Sea and Flowers 🌊🌸

A new painting on my sketchbook! You can follow the steps to see how it’s done, and even try it yourself if you like. As always I’m leaving you the basic guidelines and some tips and tricks to paint what may look like a difficult art at first, and I’m sure you’ll be amazed by the results once you find out you can do it too!

Supplies

1 – The Sketch

• Grab your sketchbook and set it horizontally.
• Draw the main subjects like the flowers bush, the cliff and the lighthouse.

2 – Sky and Flowers

• Wet all the sky area.
• Using Bright Blue, Cobalt Blue and Indigo with a touch of Violet paint the sky leaving behind some white spaces.
• Now to the bush area using Cadmium Red Light, Golden and Magenta shape the flowers. I went with a loose style but you can really paint them in any way, just go with the one you like the most.
• To paint the grass and the leafs use some dark and some light greens performing firm strokes. To lighten up the greens even more you can use Hanza Y. Use a Flibert brush to paint the grass touching the paper with the tip, it naturally looks like blades of grass, be fast and firm.

3 – The Sea

• I chose two colors to paint the sea: Turquoise and Indigo.
• Start off with firm strokes of Turquoise moving from your left to your right. As long as you come closer to viewer your lines should get bigger and finally when you reach the foreground you can even shape some wave lines.
• Do the same using Indigo only this time touching the deep areas of the sea and the ones that are far away. You want little to none of these in the foreground.

4 – Lands and Lighthouse

• Paint the mountains with a light wash of Indigo and Payne, being extra careful when you get close to the lighthouse.
• To the cliffs now. Use Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber and Umber to define the rocks facing the sea and many greens to cover the farthest greenery so that you can create lights and shadows (Olive G, Yellowish G, Emerald G., Chromium Oxide and Green). Don’t put details on the lands because they’re distant.
• For the foreground piece of land you can repeat this process only putting details this time around: I used the Filbert brush once again to create the grass using a dark green plus Indigo.
• Add some Sepia strokes on the cliffs to give the idea of creeks and rocky terrain.
• Wet the lighthouse area with clean water and put Payne in one side and Raw Sienna on the other: this shadow effect will give the building a rounded shape. Define some details on top using a very small brush or a fineliner.

5 – Details

• Keep going with the lighthouse, once the area is dry use English Red to paint a reddish horizontal stripe at about the middle of its height.
• Add some details on the lands using the Filbert brush with Payne and Indigo.
• To make it so that the flowers stand out use a fineliner and define their shape, do the same with some leafs and add very little points of Hanza Yellow here and there.
• Using the fineliner once again you can darken out some little areas you think should be really in the shadows, like some of the rocky cliffs for example.

Final Result

• You did it, the painting is done! Sign it and enjoy the view.

If you try this painting remember to tag me on Instagram (do it on the photo, not in the caption! This way i won’t miss it) with @chiaramazzetti.art and put the hashtag #chiaramazzettitutorial, i’d love to see what you create!

Happy Painting!
Chiara

List of watercolor names (based on the brand i used for this painting: White Nights Nevskaya Palitra)