Painting a Boat in Water

To start off any watercolor painting, you must first sketch your image. Steve shows how to do this, even without a reference picture.

After your compositional sketch is finished, begin painting the sky with your standard blue paint over a wet surface to utilize the wet-in-wet technique to get soft blends. You can drop in lighter cool colors like Cerulean Blue or a green-yellow for a more peaceful mood. Once your sky is complete, continue downwards and block in the shadows in the boat with the same sky colors, then prep some autumnal colors on your palette.

With the variegated wash technique (a type of "wet-in-wet" technique), apply the different autumn colors to the forest area, allowing the paints to blend into one another on paper while maintaining the vibrancy of each individual color. Try to avoid painting regular patterns, and aim for a more organic feel to the tree shapes created within the forest.

Leave your forest background to dry, then continue towards the lake banks and paint them an earthy green, adding shadows and highlights accordingly to add depth and to separate the land area from the lake. Next, after checking that the forest background is dry, use a small paintbrush, dark brown paint, and tapered brushstrokes to paint the tree trunks and branches inside. 

Using different shades of green, paint the large tree in the foreground, adding little details of foliage around the edges to increase the illusion of depth and to establish this tree's position in the painting. Don't forget to finish off the rest of the background forest as well!

With the foreground and background elements complete, Steve introduces the concept of painting water and implementing reflections corresponding to different sections of the painting. 

With the water and reflections painted and nearly dry, it's time for the main attraction: the rowboat. Paint the rowboat carefully to avoid any accidental paint bleeds, adding details over the shadows you painted before while also adjusting the paint saturation according to those same values. Once the rowboat's decorations are done, make sure to apply the same colors as a reflection in the water under the boat as well, but wavering your lines like before to get the watery effect.

With the primary objectives complete, this last section is a guide for you to touch up any areas you feel could be improved and/or fixed as you see fit. Once you're satisfied, congratulate yourself, as you've just completed a fantastic landscape painting featuring a rowboat on a lake!