Loose ink and watercolor sketching for beginners| Easy Tree Tutorial

Hey everyone, welcome and welcome back to my channel. In today's video, I will be sketching and painting a simple tree with ink and watercolor. I will be doing the tree in a similar style as this plant right here, both loose and simple. This is the reference photo for the tree. I took this picture myself in Penang and I picked this one because we had very bright sunlight that day and we have really nice clear shadows in this photograph. I will only be sketching the tree today so I'll start with the tree and maybe include a few other things if I have the time later. Notice that the light is coming from the top right and there are some very dark shadows, particularly on the lower left side of the tree. So we have another angle of the tree here just as an additional reference. I will be using this Micron pen which is a size 03, a mechanical pencil and these watercolors from Winsor & Newton. You can find the details in the description below as usual. First, I will determine where the tree will be on the page. So right now I am measuring one third up from the bottom of the page and from the right edge of the page. So roughly this is where the base of the tree trunk will be. It's just an estimate. By the way, I am using a watercolor sketchbook and it has 100% recycled cotton and the brand is Kadi. Next, I estimate where the top of the tree trunk starts to get covered with leaves. And lastly, I will mark the highest part of the tree. This is where the leaves will be and next this is where the shadows will be. Now let's start with the inking. I always use a waterproof pen because we will be using watercolor over this sketch later. Unless of course you want the ink to smudge into the watercolor, you need to use a waterproof pen. So I'm starting with the tree trunk and a few things to keep in mind is that the tree trunk and the branches usually get narrower as they go up. So maybe they stay almost the same size, the same width as they go up, but they should never become thicker. This tree trunk gets just the slightest bit narrower as it goes up and the outline is not completely straight. I make it a little bit rough, a little bit of breaks in those lines will be nice as well. Here I am very quickly sketching in a rough outline for all those leaves. You can do this with those swirls, make some loops and have some breaks in the lines and at the same time try not to trace a perfect circle or oval because if you observe the picture you will notice that this tree actually has an irregular shape. So try to draw what you see and not what you think you see. I love sketching these squiggly lines, it's really fun to let loose and see what happens and see what comes out. Now it's time to work on more branches and this for me is the hardest part of the tree. I'm sure many people will agree and in this photo it looks like it's a little bit complicated but it doesn't have to be exactly the same as the photo. You don't need to sketch every single branch and every single leaf that you see. As you can see these branches are getting very thin and narrow the left side of that trunk because we have a lot of shadows on the left side. A few lines for the grass and we are done. At this point I usually let this rest for a few minutes and it is best to wait until the ink is completely dry before starting with watercolor. These are some of the synthetic brushes that I use. To simplify sketching this tree I will roughly divide it into three main sections and so these three sections will be in yellow. Then to identify the areas with the darkest shadows you can either stand further away or squint a little bit but in this case I just zoom out. So these areas in that I'm circling in red are the darkest areas. So when we learn to divide this tree into a few sections it looks more manageable and don't just focus on painting random leaves to form the tree. It's important to try and get the overall shape and form and also the light and shadows in. So I already mixed up some paint for the leaves and I used sap green and yellow ochre for that first lighter color and now I'm using sap green plus ultramarine for a second darker shade of green. It is very important to load the brush really well with lots of paint because as you can see once we've put down that color the paint is like really moist really wet and it stays that way for some time and we want that because we want the two different paints to mix on the page whilst that paint is still wet. So because the paint is really wet and my sketchbook was propped up on this stand you could see pooling of the paint at the bottom areas. So to minimize that a little I helped the book up so it's a little bit more flat. So you can actually move the paints around just by tilting the page here and there so that that is one of the things that you can play around with when you're using watercolor. Now I'm painting with that darker green mix using a different brush and I'm painting both inside the light green areas but towards the bottom and also outside of that initial layer of light green. So I am actually refining the silhouette of this tree little by little with these small strokes which look like there are leaves sticking out. You can also work on it the other way around meaning putting down the darker green first before painting with the lighter green as I am doing here. And another thing that I like to do is very very intentionally leaving these small gaps of unpainted areas. As you can see the leaves on this tree are actually not that dense so you should be able to see through it in some areas. So you can be you should be able to see like this a little bit of the sky or bits of the buildings at the back. So that's why I like to leave unpainted areas so that we have that impression that this tree is actually not that dense and we can see things through that through the leaves. Now you can roughly see whilst I'm painting that top clump of leaves that I am trying to add shadows in similar areas as the tree in the photograph. Of course it's not a hundred percent the same as the photograph but we just need to try and get something similar to the photograph. Now I'm proceeding to the third clump of leaves on the right side and you don't have to separate the clumps so obviously. They do merge together in some areas. While the paint is still quite wet on the page I quickly mixed more dark green and I am now adding more darker shadows. So I'm also going back to those other sections that I did earlier on and I'm adding more dark green to deepen those shadows more. Watercolor dries lighter than when it is wet so don't be afraid of loading lots of paint on your brush. Now this tree that I'm painting looks a little shorter than the one in the photo and the page that I'm painting on is actually pretty small so I can't make it any taller now but it's good it's fine this is not a technical or botanical drawing we're just going loose and easy with this sketch. As I always say it doesn't need to be perfect just having improvement from your last sketch is good enough and every sketch and painting is a new learning opportunity. In my experience this paper in particular dries quite slowly so it is easier to manipulate wet paint on the page when it dries slowly. There are some papers which dry much faster than this. So after a while it is now still slightly damp in some areas and I'm going to start adding another layer of shadows. So this is the darkest that we are going to go so I'm only painting the areas that have the darkest shadows. Now I'm mixing burnt umber and yellow ochre for the first layer for that tree trunk. It's quite a light mix and then after I've laid down that first layer I use the same brush the same brush and I add more burnt umber and ultramarine to darken the brown mix. So I'm using this second mixture to add a second layer to the tree trunk and also the branches. Right now I'm using a quarter inch or six millimeter filbert brush and I'm only using the tip of the brush so we get these thinner lines and up here in the top the higher parts the green mix that we used before and I'm using this mix to paint a third layer or the darkest part of the tree trunk and some of the branches. Right we are almost done with this tree and this is a good time to take a step back and assess your sketch slash painting and to compare it with the reference and see if any areas need more refinement. Maybe you need to add more shadows in certain areas, maybe the shadows are not dark enough or let's say maybe the shape the shapes of the like the silhouette of the the tree needs more refinement. Yeah so this is a good time to really assess your sketch and painting and do those changes. Now that the tree is done I'm painting the ground or the grass and I will add some shadows as well. I want very light green for the grass and I'm using a dry brush technique which is I don't load the brush with too much paint. I let the paint kind of dry out as I paint across. So doing some dry brush lets you get this lovely texture on this rough paper. Here I'm mixing ultramarine and burnt umber for a gray shadow and the shadow of the tree is the trickiest part of the sketch and it's helpful to first imagine where the shadow will be placed and how big it should roughly be on the page before starting. So I loaded lots of paint on my brush and I'm starting from the base of the trunk and working my way outwards. At the same time I am also remembering to leave some areas unpainted. I also take note of which way my strokes are going and I don't have all the strokes going the same way. So we can see that the leaves on this tree are pointing every which way so I don't want the shadows to be too uniform because this is a shadow of the tree and the tree has very randomly pointing leaves. They're not all uniform in size and in angle and that's what I'm trying to do with my strokes. As I'm painting I have these many pauses. I keep pausing and assessing the paint, the painting and I reference the photo as well. So drawing and painting is very much about observation and it really trains you to observe things more closely. Now I'm going to add more gray closer to the tree trunk for some deeper shadows and the paint on the page is still wet so you can see that the subsequent layer that I'm adding right now is bleeding into the previous layer of paint. Again I am adding more paint to deepen the shadows right below the trunk. And we are done! So I let this sit and dry for a few hours and coming back I felt like something was missing from this. So now I decided I would add a couple of branches to this piece. The good thing about ink and watercolor is that you can use ink over that dried watercolor for adding things, for doing refinements, for adding texture. It's To complement the green leaves I'm going to paint these benches a red just like what we have in the photo. So red and green are complementary colors so they should work well together here. I'm mixing the two reds in this palette which are alizarin crimson hue and cadmium red pale hue. So when you look at the photo you may notice that the top of that bench is bathed in sunlight so it's getting a very strong ray of sun. So I'm going to leave that area unpainted At this point the ground is looking very gray so I decided to add a layer of green so it looks more like grass and not like gray cement. That extra dash of green really makes this look much better. So I think we are basically done. I hope you found this video helpful to you and if you did, as always, do like, comment, and subscribe. Your support means a lot to me. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.