Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Tuesday's Tips & Techniques for Watercolor Painting

The Illusion of Shrubbery
Painting a mass of shrubbery as a background to give the illusion of trees and stuff can be painted in watercolor using the wet into wet method. Wet your paper and keep adding wet color. The key is to add paint in the same degree of wetness as the paper. I created this entire small painting with a 3/4 inch flat wash brush. I used Maimeri Blu artist quality watercolor paints on 140 lb. Waterford cold pressed paper.

1. Start by wetting the paper with clear water.
2. Add a wash of blue for the sky leaving spaces of white for clouds.
3. Using a pale mix of green and blue add the background shapes.
4. With a slightly darker and warmer mix of green continue creating shapes that represent trees, don't paint a tree.
5. Add splotches of yellow here and there between the green.
6. Add mixture of burnt sienna along the bottom.
7. Continue to add an even darker mixture of green and also brown in dabs and touches to represent blurred tree shapes.
8. Allow the paint to completely dry. The colors will diffuse and blend.
9. Shrubbery, a mass of trees perfect for the background forest of a watercolor landscape painting.

2 comments:

We Blog Artists said...

Wonderful post...I so enjoy visiting your site.
Char

Rita said...

Thank you so much! Visit anytime. --Rita

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