Simple and Relaxing doodles to fill your sketchbook: Watercolor Tutorial

Hi everyone, this is Nia and today I feel like relaxing and doing some simple doodles. I didn't even plan the colors that I wanted to use so I just picked up a few colors and see how it will turn out. I first masked off the edges of my paper and just for fun I used different colored washi tape. I'm going to use the same palette for both doodles and here are the colors. Sepia by Holbein, Vermilion by Holbein, Pencil Yellow Medium by Daniel Smith, Composed Blue by Holbein, Permanent Green by Holbein, Yellow Ochre by Holbein, Burnt Umber by Holbein, and Aquarius Green by Roman Schmal. I'm also going to use Bleed Proof White by Dr. Paige Martens. For the second doodle I'm going to add some outlines and I'll be using this brown pen by NYX but you can also include any other medium you would like. I really like this idea of an abstract painting however I want to turn those ovals and half ovals into trees and bushes and I'm going to incorporate this into somewhat of a landscape painting but a doodle version. I want to create layers of hills for the land and I'm going to use Permanent Green as the main bright green but I'm going to switch up the tone by adding some Yellow Ochre, Hansa Yellow, and some Aquarius Green for a slightly darker more muted green. You can also add some reds or blues and just play around with different color combinations. I'm starting from the bottom of the page and whenever I'm painting the next layer of hill I'm going to leave out a bit of white negative space and this is to assure that the paint won't just blend into each other so the white line or the paper will create some form of barrier if the previous layer is not completely dry. As I get further to the top I start adding some Compost Blue into the green mixture just for a little change in tone but remember you can create any combination that you would like. Right at the very top though I'm just going to color it with Compost Blue by itself and before everything completely dries I'm going to take some clean water and just drip it in the blue area randomly then take off the excess paint on the dripped area with tissue to represent some clouds. Before moving on to the next step you have to make sure that the base color is completely dry. Since I only painted a thin layer everything's dry so I'm going to paint on the ovals and half ovals or circles for the bushes and the trees. For this you can play around with any of the colors on the palette you can just use one color or you can mix different colors for different tones as well. In front I made the shapes a little bit larger because I want it to be in the foreground and for the other areas I'm going to make them smaller so they look further away. Since I'm this on a small sketchbook all the ovals are fairly tiny so you can either switch to a smaller brush I'm using a brush that is fairly large or you can use a similar size brush but with a larger sketchbook to make it much easier. I like to play with the value of colors as well as the consistency of the paint you can see that some trees are much darker and thicker in color or more saturated and I'm not going to wait for each of these ovals to dry before painting on the next because I actually like how the colors flow into each other. With this set though since I am painting on a very small scale and my brush is fairly large it's quite easy to create puddles like what I'm doing with the red ovals on the left side here and to avoid everything just being a giant mess instead of just painting next to each other one by one I like to leave a bit of space and paint a few before changing colors this way some colors have time to settle a bit longer than if I were to paint one after the other. If some colors are running a bit further than you want them you can always fix them later when they're completely dry this way the ovals will be a bit cleaner and you have better control. You can also layer them up if you would like so it looks like they are trees behind certain bushes and from here on I'm just going to continue to fill in the rest of the space and enjoy this relaxing step. Meanwhile I'm going to take you through today's sponsor BetterHelp. A lot of you know that I juggle between living in two continents every three months or so. I have a long distance marriage where I get to spend three months with my husband in Austria where I do a bit of work but ultimately have fun, spend time with my husband, travel and socialize with friends. The other half of this is when I have to grind so hard so I can compensate and earn that long break. During my time in Jakarta I film and schedule tutorials, classes and social media posts three to four months ahead without taking any days off. This is in addition to family responsibilities, caring for my sick senior husky and participating in church events which can be overwhelming especially if I fall sick. I feel like for the most part this lifestyle is under control as I'm used to working in this condition but after therapy there's just some sort of lightness that I feel. It gives me more energy and more mental capacity to tackle the work that I have ahead. It has made me realize that just by sparing a bit of time to talk and chat with someone, to reflect on the things I've done, it gives an outside perspective and it gets me outside of this tunnel vision that I usually get stuck in when I'm constantly trying to churn out more ideas in a very short period of time. I love sharing ideas with everyone but in this line of work it's quite easy to burn out and therapy has helped me to do this in a more effective and mentally healthy way. If you're going through a tough time or just need someone to talk to, BetterHelp, the sponsor of today's video, can help. They connect you with a licensed therapist who is trained to listen and give you hopeful unbiased advice. When I first joined BetterHelp I was impressed at how thorough they were with the questionnaire you have to fill on their webpage. This is all to ensure you get matched properly and it usually takes around 48 hours to connect you to a highly qualified therapist who has years of experience helping people with struggles just like yours. Plus you can do this all from your phone or computer, via phone call, video chat, or messaging, however you feel most comfortable. Let BetterHelp connect you to a therapist who can support you from the comfort of your own home. Visit betterhelp.com slash nyanyani or choose nyanyani during sign up and enjoy a special discount on your first month. Now back to the tutorial, I'm just going to continue to paint more ovals and half ovals. Once I've painted all the trees, I'm going to go back to layer on some colors to break up some lines which may have formed from the paint traveling into each other. I'm only doing this on top of some trees though because I quite like the loose effect it creates. And here I'm just lining the bottom of the trees with the colors that I've already premixed on my palette. You can also create other colors as well. Since some areas underneath the trees are quite empty, I'm going to add more lines. I'm just wiggling my brush around and it's really fun and freeing to do this, but I'm also going to switch to my liner brush after this so I can create finer line weights as well. I think I've created enough lines and next I just use the consistency of sepia to paint some tree trunks underneath ovals which are floating. Now let's move on to the fun part, which is to add the doodles on top of the space for the trees and the ovals. Since my sketchbook is quite small, I'm not going to add too many details. I'm just going to use bleed proof white here first to add on some random textures and shapes and anything I have in mind at that time. If you are painting this on a larger piece of paper or a larger sketchbook, which is recommended, you will have a bit more flexibility. You can use different mediums like pens, colored pencils, even oil pastels if you have enough space. So you have a bit more flexibility to play around and experiment. In my case, since the space that I have is very little, I think if I were to include too many different mediums, it might look a bit too busy for my liking. But just experiment the way you would like to since this is going to be your doodle that is customized to however you're feeling at that time. To avoid everything looking too busy, I'm also going to paint on the doodles on top of some and leave some the way it is, completely empty. I also like to switch up the colors after using the bleed proof white. I like to include some other colors that I just pick from my palettes so it still suits the tonality of the doodle. Since the trees and the bushes are much larger in the foreground, I do have a bit more space so I can add on more detail for these ones when I'm adding on the pattern. This is what I meant before by painting this on a larger piece of paper or a sketchbook because you can ultimately have a bit more fun and flexibility with it. Here I'm adding some grassy texture. I thought that I would fill in a hill with this texture at first but after this I ended up turning it into rows of flowers. I only ended up painting one flower row per hill if I feel like the hill has enough space. To turn these into flowers, I decided to mix bleed proof white and vermilion to create this pink. The bleed proof white is there to turn this more into an opaque rather than a transparent color. For the row at the in the middle, because I want this to be yellow, if I mix it with white, the yellow will end up looking a bit too light and it won't have enough contrast to the background. So I used a thick consistency of bleed proof white as the base and I painted the yellow on top of it. Lastly, I felt like the sky was empty so I just added more lines. This is actually just an excuse for me to paint more wiggly lines because there's something really therapeutic about it. And that's it for the first doodle. Now let's move on to the next one. At this point, the only thing I knew was that I wanted to paint leaves, a page full of leaves, because it's just the go-to thing to paint to relax to since leaf shapes are fairly easy to create. But I didn't really have anything in mind, I didn't have any composition in mind, I just wanted to fill the page with leaves. After painting it though, I felt like this green wiggly lines were a bit redundant but it doesn't really matter because it's just a doodle and I paint whatever is relaxing to me and I still wanted to paint more wiggly lines so this was just an excuse to paint as the base color. After this, I want to make sure that everything's completely dry before painting on the leaves. Since I already painted the lines diagonally, I'm going to paint the stem following these lines. So I'm going to create a diagonal composition but once the whole page is full, you can't really see whether it's a diagonal composition or not, it just looks full. But anyway, I'm just going to follow it by creating lines in different colors and I'm going to follow the leaf colors according to the color mixtures that I've already premixed to paint the stem. For the leaves, I want to include different tones of and also play around with the values. For these pastel tones, I used the mixes from the tiny flowers in the previous doodle. It has a bit of bleed-proof white and I used a really thin consistency to make the color slightly transparent. I like to position the leaves randomly so some areas have more leaves clumped together whereas some areas are a bit more empty and whenever I get the chance, I also like to add smaller branches from the main branch or the main stem. By adding the extra branches, I can add them behind the leaves that I've already painted and this will add a bit of overlapping which adds a bit more depth to the painting. For this first layer, I like to mostly paint using light to medium colors in terms of value but I still like to play with the color variation and the saturation. This way, it's a bit easier for me to visualize and position the darker tones and spread them out evenly as accents after most of the leaves are painted. Since I already have a pretty good distribution for the leaves in the middle, I'm going to add another main stem on top and I'm going to treat it more or less the same way as before. I mentioned before that the colors I chose here were completely unplanned and they so if you guys have any color combinations in mind that you want to play around with, you can follow a theme of just maybe blues or just warm colors with an accent or you can also add metallic colors. That's completely up to you. A huge part of doodling is also experimentation and just having fun and enjoying the process. I'm going to add more leaves for the top empty area as well as the bottom and I'm just going to enjoy the repetition of painting the same shapes of the leaves and playing with different colors. Once I have a decent amount of coverage, this is when I'll start using a really thick consistency of either burnt umber or burnt umber mixed with vermilion or sepia and this will create a really rich and dark value color. With this dark value, I don't want to overdo it. This is why I painted using this color Lost so I can spread it out evenly as accents for the doodle. Now to fill in the rest of the space since I want this to be more like a pattern, I'm going to fill in some of the empty spaces with berries. I'm going to paint on the stems of the berries with my liner brush so the lines can be fairly thin and I'm going to make tiny dots for the berries. I'm going to play around with the colors slightly but I'm going to use a more or less medium to thick consistency for the berries since I want to turn these as little accents for the composition. After painting four of these, I felt like it's starting to look quite busy so for the rest of the empty space, I decided to spread some tiny dots just with sepia. You can see that the space is pretty much filled and you can leave it here but I still felt like doodling so I added more leaves with my pen. This was also really fun and relaxing for me to do. It's completely up to you how far you want to take this so depending on your taste. Lastly, I'm going to add the midrib and the veins of the leaves for the darker ones using bleed proof white and I'm also going to add some patterns for the lighter leaves as well by using the colors that I've already pre-mixed on my palette in a medium to light consistency because I don't want too many of the patterns to stand out too much. Just like before, you can play around with different mediums as well at this point. You can use colored pencils for the patterns or you can use different colored pens or metallic paints. After painting a few of the patterns and I feel like I have enough going on since it's already pretty much full. Lastly, I decided to add some blue into the composition because I felt like the colors were a bit too autumn-y and a bit too dark and brown so I just wanted a little bit more of a pop of color. And that's pretty much it for the second doodle. Once I'm done, I'm going to unmask the sides and reveal the painting. And that's basically it for these intuitive doodles that I made. I had so much fun and I hope you guys will get some sort of inspiration to just doodle whatever you feel like as a therapeutic activity. If you guys enjoyed the content, please consider subscribing for more videos like this. Like usual, the list of tools as well as my social media links will be in the description box. Thank you so much for watching till the end and I'll see you guys at the next one. Bye!