Simple BEGINNERS Woodland SUNBEAMS Watercolour Landscape, watercolor sun rays painting tutorial demo

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Today I'm painting a beginner friendly semi-abstract woodland scene with sunbeams through the trees as the focus, using a limited palette of perylene gree, sap green, cadmium yellow and paynes grey. There's a full 3 part tutorial for this on Patreon, follow the link above if you are interested. Best to wait till 1st of the month to subscribe as you will be charged when you join, then again on the 1st of the month while you are a member.
The idea is to try to let go and paint a wet in wet woodland background as loosely as possible, aiming to keep it really light in the centre and a bit darker in the top corners for the tree canopies, loosely painted and kept really simple. Then the sunbeams are lifted from the wet underpainting. Once dry, the trees are added, lifting off colour wherever the trunks, branches or limbs cross the sunbeams. It looks challenging, but it is a simple and exciting process that will probably take a bit of practice, but is really useful for getting beginners used to the way water and paint can flow on the page, and getting balanced tonal values with enough darks, while keeping things fresh and light.

I'm using the back of an old painting for this experiment, Saunders Waterford 100% cotton hot press 140lb/300g weight paper, 11" x 15"/28cms x 38cms, my paper is taped to my board with ordinary decorators masking tape and is at an angle of about 45 degrees so gravity will help me paint. I use various brushes as demonstrated in the video, but use whichever brushes you have.