Painting a snowy winter landscape in watercolors / Watercolor tutorial

Hello friends and welcome to another watercolor tutorial with me Negin. Winter is here in Stockholm and we had the first snow of the year, so I was inspired by this beautiful view to paint today's landscape, which also can be turned into a Christmas card if you like so. This sketchbook I'm using is a watercolor sketchbook or watercolor book from Hanemula. It's 250 gsm thick and 100% cotton and as you can see I made a frame around the painting with these washi tapes and now drawing some abstract shapes representing hills. And a big golden moon will be in the middle of the night sky. Now this is a masking fluid which I use to cover houses, these tiny houses, moon and stars, tiny stars. So it makes the painting process much easier for me. I want to just cover these areas and get back to them after I'm done with the background layer. So after it has dried you can peel it off. And as usual I spray my palette, let it sit for a minute or so before I start painting to get the perfect consistency. And I leave this first section and start painting in this one. And what I'm doing is that I'm using this wet on wet technique where I first wet this section only and then apply my paint. It's a Prussian blue and it's the only blue I'm going to be using in this painting. I start with a very light layer of Prussian blue so I have added a lot of water to this paint and it's important to start very light and darken your layers as you go because with watercolors you can't do the other way around. So I paint each of these sections, these hills, one by one using the same technique. Wetting the surface inside, adding the paint and drawing each layer so that paint won't flow over to the other sections. We want to create this, how do you say, transition from lighter to darker paint like a gradient. And an important thing about the masking fluid is that you need to let it dry completely before you paint over them. And from my experience different brands can have different drawing times so it's good to always read about it. And for this one, for the Winsor & Newton, I usually let it sit for 10 to 15 minutes before I continue painting. After painting the sky I felt like I needed to add more contrast and darken the hills so I repeat the same process as before, just wetting these areas with the clean brush, clean wet brush and apply more paint. As I mentioned earlier it's good to start with lighter colors, lighter layers and building them up as you go. After the painting has completely dried it's time to peel off the masking fluid and paint in those areas. For the houses I'm going with warmer tones of yellow and orange, dark orange, to create this glowing effect, also nice contrast between the cool colors of the background and the warm reddish or orangish colors. For the evergreen trees using the same Prussian blue color I'm using this simple technique, creating some sort of triangle and leaving some space in between each section to create the illusion of snow. Or this other technique where I start from the top and create some sort of zigzag shapes going downwards. Now it's time for the final golden details. I'm using golden watercolors from a Swedish handmade brand Colors by Vita and no matter what brand you use I recommend to applying some water on the metallic paints and let them sit for like two or three minutes so they absorb the water and get this creamy consistency. If you enjoyed watching this video please give it a thumbs up to support this channel and I hope you will have a great time painting and see you in the next one!