Seascape Painting in watercolours

 

Though I work in all mediums , watercolors is definitely one of my favorites. The Seascape above is one of my practice works. I experiment on different color schemes. Some color schemes can be derived but some nature provides. Nature gives us plenty of color schemes, the painting above is one of a kind.

    Let's get in to the painting...

    For any watercolor painting, sketching is very much important. keep these things noted, while you do the sketch for your painting:

• Make sure not to over sketch. For example, in the above painting all I need to sketch is the land, house, and tree trunk. You no need to sketch the outline for shadow or leaves as shown in the picture below.
• Pick one baseline for the entire sketch. Always pick one base point as a baseline for your entire sketching. Based on the baseline align the remaining objects or lines in your sketch.

    Colouring

    For any watercolor landscape , we always start with the background wash. 

    

Base Wash : 

    Here I am starting with diluted cobalt blue as base wash for the sky and water portions. when the base wash is still wet, I keep on adding Prussian blue for the dark shades on the sky portion. The water itself does the work here leaving the beautiful effect on sky. 

    This is a far view scene. The land and tree should look dark without more details. I choose the land portion to be muddy so added mix of Burnt sienna and Raw Umber for the ground , tree trunk and house portions. Added a bit of sap green to the tree base and house roof to get fungal effect. 

Adding subject form:

    The main subject here is the tree and the house near to it. The tree leaves should be prominent. I used Sap Green and Viridian hue for the leaves. Apply leaves with Sap Green first as light tone and Viridian hue as mid tone over Sap Green. Add Burnt sienna for bottom leaf branches . The Burnt sienna mix with the green leave a translucent brownish green which represents the dark tones on the leaves. 

    Added details on the house using Raw umber on the house roof. For the very dark tone on the window, I used black along with raw umber. The same dark tone is used for the fence and the details on the land. Do not add too many details on the land as the complete land portion may become dark.

Adding shadows:

    Adding shadows is an interesting part for me always. While adding shadows, we need to give random strokes. Though the strokes are random, we need to plan the colors and position of the strokes. 

    Here I used  Viridian hue , Sap green and Burnt sienna for the shadows. The greens should be placed according to the perspective. The browns in the shadows represents the reflection of the tree trunk and the house. 

Finishing's:

    I added few birds and a little boat in the water. 

    Take care that all the subjects look natural and has full form.