How to Paint Grass With Watercolors

Watercolors are the perfect medium for painting grass.

Landscapes are the most popular genre of watercolor painting. You can create lush outdoor areas that are entirely imagined, or celebrate a favorite location within your own reality. Some artists find themselves a bit stuck when approaching the grass portion of their landscape. It's actually quite easy, and when mastered, will allow the remainder of your painting to spring to life.

Things You'll Need

• Watercolor paper
• Watercolor paint
• Medium round brush
• Small flat brush
• Mixing palette
• Jar of water

Instructions

Painting Grass with Watercolors

1. Decide which portion of your painting will contain grass. The entire surface could be filled with grass, or perhaps a particular area within your landscape.

2. Squeeze a variety of green, blue, brown and yellow watercolor paint onto your mixing palette.

3. Moisten your medium round brush and scoop up a generous portion of yellow paint. Keeping the brush very wet, continue to sweep the yellow paint across the grassy part of the watercolor paper. This is the base color, or "wash."

4. Dip the same brush, still moist and containing the yellow paint, into the green paint on your mixing palette. Take very little green paint, as it will be used to add depth and shadows to the grass. Sweep the brush along the lowest and deepest ground areas of the grass, carefully blending with the previous yellow. Allow the surface to completely dry before continuing.

5. 

   Grass is the base of most landscapes.

   Dip the small round brush into the water and immediately tap it into the green and blue paint, so that the two colors are combined on the moistened brush tip. Using quick and varied linear strokes, highlight particular bunches of blades by scoring the green and blue mixture in the direction the blades might stand. Some blades are diagonal, curled, and also straight. Allow part of the yellow wash to be visible, as this will create dimension.

6. Finish the grass portion of your painting by creating a nice deep mixture of green, brown and yellow. Transfer this color to shade the various blades and bunches of grass, as well as layer on top of any areas that require depth. Use the small flat brush, dry, for detailing and the medium round brush, moistened, to cover larger areas. Note that watercolors will blend when moistened, and can not replace previous colors.

Tips & Warnings

• Use various colors of ink pen to draw random crosshatched marks and lines to allow the colors to really pop.