I like this subject because of the strong perspective leading back
from the right to the left and going through the shadow of the dappled light into the
the light in the far distance. It should give me what i need to do a sketch, keeping it very
simple and focusing on the textures of the paint. Now for those of you who are new to the channel,
welcome! What I typically do is I do a painting and talk about what i'm thinking as i go at each
stage. I'm attracted to this subject because of the way the light is splashed across the road.
The darkest part seems to be just to the left of the parapet on the left side.
I'll just drop in a few dark accents.
i'm choosing watercolor because of the way you can get things to sparkle in watercolor
like no other medium i'm using a homemade easel that's set up on a camera tripod
there's a link to tell you where you can find out more about
sketch easels here i'm using the tip of the brush to define the leaves and to leave some white
areas for the bright light bouncing off the leaves and smooth the husky mix wants to explore around
i want to take a minute to show you an exercise that you can do yourself
to experiment with some of the things i'm doing on this painting i have two colors hooker's green
and burnt sienna and what i want to do with hooker's green is to paint a tone
and leave some white areas like i was doing with the leaves a minute ago this one way to do it is
deliberately designing each shape but another way to do it is to load the brush with some pigment
and then drag it along the surface you need to have fairly texturey paper for this
it doesn't work with real smooth shiny flat paper this is watercolor paper in
a watercolor sketchbook you display the tip a little bit but what i'm trying to get here
are some light dots against that background tone
and then i'm going to try to do the reverse of that for the bottom part
to put some pigment in the brush and let it get a little bit dry in the brush and just drag it
across the very tops of the texture of the paper to get some dark dots so white dots on the top
dark dots on the pot on the bottom and i call this the salt and pepper exercise because
the top section looks like salt and the bottom section looks like pepper you can also spatter
some dots by flicking the brush if the brush is springy enough it'll send little dots
in sort of a random way on the surface so there's the salt
and there's the pepper and this is what i love about watercolor is that you can get
these textures quite easily with the rough paper let's try those techniques on the painting i'll
try springing some of that splatter along the middle of the road to look like gravel
i can also stipple with the tip of the brush
or drag the brush lightly in perspective
along the middle of the road or the sides of the road where it's darker
well i'm almost finishing up now and so it's a matter
of deciding where i want to put those dark accents i can put them with the side of the brush
by dragging the brush sideways over the paint surface allowing the texture of the paper
to carry the the pigment on the tops of their little mountains of paper
and then i want to give some consideration to the outside edge of a informal vignette like this
by carrying some of that texture across
and then i'm going to want to paint some tone down over that texture that pepper in the foreground
along the outside edge of the vignette i try to include some of the characteristic textures
of that area so if i have grass it might be some vertical strokes if i have leaves
it might be some leaf-like strokes and if it's the edge of gravel i want to have some stippling
and let's just bring a tone over that whole thing if i can build up the bead a little bit
here the bead is the little ridge of water at the bottom edge that'll dry up to a nice definite edge
watercolor is great for this kind of technique because
it naturally lends itself to a sparkling effect and really gives a feeling of bright light
you