The best-ever watercolor exercise?

hi everyone this is the last YouTube video of 2023 and what I'm going to do is give you a little seasonal exercise that you can practice over the holiday period and in my opinion and it is only my opinion it's the best exercise you can possibly do to improve your watercolor painting skills now in the previous video that I made I wanted to get across the message that we just can't make convincing original landscape art that has individuality and integrity without this important idea of subject familiarity and what we learned was that to become familiar with your subject you need to develop the art of landscape looking now of course we cannot express our familiarity with the subject with the landscape what it is that's inspired US unless we have some technical skills to do that your ability to become a capable landscape painter using the watercolor medium rests on a table supported by four legs and those four legs are subject familiarity technical skills planning and presentation and in this video I'm going to show you an exercise that contains all the technical skills that you need to make progress that may sound like a rather ambitious thing to say but bear with me you'll see what I mean and I've been doing these exercises for years and I still do them today you've probably seen me mention them and Fiddle around with these in previous videos too but let's just have a look at it in a little bit more detail and then you've got something to take away and something to practice over this holiday period there are other skills and techniques that I could have included in here but I don't see those as being foundational these are core techniques and skills that will help you to gain control of the watercolor medium and they are color mixing brush Strokes wet on dry and wet on wet timing and controlling the wash and you will see that each one of these comes up in this little exercise that I've got for you now if you stick around to the end of the video I'm going to explain to you why this little exercise and practicing it regularly is so important it's almost as if it's the secret to progressing with your watercolor painting so why don't we get stuck in now the equipment that you're going to need for this exercise is very simple I've got a block of paper here it's length and Prestige rough I'm using this paper because it's a paper that I paint on a lot and practicing on the paper that I use in my paintings makes a lot of sense to me you may think well that's a bit of a waste of an expensive bit of paper Ry but it isn't because these exercises are invaluable and you need to know how your paper behaves get a brush um I'm just using this round brush here it's a number 10 it's a Sienna by Rosemary and Co it's a fantastic brush synthetic holds loads of water and it comes to a point nicely and then choose the paints that you're going to need and all you need for this really is your three primaries and I'm going to use uh French ultramarine yellow ochre and cadmium red and I'm going to start by just mixing up some yellow ochre here and all I'm going to do on the paper really is just make a series of Fairly random marks but in the process of doing that I'm practicing color mixing and I'm practicing my brush Strokes amongst other things so I'm going to start off with some yellow at the top here and I usually start across the top I've got the board at an angle here and you can see the paint is pooling at the bottom of where I've put it on and that bead there is important because I can come back to this and keep this area of my doodle going I'm just going to come across the paper here vary your brush Strokes as you do this make little quick flicks make more detailed marks if you need do whatever you want and then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to mix in a little bit of ultramarine come back into here and come across the paper using whatever brush strikes you want and remember all the time you're practicing doing these these could be brush Strokes that are appearing in your landscape paintings I'm adding a bit more blue here and then on this side I'm going to keep it almost pure French ultramarine and then I'm going to start doing a few different things with it because what I've been doing here to make this green is mixing on the palette but I want to show you that you can also mix on the paper we've got yellow here if I drop some blue in those are going to run together and I will get a green okay I haven't mixed it on the palette but it's mixing on the paper because having gone from painting wet on dry by putting these into this wet area now I'm painting wet on wet as well so I've got both of these things going once you've gone across the top from yellow to Blue start introducing some red so let's put a bit of cadmium red in here and like I said keep veing up your brush strokes use this as an opportunity to practice what the Chinese are very good at which is this skill that calligraphers use of rolling the brush in your fingers as you're painting which allows the tip on the brush to stay nice and sharp make whatever marks you want to make there's no right or wrong to this let's come back into here with some more red and now we've got more of a sort of Pinky gray happening here try out your broken brush Strokes look at that that's a lovely thing to be able to get in a painting and this is the time to try these things out not when you're in the middle of the painting and worried about the result BS do it on your pad here now I said keep that bead of paint going there because we're going to come back into that now with some red and a bit of yellow ochre just using these three primers and I can pick that up and keep it going you see now I'm coming down this side of the paper with red mixed into this primary so I'm getting this lovely orange and look at this wonderful array of of colors that I'm getting just from my three primaries any patterns and brush Strokes are acceptable here now let's come down into this gray and start introducing this orange color adding a little bit more blue into it and seeing what happens that wasn't mixed very well you can see it's sort of gone a little bit too concentrated there but that's okay we're doodling we're not making a painting there's no right and wrong let's come into here too and do the same thing and what I'm doing even though it just looks like I'm making a bit of a odd abstract mess here is I've already practiced a number of things I painted wet on to dry I painted wet into wet you saw me add that blue that's now merged with the yellow and has become green I'm varying my brush Strokes all the time I've got broken brush Strokes here I'm using the belly of the brush sometimes on the side to get these type of marks I'm then moving it up to its point so I can get these lovely fine lines and being able to practice these type of brush Strokes is so important because brush skills are what marks out some of the best landscape painters I was looking at some recently and they all have this in common they are brilliant at controlling their brushes now what I want you to do is to investigate this idea of timing so at the top here some of this will have started to dry now let's go back to a fairly uh fairly liquid wash here of this sort of green color and I think it's starting to dry here and and just drop some of this into a damp part of the paper I think that's almost dried but let's see what happens with this painted on here just leave it and watch what develops in front of you can you see we're starting to get this nasty Bloom forming around where the pigment hasn't got any more wet paint to run into and it's just being posited around the edge of this wet shape it's what we sometimes call cauliflowers they're not particularly nice to look at although you can use them wonderfully for effect if you know how to do that and you're planning to do that they're not always bad but when they're unplanned they don't look great and what we're doing is we're learning about how the paint's drying and what we can do with it and what we can't do with it now what I'm going to do is mix up a very concentrated mix of my three primer which gives me this lovely rich dark color that's not black but it's it's it's really dark and what if I put this into a damp area of the paper can you see it's totally different it's still soft on the edge because it's running into this damp area but because it's far more concentrated than what's here it's no problem it's holding its shape take your brush with the dark mix on and continue working on your doodle seeing if you can get shapes to hold their place on the paper see what happens if you put your brush down for a period of time as opposed to just a short period of time it runs out a lot more this is far more contained there's not as much paint leeching out play around with this and see what's happening on the paper and keep touching this dark color into areas that you've painted that are at different stages of dryness just so you can see how it reacts you'll learn so much doing this about the nature of the medium how it behaves how it misbehaves there's no need to stop here we can keep going with this but let's just have a look at it for a minute we've gone from yellow to Green Into the Blue down into this nice pinky gray color down into Brown we've got oranges here coming down into Browns all the landscape colors that you're going to need from these three primary colors and so we're practicing our color mixing which is so important the more you doodle the more you become familiar with your brush what it can do whether it's on its side whether you're you're using the tip whether you're making more random patterns here we've been managing the wash by being able to pick up areas of it that are wet and keeping the whole wash going we've then gone back into it to see what happens if we get our timing right or we get our timing wrong here we put a dilute mixture of paint into an area that was just damp and we've got this nasty mess that's appeared on the paper here I dropped in some much darker color and you can see that it's gripped but it's just feathered out nicely into the wash that was still damp here it's done that to extent but just by being ever so slightly drier here you can see that we've almost got a hard Edge on that shape it has run out into that orange background but then it's come to a fairly abrupt stop which it didn't do here that can sometimes be 5 Seconds difference in drying time and that is one of the subtleties of the watercolor medium understanding the difference between areas of your painting how dry they are how wet they are are they damp should I leave them alone or can I drop in some darker marks in certain places you learn all that through this this process far more than you will when you're panicking in front of a painting as we all do myself included where the stakes are high and you're concentrating on other things such as composition and detail here you don't have any of that you're just playing around you're observing the results of what you're doing well let's do another one I won't explain as much on that one but just watch what I'm doing and I'm just going to choose three different primaries and we'll have a look at the difference between those okay so this time let's use some cooler primaries I'm using uh cium yellow here you can see it's a much cooler version than its earthy neighbor yellow ochre play around making these marks they're great fun then I'm going to add into this some Prussian Blue which is a a nice Vivid cool blue and you can see I'm getting a totally different green to the one that I got previously use this also as an opportunity to load your brush up with loads of wet paint can you see it there pooling at the bottom of this shape so important and you do that by having a brush that's full of paint and with your board at a slight angle okay let's just get some blue in and what I would say is if when you put your brush to the paper you don't get that little Reservoir at the bottom of the shape then you're not using enough wet paint how about some permanent Rose that's a nice cool red lovely color I use it a lot in my skies and you can see I'm still able to keep this wash going over this side of the paper because I was using plenty of wet paint when I first painted that area of yellow and I have a lot of comments um from people saying well I can just never go back to anything on my paper because it all dries too quickly and it must be the central heating or it must be the uh country that I live in that's very hot yes there will be elements of that but more often than not it's because you're not using enough wet paint okay let's get into some slightly murkier versions of these three colors they're very Vivid and bright so let's just dull them down a bit and see if we can explore some other colors as we as we mix through here paint little areas like this where you're needing to go up against B but not quite touch them it's a wonderful way of practicing brush control you can see the brush is fairly upright here and I'm using that nice tip that forms which I have to say these brushes are very good at you can see that bead of paint that was sitting there it's ready and it's waiting for me to carry it on further down the paper and now you've got these three pools of paint here you can go go into these and do whatever you want with them and see what color mixes you get and don't worry about these being potentially muddy is there anything muddy about this absolutely not these are lovely vibrant mixes that I've got going on here when you're painting wet onto dry it's very difficult to make mud no matter how many pigments you're using it's when you start to paint into damp paper with slightly heavier color mixes that you run into problems but here it doesn't matter how many pigments that I use how many different ones I mix up with each other as long as I put them down with plenty of water as I'm doing here and leave them alone these are going to always look fresh vibrant and transparent okay let's have another another play around with a watery mix let's put some up in here and see what happens yeah look immediately we've got a problem going on there okay now let's mix up a sticky version of it and see what happens yeah totally different right see if you can make shapes like this hold their place to an extent you can see here it's still wet there's still a little bead of paint at the bottom of this area so I know that I can keep working with that I can pick that up risk-free with more wet paint and just keep going here I can see it's dried a little bit more so it may be a little more difficult for me to do that but let's have a go yeah you can see it's just spreading out a little bit but we're okay there I think now where there may be a problem was if I was to go further up into this area of green it's you can see it's just not merging as much it's becoming a lot drier near the top here and that is just not quite traveling as freely as it was down here where that nice bead was and you can see already it's starting to feather around the edge and we may have a shape here that we didn't want watch these things happening on the paper think about how dry that area of the wash is think about how concentrated or dilute a paint in your brush is and then notice what happens make a mental note of it or even write it down keep these make notes on them put something like not wet enough to dilute watch what you're doing as you do these now what I'm going to do is just take this one further down the painting and I'm practicing this particular stroke because I use it all the time in my landscape paintings you can see that even though this broken edge here which people sometimes refer to in this context as dry brush it isn't really this this brush is loaded with wet paint but it's the speed with which I'm moving it over the surface it's the part of the brush that I'm choosing to use and I'm using a dilute wash because now I can go into this with some other colors and have a bit of fun and without disturbing those lovely broken edges I can just drop these colors in and allow them to run in to the background color so useful in landscape painting let's have some green in there too you can create foregrounds with maximum ease if you can Master a technique like this and this is the place to do it on the practice page not in the middle of a painting now what I might do just to mix things up a little bit is mix a real dark out of ultramarine and burnt sienna here it's a great way to hit a dark nice and quickly without too much fuss test out the areas that you've painted again the ones that are almost dry that's dried you can see holding its place but we've still got some control over it we're using a concentrated mix of paint and we're just touching the paper very lightly leave the brush on you get an entirely different Mark I'm not going to keep you too much longer I could sit here all day doing this and believe it or not sometimes I do um not too often though it's not going to um be the best way of moving things forward but practice like this is absolutely invaluable now I said that towards the end I would let you into the secret of why this type of practice is so important and it is something that is often overlooked particularly in the YouTube tutorial space and the importance of practicing like this is that you are not copying anything you are creating don't copy create you will learn far more and you will become a far better a painter if you can create and not copy that is why this exercise is so good have a go at something like this create your own patterns your own marks your own mixes use whatever colors you want in whatever combination you choose please get into the habit of doing these and you will find that your painting skills come on leaps and bounds well I hope you found that helpful have a go at these exercises yourself not only are they great fun to do but they are tremendously important and they really will help you to gain familiarity with the medium and enable you to develop technical skills hopefully next year we'll start to look at two of the other legs that support this table that I mentioned and they are planning and presentation and I don't see any one of these four as being more important than the other I've mentioned before there's a school of thought that suggests that you should Master technical skills before you get onto anything broader in terms of the art of what you're doing but I just don't subscribe to that and I think that all these four Concepts subject familiarity technical skills planning and presentation should all be taught at the same time now if you're new to my YouTube Channel please click on like if you've enjoyed this video and found it helpful and if you haven't done so already please subscribe to the channel click on the little bell icon and that will give you a notification each time I post a new video and for those of you that have watched regularly over the last year thanks ever so much your support is always greatly appreciated I enjoy reading your comments thank you for posting those unfortunately I just can't get back to all of them um I try to reply to as many as I can but of course it's just not possible to reply to them all especially some of those on the older videos that I've done so all that's left to say really is I hope you have a fantastic Christmas wonderful New Year and a thoroughly productive holiday season with plenty of time to practice your watercolor skills so happy painting look forward to seeing you next [Music] time

Channel: Oliver Pyle - Our Landscape

Views: 532,430

Keywords: watercolor painting, watercolour painting, painting tutorial, watercolor exercises for beginners, watercolor exercises intermediate, learn to paint, learn to paint beginners

Id: r6ORJqjR27E

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 24 2023