Robin in Watercolour

This short demonstration video is of a robin in watercolour, painted in my sketchbook using wet into wet techniques. Winsor & Newton Professional watercolours used are cadmium yellow, cadmium red, alizarin crimson, payne's gray, raw umber, burnt umber, cerulean blue and lamp black.

You can see how I start by wetting the whole bird apart from the eye and beak then add cadmium yellow for the chest with cadmium red on top, darkening with a little alizarin crimson. This is all very wet so make sure when you wet it, wet it again so it sinks in and stays wet giving you time to add all the colours in one go. Then I use a little bit of payne's gray for the belly and raw umber for the tip and sides of the head, darkening a little with burnt umber.

For the eye, I painted the highlight in first with cerulean blue and used lamp black for the eyeball. Then cerulean blue for the feet, darkened with black on the edge.

The branch was painted with a mix of burnt umber and a bit of black using a fast brush stroke, with the brush on its side allowing little bits of white paper to show through. I used a synthetic round brush size 6 with a size 1 for the small details.

Hope you have a go and please do let me know how you get on.