How to Paint: Watercolor Holly

If there’s one plant I’ll paint during the winter, it’s the watercolor holly! You can practice paint mixing for a variety of greens. And the bright red berries stand out among the leaves. So grab your supplies and let’s paint this together. Follow along with the blog post or take my course!

Watercolor Holly painting by Audrey Ra Design. A watercolor palette can be seen at the bottom right corner.

Supplies:

Paint: LUKAS Aquarell 1862 Watercolor
Brush(es): Creative Mark’s Watercolor Brushes, round size 6
Paper: Grumbacher Watercolor Paper
Jars of water
Paper towel or cotton rag
Pencil and eraser
All of my favorite supplies here

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Take the mini video course for the Watercolor Holly!

Step 1: Paint Prep

I always tell my students to prepare their paints ahead of time. Especially when you’re painting more loosely and spontaneously and want colors to bleed. In my LUKAS watercolor palette, I have four large wells. So I decided to use one for the red/red-orange, another for a mix of the chromium oxide green and a touch of blue, and the third for a permanent green color.

In the middle well with the mix of green and blue, I like to let the paint mix on their own in the well. Or sometimes I load both colors on my brush in order to let it mix on the paper. Try different ways of painting and see what you like.

Step 2: Warm-ups

Before I dive into the final painting steps, let’s start with warm-ups. Sometimes it’s in the form of practicing the technique. Or brushstrokes that will be used often. For the holly, we’re going to practice drawing the shape of the leaves and playing around with different greens.

Start by outlining one half of the watercolor holly. Create pointed curved lines. Then color it in. Do the same on the other side, but leave just a sliver of white space between the two halves.

Again, play around with the colors. Maybe drop in some saturated paint while it’s still wet. Or paint half in one color and the other half in a different color.

Although I didn’t do it for this warm-up, practice different sizes of the leaves, too.

Next, practice the berries. I like to paint it in halves and leaving the sliver of white space again.

Watercolor Holly practice by Audrey Ra Design.

Or place the white space somewhere else on the berry. Maybe it will be closer to the top of the berry. Try painting a few next to each other at different values and let the paint bleed into one another. Remember your basic watercolor techniques and play around and have fun.

Step 3: Let’s Paint the Watercolor Holly!

Start with a burnt umber color for the branch. Use just the tip of your brush to paint a broken line. The space between the broken lines will be for the leaves and berries. Make sure that the branch starts a little thicker on the left and tapers off a bit as you move to the right.

Begin painting a few large leaves at the base of the branch. Remember your warm-ups!

As you move up the branch, skip over some areas to allow for layering leaves later. Sprinkle in some berries as you go along, too.

Make sure that your leaves are decreasing in size as you progress, and that they point in different directions. To make things more interesting, have some of the berries and leaves poking out from behind each other.

Once the first leaves have dried, go back and layer leaves on top of one another. That’s the beauty of watercolors – its transparency! Add some more berries towards the end.

Step 4: Final Details

The only final detail is to use just a touch of black to the berries. Wait until the berries layer is dry. Make sure the black isn’t too thin of a consistency so that you can get a dark value. Then use just the tip of your brush to pick up the paint.