Easy watercolor Christmas barn in forest painting » How to paint a pine tree forest for beginners

Hello everybody, welcome to yet another watercolor tutorial. Yet another winter landscape as well. Surprise, surprise. So we're going to start off with our piece of paper in landscape position and we are covering the entire thing with a layer of water. You are welcome to tint your wash with like a very light blue just so you can see where you've painted water already. And the light blue, as long as it's very very light, it won't matter because it'll just look like the sky or something. I'm going to take some blue to start off with because it's going to be separated into two halves basically. So we have our horizon on this side. So I'm tilting my piece of paper upwards and about in the middle of my page, halfway down, I'm just going to paint a line and I'm going to also paint on some green in that line like that. I'm going to take some of that blue again and just let that watercolor run downwards. If it's not running down you probably don't have enough water on in your base. So that is like an explosion of blue and green there. Very very nice. And I'm going to take a very light blue, maybe even some gray actually because the blue might be too much, and I'm going to just underneath that just paint like a little, almost a reflection of it. And I've just extended it to my left. You can hardly see it anyway, it doesn't matter that much, but we are going to be painting something in the foreground here. That's why I've extended it just a tiny bit. Okay. So that's all right. Actually you know what, I know that as soon as this dries I'm going to be like, that's not dark enough. So let's see if this is still wet enough to apply a little bit more. That's a little bit better. And I'm going to do the same thing to the bottom. Kind of make it wispy looking at the bottom here because it's supposed to be snowy and icy. I am going to add a little bit of blue in there. The bottom doesn't matter as much. Okay. That is like an explosion of blue and green. I love that. We are going to let this completely dry before we come back and do the next step. So this should be dry. We're going to paint, or first we're going to pencil in just a little house. So I'm going to go a little closer here so you can see what I'm doing. And we're drawing it right on the horizon. So I'm going to have a a triangle like this that's going to come down like that. And now we're going to paint the background pine trees here. We painted these colors because we wanted to establish a background of color to work with because without it it gets a little bit tedious. So I'm just painting some pine trees. And I'm not going to get into the pine tree painting techniques because one, I have a lot of those on my channel that you can view and hope those assist you. But I plan on, hopefully by the time you see this it'll be available, but I plan on releasing a video on a paid platform of some kind that goes over how to paint pine trees like four additional techniques because I did release a video on that two years ago. But I've since refined my methods. I've found much easier ways and ways of explaining while maintaining beginner difficulty level. And it would be nice to finally get some financial compensation for all the hundreds of tutorials and the thousands of hours that I've put into these tutorials. So it's going to be available for a price but I just haven't, I haven't filmed it yet and I also haven't figured out the details of where I will be uploading it. But here we are surrounding our house with beautiful pines. And you don't just have to stick with pines and you don't have to just stick with green pines. You can kind of do whatever you'd like. I'm almost just following the my tree, like the colors that I painted. So where it's green I'm painting a green pine tree and then what happens from then on out we'll find out. I'm going to go a little closer so you can see. I don't want to go too close because when I do that I oftentimes move my paper out of camera view and then you guys don't see half of what I painted. So I get really focused on the painting. I'm also going to have some bluish pine trees in there. I know you're thinking pine trees aren't blue. Actually some of them are. Aren't spruce trees sort of bluish? Like they have those very short needles that are clustered together very very close together. They're kind of blue. some of the details of my trees here. I don't want to completely negate all the detail work that I did but I do want to blend them out so they look a little bit faded. I don't want to create a mist so that's not my intention here. Rather I want it to look like all the insides are sort of filled in and blended together so that I don't have to put as much work into filling in all those in between areas. Now the other thing I want to do is add some trees that don't have any leaves. So just like the stumps and the branches. And again this one fills up a little bit of space but also adds variety to the painting. When we zoom out that looks very nice. I like it. I like that. Okay so what are we gonna do next? I'm gonna paint the house next and we're gonna make it this gorgeous reddish maroon color. That's the plan. So the roof is going to be white from snow but the rest of it is going to be gorgeous red. So I'm just filling in the front triangle and front rectangle and the side rectangles. So I'm gonna add some black accents there because the snow is going to be on like it's going to be overhanging here so I want to give the part where the snow is overhanging a shadow and perhaps under here as well. Very nice. Okay so while that is drying we can add some foreground details over here. I'm just trying to decide what it is that I'm going to do because I love how these trees look. I don't want to cover them up but for the name of art we must. So I'm gonna have some pine trees obviously and they're gonna extend upwards like this. I'm gonna be using both of my brushes because when I get a little bit more down my pine tree it starts to become like there's there's a lot more pigment so the this brush can't handle it that well. And I'm only doing the left half because I don't want to overtake the first one that I painted. So I'm going to just use the blending technique in a moment just to kind of mix them together like that. Okay now on this side I'm just going to kind of cover it with some watercolor. When I'm lazy I'm just kind of tired painting so many pine trees so I'm just trying to fill in this space but also I want it to look like super filled in and whatnot over here. And again I'm blending these pine trees. I'm trying to maintain the detail between them. But sort of blend them together like that. I'm also going to have some some of those leafless trees on this side. They just add a really nice variation to the painting like I always say you can't have too many pine trees but when I started adding these these trees to paintings like they amplify a painting in a unique way. I do want to have another one coming up in front of the house here as well. Like a skinny like a tree without leaves not a pine tree. So it'll start around here. Perhaps I should have added a little bit of brown to that. What I'm going to do is add some like icy shadowy patches so I'm going to use blue for that. I'm going to have some coming from here. I'm going to have one around this tree. Random blue patch there. You just have a few random blue patches if you want. You can get creative here. I don't know why I added blue into the pine trees but whatever. I'm going to add some little black foliage or grass like it can be whatever you want it to be coming from some of those icy patches. Okay it's coming together now. Honestly I do not like these things. I don't know why I added so many especially this one ruining it for me. Nonetheless now you want to grab some something opaque and white. So I am grabbing my white acrylic paint but if you have white gouache or as I've said in previous tutorials whiteout works as well. Totally up to you. And we're first going to do the roof of our house here. So this entire right side of my roof is going to be covered with a delicate layer of snow. I painted a little window on top there as well. Okay next thing I'm going to do is put some of that snow on my more horizontally facing background are going to have snow. One it would be way too tedious to do that and two you don't want to ruin or not ruin but go over all those details that you painted on your pine trees. So what I'm doing which seems to work is I'm painting a few like lines or dots and then just going over it with my thumb and or my finger and it sort of mutes that white but it still keeps some of it so it looks like there's you know some sort of hint of white going on. I forgot I'm also going to add some snow at the base of my house. Okay so what I'm doing next is picking up a lot more pigment or sorry a lot more of the acrylic paint on my paintbrush and I'm adding a tiny bit of water because I'm gonna do that flicking technique to make it snow. So I'm just tapping another paintbrush on the paintbrush that has the acrylic paint and it releases some of that acrylic paint and makes it look like it's snowing and if not enough is coming off then just add a tiny bit more water and a tiny bit more acrylic paint. The looser that you hold the paintbrush the more splats you'll have I found. And if you're still not getting enough then by all means just go like pick up some of that acrylic paint and then dab them yourself or if you want bigger ones you can do that too. Bigger snowflakes I mean. I'd say that's about it. I hope you guys enjoyed this winter landscape tutorial. If you did please don't forget to subscribe, hit like on this video and I will see you in the next one.