Watercolor Desert Sand Dunes Easy Painting Tutorial for Beginners

Hi guys, welcome back to my channel. We're going to do another art journal painting today. This one is a sandscape, so it's a desert scene. It's just a really simple image that I found on Pixabay. I hope you guys love it. Let's jump in. For today's project, I'm using my Paul Reubens watercolor journal. This is a wonderful, affordable cotton watercolor paper journal, and I just applied some washi tape all around so that it will make a nice border at the end, kind of like this one. And you can see how that looks when there's a border around it. It looks just really nice. I have some water jars, paper towel, and my paint, and I'm just using one brush today. All you need for this project is a size 8 round brush. This is my Trickell Protégé round brush. If you want to do some sketching ahead of time, you can use a pencil. I'm just going to do a little bit of sketching to show some of the shapes of those sand dunes. All right, I'm just going to place a weight here so my pages don't fly into my painting, but let's go ahead and get started. So there's really just two elements to this painting. There's the sky and the sand, and so let's start by drawing our horizon line. I'm going to make the sand just a little bit taller than halfway up. If you have it right in the middle, it's just not a good composition. It's better to offset it and make it just a little bit uneven one way or the other. You could have more sky than sand if you wanted to, but in this image, I think the sand is the most interesting aspect of the painting, or it will be. Depends on how you make it, I guess. And then there's this really strong point coming up from one of the sand dunes, so I'm going to make sure that I indicate that with this initial sketch. And then intersecting with that is this really curving slope of a sand dune coming down. This isn't going to be a perfect sketch of what I'm seeing, but that's totally okay. I don't necessarily want this to be a slavish copy of a photo after all. I'm just putting in some key elements that are going to be helpful for me to just locate when I go in with paint in a little bit. This little peak right here is one of the most important focal points in the painting. You can sketch that with even darker lines if you'd like, just to make sure it's really visible. There's a couple of ripples in the sand dunes, ridges, and all kinds of interesting darks and lights. So that'll be a fun thing to explore in this painting. Drawing kind of a shadow shape right there. And then there's this curvy shape in the middle of this sand dune. I'm really just exploring the big shapes that I see in the reference photo. And that's pretty much all you need to sketch. All right, so once you're happy with your initial sketch, you can start with the sky. I'm going to use Phthalo Blue, which is a cool blue. It's wonderful for sky and water. And I'm going to mix some of that up on my palette ahead of time. And then I actually want my color to disperse really naturally on the paper. So to do that, I'm going to use Wet n' Wet. I'm taking clean water now and painting that all in the sky. So make sure to rinse your brush first if you want this to be clean water. And just avoiding the sand dunes. So it's like you're painting with white right up to your pencil line. Just slow down enough so that you can avoid the sand dunes themselves. Same thing right up to your leg. And I'm using a horizontal brush stroke to just blend out all that water so you have a nice glossy surface. Not too damp. No puddles. But it's not dry at all. The whole area of the sky should be wet. Now, grab some of that blue that you mixed up and swipe it along the top. Using a quick horizontal brush stroke, you can go back and forth. Just gently stroking the paint and smoothing it out. I want it to be rather a gradient from dark to light as it comes down towards the horizon line. And you can almost leave the horizon line completely light. While it's still wet, you have some give and take where you can push and pull that paint a little bit. And sure enough, there we have this wonderful, lovely, gradated horizon line and sky. At this point, while it's still damp, you can lift out clouds if you want to. I'm just going to leave it alone. I really like the simplicity of that simple blue sky. Make sure you rinse out all of the blue from your brush. And next, we're going to do a first layer in the sand. This can be done wet on wet or wet on dry. Wet on wet is better, I think, as far as just getting the color to spread really evenly. And I think it makes your painting quicker, ultimately, because then you're not worrying about softening everything manually or fixing any edges or any of that, at least on these first washes. So for these first washes of color, I love using wet on wet. Now, many of you are a little intimidated by this technique, and that's OK. Just keep practicing. Just keep trying it out. I would say the most important thing is to avoid big puddles on your paper and having too much water on your brush. Where a lot of control gets lost is when you have too much water. Too much water is the enemy of watercolor. So soak that up, dab it on your paper towel, and just make sure you don't have too much in your brush. OK, let's grab some for this first wash. Raw umber. Raw umber is a little like yellow ochre. It's kind of a yellowish brown, and it's actually really perfect for sand, I think. So let's just take that and paint that all inside of our sand. The same way you painted the sky, just do broad, sweeping brushstrokes all the way across. Grab more paint as needed. Don't worry about light and dark just yet. Right now, we're just doing light. Only light colors, light values. All right. With that done, it's still wet. Now is your opportunity, if you want to get soft blending, to drop in some darker colors or midtones. I'm going to still use that same raw umber color, but this way, while it's still wet, it'll soften naturally for you. So I'm going to take that darker color, more pigment on my brush, less water. Really no water. Just damp enough to flow. And I'm going to paint in a dark streak, suggesting the shadow in that sand dune. You have a small window of opportunity to do this while your paper is damp or wet still. But this is where it's so important that you don't have any extra water in your brush. Just paint. If you have too much water in your brush, it's going to immediately displace the paint that's damp on your paper, causing unwanted effects. It's called the cauliflower effect, or bloom is another term for it. And those are lovely when they're used in such a way that you intended to use them. Blooms, I think, should always be intentional, not accidental. Or if they do happen accidentally, try to fit them in your composition somehow. Or you can even soften them out. It doesn't have to be a permanent mistake. A lot of people have this idea that watercolor, when you make a mistake, that's it. That's the end. You have to throw your painting away immediately. And that's just not true. You can always find a way to utilize that mistake, make it beautiful. And it's not really a mistake. It's just, I love how Bob Ross says it, it's a happy accident. So work it to your advantage, or soften it out, adjust it. Yes, you can make adjustments in watercolor. So with still just raw umber, I'm darkening up this wonderful focal point in the painting, which is this sand dune that comes to a peak, almost like a mountain. It's going to be the darkest area in the painting. Okay, grab a little bit more. Again, controlling how much water is in your brush. And let's do a broad, sweeping, darker shape right here in the middle of the composition. It's going to be maybe a centimeter wide. That. And then there's another one right here. All of these shadow shapes in the sand dunes are really just loosely based on my reference photo. Like I said, I'm not aiming for exact copies here. But you do want to be able to differentiate between the lights and the darks. That's what's really going to give your painting depth and dimension. If it's just a flat wash of yellow, I guess it kind of looks like sand, but it certainly doesn't look realistic. And it's not as beautiful as it could be. So go ahead and boost those values and paint as dark as you can in the areas where you can really push it. Here in the corner, I do want to have this gradient effect where it's really dark, or a vignette almost. So I'm taking all this pure raw umber straight out of my palette and I'm just darkening up that little bit of sand dune. So wow, with just two colors, we've already created a very, very convincing desert theme. Now the mountains back here are a slightly different color because they're off in the distance. And this is so common to what you see in real life. You'll see sort of this bluish or purpley hint to any landscape areas that are way off in the distance. So how can we do that in watercolor? We absolutely can. Let's take some water again and re-wet that area because it's starting to dry completely. I'm actually overlapping into the sky a little bit because I want to encourage a soft edge where that horizon line is meeting the sky. I don't want it to be a really hard, dark edge. I want it to look light and diffused. All right, so with that re-wet, let's now take, let's take a warmer blue. This is ultramarine blue. Warmer meaning it's got a little more purple in it than the phthalo blue. Not quite so greenish tinted. And again, controlling how much water is in your brush, start to dab that into the horizon line where we drew with our pencil. If a little bit of blending or bleeding happens beyond your pencil lines, that's okay. And some of that blue just to the right of our little focal point here, allowing it to soften into the sky. And in the reference photo, there's a couple little dips and valleys in that desert. If you want to just suggest those with a couple of tiny darker horizontal brush strokes, you can. Just so we get a sense that it's not just flat desert. It's peaks and valleys, sand dunes. Yeah, so that little hint of blue from the yellow sand helps it appear to recede like it's even further away. But here is where I want to caution you not to go too dark with that. If your background is darker than your foreground, it's not going to look real. It's not going to look good. So make sure that this area is the darkest, strongest part of the composition. Now we're actually almost finished. We've been working really fast here. Let's take a little time and slow down and really work on the dark shapes within our sand dunes. So now I'm going to take a darker brown. I'm going to take transparent brown oxide. I'm going to do a little more of a chocolatey brown than a raw umber and a bit darker. And then for this peak right here, which is our focal point, it's going to be needing to be even darker than that. So let's mix in a little bit of ultramarine blue. I want to see how that's darkening it even more and somewhat neutralizing the chocolate color, helping it look just a little more gray. But it's still plenty brown. Okay, let's take that really dark brown and go over our peak again. Slowing down to make sure that our details and our edges are really sharp and clear. I'm painting carefully all along that line where the shadow separates from the lighter dune in front of it. I'm going to rinse a little of that so I have a lighter value. And with the slightly lighter value, continuing to paint some of the valley in front of it. So here I'm just painting the darkest shadows that I see in my reference photo. There's a really dark one right here. And I'm trying to leave some of the crest of those sand dunes untouched with the paint so that we can really see the areas that are meeting the light. Should stand out against the dark. And I'm missing some of those little peaks and valleys. I'm not doing an exact copy of my reference photo as you can see. But if you want, of course, you can follow your photo a little more closely than I am. It's totally up to you what level of detail you want to bring your final painting. There's this circular little valley in the middle of this one. By now the raw umber on your paper should be dry enough that you can add these additional layers without disturbing the raw umber colors underneath. But definitely double check that before just going in with the paint. Because where you live, it might be a little less dry environment. And if it's a less dry environment or more humid, then your paint's not going to dry as fast as mine is. So that's also a factor to consider. And knowing how fast your paper and paint are going to dry is just something you have to experiment with and paint often so that you know exactly what kind of timing you're getting into. What kind of timing to expect with the drying. I'm mixing up a little bit more of my transparent brown oxide and ultramarine for just another layer of dark color in this little valley and shadow. And then in the corner I want to go darker too. It's almost as dark as our peak, but not quite. So try to mix up a value that's maybe just one shade less than that for the corner. There, I think we're pretty close. All right, so I just want to do a little bit more touch-up with another layer of my raw umber just to make sure that I have correct mid-tones, darkening this one up just a little bit. And this one. Of course it'll dry lighter than your initial wash. So you may need to go back in and darken some of those mid-tones. That's what I'm doing now. Be careful not to apply too much extra water over any areas that are still damp or you will end up with a little bit of a mess. Okay, there's our finished sand dunes. Let's remove the tape and see how we did. Taking the tape off is one of my favorite parts. It's just so fun revealing the finished artwork with those perfect borders. So fun. If you guys decide to try this project, please tag me at eolsenart on Instagram. I'd love to check it out. Guys, I had a blast painting with you today. Thank you so much for watching. Check out these other videos about watercolor and I'll see you there.