The TRUTH about Watercolor - secrets revealed, tips for successful Fall Leaves

hi everyone Diane here welcome to my Channel today I am going to paint an autumn leaf with a couple of acorns and uh we're going to just let the colors run and do what they want to do inside the leaf shapes and so this is completely on controlled sort of wet and wet sort of leaf and we'll see how it goes shall we um I'm going to use my kiraki set here this is the main 48 set it has quite a few Browns and reds and um some yellows and orang and some greens and blues and it's got everything actually that you would expect unlike the um art newo set which I also use quite a lot but which is not doesn't jump out at you as being Autumn does it no not really so we won't use that one but we will use this set you could use any set of paints you've got that's got some Browns and things like that in it which would be most things so I'm just going to push this out the way for a sec cuz I'm going to do a quick sketch of um some leaves what paper I'm using at the moment is tival aquarel watercolor paper it's called pressed Grand as they say in France which is what this is It's a French paper it's um it's a a cellulose paper but it is a good paper not all cellulose paper is bad is it so let's um put a stem up through the center of the page like this and then we're going to have one leaf coming off here another Leaf coming off here and another one here and one main one here and then down here we're going to have a couple of acorns so it's just literally a wet and wet exercise so in order to draw a reasonably realistic um Oak Leaf we just need to do this which is not particularly tricky I'm sure you can manage this and if you feel like you want um some guidance as we always do um I will put a sketch of this on uh on the website for you to download if you [Music] wish if you're new to painting you might hesitate a little bit about this doesn't matter if they go a bit funny like that um because they often are unevenly uh LED or damaged but the loes are smaller near the base of the leaf so and then we're going to tuck one in behind here so we've just come out here [Music] and if you hear any strange noises in the background it's it's my small dog so we'll just put in some veins main veins we don't want too many just as a guidance and we won't put those in until after we've put the paint on but we just want to indicate that the veins tend to go up towards the ends of the loaves I think Zen quiet okay and then the stem the stick The Twig twig twig that's the word has got sort of rough uh crunchy sort of outline and then down here we're going to do some little acorns I do some little cups that the acorn sits in and then the acorn itself comes up like this often has a sort of little point on the top they usually grow in couples so we do another cup there and like that and maybe we'll even do three and then the chunky little stem okay so there's our sketch um I'm not going to use a big brush for this because um I'm going to use lots of different colors so I'm going to use a relatively small brush and what I'm going to do and I'm hoping this is going to work first thing I'm going to do you could use a water brush for this if you wanted to by the way if you're traveling or something like that and you don't have a place for a big jar of water you can use a water brush some people like to use them anyway so I've wetted the um Leaf the leaf shape and I'm going to put some green and some yellow and some orange in this one so we'll pick up a little bit of sort of medium medium green this is sap Green in the kuraki set and I'm just going to drop that in and let that run and um So that obviously um leaves are green before they go Brown so we'll add um bit more green different green and we we're not going for realism here you have to remember that we're just going for something hopefully reasonably attractive so this is sub green deep pop that in in a couple of places and then I'm going to switch to yellow so I've got my nice uh lemon yellow here so we just put some of that [Music] in and some down here and then let's have some orange cadmium orange and then May be a bit more green here and then I'm going to pick the whole thing up and let it move around a bit not too much because if you let it move too much um obviously it will just go gray and if you think you've got a little bit too much in some places too much color I mean can always lift it out with a thirsty brush like that adjust it a little bit too if you want something like that so then if you want to make the outside edges a little bit more wavy a little bit more natural you can go around and just adjust them a little bit like that you don't have to do that though but you can if you want okay and you could if you wanted to at this point you could add a bit more of a very dark green um I quite like this forest green just put that in in a couple of places where you want it to be darker and then you have to basically leave it alone and you go on to the next Leaf leave it alone and and wait because it will change obviously it will change so the next one this one here we're going to do it in all reds and oranges no green so we'll just go over it first of all with water put a little bit more orange in there okay so let's pick up some orange and let's go in that first moment when you put the pigment into the wet paper is quite interesting isn't it always is and then we go for some darker [Music] cadmium cadmium red and let's have some L Sienna and let's have some raw Umber bit more orange perhaps here might want to put a little bit of that in here too still very wet it's going to take a while for that to dry so we'll leave that so what I'm going to do I'm planning to do is um I'm going to leave this while I go and have lunch so this is going to be step number one and then I'll come back after lunch in about about 2 hours and see what's happened so now I've wetted number three and I'm going to put in some orange look at that and some green and we'll use let's use olive green shall we how's Olive feeling today and then the Gap I'm going to fill in with some yellow this is um oroline just put that there and we're going to let that one do its own thing and then behind here we've got another one which I'm going to do in brown and I'm going to wet but not go up to except there the idea was not to touch but I've touched so whatever uh it doesn't matter I'm going to put in some raw umber mixed with Indian red down here and we just let that go all the way up and then I'm going to pick up some cadmium red of some sort and put that up here bit more Brown in places and we let that run do its thing okay so then some burnt so sorry raw umber mixed with black for the um twig and we're going to do that all kind of chunky and rough and let that join into the leaf in a few places and then for down here we'll make the twig a little bit lighter than that one but still chunky and then I'm going to do a [Music] greenish lightish Brown for the cups and then a nice warmer Brown for the actual acorns and we can put some Line work on these afterwards to give the effect of the little dots on on the cups and the lines that usually decorate the actual acorns themselves so that's a good start and um I'm going to let that dry and come back afterwards and what we could do if we wanted to at this point if you feel like it is put in some scratch marks for some of the veins and you can use one of these Japanese uh pens pens well it's not really a pen it's actually for working with clay or you could use a dip pen one with a you know a metal nib um and what you can do is you can just draw in where the vein is going to be and you'll find that that will come out either lighter like that or darker and then you can do obviously the smaller ones as well it's definitely a good way of of putting the veins in where it's a bit drier you get light ones and where it's wet you get dark ones so you do get a bit of variety so that's quite nice and then afterwards when we come back we can do some more veins with ink or pen uh or paint rather and uh I think those are already dried you can scratch into the stem a little bit put a bit of Lights in there if you want yep and so I'm just going to leave that now until like I say until it's nice and dry and it looks as if it's going to be fairly fun and the colors are nice and bright it's always a bit kind of at this point because you know it's going to dry lighter um so you just have to have a bit of faith and hope that it will be okay so we'll see and I'll be back soon so I've had my lunch and I'm back now and um looking at this is completely dry so what we need to do first is to take off all the pencil marks and I'm using a needed eraser here here this is a needed with a K ConEd um and uh or you could call it a need B eraser I suppose uh depending on how you feel and so the way to to use this is you've got two options you can sort of roll it into a kind of sausage and then you can roll it over your work like this and it will pick up the um the graphite or well three ways I suppose you can use it like an ordinary eraser and rub but that doesn't work as well I think the best way is just to press down press and lift press and lift all over and the difference between this and a regular eraser un like this is that when you use this of course you get these bits which appear and then you have to get rid of them and it is possible using one of these to rub away some of your paint as well but if you use a knable or needed needed eraser which you can get um they come in little plastic boxes like that uh on Amazon I'll put a link in the description below um and I'm just going over here where the graphite shows as much as I can to get it off without damaging the paint there and uh it's not too much of a problem if some of the lines remain I don't think I don't mind them actually but some people don't like the lines in which case the best thing to do really is to get rid of most of them before you even start painting and uh that way of course they won't get hidden by the paint and you'll be able to get rid of them but you just have to look a bit more carefully at where your lines are and then the other thing to do possibly is to just work without a sketch but that's not always possible so that will do I think for now I've got most of them off just a quick sip of my tea now I want to um put a little bit of detail on these so I'm wondering about whether to use my ink tense pencils just to sort of draw some very light uh parallel lines on these um acorns it's one way of doing it I could use ink and then I want to do some uh um this is a very dark brown let me just sharpen that pencil um some little little tiny circles on the cups to show the texture and then we'll put a little bit more dark brown at the base here and we can wet that if you want having put the pencil in exactly the place where you want it this is one of the advantages of these watercolor pencils you can then having done that you can use a small brush relatively small and we'll see what happens and it should work so that's okay and then we can just darken these up by wetting them a little bit and then if you want to you can put some shadow a darker one on your twig along the edge using that as well and then when you wet it it goes darker still so that's quite nice we can put in the little joining thing there and then we could we could darken one edge of this twig two if you wanted and then if you want to make the um Center veins a little bit more organized it can come in with your pencil and go over the scratched lines if you want it's not absolutely necessary to make them any darker they'd be fine the way they were but then you can also using the pencil it's easier to sort of just if you want to put in more of the smaller veins you can do that too easier to use a pencil than a brush and you can go around the outside edges make them a little bit more funky if you want can use different colors if you like use this color and you could you know you could add a little bit of extra color or you know where you might feel it's a bit boring like that and then you can also come back with your brush and sort of smooth that out a little bit it's one good way of giving yourself a little bit more texture without committing yourself to to the paint brush with paint on it cuz that can sometimes go quite wildly wrong I think for this kind of thing so we can sort of like darken it there a little bit and then just gently you know it's it's quite an interesting uh process and you can take as long as you like over it of course make it very subtle could put a little bit of this uh yeah smooth that out a little bit make them a bit more shiny can go along the shadow side of the veins like that whoops where did that come from I must have dripped some water now somebody asked the other day why do artists insist on putting spatter on their paintings maybe because they accidentally put their hand fisted fingers in it and uh made a mess so I think there's enough detail in these colors here and the veins have stood out quite nicely by using the scratching method and this one and this one too so I'm just going to smooth this out a little bit here and then I'm going to leave it bit at that quite happy with that I think that's okay for the first Autumn Leaves of the season with some acorns oak leaves they are of course so there we are hope you enjoyed that give us a like And subscribe and turn on notifications if you feel that way inclined and uh come with me on a journey through the Autumn months starting now really and uh we can have fun looking at all these lovely colors that come up around about this time of the year so I'll let you go now and I will see you again soon I'll say bye-bye for now everybody bye-bye