Mountains, River and Fall Trees Painting

Hi everyone! Today I did a painting of a scenery. It is a watercolour artwork of mountains and river. I was thinking for a long time on what to paint and spent plenty of my waking hours deciding where to start. I finally landed on this one although I had something else that's much simpler in my mind.

It's because this is actually the first time I'm using this sketchbook. I have never painted on this one before and was worried whether the painting might turn out well. I didn't want to spend so much of time painting if the paper isn't good for watercolour. Sometimes the sellers will label it as watercolour paper but it ends up being not suitable or of poor quality.

This paper is of 230gsm and it did serve it's purpose as it claimed to be a watercolour paper. However it could not hold a lot of water. If I get to choose I would pick my other sketchbook with 320gsm papers. I could almost pour water on it and it still will be sturdy. This set wasn't like that and I could see the water marks appearing on the back of the paper so chances are I won't be able to use that section.

This is just a little guide proportion that I made so I know where everything goes.

This is the basic outline of the painting. While typing this, I am actually yet to finish the artwork. I got back pain due to a bad chair and the paint too needs to dry before I add more details, which is why I'm taking a break. Well, not technically but I just thought it's better to start typing this out while I rest my back.

This is my little workspace. I laid out my paint set and tools which is just a little round brush 😅 I also kept water container to wet my brush and to clean it. I'm just using a juice jar here but it works really well. I also have a mixing palette but at the time I'm typing this, I didn't use it at all.

The above are all the first layers of paint. This is just the base of the final outcome. I was just testing the waters to see how well the paper is in absorbing water and showing the colours vibrantly.

Here, I have added some details. It wasn't much but did make some difference. I just painted some natural stones and boulders around the river.

I painted some trees in distance. They were coniferous trees.

After that, I painted some tree trunks near the river. These will look like fall trees.

I painted the fall trees in reds and pinks. I used different shades of reds to get some shadows but it wasn't easy to get the contrast effect. Perhaps some brown is needed for the red trees. I used reds for the pink trees but had to figure out what shadow to use for the other trees. I settled with red ochre at the end where you can see me adding it.

I added some reds to the large pink tree.

While the trees were all drying, I added more blue to the sky. I thought it looked too dull. Now it looks cheerful, doesn't it?

I added more dark brown to the trees and painted their shadows as well. I guess shadows are really important unless we are drawing a vampire 😅

I thought this was the final outcome but I was still not satisfied with the leaves of the red fall trees.

I added a maroon shade to the trees for more divided look with finer leaves. This is the final outcome and I'm just too tired to make any more changes as it is late where I am. I thought I would call it done now.