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