Easy Autumn Landscape | Watercolor Painting for Beginners, by Zamarashka Watercolor on YouTube. 8 min.
- Video length
- 8 min
- Time to do it
- 25 minutes
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Steps
- 9
What you need
Steps
Tape a sheet of watercolor paper to a board and wet the whole surface with clean water and a wide brush. Keep it evenly damp with no standing puddles.
Mix a pale warm gray-blue and brush a thin wash over the top third for the misty sky. Leave a few patches of bare paper for light.
While the paper is still wet, paint the water area with loose horizontal strokes in a light cool blue, leaving dry gaps as highlights.
Drop in the distant pine trees with a soft gray-green, using short downward dabs. Let the damp paper blur the edges so the trees look far away.
Paint one darker pine tree in the foreground with a small brush. Add the trunk first, then the branches, and keep the edges sharper than the distant trees.
Draw the shoreline as a soft horizontal line, then pull the same colors straight down into the water for mirror reflections.
Add water ripples with light horizontal strokes, skipping over the reflection so it stays broken and soft.
Paint the foreground bank with warm ochre and burnt sienna grass strokes, then place a small accent tree on one side for balance.
Finish with thin bare branches using the tip of a small brush, and darken a few trunks to push the foreground forward.
Tips and common mistakes
Keep the paper damp but never shiny wet, because too much water makes trees spread into blobs.
Test each mix on scrap paper first, since watercolor dries lighter than it looks when wet.
Let a layer dry fully before adding a hard edge, or the new paint will bleed back into it.
Lift mistakes with a clean damp brush and blot with a paper towel while the paint is still wet.
Questions
Do I need special watercolor paper?
Yes. Use cold-press paper made for watercolor, around 300 gsm, so the wet washes do not buckle or pill.
How do I keep the trees soft?
Paint them while the paper is still damp and do not go back over them. Once the shine leaves the paper, the edges turn hard.
Can I use student-grade paints?
Yes. A basic set with a warm yellow, a red, a blue and a dark green is enough for this scene.
This guide was drafted from the video's details and general task knowledge. It has not been checked against the full video. Check the video and relevant product instructions before following a procedure. Report a correction.
