EXPLOSION of Fall Color! The Ultimate Guide to Painting Simple and Beautiful Autumn Leaves!

Autumn time is my absolute favorite season of all and if you're like me and would like to bring the colors of fall to life on paper then this tutorial is a must watch. Join me today as we explore the techniques for painting vibrant and two-toned autumn leaves using just a few simple strokes of the brush. So go ahead and grab your watercolor paper, your paints, and your water and let's get started. I have several brushes that I'll be using for today's painting. This is a large number 12 round for the background wash. Then I have this 3 eighths inch dagger aka striper brush. This is the key brush for today's painting. Now you don't have to have this exact same size just be aware of that the smaller the brush the smaller your leaves are going to be. The larger the brush the larger the leaves. Then I also have a size zero round for the tree branches and these first three brushes that I've shown all come in the same Artegria brand set that I will put a link to along with any of the other products and supplies I'm using today in the description of this video if you're interested. Then lastly I have a number one Princeton liner for some detail work at the end. So the very first thing I'm going to do here is take a pencil and draw on a jaggedy tree branch that the leaves will either be painted on or close to. This of course is an optional step. You can just jump right into painting if you'd like but I find that my paintings usually turn out a little better when I've sort of put a plan into place from the beginning of how I want it to look. And your branches don't have to look exactly like mine either. You can add as many or as few as you like. Now that my branch is drawn I'm actually going to lighten up my pencil lines just a little bit. I may be painting some of the leaves slightly over the tops of some of these lines so I don't want them to be as visible. To do this I'll take a kneaded eraser and dab it along my pencil lines. This is a moldable and somewhat sticky eraser so when I dab it along the pencil marks it will take off some of the loose graphite and in turn make the lines lighter in value without erasing it completely. So after all those lines have been lightened up I'm going to go ahead and tape my paper down with some artist tape to help prevent some of the warping when I paint on the background wash. Now let's mix up some lovely autumny colors for our leaves. I'll start with some pure azo yellow and some gamboge. Then I'll take a little bit of gamboge and mix it with some cadmium orange and maybe even a touch of cadmium red for a nice orange red color. Now I'll take some cadmium orange and a little more cadmium red for a red orange. And lastly let's take some cadmium red and mix it with some alizarin crimson for a nice rich darker red color. All right I'm going to go ahead and rinse my brush off here and then take some clean water and this large number 12 brush and paint in some of the background area with just water first. Next I'll take a little bit of orange and maybe some yellow and start applying small amounts of that to the wet background allowing the color to blend and spread. Keep in mind we want this to be light in value. This should accent the leaves not overpower them. Now for a bit of extra fun I'll take some of this orange and make a few splatters and splashes of color both in the wet area as well as some of the dry areas. Then allow this background to completely dry before painting on the leaves and if you'd like to speed up that process a hair dryer can help do the trick. All right let's switch over to the dagger brush now and get started on the two-toned leaves. So first I'll wet this down a little bit and then I'll load it up with some gamboge or azo yellow. Then here's the trick to make it two-toned. I'll take the very tip of the dagger and swipe it through one of these darker orange or red colors. Then I'll hold the brush so it feels and looks like it's upside down. I'll pick a spot on my paper for the leaf then I'll press down and pull on the brush to leave behind a nice leaf-like stroke. Then for the center point of the leaf I'll do that again but this time it will be more elongated and I'll use two strokes one for the left side and one for the right side. And on the last or third point of the leaf I'll turn my arm so that the point of the brush is at the center of the leaf and again push and pull to form another leaf-like stroke. Now you can choose to leave the leaf smooth as it is or you can add some rough little jagged marks along the edges of the leaf by simply using the tip of the brush to paint a few lines or points along the outer edge. Also I noticed that after I started painting the red color gradually sort of disappeared on the leaf the farther I went so it might be a good idea to reload your brush with color after each stroke if you want the red to be more prominent. You also can go back in and paint a little bit more red onto the tips while it's still wet if you need to. Now this might take a tiny bit of practice to get these strokes down at first so don't be frustrated if it takes a minute to get the hang of. If you need to feel free to pull out some scrap or cheaper watercolor paper just to practice these strokes over and over again until you feel like you've got the hang of it. I'm going to go ahead and paint several of these leaves using the yellow and red blend. Then I might also want to add in some using an orange and red blend with the main base color as orange and swiping the tip of it in the darkest red. You know with my art channel I try to provide tips and step-by-step information so you can walk away feeling like you can do this. If you feel inspired or like these tutorials will help you improve your artistic skills please consider subscribing. All right now that I've got several of these yellow and orange leaves with red tips I think I'll add in a few darker leaves to give my painting some variety. So now I'll use some of these red colors as the base and if you want to you can try swiping the tip into some yellow for a two-toned effect but I found when I tried this Let's move on now to painting the branches for these leaves. So I'm going to go ahead and mix up some burnt umber and ivory black for a nice dark brown. Then using my number zero round brush I'll start painting over my pencil lines that I drew at the very beginning. The good news here is that these do not have to be lovely smooth straight lines. A few bumps and jagged marks make it feel more realistic and natural. I also want to mention that the tendency when painting something like this is often to paint the branches first before the leaves but in this case I knew that I might want to have some leaves overlapping the branches. So now because I waited on the branches I can sort of paint these lines around the leaves that overlap creating some subtle depth to my painting. At this point I finished painting all of my pencil line marks but now I'm just going to add in a few more small twigs here and there in some of these empty spaces. All right we are almost done. It's now time for some of the detail work. So let's switch over to the princeton liner brush and lighten up this brown color a little bit with some of this red. Now the very last step here is to paint on the little stems that connect the leaf to the branch. Then we'll continue that line on and paint in some more smaller vein lines along the leaf. We want these to be very thin. Don't paint them too dark and try not to paint too many of them. A little of these veins go a long way. And here is your beautiful and festive autumn time leaf painting. I hope you had some fun and maybe even learned something new. If you enjoyed this tutorial please consider subscribing to my channel so I can continue to help you discover your artistic side.