Every Watercolor Leaf You'll Ever Need! w/ Genuine Crafts

In today's tutorial, we are using Genuine Crafts watercolour paints to paint every watercolour leaf that you will ever need to know. It's leaves, leaves, leaves and more leaves. So let's get started. Hi guys, welcome back. My name is Shada Campbell and our video today is sponsored by Genuine Crafts. Now they've just sent me this watercolour set and I've been trying it out over the last few weeks in the studio and I'm really liking it. It's a 48 pan set which is awesome for colour selection. And speaking of colour, any time you get a new paint set, it's a great idea to do a colour chart. I did one that just fits right in the palette so I always have it when I'm painting. Because you can see with the Genuine Crafts set, there's actually nine different colours of green. So I want to be able to really visualise that when I'm painting and be able to pick the exact colour that I need. The benefit of 48 pans is all those colours so you want to know exactly what they look like. And the Genuine Crafts set comes with two water brushes which is really convenient. Of course you fill those with water and you can squeeze the water out as you paint, making it great for portable painting, no mess. However, I will be using my two glasses of clean water, paper for blotting and my paint brushes. And that's just because I always believe in using the supplies as you want to, as you need to. I love that the set comes with water brushes for use when I'm out and about but I prefer my paint brushes when I'm in the studio. And just before we start painting, Genuine Crafts has a very generous giveaway for you, all the details at the end of the tutorial. So let's get talking about colour again. We are going to talk about green today. I've got nine different greens plus I'm going to mix up more. The first one I'm using is this really mossy green here. And then I'm using this darker green, similar to a hooker's green. So I'm just mixing those straight out of the pans, just with a bit of water. And that's where I'm going to start and then we'll start talking about how we're going to mix a whole bunch of greens because that's the benefit of a huge pan set like this. Now for our first leaf, this is my quintessential leaf. It comes together with basically two brush strokes. You use the belly of the brush where all your paint is held and you drag it across the page and then you use the tip or the point of that brush to add some detail to each end of the leaf and potentially add a little stem. So drag the belly of the brush in two large motions and then use the tip of the brush to add that little bit of detail. And you can see you can either leave a little bit of negative space along the centre of the leaf or you don't have to. You can push both those large brush strokes right up against one another. Totally up to you. That is my sort of quintessential leaf. You can make them large, you can make them small, fat, thin, whatever you like. We're going to do a variation on it now in that darker green. But here again, I'm doing much thinner leaves but I'm dragging the belly of the brush across the page and then I use the tip of the brush to add detail to the shape of each leaf to refine the shape. But I want to create each leaf in one or two or maybe three brush strokes. I don't want to overwork my paint. I want the watercolours to sit on the page and just do what they will. Watercolour is a medium that you cannot control too much. Now that I've tried some colours straight out of the pans, I want to mix up my own green. And I love a green that is created by mixing a dark green with a little bit of dark purple. It's a very cool, very muted green and you can see me mixing it up here, still adding lots of water. And then for a warmer sort of muddy green, I like to add red to a little bit of bright green and it gives it this very mossy, dead look because red and green are contrasting colours so it will mute it slightly. Now for the next leaf, I am doing just this very tiny leaf design that is great for filling space within a watercolour piece. And you just make these branches and then the branches are covered in pairs of little leaves and you can continue on and on and on with it. You can see here, I just do a thin branch with the tip of the brush and then again, you're using the belly of the brush to drag it across the page and make the leaf shape. But the variation is simply that you're using a tiny number one or zero brush so it's very, very small and delicate. And this one was painted with the green mixed with purple, so very dark and very cool. Now for our next leaf, this is a fun, simple one that can be varied in so many ways. You start with the stem, a curved line or a straight line and then it's these long leaves and you just use one or two brush strokes to create these long oval leaves. Again, you can leave that little bit of negative space in the middle by keeping your brush strokes just a hair width apart or you can just fill in like I'm doing there. Change this one up ever so slightly to make it into a fern or an evergreen sprig. All right, moving on, we are going to do a leaf that is very simple to start with. It's just these big, round, almost circular leaves and you're going to do four or five, all very close together but leave a space in the middle, sort of imagine a stem running down the middle. And then while your paint is still wet, you're going to grab a smaller brush. I did that with a number five round brush. This is a number zero and I'm coming in with a dark, very saturated brown and I am just using a thin line to join them all together and then you might decide, oh, I kind of need one or two more leaves and so you can add those as well. Just use large brush strokes, the belly of the brush again for those large oval or rounded leaves and then we're going to leave that alone and we'll come back to it. Now, the next one that we're going to paint is a seeded eucalyptus and I'm mixing a bright grass green with a little bit of teal. It gives me this wonderful minty green and I'm using the belly of the brush to create large leaves and the tip of the brush to do delicate stems and these leaves are sort of a nondescript shape. I'm just seeing what emerges when I drag that brush across the page and I'll let some of them overlap. That always looks nice and natural and perfectly imperfect. So just adding as many as I need to and trying to leave it alone once I paint each leaf. Then I'll grab my smaller brush, my number one round brush and I am just doing these tiny little seeds, little circles and using the tip of the brush to create delicate stems between them and I'll add just as many as I want to. I'm using the minty green that I mixed up but I'm also using some of the grass green that I used to create the minty green so it gives it a very natural look when you're sort of pulling one colour out from your mix. So now our last one has had five or six minutes to dry and I'm taking that number one round brush, number zero or double zero is also great and I'm taking a dark, very saturated green, so a green with just a little bit of water mixed in and I am just adding a little bit of detail. This is what we would call wet on dry so I've allowed my paint to dry and now I can go back in and add those details carefully because I know that this paint will not bleed into the other paint so I'm able to have a lot of control over my watercolours by using this technique and I can get some beautiful detail here simply by drawing a line down the centre and then painting in some more lines on one side of the leaf or on both sides. This is a simple technique to employ and it's totally up to you how you want to approach it. Okay, I'm mixing up some more greens. You can see here I'm having a lot of fun and just playing with this giant set and mixing up tons of colour. This is like a very almost blue green. I've mixed a lot of dark blue and black into my green and I am going to paint cedar. Now to do that I start with a stem and then I do this very fast stippling just using the tip of a number four round brush, any size would work, like large enough, a four or five and I'm just letting the paint sort of drip out of the tip of the brush and I just move quickly and I allow the paint to land on the page in these large broken circles and they all kind of bleed together and you can see I keep adding stems and then I stipple and then I add another stem and I stipple. Some of the paint is very dark and saturated. Some of it I allow more water in there to make it lighter and that just gives a nice variance and a nice look and you just keep going along and make it as large or as small as you need to and I think it looks like an evergreen or a cedar. It's really nice within a wreath because it is so dark and busy I guess. Okay, next one we're going to do is a fern. Now I'm using the green that I had mixed red into. As I said it's very mossy, perfect for a fern. And for the fern we do a stem and then we do these little branches and it's the same system with each branch. One leaf at the top and then pairs of leaves all along each branch and you just keep moving out and doing the same design. So two branches here and then a leaf at the end and then pairs of leaves all along that horizontal area and this is really simple. You just keep making them larger each time so as you move down the vertical center there every time you add a few more leaves you add a little length and you get this wonderful cinnamon fern look. It's really fun to paint. It's a very intricate design but it's simple enough to create. And I have a video all about painting ferns if you're thinking whoa it looks a little complicated. I'll link that other tutorial in the video description so just look below this video when it is done. You can add a little more color, a darker green to some of these tiny leaves and that will just give it a nice detail, a little bit of variation. Okay for our last leaf we are doing another leaf that I go back to again and again. You start with a line. Could be curved, could be straight. You do an oval leaf at the end. Use one or two brush strokes. Use the belly of the brush and the tip of the brush. That is so key. And then you just do pairs of leaves all along the stem. You can stagger the pairs slightly like I'm doing here or you can make them perfectly even. You can make each leaf the same size or you can allow them to become slightly larger as you move down the stem. And again that one you can vary in so many ways. What I'm going to do here is come back in with a darker paint. I've just allowed the initial layer to dry for maybe two minutes so it's wet but it's not really wet. And I am doing this very loose, very simple, just dragging the brush to get that nice dual color there and make it look like those leaves are a little more three-dimensional. So lots of possibilities for that last one. And that is my definitive watercolor leaf collection. I had so much fun painting that. I'm super pleased with the Genuine Craft watercolor paints. The color mixing was phenomenal. The colors look bright. They sit on the page really nicely. You get a beautiful variation in the watercolor and yeah, I'm going to use this set a lot in the future I think. And if you're wondering, it's an excellent price and the quality is about student quality so mid-range like most of what we use on the channel. And I will link that product in the video description so you can check it out for yourself. Would recommend. Will use again. And if you would like to try these paints, we are giving away not one, not two, but three sets of watercolor palettes thanks to Genuine Crafts. All you have to do to enter is comment below and let me know what your favorite thing to paint is, minus leaves, and make sure you're subscribed with your notifications on. Thanks to Genuine Crafts, you have three chances to win so make sure to enter. And that's everything for today. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button and I will see you soon with a new tutorial. Happy painting!