Paint a watercolor landscape does not have to be a daunting prospect. If you follow these 4 easy steps, you can create your own watercolour landscape paintings in no time.<\/p>\n
How to paint a watercolor landscape<\/p>\n
1. Study the Elements of a Landscape: Get to know the elements and how they all work together. Understand the relationship between the sky and the ground, what makes a good foreground, middle-ground and background. This will help you understand how to paint them in your own painting later on.<\/p>\n
2. Start With Your Sky: Start with your sky because it is usually the most dominant part of your painting. It’s best to start with an underpainting, where you block in your sky-tones first before moving onto other areas of your painting which are often less dominant than the sky and easier to do at this point.<\/p>\n
3. Choose Your Foreground: The foreground can be anything from grass in your landscape, or even rocks if you prefer. Don’t choose too much detail too soon though, as it can be tempting for some people and can distract from your main focal point which should be your sky and clouds at this stage of painting.<\/p>\n
4. Finish With Your Ground: This is perhaps one of the most important parts of<\/p>\n
Watercolours are a great medium for learning to paint. They’re forgiving, don’t require expensive materials and they offer instant feedback on your progress.<\/p>\n
Watercolour landscapes are an excellent subject to practice on too, as they are very popular and sell well. It’s a great way to develop your painting skills, but because there is such a wide choice of subjects and styles, it can be hard to know where to begin.<\/p>\n
Tutorials are one way of tackling the problem, but with so many on the Internet it can be hard to know which ones will help you learn in the best way.<\/p>\n
What I’ve done here is put together a simple step-by-step process that you could use when painting your first watercolour landscape. Each step has been chosen to build your skills gradually, allowing you to experiment with colours, tools and techniques without feeling overwhelmed by detail or losing sight of your overall goal – a completed landscape painting of your own design.<\/p>\n
Paintings are full of light and shadows. This is because the artist used a darker paint for the shadows, and a lighter one for the highlights. This is called “glazing” and it is a very important concept in watercolor painting.<\/p>\n
You want to start with a very light layer on your board before you begin painting. This is called “underpainting”. The underpainting sets up how your painting will look as a whole: it makes sure that white paper shows through any areas without paint, which means that they will be “highlights” in the final painting.<\/p>\n
Tinting your watercolor paints with Gesso (which you can buy at an art supply shop) helps the paint to go on more smoothly and prevents blotching (which looks like muddy brown spots). You can water down the paint so it goes on more smoothly, but do not add too much water or else it will take longer to dry and you won’t be able to paint over it.<\/p>\n
This technique works best if you are doing a landscape with a lot of white in it, such as snow or clouds. If you are doing something else, you might have to experiment a bit.<\/p>\n
Step 1: For a beginning watercolorist, it is the best to start with simple things. A landscape is a great way to learn how to use watercolor because it is easy to control and manipulate. It will also allow you to study colors in depth and compare them with each other.<\/p>\n
The best time of day to paint is early morning when everything is still damp with dew. The colors are more vivid and brilliant, and the light gives them an extra glow. You can also try painting in the evening, when shadows are longer and sunsets are more dramatic.<\/p>\n
Trees are bright green, grass fields are emerald green, the sky is light blue with some white clouds.<\/p>\n
This is my first landscape painting. I’ve never painted landscapes before, but it was really a breeze.<\/p>\n
Here’s how I did it:<\/p>\n
1. Find a reference photo of your subject matter. Use your smart phone to take this photo in the late afternoon, with the sun behind you, so that you get nice shadows on your subject.<\/p>\n
2. Look at reference photo and draw a horizon line. The horizon line should be where you intend the bottom of the painting to be.<\/p>\n
3. Paint the sky! You can do this by making a couple of brush strokes in the corner of your paper, then wetting that area with water and pulling out some blues and purples into the corner area between your two brush strokes (no need to be neat). When that dries, wet it again, adding some more color in various directions until you like how it looks. If you don’t like how it looks, add more water and more colors until you like how it looks! This is called “painting wet into wet” and results in an atmospheric effect, which is what we are going for here.<\/p>\n
4. Paint the land! This is easier because if we use our reference photo as a guide and use dark colors toward the bottom and light colors<\/p>\n
1. Choose a composition.<\/p>\n
2. Sketch the composition lightly in pencil.<\/p>\n
3. Block in the colours with watercolours (or oil paints).<\/p>\n
4. Remove excess paint by rubbing off with tissue or cotton wool ball, and\/or by lifting out of the paper with a wet brush.<\/p>\n
The best way to learn how to draw is to draw. The problem with this statement is that it is difficult to know what to draw, and so people are often drawn to books that guide them through drawing exercises in order to help them develop their skills. These books are great, but they all tend to follow a very similar pattern:<\/p>\n
1) An introduction of the fundamentals of drawing<\/p>\n
2) A number of basic drawing exercises<\/p>\n
3) A series of increasingly complex projects, usually culminating in a landscape or portrait<\/p>\n
This is a great way to teach people how to draw, but in my experience it tends not to stick. In other words, once you finish the book, you still have problems with your ability to draw. You might be better at drawing than when you started reading the book, but the improvement is usually not permanent. There are two reasons for this: \u00a01) The exercises in the book assume a high level of skill on the part of the reader; \u00a02) The books never really address the issue of improving one’s current level of skill.<\/p>\n
The problem with assumption one is that if you are just starting out drawing, you need much more guidance than even a good instructional book can provide. There’s a lot you need to know before