How To Paint Watercolour Landscapes

Get an image of a fairly simple basic landscape. In any landscape, the best starting point is the sky and to work from back to front which means the background comes first before putting any details in. Put the tree and then paint the bits of sky between all the twigs.

Work in a method called a wash where using a wet brush, you stroke water with some paint in it across the top of the paper. Start with a tiny touch of deep blue as the top of the sky is always darker than as it works its way down towards the horizon. Change it to a little bit of ultramarine.

Allow it to run down so that the blob keeps moving and keep adding water and a tiny bit of colour. Do a fairly pale style to match the feeling and the mood in the photo. As the blob of paint works its way down, there's a good covering soaking in the paper as far as you want to go of the sky.

However, if you want to get rid of that big blob, there are two ways. Either with a semi-dry brush, pick up some of that colour or tip the board away and then back again and allow it to soak in. Another way is to dab it with a bit of paper towel.

But the risk then is you may get splodges that you don't want. So the next stage, leave that out to dry and do some of the fields. Wet the paper first, just leaving the very background area, get a mixture of green, a bit of yellow oak that French impressionists use a lot, and raw sienna.

Put a small green on dry paper and you can see the difference that the colour comes out much stronger. If you don't like that effect, add more water. It dissolves the colour a little bit and helps it to spread more.

While it's still wet, put a bit of distant trees, keeping it very soft without too much colour, and along the edge with a band of dark. Keeping it quite wet means that the paint will bleed a little bit and soak in. The idea is to create the illusion of depth.

You need the distance to be quite faint and fuzzy. With a mixture of gray and a tiny bit of crimson, move it across and link it in at the side. Now, you have an idea of depth and distance before going into detail with the foreground.

But this is a base coat. Dab the colours on your brush to send it into the distance. As you come further forward with the landscape, keep working wet in wet here.

All the details should have something behind to show through. The tree comes in front of whatever's behind it and there's a very dark area of the front. So, wet the paper, move it with the big brush and let it just settle for a couple of minutes.

While that's drying, put some dark to the side, throw in a bit of green and revisit other areas with a fan brush made from badger hair. When it's wet, it can actually form the most interesting shapes by stroking a bit to can get the effects of twigs and branches. A few artists don't agree with this tool because they think it's cheating but it's lovely to use.

So, you've got a fence at the front, some foliage, leave it to dry for a couple of minutes and swap the much longer bristled brush known as the rigger brush. Put some paint on the brush and paint the fence in. It should look like a proper watercolour as opposed to something that has been constructed and too photographic.

It should look more like a painting. Keep that moving with the trunk of the tree lining up into the sky and double up thickness. This has two effects.

First of all, it's giving some depth to the picture by creating a foreground and secondly, it brings a frame to the whole composition. There's a balance now. With the fence, you can reemphasize.

Put the bushes in, swap your brush again, keep it wet in the distance and then back to the rigger brush for the branches and complete the picture. Keep it looking natural. So, it is a combination of good observation and adding a little bit of flow to create a watercolour landscape.