Watercolor owl spooky night paint along tutorial

I have looked at many owls pictures and decided that I like the intensity of the look of this one, being so close to Halloween, I wanted to do a night scene, so no cute little owl this time. With watercolor, night is hard. I don’t quite like to use so much pigments that it almost looked like acrylics. So we do the best we can as watercolor artists, and use the darks. In this painting I used payne’s gray, and dark blue purple to try to indicate darkness. I am thinking as of now, I wanted to do a raven for my next video. From past experience and project, I just go into the Chinese ink dark ink when I do very dark color. I guess that is not very traditional western style. But I like the result, I will keep thinking and hopefully it will show up soon. If I practice and am not happy, I will sometimes abandon project. So if you don’t see it, then it is not going very well. Other color that I used here are burnt umber, sepia, and quin burnt orange, and medium yellow. And I use a bit of highlight for the eyes. If you paint along, you will experience how to use the background to help with the owl being in the night, intensity of eyes, color pairing that I liked through the years, so I hope you will try this out. And my signature style of intensifying the painting at the end.

I went to Yellowstone national park last week and try to do a outdoor painting. It was my plan to have my husband film me while I was painting. In august we went as a family and I spotted a very picturesque area with a few bison. Iwas so excited to go back there this time, and when we got there, there was a very old bison fallen asleep still at 10am. That was it, and we looked and looked and couldn’t find a very good composition anywhere. All the bison disappeared, only a few here and there. And we pretty much ran out of time and so all together gave up. Then I came home and saw someone took a very good picture of a group of bison. I might just find a good fall scene and put my own bison into the painting just for fun for a post. We will see. Or else I probably can promise next year I will do a good video on my painting outdoor. We came home through the south part of yellowstone and the foliage was spectacular. We literally just drank in the yellow orange crimson mixed with green and some brown. I didn’t take a picture, I just focus on enjoying the color, it was so good. I think we are done with Yellowstone this year, my husband and I like snow shoeing, but we have plenty here in Utah to go to, probably not going to go to Yellowstone. I am very afraid of being in the cold and snow more than 3 hours, that is my limit. I would hate to get really cold and have to go into a shelter to wait for the bus, that doesn’t sound too fun to me. Maybe if I am ten years younger. Overall though I think Yellowstone is still a beautiful place to hang out in the winter. We also saw a big big elk, darted across the road while we drove into the park at night to see the moon in the horizon. We were very glad not have hit him. We saw a big moose at Lamar valley, we stopped quickly and turned around and he was getting ready to cross the road, was not happy with us in any way. That was ok. One bear, a black bear. I think we are getting really used to the driving around. You probably shouldn’t mind driving if you want to navigate Yellowstone, it’s a very big park. We have been thinking about many ways to increase the length of our stays in the Park, so that I can have more time to paint or draw. We have a few ideas, one of them maybe buying an apartment in the vicinity, so many things to consider though, I hope one day it will come to pass. I talked a little about our experience in Glacier National Park in this video too. So I hope you all have a good day, leave me a comment about a fun place that you love to go. If you are an artist also, tell me where you like to go painting outdoor. I would love to hear from you. Thank you again for stopping by, keep your brush wet.