Simple BEGINNERS Woodland SUNBEAMS Watercolour Landscape, watercolor sun rays painting tutorial demo

Hi and welcome back. Today I'm going to be showing you how I painted this imaginary woodland scene with sunbeams shining through the canopies into the wood. I'll be showing you a quick summary of the painting over on Patreon. There's an in-depth three-part tutorial which was done as a request from some of my patrons, so if you're interested in that please follow the link below. And if you think you'd like to join us on Patreon then it's probably best to wait until the 1st of September because if you join now payments will be taken now and then again on the 1st of each month, so best to wait and I hope to see you over there. So today I'm going to be painting on the back of an old painting. It's Saunders Waterford hot pressed paper. It's taped my board with ordinary decorators masking tape and my board's at an angle of 45 degrees so the paint will run. I'm going to paint it wet in wet. You can see that I'm wetting the page all over with a large Harky brush and leaving a few patches of dry paper so I get some variety of soft and hard edges. This is a large synthetic Escoda Ultimo mop brush size 14 and I'm going to create a sort of an underpainting using sap green, perylene green and cad yellow and I'm going to lightly dab the paint in various varying hues and shades across the page but keeping the central area light and mostly unpainted because that's where I want to have my light. I'm leaving plenty of unpainted patches of paper and as soon as I get the wash looking the way I want it to, I lay my board flat so it doesn't run down the page anymore and it will dry like that but before it dries I need to put in my sunbeams so I'm going to take some tissue or a paper towel and very rapidly run it across my page using a fresh piece of tissue for each pass or each sunbeam so as I keep the tissue clean I don't want to transfer paint that I remove with the tissue into a sunbeam because that would look sort of grubby and now that I've got enough sunbeams I'm going to leave it to dry and then come back and I shall then paint my trees in around the sunbeams. So here's the dry wash, I've propped it back up at 45 degrees again and I quite like the effect, I think it's subtle but still could be quite striking if I can get the trees in right. Now I'm going to be painting these trees with Payne's Grey and my small calligraphy brush so what I'm going to do is just paint them in stages but I'm going to paint them over the sunbeams but very quickly before the paint dries, each time I go over a sunbeam I'm going to use a paper towel or a tissue and I'm going to dab out the paint, soften it back so it's much much paler where the trunks are going through the sunbeams and while with one tree trunk here it doesn't look particularly impressive, eventually once I've built up the rest of my trees and the branches I'm hoping that the effects that I'll get from this will be effective enough to give me that lovely sunbeam look but without being too artificial looking or too strident or overt. I want it to be quite subtle so every time I paint new branches through any sunbeams I'll go back in with the tissue and just dab out in the area covered by that sunbeam. I'm trying to make sure that I put in enough branches for the trees to look quite convincing and decorative but without going over the top and putting in too much detail even though this is not as loose as I often like to paint because I'm not sure how to paint these effects really loosely. I think it's something that even beginners could attempt by just slowly building up and each time you put in a branch or trunk just very quickly dab it out where there's sunbeams but here on the far right we're out of the sun so with these trees I don't need to dab anything out I can just keep them very much in the shade and all fully dark. And the same with this little bit of something and nothing along the ground where I'm just sort of suggesting plants and grass and things like that I can dab out carefully where the sunbeams are hitting the grass so that's lighter than it is underneath the shadow of the trees. And now to finish the canopies if you'll notice that I didn't extend the branches all the way out to the top of the page I left some space so I can go over my underpainting with the same colours that's perylene green, sap green and cad yellow and varying mixes of those colours and my mop brush and just thicken up the canopy a little bit across the top of the painting and the darker I go with this the more my sunbeams and sunlit areas are starting to really pop then using the corner of a plastic card I'm going to be etching through the paint to reveal some of the lighter paper underneath for some just lighter branches through the canopy. Now using my large harky brush I'm sweeping some shadows and some dappled sunlight marks across the foreground and in the same sort of way I'm keeping it really loose but I'm going to dab out lighter areas on the lighter half of the forest floor where the light is hitting them and keeping it darker beneath these trees on the right and now I can begin to paint in the trees on the left of the painting in exactly the same way but paying a bit more attention to where my sunbeams are as there are more of them on this side of the painting so I have to make sure I'm quite quick with dabbing out the paint to lighten it back in the trunks and the branches that pass through the sunbeams and here you can see I've got most of my trees in and I'm just going to get the canopies darkened up and fleshed out a bit more with my three colours but mostly using the dark across the top corner where the sunlight isn't penetrating and then using the yellow to brighten up around the edges where the sunlight's hitting the leaves and once I get this sort of in place and balanced up I'll see whether I need to continue with any more trees across on the left edge you can see now I've finished off with a few more trees on the left edge and now I'm putting in some very faint pale trees with very watery yellow green paint across the middle in the background just a few of them and dabbing them out and that just gives the illusion of trees further back in the forest but only seen very faintly through that strong sunlight and here's the finished painting well I hope you enjoyed that I really enjoyed painting it and I was quite happy with how this sort of experiment went even though the effects turned out to be quite subtle I think they are effective and I prefer them to be too subtle than sort of too artificial looking if you know what I mean so let me know what you think in the comments below I'll look forward to hearing from you and I hope you enjoy this if you give this sort of thing a go yourself and if you do want to see a more in-depth discussion and tutorial of this in three parts then please follow the link below to my Patreon page and thank you so much to my wonderful Patreon group who support this channel and I'll see you again soon and happy painting bye