Lesson 35 Watercolor - Sandy Beach

I'm rubbing my hands together right now. I LOVE to paint sand. We're going to get a bit creative. First, frisket off the edge of the waves and the turtle.

We'll be painting in the sand color soon, but we want some light sandy particles to show through the final paint. We'll let the frisket do that.

Grab a dish/container you're willing to sacrifice and an unused toothbrush.

 Dribble a small amount of frisket in the pan, take your toothbrush and dip the end in the liquid frisket.

 Spritz the sand area lightly.

 Do a little more, a  bit at a time until you have a lightly dotted area. You will get some big drops or non-circular spritzes. Let them dry. You can erase each of them out if you don't want them. Wash the toothbrush in water immediately and be thorough, to get all the frisket off.

 Here is what mine looks like.

 Some spilled over into the water area.

 I'm using my handy-dandy frisket eraser to clean up the area I don't want frisket in.

 Here is what is left.

 Now paint some yellow tones in using thinned-out yellow ochre.

White grains of sand will show through when I erase them out, but I want yellow grains, too, so I'm going to spritz more frisket over the yellow tone I just painted. (Let the yellow paint dry first.) Wash the toothbrush again. If the frisket dries on your toothbrush, it's a beast to get off.

 Now that the second layer of frisket is dry, paint in some brown on the sand. I mixed brown, orange and yellow ochre for the sand color.

 Next, I shade in the skuff marks left by the turtle, and add some soft details into the background for distance on the beach.

 After letting it dry, go in and darken the tones.

Oh, boy, now you get to erase the frisket grains of sand. Make sure that all the brown paint is COMPLETELY dry or it will smear into the newly appearing areas.

Once the new grains are exposed, we'll spritz on some medium and darker grains of sand. This time, I'm covering the top part of the painting with paper, to keep any stray spritzes from going astray. Mix some light brown and some dark brown watercolor paints. Dip your toothbrush in (one color at a time) and spritz it on the sand.

 Here, I've done the the dark brown spritzes. (Click on the picture to enlarge for detail. I think you can click on it again to enlarge it more.)

 And some light brown.

 After erasing the remaining frisket from the turtle and sea, here is our sand.

Next: the hills and mountains . . .