How to paint a stunning misty watercolor landscape

Hello my friends and welcome back to another video. In today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to achieve this wet on wet easy misty springtime landscape scene. And we'll be doing some mountains and trees and of course mist. And we'll only be using four colors today. For my mountains I'm using Payne's Gray and for my trees I'm using Deep Sap Green with any purple that you choose. Not too much just a little and to darken it using some black. And I'm testing out this Polina Bright Brush and I'll be using that to lay down most of the paint. And to do my trees I'll be using my favorite Velvetouch brushes. But be warned if you do trees like me then you notice that the brushes or the bristles tend to fray. But I say the more frayed the better the tree. And I didn't mention here but the brush I'll be using for my mountains is the Graby Brushes. And those come in a set and whatever one that you want to use. And of course as always the materials will be in the description below. And I am starting by wetting my entire paper and dropping in some Payne's Gray for the sky. It's a very loose sky and background and I'm just laying down some very watery paint adding in a little bit of darker more saturated pigment. But it is going to dry quite light so I will end up doing a two or three layers I believe. So I'm just laying it down making sure I have some white space because I want to be mindful that wherever there's white that's where the mist is going to be. And then on the upper top area I will do my mountain once it's dry. Once I'm happy with my first layer I decided to turn my paper upside down and move it around. Tilt it from left to right really just to have gravity work that paint and to have it move around. And that is actually going to give a really beautiful and smooth blend as well especially for your sky. If you want some of those gorgeous wispy clouds that just move so nicely across the sky then this is a fun way to achieve that look. I'm really liking this Paulina bright brush. It's a size two and it is made of synthetic material and it holds a lot of water. The one thing I do have to say about it that I need to be mindful of is that the water the droplets can get caught in that plastic area and I end up you'll notice in the video I end up dropping in some water not intending to but because it's wet it's not too big of a deal. But being mindful of that so just have to get to know my brushes. But having water drop into your painting can be nice but sometimes not so nice because you can get a cauliflower effect where the paint moves away and spreads in an area where you don't want it to. So that can happen. But I hope you all are doing well today and happy painting. The time of recording this is a Sunday. I usually film on Saturdays and I need to get my editing and my video or my audio recording done on Saturdays as well but lately I have been exhausted and so then I end up doing my recording the day that I upload a video. So I've got to figure out my practice as far as my timing better. All right so the paper has dried so you can see it's like where's the paint? Where did it go? But that's okay we are going to layer another layer down. But before we do that I wanted to get my mountain down because I want to also layer that as well. So lots of layering and lots of building up when it comes to the style of landscapes that I do and that's mainly because I don't want it to be too dark in the beginning because I can't lighten it later. So and as far as my mountains I have a textured mountain video on the ways that I get and achieve this style of mountain because it's a bit strange I suppose in my process but basically in a nutshell I am using wet on wet where I'm dropping in the paint and wetting the surface and then dropping it in but then I'm also doing a bit of a dry brush texture as well and I am doing that you know where it's one moment I'm doing wet on wet and then the next little area of the mountain is the dry brush. So I do that because I just really like it. I really like this very fun effect for the mountains and because I usually paint misty scenes it allows me to get really fun and unique mist and I can manipulate that paint. One thing I do have to be mindful of and if you do these mountains as well is if you do too much water and you keep layering on the paint you might overwork it. I do that all the time even today and I've painted so many of these mountains but with at least these gravy brushes and if you use Neptune brushes that hold a lot of water I can get a little carried away so and I don't usually want to overwork my paint but it happens it happens so just keep that in mind if you do this technique so but it's a lot of fun and this did dry lighter so I do go over it again with some more paint and do the same steps that I do here but if you want to see that video on how I achieve the style of mountains be sure to check the description below or I'll leave a time card in the upper right hand corner of this video or wherever it pops up I don't know so but either way it will be there and the colors that I usually use for mountains are black and that that way I make a very light gray or I will use Payne's gray sometimes I will use brown I don't use brown that often mainly because well I honestly don't know I like brown I like brown quite a lot but I don't tend to use them in my mountains but I should let me know what is your favorite color when it comes to mountains sometimes I will use man blue as well I typically love that color for water but I am known to use it in my landscapes as far as my mountain landscapes but while it's still wet you can see I'm adding a little bit of water water of water adding a little bit of paint more paint here but I'm being delicate in that upper area so I don't overwork it because it's still quite wet but of course be sure to play around and I'm not really thinking about shadows honestly when it comes to mountains in my mind as far as painting them I'm more of just getting a feel of what I like and what is flowing in my mind so you can see I have lots of mist going on here I have picked up my um Paulina brush and now I am laying in some more color right on dry paper and in order to soften it and make those edges soft I just dip my brush in some water dab it on my cloth and then I just work that paint and I continue to add more water dabbing the excess water off and moving it around and then I also will add darker values of paint and I just play around and figure out where I want the dark areas to be the darker areas of green that's where the base of my trees are going to be and the lighter areas that's where it's very misty but don't be afraid to play around and get different um you know get different colors in there and really darken it up so once that's dried I'm adding my first tree and I missed my paper so the green does feather out you can see that it gets quite light there and that's because I've misted my paper every time I lay a tree down or every other tree I spray my paper and I know I've talked about it in other videos and if you've watched a few of my tutorials you know that I'm a big fan of misting my paper and that's because I just love how it distributes the paint from my brush onto the paper when I'm making those trees it just gives such a lovely effect so I'm a huge fan when I want to make the base of the tree smoothers because I'm also a huge fan of blending out the base of my trees I really like a nice soft transition I'll take my palina brush or whatever brush you want to use and I'll have it be a little bit damp and I'll gently work the base of the tree to have it blend but hard edges in misty landscapes are accurate as well I mean really it's your painting do whatever you want um I tend to favor softer blends but those hard lines you'll also see in misty landscapes as well because some of the fog is really dense and it doesn't fade out but you can see what I'm doing there where I made it softer and these trees do become quite light and I add two more layers of trees but in all honesty if I were painting this painting for someone or for me or I should say more my style I go darker and I go more detailed but for keeping this tutorial more simple because I'm trying to think of the mind of someone just starting having so many layers might be overwhelming and you know it's it's more of me showing you how to achieve a misty scene at least through my eyes how I would approach it and of course I don't want to overwhelm you but maybe if you're interested in a future video of how I tackle a painting say for a commission um I can definitely show you that and I will let you know it takes a while I am someone who loves the details and I take my time on every single tree mainly because I love to paint trees but I do have to let you know that I can spend hours painting trees um but I but I love it but I know a lot of people don't you know want to spend that much time on the the details and I know there's so many watercolor artists that love a loose style of watercolor I don't know if I'm so much loose there are areas of paintings that I share that are loose but they definitely have more detail in them so but you know to to each their own what do you like that what is your preferred style or maybe you don't have a style yet and you just want to learn all the styles I definitely don't know how to do all the styles um as far as realistic uh painting that is not a strong suit though I would love to have aspects of realism in my or realistic aspects in my painting um you know but uh but not necessarily every every area because I also really love um cartoonish illustrations um you know something you'd find on cards uh you know I do love that style of watercolor I don't typically paint that style but I really enjoy that style so um but you know I was I did a poll recently on what you guys want to see in addition to landscapes and quite a few were curious about other types of paintings so I might include some fun uh paintings on different illustrations I'm thinking something related to landscapes and outdoors maybe it's cabins I'm not sure yet um but with that kind of uh painting I do end up having a bit more I guess cartoonish so but back to this painting and enough of me chatting um so all I'm doing here is I am just dropping in some more trees and you can see they're a bit darker and then the ones on the right hand side are very faded and then to spread out the base you watched that I added some more water and then I dropped in a lot of pigment and then moved that around so that's kind of my process in general when I when I do paint and because that area was really wet the base of the trees fade out dramatically and to get a very dark value of pigment you might want to have your paper be dry so you can throw your wet paint on dry paper and then you can just blend it out but it will be darker versus wetting it and then adding your paint and either way work it just depends on how dark you want it if you do wet on wet you're just going to need to add some more layers and if you do dry on wet then it's going to be darker in general because you're using less water and if you do find value in my videos and my content want to stick around I'd love for you to subscribe so um yeah I hope that you uh stick around and leave me comments I love interacting with people it's so much fun I haven't been on YouTube for very long um but it's been really wonderful um to share everything that I am learning that I've learned and you know I just come from a teaching perspective and I think it's so important to to share and um you know give value to people in different ways and approaches to tackle paintings and you may you know um I you know don't necessarily just follow uh the tutorial you know I think it's important to um test out different things and I watch a lot of YouTube I love YouTube um but I watch acrylic I watch I don't actually watch so much oil but I do watch a lot of acrylic painting I watch a lot of watercolor painting um watercolor pencils and it's just so interesting to see the different approaches that people use in their watercolor practice and you just never know what you're going to pick up and what you may want to apply in your own and then eventually of course you create your own style but don't get too fixated on style um because style will end up changing and you'll incorporate things and and all of all of that so um but anyway that is um as far as the amount of layers for the trees I decided to stop there but I went back to the mountain because I wanted to make it a lot darker and I did the same process that I did before I didn't wet it beforehand I just drop in some paint and then spread it around by dipping my brush in water and then using a little bit of dry texture but these gravy detailed brushes have been my favorite for this style of painting mountains and I just love the mist and I love how the mist on the right hand side is just coming over the the mountain and it's just fading to the left it's so much fun I just love it I love misty scenes I don't think I'll ever get tired of painting misty scenes I'm so sorry if I'm painting too many misty scenes but I probably should let you know that every one of my landscapes there's going to be some element of mist I can't help it and I've then switched to my other uh brush my velvet touch brush and now I am wiggling in some dry texture if you find that it's too dark like I did here I just took my bigger brush and softened it and just have a little bit of water and lately I have been loving having um a splatter in my landscape scenes just for some fun texture um it you know I don't know what it is it could be anything um but it is a lot of fun and you saw that I'm tapping it and you can also flick it with your finger but I hope that you guys enjoyed this video today it's very simple you could go a lot darker and more details have fun with it but until next time take care my friends