Putting Another Artist to the TEST! Is this really the Easiest Watercolor Streetscape?

Añadido: 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]What's up, guys? My name is Robin and I make stuff. Today, we are painting an urban street scene. Now, I follow an artist here on YouTube whose work is incredible, particularly in this genre.

[00:00:10]Every time I see his videos, I'm just like, they're incredible. And he does all these little tiny sketchbooks, very tiny little studies of these street scenes. In fact, found a video on his channel that literally was called the easiest watercolor streetscape. That sounded really enticing. I was like, is this the easiest? Let's find out. You can check out his video. In the meantime, I am going to dissect exactly what I see him doing because he doesn't really talk you through it. You kind of just have to figure it out on your own and decipher exactly what his thought process is based on what you're seeing happen on the paper. That's a challenge, especially if you don't know what you're doing to begin with. I'm going to dissect everything that I think he's doing based on what I do, and we'll see if we can achieve the same or very similar result. And at the end, is it easy? We're going to find out. If you like hanging out with me, I love that for us. Make sure you give this video a like. And if you haven't already subscribed to my channel, today's the day. You can do that, too. In the meantime, let's stop talking about it.

[00:01:10]And let's paint the easiest watercolor streetscape. So, here's the scene that he's going to be painting. Here's a little sketchbook that he's going to paint this in. And this is pretty typical of his style. And I'm using a Canson multimedia pad. So, how easy is this drawing going to be? Okay, we got a horizon line. A bunch of lines going to the vanishing point. Little simple building structures. That's easy.

[00:01:33]Shading it in. Not sure why we're doing that. Maybe just for reference. This looks like maybe it's going to be a vehicle. Those look pretty sketchy. I'm not sure I would know how to do that.

[00:01:41]This must be a person. Another person.

[00:01:43]We got a bunch of people. Maybe another vehicle. If you didn't know anything about perspective, this might be a little challenging. Maybe a light pole.

[00:01:50]Okay, there's one across the street.

[00:01:52]Okay, stop light hanging over. and he's going to get his little palette out.

[00:01:56]This is typical of what he paints with.

[00:01:57]Let's break this down a little bit in his drawing. He's got all these lines coming out everywhere, you know, stuff like this.

[00:02:08]And he's got this horizon line. What the heck is the horizon line? The horizon line is your line of sight or the line of sight from the person who took this photo. So whether you're sitting, standing, floating, whatever it is, that horizon line is your line of sight.

[00:02:24]Yeah, it's also where the sky meets the earth and blah blah blah, whatever, but that is what's happening in this reference photo. And then he has all these lines. We'll talk about those lines in a second, but let's look at his reference photo. Here is the image that he is working from. If I'm looking at this, I see that maybe the horizon line is somewhere in this general area. That means the person who took this picture.

[00:02:51]Hi.

[00:02:53]That's their line of sight. They're standing here taking this picture and that's how tall they are. How tall is a person? I don't know. We'll say that most people are 6 feet. That's not really true, but a lot of people are six feet tall and it's an easy number to work with. From there, we have two different types of horizontal lines.

[00:03:12]horizontal lines that are parallel with where we're standing.

[00:03:17]So, here's where he's standing. He's standing on this line. And then you have these lines that are parallel with that line. Then we have horizontal lines that go away from where we're standing. Those are the ones that are going to go into the distance.

[00:03:33]And then we have vertical lines. At the ends of all the horizontal lines, there's a vertical line. It just goes straight up and down.

[00:03:42]And maybe there's one here. And maybe there's one there.

[00:03:46]Now we've got some buildings.

[00:03:50]This is the same as this piece right here. Look at that. And this is the same as that piece right there. So now we have a side of a building there and a side of a building here. These lines are going to extend into the distance and disappear at the same point that all these other angled lines, whether they're on this side of the road or this side of the road, they're all going to go to the same point. That is called the vanishing point because all those lines tend to vanish at the same point. Well, where is that point? Let's start drawing some of these lines that go away from where the photographer is standing. So, here's one on the road. I'm just going to take this and I'm going to keep on going with it. Just follow it all the way till it hits the horizon line. Okay, so that one went there. Here's another line for a sidewalk. I'm going to start this line and follow it till it hits the horizon line. Okay, it's the same point.

[00:04:57]Let's try this line here on the building up above the horizon. I'm going to follow that.

[00:05:04]Follow, follow, follow up. It came to the same point. What about this line for this building that we started drawing?

[00:05:13]That came to the same point, too. All of these horizontal lines that are going away from us are all vanishing at this one point. And then we have our vertical lines. These vertical lines go straight up and down. The camera tends to distort things and they kind of tilt a little bit, but in real life, these go straight up and down. So that's what all these angled lines are that he's drawing.

[00:05:37]Those are all his guidelines for the buildings, for the windows, for all those things that are on the sides of these structures that are going into the distance. And then we have these flat pieces. And those are the ones that we're facing directly. Here's another flat piece. And that one is on the same plane as where we're standing. What about people? We've got some people. A person we said is six feet. and we'll say the average door is seven feet.

[00:06:10]So that means the person has to come in below the door. And if we're looking at here's a person.

[00:06:21]Well, they're right at that horizon line. They must be 6 feet or the same height that this person was generally speaking. Here's another person. We'll say um on this bike, they're on a bike, so they're a little bit elevated, but they're generally the same height, too.

[00:06:38]And they're maybe in front of this person. The doors are going to be taller than the people. So, there's a door.

[00:06:45]There's a door. So, this person looks like it could walk into there. If we had someone whose head was up here, it would seem like they're they got a duck to go into that that doorway, right? So, there's the sidewalk for that. What about the cars? The cars, if you look at them, they're all sitting basically right below or at this horizon line. So, here's a car.

[00:07:09]Here's another car right below this horizon line. These cars are also right below. So, everything these are all going on the same kind of plane, same angle. That's really important. You can't have a car sitting right here that's this big.

[00:07:31]That would look like a miniature miniature vehicle. The point of reference is the height of this person taking the picture. So, think about that as you're putting in all of these things. The horizon line is the height of the person who is taking or viewing the photo. Everything is based off of that. Okay, let's get back to it. It's always interesting seeing how other artists set up their workspace, and I'm in awe of how simple and compact his setup is. Okay, so he's just wet his whole paper with a spray bottle. That gets it slightly damp without getting it real sping wet. Painting the sky. Okay, and the sky is reflecting in there must be wet streets. So, whatever's in your sky is going to reflect down below if there's water. So now he's kind of playing off the concept of this reference photo being taken at sunset and incorporating those warm colors, blending those up into the sky over where his buildings are going to be and then down into the foreground where the street is. He's just putting lots of warm colors in there as they get closer to the horizon. And then because his paper's wet, he's blending all of that together. Everything that's in your sky is going to reflect on water. Think of water down below as a mirror to what's up above. Whether it's a lake, an ocean, wet city streets, it's going to reflect the colors that you see in the sky. Now, I mixed up some cerillion blue with ultramarine blue. And I did not spray my paper. I know I went a little rogue.

[00:08:59]Calm down. It's going to be fine. I'm putting that blue along the top where my sky is and just like he did along the bottom of this painting as well. Like I just got finished saying, we're going to have the reflection of the sky in the street below because the street is wet.

[00:09:15]Now, some organic vermilion with some cadmium yellow, and it's going to make this really rich orange. We're going to put that next in here. It's going to mix with that blue. Why? Because the blue is wet. And then some cadmium yellow. This yellow, that's a lot of yellow, is going to go down here close to the horizon line. And then also below the horizon line. Again, we are just creating the idea of that reflection of what's happening in the sky is also happening down below in the street because there's water on the street. I've said it a lot now, so I don't think we have to say it anymore. But let's talk about why we paint the entire painting this orangey color. Why are we painting over the buildings? The thought behind that is you put this lighter color down, right?

[00:09:58]And we're doing this warm color. Then you come in once that's dry with a darker color and you paint, for example, around where the windows are. When you paint a dark color around the light color, leaving that light color to show, then that light color comes through as where the opening of the window is. So, he's going to mix together some darker [clears throat] gray, and he's going to use that to paint these window openings.

[00:10:23]kind of sketchy and really loose, leaving some areas unpainted. These vertical lines and then followed by some horizontal lines that point down towards where that vanishing point is. Carefully around the people, kind of soft up there because the paper's still wet versus going in wet onto dry paper where you have nice crisp edges. You kind of get the idea that there's these boxy shapes.

[00:10:45]Watercolors typically go through a really ugly phase, especially in the beginning, and that's kind of where we're at now. He's got some little small skinny vertical lines and those could be some antennas, some poles, who knows?

[00:10:59]Now he's letting it dry. All right, let's give it a go. I'm going to make some gray using my preferred method, which is ultramarine blue and burnt sienna. I'm just going to go in and kind of fill in these buildings while also leaving some areas unpainted. And remember, whatever I'm leaving unpainted is going to imply that there are window surfaces there or something else that has a different value. So, sketchy little vertical lines and leave some of that area unpainted.

[00:11:28]Those are what become the suggestion of the windows. You don't have to do too much. Just little tiny hints of that golden color coming through underneath.

[00:11:37]And that's all we really have to do. We can come back later and put some horizontal lines if we need to. Let's let the paper dry and see what he does next. So, he's mixing some even darker color. Like it looks black to me.

[00:11:50]Painting the back of this what I believe is like a bus or a truck or something.

[00:11:56]All very dark because that light is coming from the distance, right? So, it's on the other side of these vehicles. So, the back side of them would have very little light. So, they'd be the darkest. Then he's got some windows and shadow underneath the car. Notice how the side of that car is that orange color. Again, that's why we painted that first. So everything that's reflective reflects that glowing light. Then he's painting his little figures very, very dark so they show up against the lighter gray of the building in the back. Some of the areas he's leaving unpainted, like tiny little dots of white. That's important. You can do that. You don't have to fill it all in like a coloring book. You can leave some little white pieces. Look at how the size of this person he put in the foreground gives a reference point for the size of the people that are in the distance.

[00:12:44]Painting the pole, this light pole.

[00:12:48]Some little tiny details on that light pole. He just wiped his brush off to get less paint on there so he could paint some really tiny thin lines behind there. Okay, now he's doing some more horizontal lines which are going to that vanishing point. These lines are suggesting that these buildings are tall. It's like the window line. So, multiple stories on these buildings, but notice that he's not putting them on every single building and primarily focusing on the buildings that are in the front. All right, let's give it a shot. We're going to go with my favorite combo, ultramarine blue and burnt sienna to make a really nice dark almost black color. We're doing these horizontal lines which look diagonal in the painting. And that's that's true. That's right. They look diagonal because if you imagine them going from that vanishing point out into infinity and beyond, they are going to fan out and away from that vanishing point and get further and further apart. Just like a fan, they spread out, getting really tight together at that vanishing point and then fanning out and getting more and more spread out as they go into the distance. And we don't need to put every single line, every single window. Less is more. The more detailed in the front of the composition, less in the back.

[00:14:02]So, the front grill of that vehicle as well as the front window as well as the tires can all be painted black. They're not really getting that sunlight. The side of the car, however, is getting that sunlight. So, we can leave that unpainted. This other vehicle, we don't see the side of it. We just see the back of it. So, we can paint that mostly all black. I'm going to leave a little bit unpainted just for tail lights. And then those tires can be painted black. And then our people are going to be painted pretty dark. Sometimes it's nice to leave like where their shoulders are unpainted just a little bit because you may have that light kind of bouncing off their shoulders. The further away your people are, they could literally just be these little tiny dots. Don't go into great amounts of detail and don't try and give them all legs. It might look kind of silly. Uh, we also want to put a couple of windows on the side of this truck that's going by. And that helps it start to feel more and more like it is actually a vehicle. Now, he didn't really do this in his video, but I'm going to give some of the sides of these buildings just a little bit darker value, which can help define some of the other edges of the buildings that are in front of them. Like I said, he didn't necessarily do this, but sometimes it's a nice touch just to add a little bit darker value in there. Now, he's going to spray the rest of this area, and he's going to start working on the reflections of the people, the vehicles, basically everything. So he sprayed it with some water and he's using that same gray and dragging that gray down in a vertical motion below each one of his subjects. So the cars, the light pole, the people. And it's going to start to look a little bit messy, but when you get to the end of this, there's a trick that he does that really sort of brings it to life. those vehicles in the background a little bit lighter in terms of their reflection and just kind of building those reflections in the front under these people. But that water on the paper is going to really soften up these brush strokes. Building up a little more darkness and then also making sure he gets some lines in there for those street lights. Really important. But you can see there's little white gaps in between all of them. Now look at this. He's lifting out the color in these diagonal lines. And that is implying that the water or the surface of the water on the street is being broken up by something like, you know, the cars running through the water or whatever. And it really starts to make this scene so believable by breaking up those shadows, those reflections. The icing on the cake on this little painting is these little tiny details at the very very end.

[00:16:44]Taking that bright orange red color, putting it on the tail lights, and also then reflecting it on the surface of the ground, leaving a gap in between the vehicle and where those reflections start. And he puts a few of those red dots in the buildings and then also on the street light. And it really just comes to life. It's pretty crazy. Let's see if I can pull this off in my little painting. All right, so I got a spray bottle. We're going to follow along.

[00:17:11]I've sprayed the bottom of this little painting. Just tapping that dark paint in here underneath all of my elements.

[00:17:18]So underneath the truck, and then pulling straight down toward the bottom of my composition, underneath that, we'll say it's a van, underneath that street lamp, and then underneath all of my people. And I can tell my paper on this side is just a little bit on the dry side. So, I'm going to get my spray bottle and spritz it again. And look at what the paint does. This is one of the coolest things about watercolor and why I love it so much is it would be so difficult to paint that effect that you get where the paint hits the water and just does its own thing. It's so cool.

[00:17:50]But that is what works really well for this reflection technique. I also know that when I put watercolor onto wet paper, it's going to lighten up a lot and I may have to come back in and darken it up. and he did that same thing with his painting. I can also put a couple more little people in here and just create more energy and more movement in this composition. Keeping in mind that things get lighter as they go into the distance, I'm going to do a few very light lines here on some of these buildings in the background. Just using the color that I have left over on my brush. I noticed that he put a lot of dark color up in the front corner of his composition earlier on and I didn't really do that. So, no time like the present. I'm going to put some in there now. And just kind of making it darker here in the front while my paper is wet.

[00:18:40]And you can do that if you've painted something and you need to, you know, do some wet on wet or go back into something. Let it dry fully and then come back, spray your paper or get it wet again and then put that paint on top and it'll do some really cool stuff while still maintaining that color underneath. Like I said, these have got to be darker, especially the ones in the front. So, just adding some more darkness to these reflections. I didn't put a lot of antenna things sticking up, so I'm just going to put a few more now.

[00:19:10]Very light gray on my brush. Just some vertical thin lines kind of coming up out of these buildings. I'm going to put these final details in, but I need my paper to be dry so that I have a little more control over where the paint is going. I'm using organic vermilion for these tail light reflections. So, I put them on my paper, making sure I leave a tiny gap between the bottom of the vehicle and where these reflections start. And then I can just kind of smudge them a little bit with my finger to soften them up and make them look a little less perfect. Then I'll get a little bit of water on my brush, just a little bit, and kind of soften up those brush strokes, just so they don't have those hard edges.

[00:19:52]I'll get a little bit of that red for the stoplight. I'm under the impression that he uses some sort of gouache or more opaque paint for these final little details. I just have a gel pen and I think those work great for stuff like this. Little tiny dots and details. I don't go overboard and I rarely use it if I'm being honest. But sometimes just a little dot on the top of a head or a little line on top of a shoulder or a sleeve or the back of a bumper or the headlights really sort of brings this type of artwork to life. You don't need much, just the suggestion. So, I kind of went rogue on this last part. And honestly, I just wasn't really paying attention to his tutorial anymore. I was just kind of doing my own thing. And I did some horizontal lines lifted out versus those diagonal ones. In hindsight, should I have done the diagonals? There's no should I. It's could I? Yes, I could have. Do I need to? No. The horizontal lines work just as well. You can use horizontal lines in water reflections for all sorts of different applications. It just breaks up the paint and makes it feel like there is a highlight in the water versus a reflection or a shadow. So, is it effective? Yep. Can I do whatever I want? Yep. And so can you. I give you permission. Now, I wouldn't say this is the easiest streetscape option. However, I do feel like I understand a lot more about it now after explaining it to you.

[00:21:17]And I hope you feel the same. Make sure you check out both videos, leave a comment, and let me know what you thought about the sideby-side comparison. Thanks for hanging out. I will see you next time that I make stuff. [music] >> [music] [music] >> Hey,