and blue on the needles and let it dry so in the third layer we're ready to bring in the darkest colors. I'm going to introduce blue and I have some leftover interthrone blue on my palette. Any darker blue will work here, even something like granulating ultramarine. It's quite popular is what we often get in watercolor sets as our main blue so you can mix it with a little bit of brown or even burnt sienna. In the previous tutorial featuring a toucan bird I showed you how blues and oranges can be mixed up really easily and create a lovely range of darker values from browns all the way to black because they're roughly complementary so the idea is to introduce some sort of blue which will add the darker tone we're after here and again I will only focus on the shadows in between the scales of the pine cone very deliberately applying it with the tip of my brush and then blending with a clean damp brush so that the edges are not too harsh. In layer four, the final step, and this is completely optional, I'm just going to enhance the overall sense of form and I'm going to do that by playing with color temperature to accentuate the shadows on the left and the highlights on the right. I'm going to glaze some very diluted phthalo blue, a cooler color that indicates shadows, all over the left hand side of the pine cone. You want to do this very gently and avoid disturbing the underlying layers of color and of course we're doing this on top of completely dry paints so I waited quite a bit of time to do this step and to enhance the contrast I will also glaze some warm orange indicating a sunny side and warm highlights on the right. Let's leave the pine cone to dry and next I'm going to show you the red kelp mushroom, the acorn, the pumpkin, and the chestnut. While the pine cone is drying, allow me to tell you very quickly about the sponsor of this video. Squarespace is an all-in-one website platform for managing your brand. 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Now let's paint a small acorn up on top and once again I will cover the entire shape just with some light ochre, maybe leaving a few highlights in the center and adding some blue and violet to indicate the shadows at the bottom. I'm dropping these colors in while my first light wash of ochre is still wet so it's a very subtle, very gentle shadow effect. On top of this layer and only after it's completely dry, I will apply some sap green, a lovely convenience green or you can mix your own with some blue and yellow, maybe adding a little bit of red for that extra warmth. And I'm going to cover most of the top half of the shape and leave a few strips to indicate texture. On the cap, I will use burnt sienna to paint the scales. It's almost like fish scales or maybe even a dragon. I have dragon eggs on my mind because I just finished watching the House of Dragon on HBO, my favorite show, and I'm a little bit obsessed with it. My family is probably sick of me talking about it but they have to put up with it, they have no choice. In the final layer, I just want to add some darker shadows and maybe accentuate some of the scales. This time, I'm just using permanent brown from Daniel Smith. You can use any variation of dark brown or even something like purulent violet which is more of a chocolate color. In this step, you can use very saturated pigment, so less water, and just the tip of your brush. I typically use it just like I would use a pencil to draw very sharp outlines all around the acorn cap. And I'm going to finish with a glaze of a violet which is roughly a complementary color to the warm colors that I've already applied underneath so it helps me create a bit of dimension. And now let's paint the mushroom and I'm going to start with ochre again around the highlight and follow with perylene red. And the main challenge here is how do we get these beautiful crisp white spots on top of the red cap. There are actually several ways of doing it and I'm going to describe three different alternatives for you. One way would be to paint around them leaving the white of the paper but it's too tricky in my opinion especially on such small scale and it would make it difficult to achieve a smooth red wash. So I'm just going to cover everything with very diluted red, not worry about the red spots at all for now, and show you a different approach. Let's not forget that under the cap and on the leg of the mushroom we're going to need some subtle shadows so I'm going to add a wash of blue mixed with burnt sienna. Very diluted, it's the same mix I used to create the shadows on the pine cone before, just a very muted brown color and I'll use less diluted paint at the base to add some speckles of dirt. When everything is dry I will come back and add another wash of red blending gently around the highlight. Reds as you may already know are quite tricky when it comes to watercolor. It's really difficult to get a super vibrant result with just one layer so we really need at least two in order to build up that juicy coverage and afterwards I will add the lines under the cap using just the tip of my brush and again that darker brown mix. While I'm working on this part I will mention that the second way to add white dots would have been to use masking fluid. It's something you can add to your paper and paint on top of without covering small white details. It preserves the white. We used this method last year when I was doing a very elaborate composition featuring different mushrooms and I will leave a link to that tutorial in the description below but that's not what I'm going to be doing here. Instead I'm going to use the third method, the easiest way to add white details using white gouache. I never use white watercolor because it just doesn't make sense, it fades too quickly. White gouache which is a form of watercolor that's very opaque is thick and it will not fade into the red so I will mix a little bit of water into a blob of paint and then using my rubber color shaper just add a few dots. When you're doing this pay close attention to how they are positioned. It's not random but rather they're arranged in consecutive circles extending from the center of the cap and towards the edge. So that's how I'm trying to apply my white dots, not exactly following what I see in the reference photo but just trying to capture the general logic of this organic form. Now that the red cap is ready I'm going to show you how I painted the pumpkin and just like I did on the pine cone I'm going to start with a very watery layer of yellow ochre covering the entire surface and while everything is wet follow with some splashes of orange. This transparent pyrrole orange is probably too harsh for this particular reference, something milder would have worked better. So I'm just going to let it dry and come back for another layer, this time using a much more mild and less fiery benzo orange and just gently apply a wash over the entire surface. This time I'm going to skip a few details, those yellow stripes and spots I'm going to paint around them using negative painting technique and when that part is done I'm going to add a little bit of brown on the stem. In the third layer after everything is dry again I'm going to bring back that fiery pyrrole orange, maybe some burnt orange and just accentuate the silhouette and add a few shadows. The way I'm going to do this is just a little bit of color, a few strokes in the darkest areas that I want to emphasize and you can blend the pigment, this extra color, with a clean damp brush so it can gently disappear into the background. In the final step I just wanted to glaze some warm yellow to bring up the highlights and the pumpkin is done at this stage. Now we're ready to paint the chestnut. Let's start with a very light blue underpainting all around the outer shape and then add that same ochre in the center. In the second layer once everything is dry I want to experiment with some warm browns just to see which one works best. So I will start with burnt sienna and I feel like maybe it's too light and too warm so maybe I will add some Dioxazine purple to create some extra depth and maybe even burnt orange. However I'm still not quite happy with this particular hue, it all feels a little bit too warm so I'm going to let it dry while adding some texture in the center. And here I feel like Dioxazine purple and burnt sienna mix works quite well. In the third layer let's try some permanent brown. This one worked out really well, I feel like this is just the right shade for the chestnut and I'm going to leave a few spots without any color just to allow that warmer wash of brown to shine through and also maybe I will add some Dioxazine purple for extra dark shadows. A little bit more texture in the center and I feel like I'm happy with the chestnut at this point. My sketchbook page is almost full but I feel like painting more and I wonder what else you would add here or if you feel like this is enough. I just maybe wanted to add some cinnamon seeds and another plant. Very quick, just two layers of color. First a light wash using permanent brown and yellow ochre and then maybe using wet on dry method. I'm going to add some details on top just outlining some of the darker areas with my brown and adding the shadows using phthalo blue. I hope you enjoyed this sketchbook session. Let me know in comments below what else you would want to see me sketch and I'm currently working on this squirrel on the next page of my sketchbook so don't forget to subscribe. I will be posting this watercolor next week. In the meantime if want to paint an even more elaborate composition featuring a fall forest, check out this video featuring an entire variety of watercolor mushrooms.