A Dreamy Beach Painting With New Watercolor Brushes!

Today we're painting something that feels like summer in watercolor. A dreamy beach scene full of glowing light, soft waves, and beautiful coastal color. I'm also trying out some brand new materials that I've been so excited to share with you. I'll be painting with the new Michael Souleviev Starter Signature Brush Set and pairing them with five absolutely gorgeous Michael Harding watercolors that have such richness and luminosity on the paper. And in this video I'll walk you through the entire painting process step by step while we explore how these brushes handle, how the paints flow and mix, and how to capture that relaxed beach atmosphere in watercolor. Michael Souleviev is an award-winning watercolor artist whose work I've admired for a long time. It's sunny, transparent, full of light and movement, and I just love his edge control. Now he has a set of brushes for sale through his watercolor online website and I thought I would give these a try. I've seen him demonstrate them in a few of his YouTube videos. Yes, he also has a channel so definitely go follow him after this. But this is called the Michael Souleviev Signature Set. It comes with three brushes. The largest brush is a flat brush made of goat hair. There's also a mini calligraphy brush and a rat liner brush. I'm opening these for the first time and using them on a beach scene of my daughter. This was from my own reference photo taken in Florida last year and I'm super excited to try out these beautiful new brushes. The paints I'm using today are Michael Harding quinacridone coral, cobalt teal blue shade, phthalo blue red shade, wisteria, and cadmium golden yellow. If you'd like to learn more about these pigments I do have a video that I made specifically about these different paints so you can check those out after this. My paper is a 16 by 12 inch watercolor block of 100 cotton 140 pound cold pressed watercolor paper and I loaded up my brush with the phthalo blue red shade. This gorgeous color is perfect for the sky and with just the first wash here I am absolutely loving this large brush. You can see I have my paper at a slight angle. This is allowing gravity to assist pulling the color downward. When you work at a slight angle like this this allows a little bead of paint to pool water and pigment at the lower edge of each brush stroke when you're applying your wash. This helps you maintain a moving puddle that allows gravity to do the work helping create a seamless and streak-free color without harsh drawing edges or weird looking lines. This can only be done if you use lots of paint and lots of water so I'm using my butcher's tray palette which gives me lots of space to mix up large puddles of water. Especially working large like this you really need more paint than you think you do so always mix up more paint than you expect you'll even need. You won't be disappointed. There's nothing worse than going in doing a wash and then realizing oh no I need to mix up more paint because of course it's going to begin to dry and you'll end up with some hard edges. So I had beautiful freedom of movement with this wonderful large brush for the sky. This ended up being one of my favorite parts of the painting because it was created so loosely and with just a freedom of movement that I felt both the pigments and the brush work together to create. The nice thing about a flat brush like this too is that not only do you have the wide portion of the brush for big broad brush strokes but you can also use the slender edge of the brush to create thin lines. So as I worked my way towards the horizon line where the sky meets the water you can see I was being more delicate and using just the very fine slender edge of the brush and that worked beautifully for stopping right up to the water without needing to use tape or any kind of straight edge. The goat hair also worked great for lifting out some clouds in the sky and I forgot to mention that the purple I introduced there into the sky along with that phthalo blue red shade is wisteria. It's one of my favorite Michael Harden colors. I absolutely loved it for this painting. I thought it was perfect for this gorgeous sunset at the beach. Now I'm introducing some cobalt teal blue which is a perfect color for this gorgeous ocean water. I'm interspersing some of the colors from the sky. Remember that when you're painting a landscape there are so many areas of the landscape that are going to be reflecting some of the ambient light and color of the sky especially in sunset scenes so make sure that your flat ground or water in this case are reflecting the same colors that you see in the sky above. Now I'm switching to my smaller brush here. This is the mini calligraphy brush. You'll notice I'm also choking up a little closer to the tip of the brush for smaller details and just working in gradual layers applying more color more pigment and more detail one layer at a time. The advantage to working large like this is that there's almost always something you could be working on when other areas of the painting are drying. As I work through each layer I'm leaving little bits of the underpainting shining through and the sky still has little hints of white. This lends a movement to the painting and is actually really easy to do as long as you're working wet on dry and using loose and free brush strokes. This calligraphy brush was such a joy to work with. I really can't wait to create another painting with these brushes. Honestly this calligraphy brush maintained a gorgeous fine point and it had just the right amount of both stiffness and softness to pick up enough paint and also release it in a beautiful smooth sort of way. As I continued to layer the water in I used smaller and smaller brush strokes controlling my values of course with my rag or paper towel and using more pigment especially where the waves are turning over. That's that cobalt teal blue shade and then I saved the little figure for last although you can see that some of my underpainting in the ocean went right over the top which is a great way to incorporate a figure into the atmosphere or the environment. Again try to remember that all of the surfaces you're seeing in both the sky and the water and in the figure are going to pick up the ambient colors and lights from the sky unless of course they're completely shaded from the sky. So I'm continuing with that same limited palette even though I'm working on the figure here. Now for the first time I am introducing the quinacridone coral and a little bit of that yellow for the skin tone going much more intense. Remember that watercolor will dry at least two shades lighter so if you feel like it's going on really dark in these initial wet washes just remember it's going to dry lighter so don't freak out. The shadows of course are maintaining some of that purplish hue from again reflecting the colors all around the scene and then I switched to that tiny liner brush for the details of the fingers and to help me outline some of the details inside the dress, the creases in the fabric. This liner brush was wonderful. I like to switch to a larger brush once again to do larger washes like the skin on the legs and then switching back and forth from the larger brush depending on the size of the details that I'm trying to convey. I really took my time with this painting. I wanted to get the anatomy correct and the colors really really close so especially since this is the focal point, the little figure on the beach, my daughter, I wanted to really take my time and make sure that I wasn't rushing anything. For the dress I worked with a combination of the wisteria and the phthalo blue red shade and of course a little bit of that cobalt teal as well. The two blues and purple combined really worked beautifully for her light blue dress. To mix a brown you can just combine a red and a blue and a yellow, all of your primary colors. Different ratios will yield different kinds of browns and you can see I was playing with different warm and cool colors inside of her hair and trying to blend softly and leave little highlights on the hair reflecting the light of the sky. I'm actually using a softening brush here. This is just a cheap brush from Hobby Lobby and then going back in with the calligraphy brush to add some finishing details, dark little creases in the dress, and suggestions of the pin striping in the fabric. I used the rat liner brush with some dr ph martin's bleed proof white to add some white highlights to the hair and finally to add some finishing white highlights into the water as well. I used to be a little bit more of a purist and not use too much white gouache or white opaque paint in my watercolors but I absolutely loved how the white looked over the top of the sand and the water in this ocean scene. Now some of the water needed to be darkened a little bit so I switched back to that very large flat wash which worked so beautifully for adding just another glaze of color across the water. I could then apply some more tones wet into wet, some waves and shapes within the water as it's lapping towards the shore. I used the calligraphy brush to paint the soft dark shadows that are pooling around her feet and added some more detail to the water and then the last thing I put in was some pure whites using the calligraphy brush again to paint the foam on the surface of the water. I think it looked super beautiful. It's really important when you're doing details like this to make it organic looking. No shapes should be exactly alike or perfectly patterned. I absolutely loved creating this painting. I felt like it really flowed and of course having the right tools can make your job so much easier. This painting was actually displayed for a little while at a gallery in Denver and was purchased by a collector. Thank you to my collector and thank you to those of you who stuck around to watch this video. When you watch, like, and comment it means the world to me so thank you for your support and I hope to see you again soon!