How to Paint Leaves in Watercolor

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Sherie Tengbergen here at the Education Network in Palm Beach County and we're here to learn about water color painting. In this clip, I'm going to show you how to paint leaves. We're going to begin with a liquid Miskit outline that I make using Maskoid in my tiny little bottle, and I've kind of just sketched own some leaves. And I'm going to take my big wash brush and I'm going to take Windsor Green and Yellow Ocher and mix them together to make a nice Olive Green for the top leaf here. And I'm going to just very easily paint from the inside going out, and I want to add some yellow to this, so I get a lighter color as I get to the tips. And now it's time to pick up a smaller brush, and start adding a lighter color to the tips, because leaves are always darker in the center. So I'm going to just, very, very quickly here, pull out those colors, picking up some Cadmium Yellow. Now there's a little trick I do to my leaves, it really makes them different and unusual. I'm going to take a little bit it of Burnt Sienna here to do the stem of the leaf. And then I'm going to pick up, this is an old brush that I broke off and stuck in a pencil sharpener. And I'm going to take that and I'm going to actually draw into my leaf, the veins, by pressing pretty hard into the color. And if you can see in these leaves that I have over here, that's exactly what I've done. And when the paint dries, you will see those leaves very nicely on your paper. And I will continue filling in the tips of the leaves and trying to make each leaf just a little bit different color. And the least thing I'm going to do, is make these little squiggles by taking a fine brush, some Yellow Ocher and just painting some little squiggles outside of my leaves. Once gain, this has been Sherie Tengbergen, thank you for watching."