Watercolour Painting - Mountain Landscape

Our first painting only uses one tube of paint so we don’t have to worry about mixing colours. We learn about tone too – mixing in more or less water to create lighter or darker shades of colour. Read the steps through before you start.

You will need:

• Paint: Burnt Umber
• Brushes: Large (1 ½ inch) brush and no.3 rigger.
• Paper: a sheet of 10 x 14 inch 140lb/300gsm watercolour paper.
• Palette
• Water pot
• Mop-up cloths
• Pencil
• Ruler
• Eraser
• Board 16 x 20 inch to stick your paper on
• Masking tape
  

1. Horizon – Using masking tape across the corners, fix your sheet of paper lengthways to the board. (This is called ‘landscape’. If the paper was upright it would be called ‘portrait’.) With a pencil, draw the horizon line about 3 inches up from the paper’s bottom edge. Prop up the board or place on your easel. Be aware that you only have two minutes to paint a sky, once you’ve wet the paper, so don’t labour it! Squeeze out some Burnt Umber onto your palette.

2. Sky – Wet the large brush. Starting from the top of the page, use broad strokes to wet down to an inch above the horizon line. (Look from the side to see the sheen and make sure it is wet.)

3. Quickly mix watery Burnt Umber. Paint the sky starting from the top. Leave some gaps of white cloud. Mix more paint with less water to apply another darker layer of sky. Use horizontal dabs to form sausage shapes – large ones at the top, small below. Dry this.

4. Middleground – Reload your brush with paint. Keep above the horizon line and paint a wobbly ‘M’ for your mountains. Fill this in and let it dry. (I’m left handed so I start from the right. If it is easier, start from the left.)

5. Mix some darker paint (use less water). Dab in the lake shore, holding the brush upright like a chisel. Leave some white bits but don’t go below the horizon line. Dab some even darker paint along the horizon line to finish the lake edge.

6. Foreground – Making sure your painting is dry, let’s paint the lake. Make a weak mixture of paint (use lots of water) and load the large brush well. Start from one side and make a broad stroke across to the other side. Leave some white between the shore and water’s edge. Sweep across again, and repeat the action to fill the foreground with water.

7. When the lake is dry you can paint the rushes. Dry your large brush on your cloth, and then load it with almost neat paint. Using short downward strokes, form small patches of rushes. You can vary the shade of the paint slightly by adding a little water to give lighter patches here and there, but keep the brush quite dry so that the bristles splay to create the stalks of the rushes.

8. To finish off, paint in one, three or five little birds (even numbers never work right on the eye for some reason) with the rigger brush - it’s simple, just a tiny ‘V’ stroke or tick to show the wings in flight. Then sign your painting off (personally I use a pencil but a pen or paint is fine too).

Congratulations! You’ve just created your first masterpiece.