Paint A Loose STORMY SKY & MOUNTAINS Watercolor Landscape Painting, Lois' Watercolour Tutorial Demo

Hi and welcome to Lois and Morgana Davidson Art. It's Lois here and today I'm painting more distant mountains, this time with a beautiful foreground tree on the left and grasses surrounding a path that leads back towards trees and distant mountains. And above all this, heavy grey storm clouds blowing in from across the mountains. The photograph from Pixabay will be used just for inspiration. I'm not going to be trying to sort of exactly copy it, but using it as a great starting point to try and create a unique and very loose picture. My paper today is Saunders Waterford cold pressed 100% cotton watercolour paper. It's a quarter imperial sheet which is about 11 inches by 15 inches or 28 centimetres by 38 centimetres. It's taped to my board with ordinary decorators masking tape and my board's at an angle of about 45 degrees so gravity will help me to paint. I loosely sketched in the position of my mountains and my tree and my path. I painted the sky with clean water and now this is raw sienna. I'm using a Princeton Aqua Elite one and a half inch mottler brush but use any large wash brush for this. So that raw sienna base gives me that nice light glow in the sky and this is Payne's Grey. I'm trying to use very loose, very expressive brush strokes which I'm trusting will soften and diffuse from a combination of the wet in wet technique and the gravity as that affects the paint and the water flowing together. I'm feathering out and lightening it up towards the mountains and the horizon line, trying to keep it a bit darker across the top so that I get that sense of perspective in the sky. The clouds at the top of the painting are nearer to us and the clouds at the horizon are further away. So I've squeezed all the water out from the brush and paint onto a paper towel and using the tips of the brush I've lightened a few areas and now I'm introducing a bit more raw sienna just near the horizon. A lot of that will probably disappear when I paint the mountains in but for now that just adds to that nice sort of glow and sense of depth and distance and gives me that sort of subtle effect. I've mixed up a green using raw sienna and a touch of Windsor blue and a touch of burnt sienna and I'm pulling that across the foreground and then adding in extra raw sienna to just try and build up sort of the underpainting, trying to keep some light in the middle of the painting so that I get light reflecting from the sky between the clouds and I can build up the shadows under the tree and shadows in the foreground eventually. So this is a nice earthy green just to darken up the foreground and just using scribbly brush strokes to fill in that area there. This is made with burnt sienna, ultramarine blue, raw sienna and there is a dab of burnt umber in it as well, just building up that colour and tone. Not too worried whether it looks sort of a little bit ugly at the moment, we'll refine things at the end, just building up tone and texture. Now dipping into much richer, drier raw sienna, putting some of that into the foreground, it will dry back a little bit lighter and I want to sweep some of that for some stronger distant plains or mid-ground plains that will be just underneath the mountains, so getting a little bit of colour across there now. This is my palette knife so I'm going to start scraping in some scruffy little grasses on either side and they will act as sort of framing device to lead the viewer across the path eventually, once I get the path established by sort of painting negatively around it. But for the time being I'm just building up texture and tone and hopefully bring the painting together in the next stage. So I'm quite happy with that for the first stage, now it just needs to be left to dry completely and I'll have a cup of coffee and then come back and finish the painting. So here's the dry painting and it's dried back a little bit paler, remember watercolour always dries back about 30% lighter, so if it looks right when you're first painting it then it's probably going to dry back too light, which is why I always tend to try and go in a little bit darker when I'm painting. The distant mountains now, I'm painting with my size 14 round brush which is an escoda pearler and I've mixed up some ultramarine blue, burnt sienna and light red with plenty of water to make a sort of palish sort of greyish violet shadow colour for the most distant mountain and then I'll add a bit of burnt umber to that mountain colour and paint in the distant mountains that are just in front of that one. So here you can see with the burnt umber added to that colour it's bringing this mountain, it hopefully will bring it forward a little bit so it stands in front of that distant one, so I can get a bit more dark into that if it sort of looks a bit too light once it's on the page. So it's a bit of a balancing act now with these mountains, making sure there are enough subtle differences in the values so that the side of these high mountains are nicely shadowed and that the far distant one is a lot lighter. I'm just going to use the tip of my palette knife to scrape through the mountains just above the base of my trees, just some trunks and branches so I don't lose my outline and I can see where it's going and while I'm here I might as well just quickly get in a base coat of dark brown. So for this I've just added a bit of Payne's Grey to my mountain colour to darken it a bit and I'll just add in using the rigger brush a few branches protruding out over the mountains because the tree's in the foreground or mid ground at least and then I'll build up a canopy above those branches once that's completely dry. I'm now going to mix up more of my lovely dark green but making it even darker this time with a bit more burnt umber and a bit more of the ultramarine blue and using my size 14 round brush I'm going to get in some darker sort of shadowy areas over here on the right leading down into the foreground and around the grasses and this will lighten back a bit and I shall paint it over again a few times probably until I get the shadows right. It's all going to look a bit strange at the moment because the picture is incomplete but hopefully when you see it at the end you'll see why I'm sort of painting in these sorts of areas around here still leaving some of the underpainting showing through for variety and keeping most of my brushwork horizontal for the most part except for the sweep of the path and that keeps the land nice and flat and means that I can establish the grasses with these more erratic sort of vertical and diagonal brush strokes. You can see that I'm holding my brush really far down the handle and this is helping to keep me loose so I don't get bogged down with too much detail just making these very scribbly calligraphic marks which hopefully once they dry and once everything else is finished will look sort of convincing for a tangle of grass across the foreground. So establishing more shadow over this side of the painting and now that I've done that I can pick up some more of this dark green but make sure that my brush isn't too wet and using dry brush I can create the canopies for this tree. I'm going to have it darker green over on the right and where it's sort of catching the sunlight over here, sorry darker green on the left and where it's catching the sunlight on the right I'm going to dip into my raw sienna and make sure that that side is a yellower green. That's a little bit too wet I need to dry my brush off because I'm looking for dry brush here so that you can see the sky in places through the canopy so it gives it that sort of convincing freshness and lightness. I can drop in some slightly darker shadows below the tree and I'll probably have to re-establish that a bit later and I can put some shadows into the canopy as well and I can begin to work some shadows across the foreground too between the ground and around the grasses. I can scrape in again with the palette knife just to continue to build up the texture and the look of these grasses trying to get them to look upright in the foreground sort of so that we get some dimension to the foreground as well as having dimension and distance in the background and then I want to sort of see if I can work on bringing some shadow across the foreground path a bit more and then getting a bit of dimension to the path by putting in some darks on either side of it and a sweep of dry brush through the middle helping to build up the perspective of the path coming towards us. Don't be afraid to smudge some of the lines a little bit with your finger to soften and blend them in when you're working with wet paint onto a dry painting like this. Don't do that onto when you're painting wet in wet because you'll create some really nasty marks but it's lovely to sort of soften back a bit. Now I'm creating a tree line in just in front of the mountains but further back from this single tree and I'm using my mop brush for this. It's a size 14 mop brush and I'm just bringing these very soft sort of bumpy shapes across from the path back across and then scraping in a few highlights where the trunks are into this dark mass of trees. This is just a suggestion of trees, it's just brushwork but hopefully it'll be effective enough the viewer will be able to interpret those brush marks as distant trees and they will just help to sort of balance the scene and give somewhere for the path to sort of go around the corner of and disappear into the distance. I'm just going to dab a few areas with a tissue to lighten them and I can go back in a bit darker if I want to or if I need to. So here's the finished painting. I'm afraid I forgot to switch the camera on, I really apologize for that but I'll talk you through what I did. I haven't done much, what I've done is I've used that dark green to glaze over the foreground and darken it in a few places whilst trying to keep the light. I've strengthened up the shadows underneath the tree and I've added some more darks at the base of all the grasses and then scraped through those again with the palette knife and dotted in some flowers and seed heads and grass heads across the foreground. I've also darkened up the tree trunks and some of the branches and added a little bit more dark to the foliage. All these simple steps have brought light and deep shadow to the painting and it's these strong contrasts along with the very loose brushwork that helps this loose painting to look sort of fresh and expressive even though if you were to analyse it, it's certainly not perfect in any way but loose painting is not designed to be that way, it is designed to express an atmospheric sort of expressive moment. So I hope you'll have a go at something like this, just sort of let yourself go, have a lot of fun and try not to get bogged down with detail. That's often the way to progress with loose watercolour painting is just to leave the idea about detail behind and just go for an impression and don't worry about if things don't go quite right. It's better to have something that's not quite right but that's filled with life and sort of expressive brushwork than to have something that's very detailed but has no life. Well I hope that was helpful and I hope you'll give something like this a try and please give us a like and subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and thank you so much to everyone that supports us on Patreon and if you'd like to support the channel on Patreon please follow either the link to Morgana's Patreon page or my Patreon page below. Thanks so much, have a lovely weekend and I'll see you soon and happy painting. Bye!