In this watercolor landscape video demo, I’ll take you through my process of creating a loose scene with buildings, cars, trees and figures walking. I’ll be using a photo reference for this demo.
Let’s start with the photo reference
This photo was taken in Carytown, VA while visiting many years ago. The afternoon light was perfect so I took some photos. I tend to prefer corners when it comes to urban and cityscape scenery. I like the intersections as they offer a good start to designing a solid composition.
I’m not a fan of copying what I see, instead I prefer to use it as a starting point. Starting with a large shape and point of interest I will create a design around that and only extract from the reference what I need, the rest goes away.
Here are the changes I made
- Added a cross walk
- Eliminated larger trees next to building
- Added the right side of street with a house
- Placed figures in the scene
- Used two figures walking across street as a lead-in
The materials
Materials are important for the art and artist. You have to have artist grade paint and paper, that’s a MUST! There are a lot of synthetic brushes on the market these days that do an amazing job, that’s what I tend to use over the higher end brands.
- Holbein paint – Cadmium red light, alizarin crimson, Cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, cadmium yellow lemon, yellow ochre, burnt sienna, neutral tint
- Brushes – Princeton Neptune pointed round #12, #6, Rigger #3/4″, Silver brush black velvet jumbo (medium)
- Paper – Fabriano Artistico, bright white, 140 lb. cold press 11″ x 15″
And the results
All in all, it turned out well! I’m happy with the overall design & composition, the colors pop’ and the light and shadow work well to give the scene a beautiful three-dimensional feel.
