Expressive Watercolor Tree Paintings

Hello everyone, welcome to a new series on my channel. As many of you know, we recently moved and while we're still in Scotland, we are now a little bit deeper in the highlands, surrounded by nature. And honestly, one of the things that sold me on this house was the surrounding forest. And as a huge bonus, we have this beautiful old tree in our garden. And winters here are long, cold, dark, and a little bit difficult to get through. So I'm especially happy that I can sit inside next to a radiator and sketch this beautiful tree anytime I want. This tree has become one of my muses and has really helped me get back into art after a very stressful move. And trees have always been one of my favorite subjects, so it's no wonder that this one really jumped out at me and has just been begging me to paint it. So as I said, this will be an ongoing series. I have no expectations or particular plans for this series, except that I'm sure you'll get to know this tree as well as I will in the coming years. And whenever I do a video about this, I will just add it to the playlist on my YouTube channel. And I'm sure some of you are wondering, how many ways can you possibly paint or draw one tree? But it's not just about capturing the likeness of the tree, it's about getting to know all the interesting little details. The mosses and the lichens and the birds that visit, how light dances through the branches across the trunk and the surrounding trees, and how different it looks covered in leaves in the summer or covered in snow in the winter. So there's a ton of variety just in this one little corner of my garden. And I'm also excited to play with lots of different materials, everything from graphite to watercolor, gouache, oil, pastels, just whatever I have, and use my tree as inspiration to learn the different materials. So yeah, speaking of materials, let's chat about what I'm using here. This little sketchbook is what I'm using as my nature journal around the house, around my garden. Basically sketching and painting whatever I see growing or, you know, as changes happen throughout the seasons. And the sketchbook itself is the Hanamula 100% cotton. It's actually the small A6 portrait size of my usual square, one that I use in a lot of my videos that I love. The paper is great, especially for mixed media, and I love the size of this one. I'll put a link in the description to a blog post with all the materials and specifics. I actually get asked a lot why I choose watercolor or gouache depending on what I'm doing, and there is no single answer. It completely comes down to the moment and the mood. The longer I paint with both watercolor and gouache, the more I see the very, very subtle nuanced differences in them. I find that when I use gouache, I tend to use it a little more thickly, and I layer up the opacity, whereas when I use watercolor, it's a very transparent medium, and I tend to let things just flow and bleed. And I find that I leave things a little bit more abstract, a little more wild perhaps on the page, and that's just something I love to do when I'm in a super playful mood. That's not to say I don't use my gouache in a playful way, I very much do, but it's just subtle differences I guess. And one of the more obvious differences is that gouache tends to sit a little bit heavier in the water, so it can spread and flow and bleed just like watercolor to an extent, but not quite as much. So again, when I really want things to bleed and flow and be really loose on the page, I tend to reach for watercolor. And for those of you who are curious, I am still using the same colors that I curated for my watercolor palette last year. I'm absolutely loving them. I have them in a larger studio palette as well as my little portable painter, and they're just a magnificent combination, especially for my type of landscapes. Okay, so I actually recorded this video over the course of many days, and each little session was just a different day, different mood. I wanted to do this again, but bigger and a little bit more detailed, but try to keep that loose, fresh feeling I get when I do those quick small sketches. And this is a challenge that I face a lot because I am often painting outside quickly and in a small sketchbook, and I end up capturing it in a very fresh way, and it is so difficult to to redo that at home in the studio. Not that I think it's necessary to, but it's just something that I'm working on. I like the idea of translating my little studies that I do outside to bigger works that I could maybe frame or even sell. But again, capturing it with the same loose, fresh feeling I have when I'm outside is... well, maybe it's impossible. I don't know. That's what I'm trying to discover. But luckily, I can see my tree from inside, and so I can set up my studio easel right by the window and look at it through the glass, almost like plein air, but from the comfort of my home. And I got really lucky this week because we had a whole afternoon of sunshine, which is pretty rare these days. So I planted myself there by the window and just painted my heart out. I was quickly reminded and humbled by the fact that the light this time of year stays really low in the sky and moves very, very quickly behind the hills. So I lost the light pretty fast, but I was able to see how it affected the color of the moss and made really interesting patterns across the bark and the branches. And I just did my best to enjoy capturing it and kind of capture it with that fresh feeling that I usually have when I'm outside. I hope you enjoyed the intro to this little series, and I really look forward to exploring this subject in the future with all sorts of different mediums. I hope you're all doing well, and I will see you again soon with another video. Take care.