Watercolor Tutorial

I just finished this painting and took photos at each step and thought I would post them as a tutorial on how I do my landscape paintings. Click on any image to see it bigger.

I do a very loose sketch - either from a photo or sketch in my sketch book. I will work from back to front. I always work upright on an easel.

I completely wet just the sky area and paint in my sky - in sections I will blot out the color with a tissue to form clouds.

My next step is to put in the background mountains and tree line. Now I am working on dry paper but with very wet pigment.

I next put in the first layer of the water - this is on dry paper but with very wet paint (lots of water and just a little pigment) I want the first layer of the water to be light - I can always darken it later.

Next I start forming the middle piece of land and rocks - while doing this I put in a few foreground rocks - my paper is dry.

I wet the area I will be painting my background trees and mix up a dark batch of bluish/green - this pigment is much ticker as the paper is wet - I loosely paint in the trees. At this point I also added a few more foreground rocks.

I now start to form the foreground piece of land starting with more rocks and a little bit of the grass.

My next step was to paint in more trees - the same as the previous trees - I wet the area first and mix up a thicker dark pigment and paint in the trees.

Next I put down the sand area on the beach and I darkened the water in places. This was all done on dry paper. Now I just added some details - like some trees in front of the fir trees and some high light on the water and signed my name. The finished painting is at the begging of this post.