How to paint a Beautiful Hummingbird and Loose Hibiscus Flowers in Watercolor - Realtime Tutorial

Hi everyone and welcome. I'm Diane and my passion is painting and creating nature-inspired watercolours in my studio which are easy for you to do too. I share all my paintings with you on YouTube and on our website dianeandtone.com you can find free downloadable sketches for all the videos to help you make the most of your painting journey. And if you'd like a little bit more we also have channel memberships with loads of perks for you to enjoy. So welcome on board, click subscribe and turn on notifications and let's learn to paint watercolour. So today I'm going to paint a loose hummingbird. I hope everyone is ready for that. We haven't done a hummingbird for a while and I'm going to... I've sketched here and you can download the sketch from our website dianeandtone.com if you're interested in having a go at this painting and if you like my style which obviously isn't the case for everyone. Anyway, so I'm just wetting the body of the hummingbird here and I'm going to put some water over here as well because this is somewhere where I'm going to put some flowers because the hummingbird presumably is interested in that and then I've got some various colours here. I've got some blues and some reds and I'll list them below and I'm just... what I'm going to do is I'm going to make this into a... what would you call it... imaginary bird and I'm just going to pick up different colours and pop them in in different places and let it run and not try to do anything terribly constructive at all. Just make it look hopefully reasonably pretty. Different colours. This is what you could call it a fantasy bird. So once I've dropped the colours in, let them run. I'm trying out this paper, I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's going to bleed well or whether it's going to be a problem. We'll see. And then over here let's have some some pink, some potter's pink and some pink and just drop some of that in. Maybe a little bit of red. This is just the first layer. And then some greens. Violet, a different green down here. Some more pink just to drop it in. Completely abstract and so I'm going to leave that for the minute and let it do its thing, whether its thing happens to be. What we want is some sort of sharp lines where it's hit dry paper and mostly blurry lines though where it's and I think I might just pop in a few drops of water because that always makes an interesting effect. But I won't do that to the bird, I'll let him just dry like that and see what that looks like when it's done. So I am going to go and get myself a cup of something and I should be back shortly. Okay so 10 minutes, 15 minutes later and this is dry. So I'm just going to put in the eye and I'm using a number two I think, yeah number two brush and I'll just put a little bit of dark here for the beak. A little bit underneath here and I might just soften that up a little bit. And now I think I might use my water brush a little bit here to put in, to emphasise some of these colours. So I've got this Kuretake medium water brush and I'm going to, let's go to the green and this is a mixture of, what's that, I've got here Schmincke hookers green, so I've got a hookers green and I'm going to mix that with a bit of sap green and I'm just going to emphasise there and just drag that down a little bit like that. Emphasise that line and then I might add a little bit more of the turquoise blue, strengthen that up a little bit and then we've got some, I think I had quinacridone gold so we'll also add some more of that. Then we have pink and turquoise in the head, a bit more pink green down here a bit, leave at the end, trying to keep the lightness that we had before which is possible. Okay, so we'll let that dry and maybe pop some feet in with a little bit of grey, need to let that dry now and we will be doing some spatter and so on now and then for the flowers, obviously they need to be increased in strength as well. This is the kind of painting where I tend not to ramble and chat too much because it actually takes a little bit more concentration so forgive me if I'm not being particularly entertaining and now it's time probably to let that dry again and what I will do though is probably put a little bit of colour in behind up here so I think maybe a bit of cobalt blue perhaps to indicate the sky, maybe down here a little bit more green it's very loose, soften up some of these edges and let that run and once that's dry I can put a light in his eye, I can put a few more perhaps a few spatters or some stronger colours, just some strokes onto him. I think that will probably be okay when that's dry because that's meant to be, what's the word, a kind of subsidiary to the bird, the bird is supposed to be more important so anyway we'll see how that dries it needs a few minutes while I'm waiting for that I shall get on with the next one. Okay so this is dry now and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to do a little bit of light spatter with a small brush trying to keep it more or less within the area of the bird and then having spattered a little bit like that I'm going to go in and just break it up a little bit to give something of the impression of feathers so I don't really want it to go all into the background so I'll just put a bit of tissue there and try to keep it into the area of the painting whereas it doesn't matter if a few go over and then I'm going to add some feather shadows here just sort of like that. I don't want to be too much you might want to increase the shadow on there a little bit and then I was thinking I've got this white ink and I might just give perhaps the impression of movement a little bit some white and maybe some over here as well in these flowers and then I haven't used this ink very much but I reckon if I mix that with watercolour I would probably get a kind of semi-opaque thing so I'd be able to put in some extra darks into the centre of the darker areas that's interesting I don't think there's anything wrong with that maybe a little bit more mixed with some green and see how that works you can put oh that's not a good green is it interesting yeah that makes an opaque green and it's dry that's just me having a little think as I go along about what to do and I've put a little bit of white in there I'm going to put a bit more and uh well I don't know I think I do want a bit of toothbrush I think I do I think I want a bit of toothbrush greeny blue and maybe should I I don't know I'm not a big expert on hummingbirds but I guess he probably wants a bit more there and maybe a bit more and maybe a bit more here okay I am going to stop there and I'm going to call that done so there's the final painting I hope you enjoyed watching me do that and if you did please press like and subscribe to the channel because it really helps when people do subscribe and please leave your comment in the boxes below and I will try to reply to everybody so I will look forward to seeing you again tomorrow and have a lovely evening and I'll say goodbye for now bye-bye everybody bye-bye