Materials used:
Brushes
1 1/2" (381mm) Flat Winsor & Newton Series 965
#10 Winsor & Newton 820 round red sable
#5 Scripto Red Sable Rigger
#8 Winsor & Newton 820 round red sable
#6 Grumbacher Watercolor Classic Red Sable
Paints
Sap Green, Hooker's Green Dark, Cerulean Blue, Cobalt Blue, Dioxazine Purple, Alizarin Crimson, Permanent Rose, Raw Sienna, Burnt Umber, Indian Yellow, Pthalocyanine Green
Paper
Watercolor Block (12" x 16") Arches #140 cold pressed
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Miscellaneous
#2 Pencil
Kneaded Eraser
Palette - Your choice. Mine is an old Robert E. Wood model.
Water container (2) and water
Hair dryer (optional)
Reference
Photo or Sketch big enough for you to see reasonably well.
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Step One: Sketch it in
Grab your pencil and kneaded eraser and draw. Remember that you are laying down a rough map of where you are going in this painting. There were certain arrangements of shapes, lights, darks, and colors that tricked your imagination and emotions into thinking "I must paint this..." The whole process of painting is focused on getting that same "feeling" across to your audience, which is anyone other than you. I liked the way the trees lined up in a row against a hazy light background.
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Step Two: Working way back
My reference photo was lit strangely with the background very blurry and bright with morning haze. I dampened the paper from mid horizon up with clean water using a 1 1/2" flat wash brush. Using a mixture of cerulean blue and dioxazine purple I used the same brush to lay in the cloud forms in the sky.
Switching to a #10 round I brought in a darker purple/blue tree line about a third of they way in at the horizon. I mixed a heavily pigmented wash of cobalt blue and drew in the remaining darker tree line.
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Step Three: Don't ask
Maybe it was the intensity of the pure blue and purple of the previous wash. Maybe I was playing. I mixed a clean intense yellow using indian yellow. An odd color, it reminds me of the yellow you get with food coloring sets. A light wash is lemon and a dark wash can look yellow orange.
I painted the middle and foreground areas using a 1" flat sable. While it was still damp I dipped my #8 round into some sap green and floated in some fuzzy bush shapes.
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Step Four: Do I see a pattern here?
With some vague thoughts of 4-color process printing, I mixed a rich wash of permanent rose and painted in the foreground rills and furrows with a #10 round. Using the same magenta wash I drew in the bushes at the base of the pines.
You'll note I had to cut in the wooden fence shapes as I painted. Had I used a liquid frisket I could have saved about 20 minutes during the painting.
As this step I have a rather vibrant primary color underpainting. As I add the local colors I will try to leave some of this underpainting exposed as highlights of color. The rest will show through subsequent washes as new colors.
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Step Five: Trees are green, right?
I mixed a large amount of green. I mean a lot. Using sap green and hooker green dark I looked at the middle and foregound areas and decided to treat the whole of the two as a single plane of color. I washed the same intensity of wash across the foreground field, up through the bushes and over the fence and into the details of the tree forms. I split the work between a #10 and a #6 round red sable.
I stopped at this stage so you could see how I was constructing the actual tree shapes. There are certain symbolic brush strokes you find for different kinds of trees. Study different trees and how other artists handle tree shapes. Develop your own internal artistic symbol library for those times when you don't have the real thing in front of you. Stare at nature.
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Step Six: Bough break is over
I finished painting the basic tree shapes in the single color, all the while using my reference photo (or sketch) to see what shapes made these trees hold together. Note that the larger trees on the right had more of their lower branches bare. I switched to a #5 rigger and added more branch detail to this area.
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Painting a line of Pines - Part 1
Step-by-Step Watercolor Paintings