Paint realistic grapes with watercolors 🍇 how to mix colours and why layering is important 🎨

Well hi there! If you just stumbled upon my video then welcome to my channel and thank you so much for taking a look and if you already know who I am well then I'm very grateful for your continuous support. So today we're gonna be painting grapes. So full class of this painting is on my Patreon that's where I teach monthly and right now I will show you the process we took to paint it. So I started by mixing up the colors for the bloom so that's the layer underneath all those red patches on the grape. I try to use my limited palette as always and mix with my limited palette all the mixes. So I choose the few primary colors and then I try to stick with them so that the painting is unified and coherent. So I made a few mixes a little bit more blue, the other ones a little bit more pink, a little bit more purple and so I'm gonna paint the bloom layer first. And before I start to paint I remove the excess graphite off my fourth color paper just with a little bit of kneadable eraser and I start doing that by using wet on wet technique meaning I wet the paper first with clean water and then I apply color on that damp surface. It gives you a really nice smooth spread and you can easily lift all the highlights just as I'm doing right now. I'm lifting some color off the middle of the grape and around the edges for reflective light. I'm starting quite light because that bloom is very delicate and very light and I don't want to go too dark just yet. But of course when you paint your mid-tones it's very hard to know whether they are right without the dark tones. So once we lay down the darkest tones then we will see whether the mid-tones are right or not. So we need a contrast in order to see. After the first layers it's good to remove your pencil line that you're not gonna need anymore because some watercolors can make pencil marks permanent and we don't want that. And so once the colors dried I noticed that they're definitely too light so I needed to darken them and I gave a second layer of wet on wet for the bloom color. It's always better to start lighter than darker because it's much harder to go lighter in watercolors so no rush. So once the bloom color is done now I'm mixing up some colors for those red patches and again with my limited palette I mix few different shades of red and purple and I continue my painting with wet on wet technique still because I want those really soft nice blooms. Not too much water though because I don't want those marks spread too far. Starting with my lighter color then I'm adding some darker one and always lift off highlights. So once I completed the main patches of those grapes now I take my smaller brush and I focus on more finer details and I'm adding all the little scratches and marks and dots and just really trying to capture everything that those grapes went through. So now with all my darker stones and all the finer detail in place I see that the bloom color has faded and in contrast to the darker stones are too light so I water down my mixes and I glaze over and that serves me one for darkening the bloom color and two by glazing over those marks and fine detail it softens them and makes it a little bit more realistic and natural. In watercolors if you want to achieve the luminosity and transparency and vibrancy you have to work in those really watery transparent watercolor mixes and just layering them over and over again until you achieve the saturation but just something about layering those transparent watercolors really makes them luminous just as you would imagine a stained glass so that those transparent watercolors allow for the paper to shine through and now I remove a little bit of paint from a few parts just at the tips of the grape and there are a few little marks that I'm using this little tool just to scrape off the paint of the paper so the grape part is over and now all is left to do to paint in this little stem so using the same pigments I use for mixing my colors for grapes I mix up a little bit of green and brown and you can see how using the same pigments but changing the amount of each you can create different shades of colors. Thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed it and if you do please subscribe and like the video I'll see you in the future bye