Virtual Art Academy

Basic Watercolor Technique: Texture – Grasses

Now you have the basics for a landscape, you can start to build it up. A feature that appears a lot in landscapes are grasses.

How do you make grasses look real without painting every blade?

When you want to add grasses to your painting, many beginners make the mistake of painting every single blade of grass. This creates a very unreal looking painting, because every blade ends up being the same size, the same color, and the same distance apart.

A good tool for suggesting grasses in a painting, is an old fan brush. In fact the more beaten up the brush the better. For this watercolor technique you need to have dry paper. If your paper is wet with some kind of wash, wait for it to dry.

Mix up a green that closely matches the grass you want to include in your painting, and fill the fan brush with it.

Drag the fan brush across the dry paper in several different directions, and overlap your brushstrokes.

Tips

To make your prepared paper dry faster, use a hairdryer on a low to medium heat, and angle it to the paper so you don’t burn it or create uneven dry areas.

Layer different shades of green to represent different types of grasses, and to show where the grasses are in light or shade.

To help you better capture the grasses you want to paint, try squinting. This will reduce the amount of detail you see, as well as focus on the light and dark areas of the field.

Free Watercolor Tips

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