Category: Painting Tutorials

As a working mother who tries to run a few times a week, write in my blog and keep my family from starving or looking unacceptably dirty, my time is limited. I tend to paint in bursts, my least favorite part is figuring out what to paint and followed by how to frame my work. I still don’t have a good plan for how to frame them, I have a pile sitting in my workspace as I type.

One great way to be inspired is to watch a YouTube tutorial. I have mentioned some of the artists I subscribe to here.

Many of my painting are water scenes painted from my own photographs. As a life-long student, I love to watch and learn from other artists including how they paint water. Often times I will just watch the video and not even paint. I have painted this Grant Fuller tutorial a few times and think he gives great tips about painting wet sand and creating the a “water’s edge.”

Overview of the tutorial

  1. Do a quick pencil sketch, I pause the opening frame of the video and draw my sketch. The pencil lines won’t show in the final painting but try to keep them out of the sky!
  2. Wet the horizon and sky blending into the distant tree line is fine as we will be going over it with a darker pigment.
  3. I didn’t have cadmium orange but used gold ochre to create the distant light on the horizon. The use of cobalt blue and the gold ochre creates an interesting grey/blue that I wouldn’t have come up with on my own. I tend to use ultramarine or windsor blue in my skies and have started to use cobalt more to create some nice colors without the granulation that comes from the ultramarine.
  4. Let the sky dry. If you don’t you will get bleed. Sometimes we want bleed, in this case we do not.
  5. For the background, I used a cobalt blue, yellow ochre with a touch of burnt sienna. You want this layer to look misty so don’t put it on too dark.
  6. The whites are so important when you are painting waves, you can always go back and add more “water” but it’s much more difficult to get back to white! The thin layer of white against the distant shore is essential.
  7. Burnt sienna and ultramarine for the rocks
  8. When using the UM and BS on the water’s edge, go easy! Leave some gaps, better to add more than to have dark globs. Light touch is the key here. This step is what really makes the water “pop” and gives depth to the painting.
  9. Let everything dry and then wet the entire bottom portion of the paper, use the ultramarine and burnt sienna again to make a gradient in the wet paper, more blue at the water’s edge and more brown towards the drier sand at the bottom.
  10. Use a clean brush to create breaks in the sand adding reflective elements and giving the sand a “wet” appearance.

One of my attempts. This is a great tutorial, I learn something new each time!

And another! I like to paint the same scene with some tweaks!

Using some of the techniques!
Wet sand and water’s edge.

I follow a few artists on YouTube and thought it would be fun to post my sketch and painting of one of Alan Owen’s tutorials!


Alan Owen has that breezy, easy style that so many of us long to be able to pull off. I spend to much time fiddling around and stuck in details and I long to be a a landscape painter that gives the “impression” of the scene, not a copy. We always want what we don’t have, but I don’t call this blog “Learning New Tricks” for nothing! Alan uses some interesting paint combinations, I am trying to be more consistent with my trial and error so I wrote out his colour recipes and a quick sketch/painting.

If you are like me, you are forever trying to find the perfect green. I learned the hard way that a tube of green is usually not your friend. In this painting, the palette is muted but the green quite lovely, it is a cadmium yellow, windsor blue and raw sienna. I don’t have raw sienna (thought it is now on my list) gold ochre is listed as a possible substitute. I tend to mix my greens with ultra marine but the windsor blue mixed nicely and I will try using more often. I also like the grey we put in the sky, it was also a mix of cobalt blue and Indian red ( I used alizeron crimson). I didn’t do the sketch book until after I finished the painting, if I had I would have realized there was going to be a house! I put a bit too much shore line in front of the house, these people are definitely not going to get flood insurance…

For my next tutorial I started with the tiny painting and color chart.

I haven’t done the exercise on real paper yet but I love the grey from cobalt and burnt sienna!

I enjoy Alan Owen’s videos and find him easy to follow, though I do pause to catch up when I need to!

I found a list of some additional watercolor tutorials, some I have watched and some I plan to watch! As a visual learner, I really find watching other people work gives me so many ideas.