ATTENTION BEGINNERS! 🤩 Looks Advanced… But This Watercolor Is Shockingly Easy to Paint!

If you think watercolor has to be complicated to look impressive then think again. Whether you're brand new to watercolor or just looking for a fun fresh project this tutorial is for you. I am going to walk you through how to create a textured dimensional piece that looks far more complicated than it actually is and that is the magic of it. So what are we waiting for? Let's get started. Now really quickly before we jump into the painting My parents gave me something a little while back that I thought would be fun to show you. I've loved drawing and coloring and painting ever since I can remember and my parents have saved this little self-portrait that I did in kindergarten. So my friends this is where it all started. I absolutely loved the idea of long hair, pretty fingernails, dangly earrings and high-heeled shoes. I was very much a girly girl. I loved tea parties and dressing up so this is of course how I portrayed myself in this cute little drawing. And for being only five years old it's not bad. My fingers do have six fingers on each hand but you know who's counting. I even have my name here at the bottom written in the wrong direction but I thought this was pretty cute and it would be fun to show you where my artistic skills began. Anyway that was kind of silly and off topic but it was kind of fun to see an early drawing creation that I had. But enough of that let's go ahead and get to our painting today. I'm just going to pull out my supplies really quickly. Here is my watercolor palette. Now I often have it facing in the other direction but we are going to be using some very neutral colors today. Actually you can use whatever colors you want but this is what I'm choosing to use. So I am going to turn my palette around to this side for this piece. Then of course I have some clean water and a paper towel and then some watercolor paper. Now I've cut my paper down to the size of eight inch by eight inch today just to do something a little bit different than normal. And one of the good things about this painting is that we do not need to have a fancy drawing. You don't even need one of my outlines for this. You could totally paint this free-handed if you want to. If you do like to have somewhat of a guideline then I do have a really simple drawing that I can show you. So here we go. First off all we need are some center oval lines for where we want our dandelions to be placed and then off from that oval line I'm going to draw some little lines surrounding that for where the dandelion seeds will stem off from. But even that's not necessary and you can do as many or as few of these dandelions as you want. I'm just going to do two for this piece today. I am planning to do a really fun texture in the background that is really going to be a big feature to this piece. So I want to make sure to save some room for that. Then after we have our oval centers we can add in some stem lines for that if you want to and that's all you need if you want some sort of a guideline. I drew this pretty dark so that you would be able to see it on here but I probably am going to lighten this up just a little bit with a kneaded eraser just so it doesn't stand out too much in the end. All right one more thing that I'm going to do today if you've watched many of my tutorials you know that I usually just tape my paper right down to my table. That just helps me keep from moving my paper around too much in my videos. But for the technique that we're going to be doing today I'm actually going to be taping my paper onto a separate board or a different platform. I just have this little plastic palette here that I think will work. So just whatever you have on hand anything that can be movable. So I'll just go ahead and tape this down with some artist tape. We're going to be using a lot of water and paint on the background of this piece today so it's probably going to cause some warping and this tape can help with that. And I will do my best to try not to move my painting out of the camera shot. Also I didn't realize it at the time but I have a little light that I shine on my table so I won't get shadows as I paint so that you'll be able to see what I'm doing better. But later on I realized that that light was reflecting on the plastic palette so I do turn that off later after I realize that. And it is a bit distracting for now but we'll just have to deal with it so sorry about that. Now the last thing that we need to pull out are some brushes to use for this piece. Let's start out with a larger brush that we can put the background wash on with. This is a round number 10 size and we also need a small thin brush to use for some detail work later. So I'll also pull out a number one rigger brush as well. And just as a side note these brushes are available and back in stock so I will leave a link for those in the description of this video along with links and information for most of the products that you see me using today just in case you're interested in looking into anything more. Now just for fun I did do a quick little practice piece with my idea so I could see if it would even work. So here is a little bit of what I had in mind. I think one of my favorite things about this piece is the texture that we're going to be doing in the background. I'm sure you've seen this done many times before. This is a sea salt texture background. I've wanted to do something with this for a couple of months now because at Christmas time we had a family member give us this awesome Baja mineral sea salt. I'm sure this isn't what they thought I was going to be using it for but I did test this out on my practice piece and it worked amazing. So I'm excited to use this for this painting today but if you have any other kind of sea salt it should probably work just as well. I wouldn't necessarily recommend table salt though. It does do a cool texture but it doesn't do the spreading type of texture like we're looking for today. One other supply that we need for this piece today is some white opaque watercolor paint or you could use gouache paint if that's what you have. We just need something that's more opaque that we can paint on top of our background with later. So I'm going to pull a little bit of that out and put that on my tray and you might be wondering if you could do this painting using some masking fluid instead of the white paint. The answer is yes you probably could. The reason I chose to use white paint today though for this is because that way I can build up layer after layer of the paint and that's going to give the look that I'm going for which is going to turn out much better than if I were to use the masking fluid. But if masking fluid is all you have then you can feel free to give that a try too. You're going to want to put the masking fluid on first before this background color though. All right let's go ahead and get some colors onto our tray. I'm going to start with some raw sienna and I want these colors to be pretty dark and concentrated. I'm using quite a bit of pigment here with just enough water to keep it very movable and fluid. Next I'll pull out some burnt umber again keeping it very dark and concentrated. Now let's mix up a really nice dark color by using burnt umber mixed with some ivory black. That gave us a really nice dark brown color and I'm also going to pull out some pure ivory black here as well. All right now that we have our colors ready let's go ahead and take some water and we're just going to fill and cover our entire paper with a layer of water. Try to keep it as even as you can so we don't get pools or puddles of it though. It might help to use a larger brush or some people even just use like a little spritz bottle or something so just whatever works best for you. All right good enough. Now that we have the water layer on here I think we can go ahead and start dropping in some color. Let's work our way from the lighter colors to the darker colors. So I'll start with some of that raw sienna first and start placing that up in the top corners of the page and maybe down the side a little ways. That looks pretty good so let's go ahead and start adding in some of the burnt umber next. Now I really want the corner areas to be a little bit darker so I'm going to place some of this paint color into the corners as well as the area where I know my dandelions are going to be painted. The darker we can get that background area around the dandelion heads the better our dandelions are going to stand out and we're going to have a much better contrast in the end. So I'll just blend this color into the raw sienna the best I can. All right moving on to our next color we've got a really dark brown. I'm going to put this in the middle area again right around where the dandelions are going to be painted in later and then I'm going to move this paint color down towards the bottom of the page. And lastly here at the very bottom we'll go ahead and add in some of that pure ivory black to finish this off. I hope you are enjoying my tutorial so far. I've been really excited to share this one. It's really striking it's very unique but it's also very easy to do. So if you find you are enjoying my painting and teaching style today I hope you will subscribe to my channel if you haven't already so you don't miss out on any of my new and upcoming weekly tutorials. Now this looks pretty good. I might even out some of these colors just a little bit more or maybe add a touch more paint here and there if I feel like it needs it. You'll have to be the judge of what your painting needs but this is where the separate board that the paper is taped on comes in handy. We can actually pick up that board and tip and turn our paper around and that's just going to allow that water and paint to spread a little bit better and blend together more smoothly and naturally. Okay that looks good enough I think. When you feel happy with how your background color looks and while it is still wet and that's important it does still need to be wet. We're going to take some of our sea salt and sprinkle a little bit of that on our page here and there. You can put it wherever you want. I'm kind of trying to focus it a little bit where it makes sense like maybe going around the dandelions where the heads are going to be but I wouldn't stress too much about that. Anywhere you put this is going to look really neat. Now also if you've watched many of my tutorials you know that I feel impatient when I'm waiting for things to dry so I usually end up pulling out my hair dryer to speed up the drying process a little bit. Today is not one of those days. You do not want to speed up the drying process. You want to let that sea salt sit and do its thing. By letting it sit it is going to create a really neat texture but it works a little bit slowly so you have to be patient today. But watching the process is really so cool and a little insight to me I have a fun pac-man arcade game that I got for Christmas. I put it here in my studio so while I sit here waiting for my paint to dry I just go and play a little bit of pac-man. Now I'm coming back in here really quickly. My paper has started to dry. My salt has started to spread but my paper is still pretty wet so I do need to let it dry more. Also this is the point where I noticed that my light was really shining and putting a big glare on my palette so I did turn the light off at this point. But I wanted to come back in here and show you how cool the process is in between waiting for it to finish drying. It's really kind of like magic and as you can see it felt like I didn't put a lot of salt on here initially but look at how it's spreading out. It looks like I put a lot on here. I guess my goal with this texture was to try to make it look like a whole bunch of little seeds floating around in the background. Okay after playing a little bit more pac-man I am coming back in here just to check on my painting. It seems like it's pretty dry at this point. Sometimes when you start removing the salt then it can feel a little bit wet underneath. So just check it really carefully and see if it's dry enough. But once as it is you can start rubbing off that salt with your fingers to remove it. Now my studio door connects right to outside so I'm just going to pick up this little palette here and go throw this leftover salt outside really quick and then I think we can paint in our dandelions. But doesn't this look so cool? Isn't that salt texture so neat? I just love what it's done to this piece. I only pulled out two brushes at the beginning of this painting but at this point I realized I probably needed another brush, a smaller round brush, so I'm going to pull out a number three round really quickly so I can use it to paint in the center part of the dandelion as well as the stem. I'm also realizing that because I drew my pencil outline on here really light and my paint is dark I actually can't see my pencil lines anymore so I guess I'm just going to make it up as I go. But I'll just take some of that dark brown paint that's already on our tray and I'll paint that oval shape in for where we want the dandelion centers to be. Now I'm kind of leaving a bit of an opening in the center of this sort of where the lighter color can show through. This is optional in fact I think I might even come back in here and show you how you can lighten that up or take some of that paint off to make it look even better in just a minute. Now that we have both of the centers of the dandelions painted on we can paint in the stem next. You can use that brown color that's already on your tray if you like. I think I'm going to pull out a little bit of olive green just to change things up a little bit. So maybe what I'll do is I'll start out with some of the dark brown right at the top of the dandelion head and then as I start to move downward I'll grab some of that olive green and finish the stem off with that. This way I can get sort of a gradient of color where it's nice and dark right up at the top and that fades out to the lighter green at the bottom. Okay good enough let's switch over to the number one thin rigger brush now and I'll take a little bit of that dark brown paint once again and just paint in some nice thin lines that go all the way around the center part of the dandelion for where the seeds are going to stem off from. We'll be adding in some lighter color in here as well but this is going to represent the shadow parts. Now while we kind of let that dry I'm going to go ahead and show you how you can lighten up the center part of the dandelion and give it a little bit more of a highlight. I've kind of lost some of my light color in there but all we have to do is take a brush get a little bit of water in the bristles and then rub that water in the center part of the dandelion head then use the paper towel and dab the water and the color off and look at what a nice highlight we've just created. Okay now comes the fun part let's pull out that rigger brush once again and water down some of this opaque titanium white color paint that we have and we're going to start just painting in some thin lines that can go all the way around this outer edge along with those dark lines that we already have painted. We're going to kind of paint these in between those though we don't want to totally lose that dark color. Perfect now it's time to start painting in the seeding heads or the dandelion fluff so I'm going to again take some of that white paint and the rigger brush it is a little bit more watered down for this first time around we are going to sort of be creating layers but then I'll just take this paint and use several lines all connecting to the center spot here that can represent one of the little seedlings. I will go ahead and paint several of these around this outside edge of the dandelion head I'm kind of starting in the middle area of where the dandelion head is going to be and then I'm going to work my way around but something else that's nice about having this painting on a separate board or a palette or something is that you can turn your painting around and it makes it a little bit more convenient to paint in some of these. Once as I kind of have a circular shape of these dandelion seeds going all the way around the flower head I can come back in here and start layering on more I'll put some closer to the center of the dandelion as well as some farther out really at this point we're just shaping our dandelion head to make it large and fluffy and nice and round as I continue layering the paint I am going to make it a little bit thicker and more concentrated as I go so that the paint stands out better and has some more bright colors right up in the front this is really going to create a fun layering technique and like I say this is something that the masking fluid can't do and there we have our first dandelion it looks really cool I did lose a little bit of that darkness around the center so I might add in a few more dark lines so that that'll show up again and then I'm going to go ahead and paint in the second dandelion head in the exact same way as this first one a lot of this just comes down to the look of it how you want things to go what you want your painting to look like you can add a lot of fluff you can have a small amount of fluff you can even have a section on the dandelion that doesn't have any fluff at all just whatever you want to try so all right I think that finishes up the second dandelion here this looks really neat this is one of my favorite pieces now so on my practice piece I thought it would be fun to have maybe a few dandelion seeds like floating in the air kind of like they're floating from the dandelion heads I wasn't sure if I liked that or not so I decided not to put it on this particular piece but if you feel like that would be a fun addition or element to your painting feel free to add that in but I think that's actually it for this painting today I really love how it turned out and I hope you give it a try sometime thank you so much for joining me today I hope you had some fun and maybe even learn something new we'll see you again next week with another fun painting but until then have a great day and happy painting if you did enjoy this tutorial I hope you'll consider subscribing to my channel so I can continue to help you discover your artistic side