Using Kuretake Gansai Tambi watercolor paints
This beautiful mushroom forest painting is beginner-friendly, as well as being a challenge for more advanced artists. It’s easy to make the design different by painting only one or two of the mushrooms, and making the whole picture bigger or smaller depending on whether you want a full size painting or a greetings card! It might look a little complicated but in this video I show you how to draw a mushroom and then we will work through the painting step by step to make the whole thing easy to complete.
So choose yourself a nice sheet of paper, pick out your favorite brushes and lay out your chosen colors ready to start!
Recommended Materials
Paper
For this painting I used a piece of 140lb cold pressed watercolor paper, about 10 x 12 inches in size. Here are some recommended brands of paper which I frequently use:
Paint
The set of paints I used for this painting are absolutely great. If you are a beginner and you don’t have any paints, and you think you’d like to use pans rather than tubes, I can recommend these Kuretake paints. The pans are much bigger in area than the average traditional pan size, which means you can use a larger brush if you want to. The colors are very intense, and if you use less water they can be used like gouache, which makes them multipurpose. You can actually paint light over dark using these watercolor paints, which is very liberating! See my other video on painting pot plants here for an example of them in use.
brushes
The brushes I used were a No. 9 and a No. 3 round by Drawell. If you want to purchase the Drawell brushes you will need to contact the manufacturer in Japan direct. They will happily send you a price list and then the product with no problems. They don’t have outlets in Europe or the US at this time.
I had on hand a 2B pencil and an eraser, a jar of clean water and a piece of old towel to dry my brush.
Here are some closeups of the painting.
And now watch the Whimsical Mushroom Forest video on YouTube here!!
Here’s another painting done in the same style you might be interested in watching.