How to Paint an English Cottage with Flowers in Watercolor with Graded Wash Technique

Good morning. An English cottage is great fun to paint, so I hope you give this one a try. You can download the outline page at Watson Watercolor for free. This tutorial focuses on the graded wash. Learning to do a graded wash will improve all of your watercolor painting. For colors, you're going to need a variety of greens for the foliage and the trees. You need a light, a medium and a dark. For building and walkway, we'll be using gray. The easiest way to paint a landscape is to work from back to front. So start with the sky. Mix a watery puddle of your blue. I'm using phthalo. And wet the sky area all the way down to the horizon line on the right. You want the top of the sky to have color, but it gets lighter as it goes down. If it doesn't blend, you can use a clean, just damp brush to smooth out the wash. But try to get it wet enough that the paint spreads out without brush strokes. That's the key, just using enough water and enough paint. While the sky is still wet, add some light, far away trees on the right side. You can mix your green plus a little gold or brown. Touch your mix to the bottom of the wet area to see how much it spreads. If it doesn't spread more than you want, you can start painting. If it's spreading too much, you can let it dry for a few minutes. If you start at the bottom of the wet area, the bottom will stay a little bit darker. And then you can use your brush to pull the paint up and make it lighter on the top of the far away trees. I like variety, so I'm putting in a little darker area next to the building and maybe a little bit of brown. For the top tree area on the left, I want it to be lighter, more yellow-green where it meets the sky. And then it's going to gradually get darker as it goes down towards the bottom. This is a graded wash, and this is great practice. Use your leftover puddle of blue to make a medium value green. Just add yellow or gold. You'll also need a puddle of dark green. I use perylene green, but you could mix phthalo blue plus brown. Start with lighter green near the sky. Paint carefully around the chimney and the top of the house. And leave skippers. Just miss some places in the painting. Think of holes where the birds fly through. The flowers are going to have a lot of skippers, so if you add some up here at the top, it matches the rest of it very well. As I come down the side of the chimney, I start with the darker color, painting around the next tree. And then I kind of blend the two colors together. The tree shape is a graded wash from light at the top to dark at the bottom. Now remember, you don't want a straight line on the edges of a tree. Try for a leafy-looking edge. Let's do another graded wash for practice. Skip down to the next area and paint it the same way. Light yellow-green around the top edges, and then get darker towards the bottom. Mine isn't very dark, so I add a little more and blend the dark in with a damp brush. And here's another bush on the right. The sun's coming from the top left, so your bushes are going to look more realistic if they're light on the top and dark on the bottom. Are you getting the hang of it? While those areas dry, let's work on the building shadows. Get out some gray or mix a gray with blue and brown. Wet the area on the right side of the front of the house and paint a dark shadow in the top corner, and then add another shadow under the eave. You want your shadows to have soft edges, so you can work wet-on-wet or wet-on-dry and then soften the edge. Can you see how the dark shadows give the building a sense of depth? You can paint the rest of the side of the building with a very light gray. That's the same color as you used for the shadows, but just add more water. I'm painting the inside of my windows with a yellow-orange color for a cheery feeling that someone is home. While all that dries, paint the field beside the house. It can be yellow, gold, light green, anything you like, but be sure to paint around the flower stalks. We're going to be painting around a lot of things in this picture, so a small brush works for most of it. For the grass at the bottom right, paint it with yellow and green. Use dark brown to paint the dirt under the flowers along the path. Dark brown can also paint the wood around the small windows. For the two front windows, you just want a shadow line on the inside, so paint a dark brown line under the top and the left side, and add a dark brown shadow to the left side of the door. Switching back to the gray, paint the stone wall with light gray and add a gray shadow to the left side of the roof. With the shadows in place, the house is really shaping up. I'm painting my door brown, but yours could be any color you like. Red would be a nice color, too. I'm adding a wreath in the middle of mine, which I'm painting around. Now for the roof. The roof is going to be brown with a little black or dark gray for interest. Paint the small side of the roof first. That's going to be the darkest. It's more in the shadow. Then mix a big puddle of light brown and a smaller puddle of dark brown. The left side of the roof is just brown with a bit of shadow color near the right edge of the chimney. For the large area of the roof, you may want to use a large wash brush. Go right over the side area again and paint the top two-thirds brown. Then add dark brown to the bottom or add a little of your dark gray. And you can use a small brush to blend the colors softly together. While you have the gray, paint the stonework around the door with a medium gray. And to create steps, paint the front of the steps with the same color, leaving the top of the steps white. The walkway can get a little bit of gray, but you want to keep it very light. The last gray item is the front of the house and the chimney. I'm imagining this cottage to be mostly white, so you can leave yours white if you want or just add the lightest hint of gray. The chimney is lighter gray on the front and darker on the right side. Or you could paint your chimney red. It's up to you. Last, add a shadow under the left eave and a shadow on the left side of the stone door. If you want your stone wall to have more details, you could outline some of the stones with the darker gray also. A few more greens and we'll be ready for the flowers. Now the tree we skipped beside the left side of the house is going to be a graded wash. Light at the top, light green at the top, down to dark at the bottom. For a graded wash, you need to work just wet enough that the colors will flow and blend. And getting that perfect mixture of paint and water just takes practice. Finally, we can put on some flowers. I'm starting with some roses around the top of the door. When you paint flowers, don't do individual little spots. Be sure to put in masses of flowers with only a few individual spots. While that dries, I'm adding the green around the window. Paint some masses of yellow flowers in the front of the house. Paint the hollyhocks with red or pink. I'm just doing some circles. I'm adding more greenery beside the flowers, but feel free to add as many flowers as you want. Now personally, I like to have three areas of the same color. Like if I put in red flowers, I'll put in three areas of red flowers. So I'm adding a red flower mass to the left to balance the other two. See how nice that looks? Paint light color, leave some skippers, and then you can go back and dot in some darker red while that's still wet for variety. Now that we have yellow and red, we need one more flower color. I think I'll paint mine with blue flowers, or you could add some purple flowers. Be sure you don't make your flower masses too solid. Leave skippers. That little bit of white around the bright colors just keeps the colors exciting. Since we only have one area of yellow so far, I'm going to add two more on this side. So I have a blue and a blue-purple, and my last area of blue or purple is going to go here on the back. Once your flower colors are dry, you can work some green around the flowers. But once again, leave plenty of space. Less solid areas will look better. The greenery in the very front, I'm making it a bright yellow-green and going more to medium as I move toward the left. For your values around the flowers, don't paint a medium green beside a medium red flower, or they just won't show up. You want dark green around the medium flowers to make them pop. I'm adding one darker area in the front just to add more impact to that light space. Once all this dries, I'm going to add some white baby's breath with opaque white, and I'll probably use a black ink pen to outline the roof and the window edges, and maybe some casement lines in the windows. Lines and shadows make objects pop, like this wreath on the door. Just a couple small half-circle shadows and it pops out. How did your cottage turn out? Do you see how the quiet areas like the roof and the background trees help balance all the busyness of the flowers? That's one reason that English cottages are so pretty, and so much fun to paint. Happy painting!