EASY Squirrel ｜ Wet-on-Wet Technique Watercolor Tutorial for Beginners WEEK 3

Is wet-on-wet in watercolor a technique that you're still struggling with? I totally get it. It's all about timing and sometimes the timing can just be off by a little bit and the effect is totally ruined. So that's what this series is about. We're here to master the wet-on-wet technique through fun, stress-free projects and today is going to be especially fun because we're painting the floofy tail on a little squirrel. Alright, so if you're going to join me and paint right along with me, supplies you'll need for this project are some cotton watercolor paper. I'm using my Fabriano Artistico 140 pound cotton cold pressed watercolor paper. I really prefer cold press for the wet-on-wet technique because it has a little bit of tooth and texture to it and it stays wet a little bit longer than hot press paper which is really smooth and dries out super fast. You'll want to have a size 8 round brush or something similar in size like a 10 or 6. It really doesn't matter. This is my favorite brush. It's a silver black velvet size 8 round brush and if you happen to have a natural sponge, this is a great tool for using in wet-on-wet techniques because it can evenly disperse the water on the paper. So you'll get to see that in action in just a second. Make sure you have your paints and a water jar and I have a sponge today for blotting. It's a little more economical than using tons and tons of paper towel so I've started using this more and more. If you are using a sponge, totally soak it and then squeeze out all the excess water and it's ready to help you with water control. Okay, we're going to start with a Now if you're a little nervous about this sketch, it's okay. Just give it a try. Remember, this is just for practice and I encourage everyone who's learning how to paint to practice their sketching skills a little bit every day as well. I'm including the reference photo so you can follow along. I'm going to start with a tall oval shape. This is going to represent the squirrel's little hindquarters, okay? So it's not a perfect oval. It's kind of tilted a little bit. The body's coming back like that and if you want you can have a kneaded eraser in hand so you can limit the amount of eraser crud that gets on your paper. All right, so next to this little hind leg we're going to put an L shape and this is going to represent the arms and the middle body. Now the L is tilted slightly up. See that? All right, so we've got an oval and an L. The next shape is another oval for the head shape and I wouldn't, I would say circle but it's not a perfect circle. It's a little bit taller than it is wide and if you want to go ahead and add those little pointy ears on top right away you sure can. Aha, starting to look like a squirrel already and then we have a long skinny shape for the foot. Now I'm not actually going to draw anything for the tail and that's because we're going to let our paint do the work there. So imagine this sideways S shape and that's what we're going to create with our paint using the wet on wet technique, but let's go ahead and tighten up our sketch first just so we have something that we're happy with before we jump in with paint. It's always a good idea to just be happy with your sketch before you dive in. The paint is not going to fix it if the sketch is off, so keep that in mind. Spend a little extra time on your drawing. Okay, I'm just refining the shape of the head and I'm going to draw the eye on pretty carefully. I want the eye to be super cute, so again it's a kind of a upturned almond shape. I'm going to leave a little highlight there preserving the white of the paper for that and we can see a tiny bit of the eye on the right side too and then there's a little nose and a little muzzle and you can go ahead and erase any of your excess pencil marks that just don't serve you at this point and then inside of your L shape go ahead and draw a little hand. It doesn't have to be perfect, you can just suggest the separation of those fingers, clutching his little nut, whatever it is he's eating. I say he, I don't know if it's a boy or a girl. Okay, and then the hindquarters right there and I actually made the space between the foot and the body too wide, so if you're checking distances and proportions, look for the negative space between things. The negative space is the space in between, for example, the elbow and the foot. How wide is that? I made mine too far apart, so I'm adjusting and that's the bottom of the squirrel. Okay, that's pretty much it. Now I'm going to erase this pencil line here because where the tail begins there's a little bit of connection in my color there and I don't want to have a hard line separating anything. All right, but I'm going to go ahead and draw the back body of the squirrel and set that in stone, so to speak. So there's our sketch. I'll show that to you up close and now that we've done the sketch, we are ready to do our wet-on-wet technique for the floofiest squirrel tail. So make sure that you have some clean water, totally clean water. I have two jars and they're both clean. I'm going to start with clean water in my sponge and squeeze out the excess and then I'm going to go ahead and paint that on the paper, just avoiding the squirrel's ear and body. The reason for that is I don't want my paint to just explode all into my carefully drawn squirrel. That we're going to do with a separate layer of color. Now it's okay if some of your water goes into the back body of the squirrel, into the thigh there, but avoid areas like right here. You don't want the squirrel's tail fur to extend down under the squirrel, but do extend your water a little bit above where the tail is going to stop. Wherever your paper is wet, the paint will flow and so you can go ahead and extend your water way further than that. That'll give the paint some room to stretch its legs into that wet area. Now I'm going to grab some burnt sienna and the paint on my brush should be kind of a half and half consistency. I'm going to mix in some ultramarine to help gray that down, and you can do a combination of these colors. It doesn't have to just be a solid color, but make sure your paper is glossy wet. You can see how it's slightly wet, not puddling or pooling anywhere. Now I'm going to start on the outer edge of my squirrel's tail and just do that s-shape and take some darker paint here. This is indigo. All right, and then I just need to fill it in. I'm going to take some ultramarine and fill in the middle of the tail and then take some more of my burnt sienna. Now you can actually do some manual spreading of the bristles of the brush to create even more floofy texture, encouraging that paint to spread out and soften a little bit further, but you can see how that edge is naturally forming a super soft fuzzy edge. We really didn't have to do much. It's kind of just doing the work for us. That's the beauty of the wet on wet technique, but just a little bit of encouragement of your brush. Make sure you don't have any extra water on your brush if you decide to do this, and I'm going to bring the tail right up to the squirrel's ear like you see in the photo. All right, there's our tail! Look how fast that happened. It was so quick. Now we can also use the wet on wet technique inside of the squirrel's body. For this, you can actually start with some tone. I'm going to begin with my mix of burnt sienna and ultramarine. So I have some color on my brush already and I'm going to go ahead and paint that into the body, spreading out my bristles to create some fur texture under the tail and then switching to burnt sienna where the colors change along the top of the leg. And while it's wet, you can encourage a manual softening between those two colors, blending the paint right on the paper. I'm going to take some more burnt sienna and bring that into the squirrel's arm. You're pulling paint directly from the palette, so I have a darker pigment mix here. I want the arm to be nice and dark, but you can make this loose and painterly. Don't feel like you have to put in tons of detail here. You did the work with the sketch already too. I'm going to take some indigo, blotting on my sponge to control how much water is in my brush and spreading out the bristles, and then I'm going to drop that in onto my pre-wet surface. It's kind of just damp now, but moving my brush in the direction that the fur is growing, and we're creating some soft texture wet into wet on the squirrel. And that's pretty much it for the squirrel's body. I don't need to add any more detail than that. And then we're going to take that gray mix, paint that into the squirrel's head, controlling our water on our brush by blotting on the sponge. Now watch out for any little highlights you might see in the squirrel. I don't see any pure white, but I do see some lighter values like under the head and on the muzzle, so I'm going to use a wash of ultramarine right there, kind of a light gray mix of burnt sienna and ultramarine, representing the lighter areas on the squirrel. And then I'll switch to my darker burnt sienna, painting around the highlights, painting around the eye, and you can pretty much just fill in the head and the ear with burnt sienna. It's good to have a variety of edges, so we did a really soft edge with that tail, but now on the squirrel's face, we can work with harder edges and make them more crisp and clean. Since this is where the focal point is, we're looking at the squirrel's face and we want there to be the most detail in the face. And we'll take some gray and put it on the eye, on the other side of the head I should say. All right, for those little fingers, I know it looks pretty complicated, we can simplify that. I'm actually going to take my dark mix here of indigo and burnt sienna and go ahead paint the nose and just hint at a nut in between these little fingers. So my dark paint is going to create the separated fingers like that, and we're just suggesting at the squirrel holding something. If you look at it from farther away, you can tell he's just chewing on a little nut, but there's really no detail. It's just a dark shape and that's totally okay. And then if you want, you can paint in the eye, watching out for the highlight. The highlight is so important on a little animal because it just really helps it look lifelike and gives it character and extra cuteness. So I encourage you to leave the white of the paper for that, but if you accidentally cover it up, that's okay. You can put that highlight right back in with a white gel pen or an acrylic paint or some sort of an opaque white and that is totally fine. It can be really tricky, negative painting around such tiny shapes. I've had to go back in and fix it a few times in my paintings too, so don't feel bad if you cover it up and have to go back in and fix it, that's alright. The last thing is the little foot. We can use our burnt sienna for that and again, just quick little brush strokes hinting at and suggesting the foot. A little more burnt sienna on the hands and if the back body of the squirrel is dry, feel free to add some more texture with dry brush. No more wet and wet at this point. We've done the work with the wet and wet technique and now we can add some finishing details, giving our squirrel some more fluffy fur on the body. Yes, and then maybe suggesting that something that he's sitting on, like a fence post or something like that, and I'm creating shapes that sort of mirror what the tail is doing. I think that looks nice. Throwing some burnt sienna in there as well for color harmony. Yes, there's our finished little wet and wet squirrel. If you really enjoyed this quick real-time tutorial, I wanted to let you know that there are so many more tutorials just like this included in the Watercolor Mastery Membership. We have something called the Daily Challenge where we release a brand new tutorial every weekday for the entire year, so you get to paint right along with me these quick 20 to 30 minute tutorials, practicing wet and wet, wet and dry, glazing, color mixing, all the things. I'll leave a link in the description so you can check that out. Thanks for painting with me today and I'll see you in the next video.