How to improve just about anything by layering yellow!

I thought it might be fun to write out a little walk through for this post. This is a painting, one of our 30 in 30 collabs Nick and I have been working on. He drew this up and started it, so now I get to finish it up.

I was explaining this little trick to Kelsey one day, and it's something I just about religiously do. It works great with your greens and especially browns! It's so easy to make anything that's brown come to life by layering over a little yellow at the end.

This is the before picture, with no yellow in the leaves/legs. It's pretty simple...


For this, I used Dr Martin's watercolor instead of FWs. If you use Dr. Martin's, just dip your brush in the paint, then brush over the entire area. If you're using FWs, I will usually dip in the paint, then do a quick dip in your water cup to dilute the paint a bit, then brush over the entire area.

If you don't brush over the ENTIRE area, it'll leave choppy paint lines. you want to wet the entire area for each color you add. This is important, but I'll go over that maybe sometime later.


I brush over the entire area here, starting at the tip, then right into the green and over the black. Over the ENTIRE AREA. You can do this, I know Dr. Martins are smudgy and annoying, but you can STILL do layering when you paint.


This is the end result. You can see that the leaves are brighter, and prettier. :) Next time I'm painting something with brown, I'll do another walk through, because it's so so so worth the extra step to do this same thing with your browns. They'll look richer, and less mucky!


I'll post the finished painting in the next couple days with some more collabs! Hope this was somewhat helpful, I'll do a few of these walk through tips every once in a while.