How to simplify a complex woodland scene in watercolour

[Music] now it's very hot here today i'm 30 degrees so i've come into the woods to get a bit of shade now at first sight this is a very complicated uh scene um and it will be a good opportunity to demonstrate the difference between being literal and being realistic i hope to be a realistic i'm not a botanist or a special specialist in the knowledge of trees and but it will be the light and shade that i've been i'm most keen to uh to depicting my painting and as it's so warm i'm actually painting a slightly smaller size than i would normally this is quarter imperial about 15 inches wide and 11 inches high now just put in one or two of the main forms um the pencil starting with this sort of tree in the foreground all sorts of broken logs and twigs and branches and in the foreground it's a real chaotic mess now the the ground slopes down from the left to the right and that's quite an important um feature to try and get hold of the trees go back into the distance and obviously i've got to do a fair amount of elimination and simplification here particularly under these very hot circumstances when the paint is going to dry very quickly now as you draw each tree they're fairly sort of upright and these trees and as you draw each tree just look at the space between them and try and get a slightly uneven chaotic feel to the the picture pick out one or two logs and colors within the painting which will be a good representation of of the the other tweaks and branches laying about what i particularly like is the the variation in the shadows the warm ochres and greens very few branches these are all quite upright and trunks of trees and there's very few branches going out of the sides of these conifers a lot of negative painting going to happen here with the the light struck trunks so as a case of forcing out the um the trunks and against the the darker background [Applause] now use a variety of brushes in this scene although i get a lot out [Applause] and probably end up using three at most four of them now because it's such a hot day i've got a slightly different palette a restricted palette and it's got some nice guppy soft paint in a fairly limited palette windsor blue french ultramarine cobalt burnt umber burnt sienna cadmium orange raw sienna cadmium yellow glycerin crimson hooker's green i don't think i should be using these but that's cadmium red i think that might be payne's gray or overly black but it's very important to have nice guppy paint because even on warm days you'll find that there's nothing worse than the paint they're drying in the palette and then you're scrubbing away right well let's sort of make a start and there's quite a lot of dappled shadow on this one a little bit annoying you want some nice attractive colors on this this is a bit of burnt sienna raw sienna and a tiny bit of cobalt um let's get these colors through here [Applause] i'm going to paint round the trees and keep changing the color and i'm going to add a little bit of cadmium yellow it's a little bit more through there [Applause] and burnt umber ultramarine it's just a little bit of a alizarin it's very important i think to keep changing the color and what comes down here on this side and now there's some really bright green so this is a bit of hooker's green and cosmic yellow and a little raw sienna don't try and paint every little leaf keep screwing your eyes up and look at it in terms of masses [Applause] now we can raw sienna let's have a little bit of cadmium red color i said i wouldn't use so much attractive yellow on that just more cadmium or even a bit of cadmium orange you raw sienna oh sorry burnt burnt sienna back to the ultramarine and burnt sienna carry on with this left hand side now there's bound to be little flecks of white just yeah i'm in a hurry to get across this paper before it dries out hold the brush at the handle end so you have a nice free brush stroke i think i'll just establish this tree in the foreground first of all so some windsor windsor blue and burnt sienna a bit of cadmium it's fairly dark actually when i compare it with the other tones and like many trees the trunk is more green than brown let's start at the top and it's in shade [Applause] there's occasional areas that are lighter raw sienna and a bit of hooker's green here let's change it as we come down the left-hand side which is catching a lot of the light and it's a bit of a littering crimson with that and of course the shadow on the left hand side i go back into that with thicker paint although i'm painting against the dark the damp area it won't go into a cauliflower because the thicker paint will absorb much of the excess moisture you only get cauliflowers when you go into damp wet areas um with a brush loaded with a more dilute wash kind of dark green at the bottom here sort of a mossy green a bit of cadmium orange and then a little bit more burnt sienna it's important to try and join that up to the to the rest of the picture and and have some sort of indication of the shadow going across here and i'm trying i'm simplifying it and squinting at the same time to stop myself being distracted by all of the branches there's no bits of log here and if while that's drying out cobalt burnt sienna we can probably um just indicate a little bit of texturing with thicker paint still still a bit damp with just a bit of thicker paint just to indicate some sort of texture on the of the bark on the tree keep the detail oh or confine the detail to the light struck areas um because it's all got a bit lost really in the darker areas in the shade [Applause] just widen that base a bit let's just have a little shadow across like that that's slightly invented but it helped with another one there it helps perhaps down there i can't resist it shadows from other trees are they they're like the braces on a fat man they indicate that the the tree is round and it's a car shadow rather than a shaded side now that's i feel a little bit more encouraged now i've got that tree in so let's go for some of the other trees the i think the important thing to try and bear in mind is keep each tree as individual as you can very tempting to paint get get a tree trunk mixture and then paint go around and color in all of the trees that would be a mistake um it's quite light that just puts a little bit of delicious crimson just for making it different these ones are further into the distance so i need i can sort of simplify those [Applause] now this is a lighter green one on this side a little bit of a cadmium yellow to make the green a little bit lighter and now burnt umber and cobalt [Applause] whoops [Applause] and darker at the top and then down on the side here and with some burnt sienna and cadmium orange let's just indicate a little bit of shadow that casts on there some of the trees [Applause] trunks are almost a light gray the burnt umber an ultramarine stiffer mixture and that will fuse to give a soft edge between the shaded side and the car shadow [Applause] by indicating some sort of shadow straight away it links it into the ground obviously the ones way in the distance won't have the same detail of light and shade on them so we could actually indicate a certain amount of texture by just having a bit of dry dry brush i'll put some lighting shade on this side dark at the top the shadows always very useful in how they go from one side of the tree behind so they help give depth to the picture as the shadows go disappear behind various trees like this and of course a slight drop down towards the um down towards the right hand corner will help very light colors for these ones some of them are a little warmer color just put a tiny bit of shadow there there then reappears on the other side it was gradually lost in the green bracken and of course there'll be shadows from trees outside the picture boundary on the left right now we've allowed that to dry out we'll need to force out some of these trees in the background um so ultramarine and burnt sienna in raw sienna it's alternately dark light and green in places i can't see any sky so let's start there there that will be odd areas of quite light green and it'll go over the some of it'll come across these tree trunks [Applause] a little bit darker keep that light there because i'm coming up against a lot a dark area there light there then back to a little bit of dark just put a bit of blue in it help suggest distance [Applause] [Applause] just tied it up a bit so it's a little bit bit more careful with the edges keep them nice and straight and they look loose that's not the same as being careless so i still want them to represent trees little green if you do paint on one side of the tree then try and paint on the other side at the same time so it doesn't look as if there's a change in the background [Applause] behind the tree you know if there's any changes make them out in the open a little bit lighter just here even here ultramarine [Applause] you watch me so what we want to try and do is represent the reality of the dappled light coming through the trees which isn't the same as being realistic and painting everything botanically correct which doesn't interest me frankly and would be quite tiresome to do [Applause] let's try cadmium and cobalt to give me a lighter green [Applause] cobalt that dark mixture a bit more burnt sooner there's all sorts of shadows and things in here [Applause] particularly dark way in the corner there so some winds are blue and burnt umber now there's where there's one or two little light branches you can often just use your nail to scratch some out if it's not dried the very early ones have drained out a bit quick now come down [Applause] [Applause] well let's just get some burnt sienna an ultramarine some of these darker shadows coming across here and that will link that background to this foreground [Applause] the dry brush this is some harsh 140 pound rough paper when it's very hot you need a paper with a reasonable size on the surface to the the dry absorb absorbent papers in hot weather are very hard to paint one because so much of the moisture is absorbed into the paper anything left very quickly evaporates and so you want the maximum moisture on the paper to delay the evaporation to keep the paint workable right well i think we'll set about some of these long shadows from the left hand side um to the bottom right hand side which will give me the not only the direction of the sunlight will reinforce at least the direction of the sunlight but also indicate the the contour of the land as it falls away right now this is mainly ultramarine blue and burnt sienna tiny bit of um because green which is going to be made this kind warm [Applause] a little bit of dry brush in this [Applause] look as green and burnt sienna tiny bit of cadmium and can be orange can be mine's lizard and crimson a bit more ultramarine blue with that nice strong cool color make it a bit darker there [Applause] to set up the light on the side of that all sorts of broken tweaks here and then i'm going to come down just strengthen the shadow here now i don't feel i've got that sight inside of this tree dark enough so i'll just restate that [Applause] and dry brush the edge of it that's better now there's all sorts of broken twigs in the slot some of which we can scratch out just with a fingernail it's sort of giving the picture making it a little bit more untidy [Applause] now that's darkened that tree so i'm just putting i'm just going to darken one or two of these others although i always try and get everything painted once the way i want it to look i will so i don't always succeed um and when i don't i recognize it but it's this is essentially a tonal problem and um if you've got tones wrong normally the correction will will be will be okay even though it requires some over painting um it's over painting um with a lacquer over i would say overpainting for what i call a good painterly reason and is usually um you can usually get away with it i'm going to darken just odd little bits of this through here and there'll be one or two darker trunks going up as well amongst the lighter ones it was a good idea to sort of do some darks again lights lights against darks to get that sort of pattern of probably the trees are dark at the top with a little shade on them and that will stop the eye of the viewer disappearing at the top of the picture as they follow we follow the light all sorts of twigs and branches [Applause] because some of these tweaks branches are laid down or fall down i should say they'll be dark against the light [Applause] [Applause] some of these are quite quite big it's been a slightly smaller brush of course the way to get depth in the picture is to have one thing in front of another [Applause] you prepared to have some dark rich colors in those places [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] now this is a little bit of cadmium red sorry cadmium yellow and cadmium orange just to indicate some very almost like wash straight out the tube light in various places [Applause] it's put a bit of littering crimson with it and the hook is green and cadmium and just one or two little specks of light green [Applause] what do you think we'll call just one time we call that a day and i hope that's encouraged you to have a go at these perhaps more intimidating and complex scenes but be ruthless in terms of simplification keep squinting at the subject to eliminate all of those unnecessary details and remember not to be too literal this is an important distinction but be realistic and the realism here is the dappled strong sunlight coming through the trees bouncing off the trunks and making these nice long cast shadows i'm not sure i've necessarily caught them successfully and but i've had a go and it's been a pleasant morning despite being very hot thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Pitt

Views: 93,897

Keywords: watercolour, watercolor, tutorial, artist, guidance, painting, brushes, drawing

Id: Mx-cUhALxB0

Length: 41min 51sec (2511 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 19 2022