Hello! Today I am going to be painting some sunset photos that were on my friend Kayla’s blog Journals of Joy (her blog is private). She shared many great sunset photos, and out of those I chose these two.
I love these two photos because the colors are drastically different from each other and there are very little clouds, which makes the colors very pure (and clouds are really hard to paint in my opinion).
0 | Start by taping the edges of your paper down. I split my paper in half, but if you want your paintings bigger, use two sheets of paper.
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(From left to right)
1 | Start by wetting the paper lightly. Then add some mid-toned blue in small triangular shapes on the side, near the top, but leaving an inch or so to the top. Leave everything loose.
2 | Add some blue-gray between the two triangles and blend things together a little bit.
3 | Add some periwinkle/violet in the slit that you left at the top. If you want to make your purple slit bigger, just lift some of the blue paint off.
4 | Add some scarlet-ish paint in a small rectangle shape right below the blue/gray/violet blob.
5 | Add some brown red to the side of the scarlet paint and some lemon yellow below.
6 | Blend everything together with minimal strokes.
7 | Add more paint on top for more vibrancy. Let dry. In the meantime, let’s start the next sunset.
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8 | Coat the next piece of paper with water. Then add blue paint from the top blended down, and then a bit of cool red/pink.
9 | Add some texture with the red.
10 | Blend out the texture, creating a lavender color. Blend the red downward too.
11 | Add a setting yellow sun. Make sure it isn’t too low, we still have some trees to paint over it.
12 | Add some blue texture to the red block.
13 | Add more pigment onto the painting to brighten the sunset. You can blend it out more, but I decided to leave it very patchy. (Now that I think about it, I don’t understand why I did that.)
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Yay!
14 | Using black paint (I used gouache) create lots of trees across.
15 | Then add a house and fill in the rest of the bottom with black.
16 | Onto the second painting. Add a power line stand (?).
17 | Add trees. I made the trees in front of the setting sun lower so you can see it.
18 | Finish filling the bottom in with black.
Here are the finished sunsets. They are quite different from the photos, but I like how bright and contrasting the colors are. I hope you enjoyed this post. What sort of tutorials would you like me to do in the future? You can leave a comment or send me message in Contact. Thanks for reading!
Whimsical Watercolor 
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