A 30 Minute Watercolour, Paint a Bluebird

Animals. I love petting animals. It really is one of my favourite subjects without question. And I've recently, as a lot of you know, I've just put the finishing touches to this book here. Animals in Watercolour. So if you've got your pre-orders in place, well done to you. There it is. This is the advanced copy, so this is me giving you a bit of an exclusive sneaky peek at this. Now this has took two years to put this book together. So hopefully you've got yours pre-ordered. Lots of you have. So that's the sketch. If you're having a go at this at a later stage, remember I'm doing this as a demo, which means I'm going to paint the thing very quickly. That's the outline, that's the sketch. Whatever you want to call it, that's what it is. And it's basically a case of just kind of whizzing through and working at my own little speed. And bluebirds are very pretty birds. Birds, you know, you've got your sort of blues and your sort of browns, your tan colours in there to talk about as well. Now I've got it sketched in. I've got it sketched in on a sheet of watercolour paper here. This is my own personal paper. This particular surface here is a quarter imperial, which is roughly 11 by 15 inch. Now it doesn't matter how big it is. I know people say size and all this stuff, but it doesn't matter honestly. And this is a bloke saying this. The size doesn't matter when it comes to these kind of things, whatever. What does matter is what materials you use. Let's have a look at the palette. We've got the palette here. This is my palette. This was the original design of my palette. Matthew Pond Music League palette. Been around for ages, this one. And it's still going strong, this one. This is the prototype from the factory quite a few years ago now. Natural colours, which are my own sort of blend of colours. But a couple of colours that aren't part of that range is going to be natural. Sorry, start again, rewind. Cerulean blue or cerulean blue. We want to be using some cerulean blue, okay. And I've got some white as well. So opaque white, natural white or gouache. Or goulash, whatever you want to call it. Other colours from the natural range, natural grey, natural blue. Skin tones are going to feature as well. And the greens, and the greens as well. So that's the actual colours. Brushes wise, I've got just a few five brushes that I'm going to probably use. Large one, size 20, size 10, size 6. Matthew Palmer lift out brush. And one of the favourites for me, which of course is the beautiful branch and detailer. Which is just the perfect tool for doing that gorgeous fine work. Bags of water, kitchen roll, it's all happening. I can smell the excitement in the room. And we're pretty much going to get stuck in. It's about bloody time, come on. Time is money. Chase is coming on soon, come on, quick. Come on. What is the chase anyway? What is it? What is the chase? I don't get it. Anyway, forget the chase. Yes, they are pinball machines. Someone's just asked what they are. It's a pinball machine. Revenge for Mars and Star Wars. Boys toys in the corner, yes. This is a microphone here. Yeah. Just in case you're thinking. Yes, so another question come through. Because we are live here folks. And if it's live, you never know what's going to happen. We are broadcasting live. Live from Derbyshire. Today we are painting a bluebird in watercolours. Live, live. Live on BBC. Live on Facebook. Come on. The roast chicken is going cold. I'm just going to sit here and talk nonsense for half an hour. I'm quite good at that. That's what I was going to say. Someone just dropped me an email. Yes, okay. So if you do want to get the animal book, folks. You actually need to get yourself on to watercolour TV. Click on the link for art books. And you'll see it. Pre-orders shipping late Feb. Tipping point. You're missing tipping point. Tipping point. You can smell the stew cooking. Yeah. I suppose I should probably start painting then, should I? Here we go. Let's put the background in first, folks. Come on. So nice big brush. Nice big brush. I'm going to wet it. It's cotton paper, this. Cotton paper is like a cotton T-shirt. When you go out for your morning jog. Oh, yes, every day. When you go out for your morning run. And your cotton shirt, T-shirt absorbs the sweat. A beautiful thought. But that's kind of the way that cotton works on a watercolour surface. If your paper's cotton, the first water that goes on is going to absorb. It's going to soak up the moisture. Is it me or is it moist? Give it a couple of coats of water. You need to. You can't not. Coverage. Complete coverage. Then we'll go into the palette. We'll pick a few colours for the background. Let's go for some light green. Natural green light. Beautiful colour. It's up to you what colours you use here, of course. But I want to put some of that in the background. And what we're going to do here is we're going to twist. That brings back memories, does it? Twisting the background colours in. Now, being a little bit cautious around bird. Spot your paint. Let it spread. You've all seen photographs of birds, close-ups in the background. It's a little bit out of focus. That's kind of what we're going for here. That's the vibe that we're going to go for here, folks, okay? Twisting the paint into the picture. Into the wet paint. I'm working on ever so slight tilt. Now, that's light green. Natural green light. If you're mixing your own colours, good luck. No, I'm joking. If you're mixing your own colours, lemon yellow and blue, then what we need is the darker green, which is a yellow-blue with a touch of red. Natural green, this one's called. Designed for replicating nature. Live on Facebook. What we're going to do is bring this in. Can't go wrong with this, can you? Eh? Just make a mess on a piece of paper. Oh, we can do that. Just let it sort of twist in. Let it become part of the picture. Moist is a good word. Especially for watercolour artists. Beautiful. Now, I'm just allowing all this to spread, so I'm sort of zigzagging the paint a little bit. The light's reflecting at the minute. Just going to bring in another colour, which is going to be some skin tone dark. Some dark skin tone, which is not necessarily for portraits. It's just like the Mediterranean. There's a light and dark, this one being the dark. Lovely colour, this beautiful colour. Bring some of that in. Make it become part of the background. Spread the paint. Just had a few bookings come in, folks, for the workshop on, this workshop you can see at the bottom of the screen. Saturday, 16th of Jan, tropical beach with turquoise sea, crashing waves, colourful boat palm trees. If you're not booked into that, you need to give it a go, folks. There's no better way to escape the real world than doing a Mr. Palmer workshop, a live workshop. I don't see you, but you see me. It's like one-on-one tuition. I love that colour. Just nicely mixes in. Beautiful. Becomes part of the background, smashing. Okay, I'm going to give that a very swift dry. Now, I'll just mention, folks, and I say this every time, but in this particular studio, there's quite a lot of noise from the heating system, the computer, and all sorts of things. So we have a little filter on. Cheers, having some gin there. There's a little filter on the program that cuts out background noise, which means that when this hair dryer... I'm just going to lean over here. When the hair dryer goes on, it goes quiet. It goes quiet. So I'll tell you a joke, if you can lip read. There we go, folks. That's nice and dry. That's nice and dry-ish, dry enough. So I'm going to paint in the bird now. We're going to go straight in here then, get a little bit closer in for you. First of all, a size 10 brush, and we're going to take some dark skin tone and some light skin tone. So we've got light skin tone here, and this one's dark skin tone here. All these are available online, folks, if you like the colours. And we're going to mix and match with a size 10, and we're going to go straight in. Now, this goes right up towards the beak here, so I'm using the light skin first, but it wouldn't have mattered which one, to be fair. Bring it round. Bluebirds have this wonderful kind of sort of red, rusty sort of colour for the chest, and this goes right down back to the light skin. There's no particular order. Rotating the board makes sense. Does it not? Bring that over. Follow the wing. Love that background. It's nice and soft. Beautiful paper, this cotton paper, right down towards the bottom. And what we'll do is we'll clean the brush out, and we'll give that a bit of a, a little bit of a soften as well, okay? So we're going to soften the colours just a touch. So at this point, cleaning the brush really well. Wipe it off on the tissue a few times, and we're going to use water to ever so gently spread and soften the colour. And also at the top here, just lightly skimming the edge. So that's literally just that first colour. Now, down here is light, or lighter colours. So what we'll do with that is we'll come back to that. We're now on to blue. Now, the blue I'm going to be using is actually a cerulean blue, as I mentioned at the beginning. Now, this is very much a light blue, cerulean. It's not a colour I tend to use a lot of, but for animal paintings, it's a nice one to have hanging around. So we'll take some cerulean, cerulean, however you pronounce it. It doesn't really matter, does it? But we're going to mix it with a touch of natural blue, so it's not quite as bright as cerulean, because that's a little bit too bright for this one. Now, we're going to work over the top of the head with a little gap. Still using a size 10 brush for this one. I mean, if you look at the brush, you can see it's nice and pointy, which is going to give me lots of detail. Working around the eye, beautiful, and then coming over, rotating the board as we go along. So I want the light catching the back of the head. Yeah, but where's your light coming from? Bring it in, down there. Can't go wrong with this. Bring it over, down the back. A few other colours to creep in later. Anticipation's half the fun. Now, I'm just going to add a little bit more natural blue, which is a standard sort of blue, to your cerulean, so you get a slight darker blue. Let's turn this that way. As we come down the edge of the wing here. There we go. Now, all this will get blended in in a minute. Notice I've left a bit of a gap, so it's not quite to the edge. And once we get lower down, the tail feather, feathers, has some of that blue in it. Now, all this is just blank colours, very crude at this point. But then here on this sort of back edge, we need to bring some grey into play. Now, grey's an interesting colour, is it? Could have fooled me. You get 50 shades of grey, and I'm going to use shade number 17. And this one is natural grey, not Payne's Grey. And this is going to go right to the edge, so you get some darkness coming in, the darkness that surrounds it. Little flicks of grey in there. Okay? Clean the brush. Wipe it on the tissue. They all look drinking while I'm painting. Amazing. I'm just going to use water here, and smooth all this in, rotating that board. Work it all in, keeping that lightness across the back of the head. Now, this is literally just the, you know, the sort of starting point of this thing. Smooth it all in. But we've got a nice kind of coverage already. Paint there. It's nice just to sort of grab extra bits of that cerulean. You can use it quite strongly. It's not opaque, but it's not far off cerulean blue, so you can bring it in, and you can use it to add a bit of extra texture. Like, for example, around the eye, you get a lot more colour surrounding that eye. And even if we work down to a six brush, get close in, grab some of that grey, and I'm going to rotate that brush across some kitchen paper so we get a nice point on it. And what I want to do here is get the lovely dark that always surrounds the bird's eyes. It's like a... It's almost like a sort of flash, isn't it, you know? Like a dark flash, and it kind of comes around and it goes off to a point, like so. And then there's little bits of dark that creep, little flicks, and the little bits come down here on the underneath of the beak, across the top of the beak as well. So you're painting some distant white clips, and bringing some water there, but that's kind of giving us the starting point for the beak there, yeah? This is just natural grey, and there's a few little flicks of that just randomly around here and there, not a huge amount. Down here on the back of the wing, there's quite a bit of this coming in, so there's little bits of grey around here on some of the edges of some of the feathers, and a little piece of grey to get that sense of depth. Throw in some grey, imagine the tail feather is underneath, and then you can put that shadow in, that grey, and then with a damp brush just spread it down. Beautiful! And then we'll take some grey, let's come back a little bit so we can see what we're playing at, and then we'll get the grey, which is going to come down here, get the shadow, water, tissue, bless you, and then we'll use water to blend that over the top, and that will give us the shadow. That's giving us a starting point, a very simple, it's got a bit of a Kingfisher vibe, hasn't it, this? I suppose, I think bluebirds have got a bit of a Kingfisher vibe going off to them, if I'm honest. Definitely. This is interesting, because the leg here is going to wrap around this. Of course, there's plenty of photographs of birds online, so if you go onto the internet, on Google or whatever, and just type in birds, and see what comes up, that's probably a bad idea, actually. Type in flying birds. No, that probably won't work either. Well, type in birds, and then after about 15 pages of things that aren't birds, you'll probably find a picture of a bird, and then you've cracked it. So, nice and dark here. I was sat watching Jurassic Park with my little boy Jacob today, so we know all about birds being related to dinosaurs. It's a Velociraptor. Let's get close in here. This number six bush is nice. It's got a nice bit of detail using the grey. Using the grey. We can start to pull in some of the shadows on the feet, the claws, whatever they are. Just a little bit. And then just using a bit of water to smooth away. We'll put the claws in later. This is just giving us a starting point. Let's get the eye in, shall we? Beautiful. Get the eye in. Very strong grey for the eye. Darkest colour we're going to be using, to be honest. We're going to get some of that in. I like to sort of rotate the brush through the fingers or through the tissue because that will give you a point. If your brush is not pointed, there's no point using it. It's like a script, isn't it? We're going to work it in, trying to leave a... It gets a bit tricky here, but trying to leave a thin line. Rotate it around again. Just going to use a bit of water on the brush there then. Give it a soften. So we've kind of got the eye in place, or at least the starting point of the eye, which is good. Like I say, the darker the better when it comes to these kind of surrounding colours. I'm going to pop quite a few shadows into this thing now, including sort of down in the wing. I want to make sure that there's the little nostril here. Always get one of those on a bird. There it is. Nice and dark around the eye. Lovely. Then sort of down dark here. This comes down into the head. All this will get softened in. A lovely dark separation under that wing. You need to be really getting the grey quite heavy at this point, and don't be afraid to do that. Turn it on the side for this, because obviously there's going to be a lift. A very rich colour. Clean that brush on the tissue a few times. Soften it up. Now if you're thinking, this is working a bit quick for me, I fancy doing one of these virtual workshops, but this is a bit speedy. Well, this is a demo, folks, and you've got to think this is very different to a workshop. A workshop I'll do a bit, stop and give you time, and sort of recap it several times. I'm sure people that are watching this demo, is anybody actually watching this demo? Yes, a few. People that are watching can actually sort of back me up on this. It's very steady. It's a very relaxed process. You're not rushing. I love that shadow down there, beautiful shadow. Let's drop in a couple of little extra, almost like little ticks. Ticks? You don't get ticks on birds, or do you? You might get ticks on birds, I'm not sure, but these aren't ticks like ticks. These are ticks as in ticks. Tick shapes, to give a little bit of feather detail. Bit of feathery stuff going on. Ticks, and then a bit of water on the brush. Just going to skim over them. Brush is pretty much dry at this point. Skimming over, softening, blending. Come back to that beak, because we've popped a shadow up there, if you remember, in grey. I'm going to give that a bit of a soften. Making sure the top is nice and dark as well. Lovely. We can sort of pinch the brush a little bit at this point, and we can use this to add some feather markings. I don't know how that's coming across on the camera, because when Facebook receives a live video, it kind of converts it into its own video, if you like, so sometimes it compresses the colours a little bit. It doesn't always look exactly the same as what you see here. But that's quite effective. You know, that nice bit of shadow. Let's just zoom back a little bit, folks. See how everything is shaping up, can't we? How are we looking? Lovely jubbly. Let's get close in here. Let's pop in some of these little rings on the velociraptors. I don't know if you've painted a velociraptor, do you? Shall we do a T-Rex in watercolour? Live demonstration. You'd watch it, wouldn't you? Hey, would you watch it? Come on, would you watch it? Tell me. Would you watch it if I did a live T-Rex? We've got a live modelling, live T-Rex here. Would you watch it? Hey? Yeah? No? Maybe. Anyway, we've got a stick. A stick? A stick. What's brown and sticky? A stick. Let's use the grey and let's use some dark skin. I'd watch it as well, to be fair. Julie wouldn't watch it. Maureen would watch it. I'd watch a T-Rex painting. I would. I'm going to pop some shadows on this sticky, sticky stick. How about a pterodactyl? It's free. You'd watch it, wouldn't you, if it's free? If it's free, I'll have it. Pterodactyl and watercolour, eh? I've used some grey and some dark skin. I'm just kind of blending this in. Yes, you could use your fantastic brushes, absolutely, 100%. If you've got those new fantastics, the perfect tool for doing the feather. A lot easier than splaying the bristles, that's for sure. You've got it all happening there. I'll come back and pop a little bit more work on once it's dry down there. But we're just going to leave that to sort of disappear off at this stage. So that's just a bit of background. But it does need a little bit of time to dry before we progress on that one. So if we look back, we can see we're taking a nice bit of shape. I do need to give this thing a good blast with a dryer. So you can have a sip of gin. I'm going to grab a hairdryer. Remember, when I use this, the audio goes off. I'll tell you another joke. Is anybody here? I hope not. It's a bit blue, like this bird. Right, okay, close in. A bearded chuff. Okay, we're getting there, folks. We've got some dry tissue here. And we have a extra large lift-out brush for a few highlights here and there. Now, when you're all dashing out and stocking up on toilet roll in the first UK lockdown, I dashed out and stocked up on kitchen roll. Not really, but I do use a lot of it for painting, that is. A few highlights, folks, and highlights are always good. We're going to start off by working on the edge. Again, all the products we use in here, look how that lifts that up instantly. Beautiful. Down here as well, look at that. Right on that edge. And just inside the wing, every so often, we're going to drop in some lovely highlights. Down into those tail feathers. Just drop in a few. There you go. I love that. Really makes a difference. And then even around the head, not a huge amount around there, to be fair, but just a little bit would be quite nice, just to sort of go around this back edge here. There we go. Which part of the world do you get bluebirds in? I don't think I've ever seen one. Do we get them over here in the UK? No idea. You tell me. That's put some lovely highlights in. I just want to work a little bit more on this sort of twig stick with the grey. Just going to pop in some shadows and various things. Doesn't want a huge amount on there, to be fair. Just a little bit. Not the main focus, but it is obviously there, so we need to do something about it. Sort of directional strokes of your brush would work for that. I think they're American birds, aren't they? Are they? Are they American birds, bluebirds? You tell me. Nice. That gives it interest. Now, I want to get really close in, folks, to these claws here for the minute, because for this I need to change brushes. I want to go for this real fine brush, and a very thick, strong, natural grey. I'm using the branching detail brush here, and we're going to get some claws coming around. Most birds' claws are very, very long things, because obviously they're designed for digging and getting the worms or whatever, these things. Very, very definite colour here. Beautiful. Nice. So you can really see them kind of wrapping around. And then just while we're in the wings there, I know we're getting towards the end of this thing now, folks, but I'm just going to pop in those wonderful little bits of detail that always make the difference, little lines and little flicks of grey. Back to the eye briefly. Little spots of dark around the eye. Lovely. Now, I'm just going to grab some white paint here, folks, natural white or something similar. And literally what I'm going to do with the white is just put it on a bit of tissue, because I have a habit of forgetting that I've put it in the palette and then end up mixing it with other colours and it all gets a bit chalky, if you know what I mean by that. So just taking a little bit of white, and on those claws I want to put some white into them, just on the edges. And then in the wings, little white flicks, just on the tips of some of those wing feathers. Slight white on the edge. Just those little teeny-weeny bits of white. Less is more when it comes to this. Just little teeny-weeny little bits. You could use gouache or even goulash. Now, on those claws, just a little tiny bit of blending. I've put the wrong date on, haven't I? You know, it's been a long day. Should have put 2021 there instead. Geek. Anyway, I'm living in the past. I think we're trying to forget about 2020, aren't we, really? Anyway, listen, thank you for watching that demo. A few things to mention. Please head over to the Facebook page. Hit like, Matthew Palmer Artist. If you're watching this on YouTube, if you could, give me a subscribe and give me a thumbs up and give me the notification bell on the YouTube channel, which is just, of course, Matthew Palmer.